Xbox Live Gets Into Inauguration Day Spirit

After a hard day’s work, and a bit of watching the Inauguration Day festivities, I popped on my Xbox to find some of the presidential pomp and circumstance billed prominently for free viewing over Xbox Live.

The handful of video clips include the swearing in of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the performance by Aretha Franklin and the classical number featuring Yo-Yo-Ma and Itzhak Perlman. There’s also a video of “man on the street” Xbox Live gamers talking about what they’d like to see from Obama when he takes office.

Apparently, Microsoft’s PR wing announced this earlier in the day, but seeing it on my own was pretty cool. A rep tells me by e-mail that this is “less about political awareness and more about activating the LIVE community around events that are relevant and social,” and says a similar initiative is in the works for football fans.

Of course, scrolling down from the free content reveals a whole bunch of things you can buy, like network news specials and movies related to the presidency, but that’s okay. I’ve always hoped that Microsoft would use free content (besides demos) as a lure to the paid stuff, and this is a good place to start. I’m even tempted to use my handful of spare Microsoft points to rent “All the President’s Men” later.

Circuit City: The Frenzy Has Passed!

I happened to be running errands today near the local Circuit City that had an amazingly long line of bargain-hunters waiting to get into its going-out-of-business sale on Sunday, so I popped by to see how the story was faring after a couple more days of liquidation. Once again, I took a few photos using my iPhone’s trusty-but-blurry camera.

Sunday’s snaking line of shoppers had dwindled to…well, it had disappeared. Once again, it was possible to stroll into the store:

Inside, there were quite a few customers milling about. But most products were still marked down by only ten percent, and that still didn’t seem to be nearly enough to send anyone on a wanton shopping spree. At least I saw a few items marked down by thirty percent–which is, for me at least, the minimum discount required to make me raise an eyebrow and reach for my wallet:

All in all, though, it felt like word had reached deal-seekers that Circuit City’s bad luck is not anyone’s hugely lucky break just yet. The clearest sign: During my brief visit to the store, there wasn’t a single soul at the main checkout buying anything. Here you can see the only clerk wandering away from the register:

At some point, the companies handling Circuit City’s liquidation will be forced to knock everything down by thirty or forty percent or more. I’ll be interested to see how long it takes, and whether there will still be any good stuff left on the shelves by then…

NASA Tests Interplanetary Internet

It might not be subspace communications, but NASA has successfully tested a deep space communications network that it says is the first step toward the creation of an interplanetary Internet.

Today, NASA announced that engineers from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had transmitted images to a NASA science spacecraft that was located more than 20 million miles away. The engineers used the Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, which was co-developed with Internet co-founder Vint Cerf, to transmit the data.

I’m always happy to learn of instances of the U.S. government giving scientists the time and resources to focus on their work. Research, while not always something that can be ‘productized,’ drives innovation. An interplanetary Internet might not be a practical venture yet, but neither was the original Internet when Cerf and others got it going forty years ago..

On this celestial body, DTN could be useful in situations where network connectivity is spotty. I’m not an expert, but it sounds like it could be useful for bringing the Internet to rural areas, and that is a good thing.

Sony’s Hirai Suffers Delusion, Thinks PS3 Leads Market

I think somebody’s off their rocker. In comments to the company’s official rag PlayStation Magazine, Sony Computer Entertainment Chief Kaz Hirai made the unusual claim that install base numbers are worthless: the PS3 is still the official leader in the industry.

Pay no attention to the fact that the console is in third in overall console sales, that it was outsold by the Xbox by a 2-to-1 margin over the holiday, or that it still cannot attract decent exclusives. Because Mr. Hirai says it, we shall all bow to the PS3′s power.

Of course, Hirai’s comments are peppered with jabs at its competitors: that the Xbox is aimed at short term success while the PS3 is on a ten-year plan, and that Nintendo operates “in a different world.”

Nevermind that the console is difficult to program for because Sony did that on purpose, Hirai claims. His argument is this: if the console was easy to develop for, then developers would not take full advantage of the consoles power.

