Take Technologizer’s Apple WWDC Prediction Challenge

Analysts and other pundits do a lousy job of predicting what Apple will do next. Rumors about the company are often sheer fantasy. I’ve guessed wrong so many times that I’ve mostly given up trying. With Apple’s WWDC conference and its accompanying keynote a week away, what to do? Should we just swear off predictions altogether?

How about seeing if the collective Technologizer community–or any of its individual members–comes closer to telling us what Apple will unveil than your garden-variety professional Applewatcher probably will? That’s the idea behind our WWDC Prediction Challenge. Spend a few minutes taking our survey, and we’ll ask you about a bunch of possible announcements, including the likely (a new iPhone), the unlikely-but-tantalizing (a tablet), and the almost-certainly-not-for-one-reason-or-another (like new iPods). We’ll aggregate the results and see if there’s any consensus on what’s likely to happen, and publish a report before the keynote. Then we’ll publish another report after the keynote, grading the overall results. We might also mention any respondents whose predictions were eerily dead-on or otherwise interesting.

(Related shameless plug: I’ll be attending the WWDC keynote and will provide live coverage of what we learn as we learn it at www.technologizer.com/wwwdc09.)

The survey mostly involves multiple choice questions, but you’ll have the opportunity to make free-form predictions. For the most part, it involves matters other than the two topics which Apple has already told us it will discuss: the upcoming Snow Leopard OS and iPhone OS 3.0. Oh, and here’s one more incentive to participate: We’ll give one $100 Apple Store gift certificate away to a respondent in a random drawing.

Ready? Click here to take the WWDC Prediction Challenge.

PSP Go is All But Official

Marketing photos, video and details on a new Playstation Portable have leaked three days ahead of Sony’s E3 press conference.

The source of the material is Qore, Sony’s official interactive magazine for Playstation Network members, so this was either an intentional leak to preempt the other console makers or a major foul-up. We’re beyond rumor territory now, but Sony will probably keep quiet on this news until Tuesday.

On to the details: The PSP Go includes 16 GB of flash memory and no UMD drive, Sony marketing executive John Koller said in Qore’s video interview. Of course, all the PSP Go’s content will be download-only, and a Memory Stick Micro slot boosts the potential capacity. The screen measures 3.8 inches, which is a half-inch smaller than the current PSP-3000, but the new model is 43 percent lighter. Bluetooth will be included for using a headset or tethering a cell phone, Koller said.

As you can see from the photo, the controls are located on a panel that slides out from the bottom half of the device. It looks the the control scheme of the old PSP will remain in this model.

Koller blabbed about a few big-name titles in the video, including previously unannounced versions of Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo. Whoops?

The PSP-3000 will stay on the market even after the Go’s fall release, Koller said. Smart move, because it’ll allow Sony to gauge the PSP Go’s success against a console that uses physical game discs. It remains to be seen how Sony will handle the release of UMD games versus digital downloads. Down the line, that ratio will probably be a good indicator of which direction Sony wants to go (no pun intended).

Maybe They Should Call It “Windows 7 Grudging Acknowledgment of Reality Edition”

Paul Thurrott had it right: Microsoft has decided to lift the three-apps-at-a-time limitation from Windows 7 Starter Edition, the low-cost, low-end version of the OS which will likely show up on a lot of netbooks beginning this fall.

The company announced the change in plans at the Windows 7 Team Blog, in a post that also detailed remaining limitations of Starter Edition, among them its lack of Aero effects, custom wallpaper (!),  Taskbar previews, Fast User Switching, Media Center features, and DVD playback. It also tries to dissuade folks from associating Starter Edition and netbooks too closely:

As we continue to say since we announced the Windows 7 editions in February, all editions of Windows 7 have been optimized to run on the broadest range of hardware ranging from small notebook PCs all the way up to high end gaming machines. Windows 7 Starter should not be considered “the netbook SKU” as most machines in this category can run any edition of Windows 7. Many of our beta users have installed Windows 7 Ultimate on their small notebook PCs and have given us very positive feedback on their experience.