Okay, that makes sense. Make life difficult for the people who sell your equipment. That should work! I bet any game developer wants to spend twice the amount of time just to develop for a console that in the end has a smaller install base than its competitors.

I think its time for Sony to start realizing that the PS3′s business model did NOT work. I sure hope when it comes around to the fourth generation the company applies what it learns, but as stubborn as Sony is, I’m betting that won’t happen.

Life Without Comcast: Watching the Inauguration…or Trying To, at Least

I’m still trying to do much of my TV watching via an Apple TV box running Boxee hooked up to a TV that doesn’t have cable. This morning, however, I discovered that it’s not a great way to watch a once-in-a-lifetime event. Actually, the Internet isn’t great at broadcasting once-in-a-lifetime events yet.

I’d heard that Hulu would be streaming the inauguration live, which was good news: Boxee can put Hulu on a TV. But when I navigated over to Boxee’s Hulu menus, there was no mention of the inauguration, even though it was all over Hulu’s standard Web site. Discovery: Boxee’s Hulu presentation isn’t a direct, on-the-fly translation of the Hulu site into TV-friendly form.

Then I happened to stumble across the Boxee’s Twitterfeed, where the company was explaining that it was working on getting the inauguration up. When it did, it was Hulu’s feed of Fox News’ coverage, and it was linked to from the Boxee home page.

Nothing against Fox News, but I wanted to hop between multiple stations, and the Hulu-on-Boxee-on-Apple-TV version was in a sort of choppy slo-mo. So I switched to trying to watch the live streaming on MSNBC.com. The audio kept disappearing on me. And I noticed on Twitter that folks watching streaming coverage on multiple Internet venues all seemed to be squawking about the glitches they were encountering.

So I switched to Comcast. Live coverage on a zillion channels; perfect sound and audio; pretty easy to switch between stations. I may gripe about cable, and I most definitely get most of my news and analysis on the Web these days. But the Plain Old TV that’s been part of our lives for sixty years scales beautifully.

Anyone want to guess how long it’ll be until we can just assume that streaming Internet video will work just fine no matter how many people are watching it?

Comcast Back On FCC’s Naughty List

Okay, I could have titled this a little less PC, but hey this is a family site. Anyway, the FCC is looking into the cable provider’s practices surrounding its VoIP service. And surprise, surprise: it has to do with net neutrality once again.

The charge is that Comcast is giving preferential treatment to its own phone service at the expense of its competitors. The FCC is pointing to Comcast’s own documentation on the service, which state VoIP calls are placed over a seperate network away from the Internet and thus less prone to congestion problems.

What this means is that network management policies put into effect by the cable provider could essentially degrade service from competitors such as Vonage, while leaving its own VoIP service unaffected. This could leave VoIP calls sounding “choppy,” Comcast has admitted

If this is true rather than some marketing gobbledygook, Comcast’s phone service would then fall under a different set of telecommunications policies that are reserved for regular landline service. Essentially, it would be considered a phone company like any other and thus would also be subject to regulation and fees of the landline providers.

Free Press, which has been a frequent critic of Comcast’s network management policy, said it was pleased by the FCC’s action.

“This letter is a positive sign that the FCC’s Comcast decision was not a one-and-done action on Net Neutrality … an open Internet cannot tolerate arbitrary interference from Internet service providers. Congress and the FCC must close any legal loopholes that permit anti-competitive behavior to thrive.”

Comcast had no immediate comment on the matter, however it has until January 30 to respond to the FCC’s allegations.

Study: Gore Does Not a Fun Game Make

Instinctively, you’d think the flying giblets and gore of first-person shooters like Half-Life add a bit of visceral fun to the game, making it more attractive to players. A new study out of the University of Rochester disputes that idea.

Researchers in the graduate department of social psychology found that violent content doesn’t motivate people to play, at least not any more than a game without guns or swords. The research consisted of 2,670 gamer surveys and two experiments.

For the experiments, researchers created custom mods of Half-Life 2, one that focused on shooting enemies with a shotgun and another that required psychic powers to float opponents “up very serenely into the air before evaporating,” according to lead author Andrew Przybylski. He said roughly five percent of the subjects showed aggressive tendencies, but most said the added violence didn’t increase the game’s fun factor.

There is one point that’s missed here: Attacking someone with psychic powers is still violent on some level. Heck, the act of stomping on a goomba has aggressive undertones. Those examples aren’t as sensational as Halo or Grand Theft Auto, but the message — that a conflict should be dealt with through aggression rather than mediation — is the same.

That’s why I’m surprised to see Iowa State University psychologist Craig Anderson throw his support behind the study. Anderson has published several reports that attempt to link violent video games and aggression. He’s a polarizing figure, if only because pundits and politicians use his work as fodder for their own agendas.

“A common belief held by many gamers and many in the video game industry –that violence is what makes a game fun – is strongly contradicted by these studies,” Anderson said in an e-mail to The Canadian Press. He then talks about satisfying gamers’ “competence urge” without resorting to violence.

“Whoever does this well will be able to tap into a much larger market,” he wrote.

Even if his support is somewhat contradictory, I can’t say it’s unwelcome. Finding middle ground between video games’ cheerleaders and detractors is the key to resolving the whole violence issue,  and this is a step in the right direction.

Whitehouse.gov Gets a Makeover

At 12:01pm, the official website of the White House changed hands, and with it came quite a sea change as far as the openness of the executive branch. The website has a definite Web 2.0 feel to it — from the blogs, to the dynamic headers and whatnot.

But what’s really exciting to me is the transparency. All of Obama’s executive orders and proclamations will be posted on the site for all to see. The president’s agenda is also laid out on the website, and the Administration is soliciting readers to join the mailing list to stay abreast of current government happenings.

This is really smart. Keeping the citizenry up-to-date on your actions, as well as inviting them in, will go a long way in getting what you want done. Too often lately in politics, things are done in the so-called “smoke-filled room,” with little input from the people they are supposed to represent.

Ever wanted to have the President’s ear on a specific bill? You will. Non-emergency legislation will have a seven-day comment period before Obama decides to sign it: those will also be posted on whitehouse.gov.

The Adminstration says it has more in the works, but I’m certainly excited about what I’ve seen so far.

What Computer Graphics Were in 1984

It’s not multi-touch. Hey, it’s not even single touch by modern standards. But the Atari Touch Tablet that Vintage Computing and Gaming‘s Benj Edwards recently bought was still in its original, unopened packaging. And so Benj took the opportunity to do a new unboxing of a really old gadget–and we’re delighted to publish it here.

View Atari Touch Tablet unboxing slideshow

Atari’s 1984 Touch Tablet: A Retro-Unboxing

The next time you use your shiny new Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4, think back to a time before time–a time before blends, morphs, heal brushes, and 10-megapixel images.  A time like 1984, which, for computer graphics, was darker than the Dark Ages. It was a time when you could buy an $89.95 Atari CX77 Touch Tablet for your Atari 8-bit home computer.  Luckily, I bought mine for considerably less last year, although it was still in new, unopened condition.  Safely sequestered in the official Vintage Computing and Gaming computer lab, I recently began the task of unpacking the antique peripheral and documenting the process.  Here’s an account of the experience.

Do You Trust User Reviews on the Web?

More scuttlebutt continues to emerge in the case of the glowing reviews for Belkin products that turned out to be written by a glowing-review mill set up by a Belkin employee. The Daily Background, which broke the story in the first place, has found evidence that the Belkin staffer who was apparently behind the scam was also publishing favorable reviews under multiple accounts. And Gizmodo has published an incendiary e-mail, supposedly from an ex-Belkin employee, that charges the company with making crummy products and then engaging in an array of sleazy practices, including posting negative reviews of competitors’ products, engaging in rigged demos at trade shows, supplying bloggers with products that sported custom, non-standard firmware, and paying off magazines to publish favorable reviews.