The post’s right that netbooks can run beefier versions of Windows 7–actually, I’m typing these very words on an Asus Eee PC 1000HE that’s working just fine with Windows 7 Ultimate. But  it remains to be seen just  how many netbooks will ship with anything other other than Starter given the price competition in the category (which is fierce) and the additional cost to bundle higher-end versions of Windows (which will be substantial). Starter Edition exists only because Microsoft would otherwise have to cede the low-end netbook market to Linux; it’s a version of Windows that Microsoft is releasing only because it doesn’t have much choice.

So if you’re thinking about buying a Windows 7 netbook, would you opt for Starter, or would you be willing to pay extra bucks for Windows 7 Home Premium or another more full-featured edition?

Sirius XM Set to Raise Rates Yet Again

Already peeved satellite radio customers will have one more reason to be upset with Sirius XM: yet another rate increase. While you were able to escape the last one by simply electing to forgo online access, this one is unavoidable.

Every subscriber will pay at least $2 more per month. The reason is this: beginning in August, the company would be able to raise rates to cover the costs of higher royalty payments to the record companies.

The royalty rate increases were allowed by the FCC as a result of a December 2007 agreement on those rates. The company was not able to pass along these increases due to the stipulations of the approval of the merger. However:

“After the first anniversary of the consummation of the merger, the combined company may pass through cost increases incurred since the filing of the combined company’s FCC merger application as a result of statutorily or contractually required payments to the music, recording and publishing industries for the performance of musical works and sound recordings or for device recording fees.”

That anniversary is coming up on July 29. According to unconfirmed reports, after this date a $2 charge on the primary radio, and a 97 cent charge on additional radios will be applied as a “royalty fee.” In other words, you will be paying at a minimum $14.95 per month for service.

People with knowledge of the situation are quick to point out that this isn’t an increase from Sirius XM per se, but rather a pass through of charges that were already being paid by the company because it can no longer afford them. You don’t say–after all its financial situation is pretty damn bad.

(See this link for a copy of the internal memo to customer service reps who are sure to be facing the brunt of yet more consumer dissatisfaction.)

Worse yet, this fee will increase by .5% per year through 2012. Thus it will be at least $2.10 in 2010, $2.21 in 2011, and and $2.32 in 2012. So much for those rate freezes eh?

This is really bad for Sirius XM. The Internets are flooded with consumer complaints about the service post-merger, and many are looking for a reason to drop sat radio like a rock.

I don’t see how the company doesn’t lose more customers over this. The company better get more responsive to programming complaints or there may be big trouble in sat radio-land.

Sirius XM customers out there — is this the last straw for you?

The Obligatory E3 Wish List

The run up to the Electronic Entertainment Expo is always full of predictions, rumors and promises, but I’m tired of peering into the crystal ball. Instead of guesswork, here are my wants and needs for the games industry’s biggest trade show:

From Microsoft: Word on the street is that the Xbox 360 will get a motion-sensing camera to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. No thanks. I’m pretty happy with the Xbox 360′s thumbstick gaming, and I’d rather see Microsoft wait on motion control until the next console cycle, when the company can gather a full stable of game developers behind it. Instead, lets see Hulu support over Xbox Live. A robust gaming handheld, as rumored, would be cool, too.

From Nintendo: This is a tough one. Conventional wisdom holds that The Big N will focus on games instead of hardware this year, maybe with a Zelda or Mario-related announcement to please the fanboys. I’d like to see something that uses the Wii MotionPlus in a mind-blowing way. If such a game involves any Nintendo icons, so be it.

From Sony: Cut the price of the Playstation 3 already, jeez. Seriously though, the most likely rumor — that of a UMD-less PSP — is the one that I like. I desperately want to see what happens when a game console ditches physical media, and Sony has the chance to be ahead of the curve.