I have no information on whether any or all of the charges in the Gizmodo letter are true, but my instinct is to be skeptical about the notion of Belkin (or any company) paying magazines for positive coverage. When I worked at PC World, Belkin networking equipment sometimes performed well in our tests; I hope it goes without saying that we said we liked it because we did like it.

Much of the coverage I’ve seen of Belkingate, including comments here on Technologizer, has been from jaded folks who have said that lots of companies game user-review systems, and therefore user reviews simply don’t provide reliable advice. (Speaking of PC World, here’s a story it published after I left investigating the issue.) Time for a quick T-Poll–feel free to leave further thoughts in comments:

Secrets of Managing your Flip Video Collection

[David Spark (@dspark) is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a storytelling production company that specializes in live event production. He also blogs and does a daily radio report for Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco at Spark Minute.]

If you use a Flip video camera like I do, (here’s a photo of my Mino HD with a design of my company logo on it) you probably also have quite a collection of videos that are being managed with their video management software. If you have the old Flip Video software, you should upgrade to the new FlipShare software for free. It does much better management of your videos and it’s considerably faster.

But when I installed the FlipShare program it moved all my videos! The “My Flip Video Library” is still there and all the folders I created in the Flip Video program are there as well, but all the videos are gone. All that’s left in each folder is a video that says, “The videos which were previously located in this folder have been imported into the NEW FlipShare software. To view or edit your videos, open the new software.”

Continue reading this story…

Patent Holding Company Sues Computer and Software Makers

Software patents are increasingly being used like lottery tickets: If you file enough of them, you’ll eventually have the winning number for litigation. Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has sued a dozen computer makers and some software developers for allegedly violating two security related patents that it holds.

IPAT filed a formal complaint in a south Florida district court last Thursday. Some of the defendants are Apple, Dell, HP and Lenovo. It has also separately filed suit against software makers including Microsoft and Symantec in a Texas court.

The patents, US patent No. 5,311,591, titled “Computer system security method and apparatus for creating and using program authorization information data structures,” and its continuation, US patent No. 5,412,717, deal with how an an operating system monitors and enforces application permissions.

These folks would make Vito Corleone proud. IPAT is asking for jury trials to shake down the alleged violators for as much as it possibly can.

If this case doesn’t demonstrate why patent reform is necessary, I don’t know what is. The patent, which was granted in the 1990s, does not seem unique, and I hope that prior art is found which invalidates it.

A MobileMe Rival From Microsoft?

Neowin is reporting that Microsoft plans to unveil a mobileservice called SkyBox at next month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It’s supposedly similar to Apple’s MobileMe–although I hope it works a whole lot better–and syncs e-mail, SMS, calendar info, and photos from device to device via the cloud. (Neowin says it “could be” available on phones other than ones that run Windows Mobile–and I’m officially guessing that if it exists, it’ll be free, unlike MobileMe.) Neowin says that Microsoft will launch a small-business version called SkyLine as well, and will open an iTunes App Store-like software download service called SkyMarket.

I plan to be at Mobile World Congress–which is the one best place in the world to learn about what’s new with mobile phones–and will let you know what I find out…

Google to Give “Preferred” Sites Prominence in Results

The Mountain View, Calif. search giant is rolling out an interesting new search feature in beta that allows users to set a list of preferred sites, from which the search algorithm will give prominence to those sites when results are returned.

Google explains the feature as such:

The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they’re relevant to your search query.

What this sounds like is that Google is interested in making its results more relevant to the specific user. While it’s not clear yet whether this may be the start of Google attempting to use these lists to create a “trusted sites” directory to further tune its standard results as some have suggested, this is useful for those of us who may be frustrated with the amount of junk that is sometimes returned in Google results.

Technologizer Launches a Newsletter

I’ve been talking about launching a Technologizer  e-mail newsletter for almost as long as there’s been a Technologizer. This is the week it happens. On Friday, we’ll send out the first weekly edition of T-Week, in which I’ll wrap up the tech week that was with news, commentary, and links delivered straight to your in-box. You can sign up to get it delivered for free right here–and I hope you do.