From Game Publishers: It’d be nice to hear that the old way of piling up game releases around the holidays is being phased out. Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera has a story today on why this may not happen — basically, there’s still a market for all those games, so no reason to hold back — but as a gamer it’s frustrating. This spring was fruitful for good games, but I think we’re headed for a dull summer before the usual fall/winter pounding.

I’ll be covering the show here in Los Angeles, starting with Microsoft’s Monday morning press conference. In the meantime, feel free to offer up your own hopes and dreams for the future of gaming.

Obama’s Cybersecurity Initivate a Step in the Right Direction

Today, U.S. President Barack Obama took the wraps off of a 60-day review of the nation’s electronic infrastructure. The report outlined concrete steps towards achieving better security, called for the creation of a cyber security czar in the White House staff, and emphasized the importance of respecting people’s privacy.

In April, I wrote “Obama gets it,” in an article about how critical U.S.infrastructure was vulnerable to damage and disruption. While some of the details haven’t been shared yet, the initiative that the President announced today does chart the right course.

The report concludes that the federal government needs to its increase investment in achieving security and resiliency in information and communications infrastructures, and calls for a public-private partnership to coordinate responses to cyber attacks in addition to rallying  international cooperation to mitigate security risks.

Another goal is to educate the public about the importance of cyber security, but with incidents such as the U.S Army being hacked in news headlines, reality has already helped there.

Obama’s plan mirrors a bipartisan effort that was championed by U.S. Senators John Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). The bill that they proposed also called for a White House position to coordinate all Federal security efforts.

Rex Black, a well known security expert and president of Rex Black Consulting Services, told me that it was understandable that Obama would want someone to fill that role. The position should be staffed by the White House rather than the Commerce Department or Military due to the turf wars that would inevitably happen, he added.

The report strikes a political balance: New laws and mandates could come as a consequence, but the White House said that it would avoid imposing new requirements on the private sector if it could be avoided. Privacy was also mentioned more than 60 times in the report, and the President said unequivocally, “Our pursuit of cyber security will not–I repeat, will not include–monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.”

Overall, I am heartened by the high priority that Obama has placed this very serious problem so early on during his Presidency. He is giving credibility to the people that are trying to solve it, and that will only help drive towards a solution–even if we have to walk before we can run.

The First Palm Pre Review

The Boy Genius Report has seen, touched, and tried a pre-release Palm Pre, and published its findings. It’s a long piece with a bunch of photos, but the Pre has been so thoroughly previewed in so many venues that it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know. BGR’s verdict? Uninspiring hardware (the keyboard is said to be too small to be pleasing, and the case kind of plasticky) but sensational operating system (although not much software was on the device).

The Pre hits stores on June 6th, so look for gazillions of reviews shortly.

See You at TWTRCON–or on Twitter

I’m looking forward to spending my Sunday at TWTRCON, the Twitter for business conference which I came up with and which Modern Media has done a spectacular job of running with. I know that some of you will be there. But if you’re not coming to the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, you can still participate: I’m going to be tweeting the day’s proceedings at @TWTRCON. I’m thinking it’ll be akin to doing a radio broadcast of a baseball game–listening in won’t be as good as being there in person, but it’ll have pleasures of its own. And I’m going to help relay questions from twitterers to the impressive lineup of speakers at the conference.

It should be a fun experiment–and one way or another, I hope to see you on Sunday.

US Army Servers May Have Been Hacked

An Anti-US hacking group known as “m0sted” has apparently hacked into at least two sensitive Army servers, InformationWeek claims, citing “exclusive” information. The breaches are being investigated by the US Army, although they have not been publicly disclosed.

The two servers known to be hacked were one at the McAlester Ammunition Plant in McAlester, Okla. on January 26, and another U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Transatlantic Center in Winchester, Va which occurred on September 19, 2007.

In the earlier case, the divisions webpage was hacked redirecting to the group’s own site. That site hosts anti-US and anti-Israeli messages. It is not known whether the group was able to access or download any sensitive data.

Both hacking attempts took advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s server software. Even though the Defense Department has put in place tools to prevent such attacks, the hackers have apparently found a way to bypass those measures.

As part of the investigation, search warrants against Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been executed in an effort to reveal the hacker’s identities. The Defense Department is not commenting on the report.

No Color Kindles for Years Might Mean No Kindles

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says that a Kindle e-reader with a color screen won’t show up any time soon:

The Amazon CEO also said a color version of the Kindle was not imminent.

“I know it’s multiple years. I don’t know how many years but it’s years,” he said.

“I’ve seen the color displays in the laboratory and I can assure you they’re not ready for prime time,” Bezos said.

Bezos’s stance sounds like it’s based on the assumption that the Kindle will continue to use a power-miserly E-Ink screen, or at least that Amazon is unwilling to consider the possibility of an LCD Kindle with a battery life measured in hours, not days. I persist in the stubborn notion that we live in a color world, and that the Kindle might have trouble competing with a cool, multipurpose tablet device in a similar form factor from, oh, say, Apple–even if the tablet had a traditional LCD display with traditional uninspiring battery life. I’m also intrigued by alternative display technologies such as that offered by Pixel Qi, which may bridge the gap between the benefits of E-Ink and LCD.

Maybe Bezos is being less than entirely forthcoming–hey, if Amazon is working on color right now, it’s not going to tell us–but if I were him, I’d be formulating plans to have some sort of color Kindle out in months, not years…

Page’s Law: Why PCs Get Slower, Not Faster

At Google’s I/O developer conference yesterday, company cofounder Sergey Brin spoke of Page’s Law–defined by his partner Larry Page–which states that software gets twice as slow every eighteen months:

Page’s Law is painfully true. It helps to explain why 2001-era PCs which ran Windows XP just fine are incapable of running Windows XP SP3 well, let alone Windows Vista. Actually, it explains, in part, why so many people feel the need to buy new computers every couple of years. We’re not buying faster machines so we can work faster–we’re buying faster machines to compensate for the speed lot to more bloated, inefficient software.

When I got into computers, circa 1978, many machines had 4KB of RAM (one one-millionth of the capacity of a system today with 4GB). 16KB was considered generous. 48KB was downright sinful. And the TRS-80s we used at school ran at a rip-roaring 1.77-MHz.

Result: Just about anyone who wrote software for any personal computer of the time wrote extremely efficient code–you pretty much didn’t have the option of not being maniacally miserly with bytes and processing cycles. I’ve often thought that if today’s programmers were as diligent as those 1970s hackers, there essentially wouldn’t be such a thing as a slow PC today, or one that ran out of memory.

Among the unexpected benefits of the migration of applications from local machines to the Web is this: Programmers once again have to deal with severely constrained resources. There’s no question that an app like Zoho Writer does Microsoft Word-like things in a more efficient way. I’m also heartened by the fact that the browser wars have lately turned into a speed competition. But I still think we’d get even leaner code if developers pretended they were writing for, say, a Vic-20 with 3.5KB of available RAM and a 1-MHz 6502 CPU.

Mac Clone Maker (Not Psystar) to Open Retail Store

Mac clone manufacturer Quo computer said it would be opening a retail location in Los Angeles area on June 1. It will be located at 2401 West Main Street in Alhambra, a locality northeast of LA’s downtown district.

The company plans to offer three models, the Life Q, Pro Q, and Max Q. While Quo has not released details of what each model would entail, the company is using Apple’s current product lineup for guidance.

As with Psystar, the company is installing copies of Mac OS X Leopard on its equipment before shipping it to the consumer. This means Quo is breaking the same part of the EULA that Apple has sued Psystar over. In all likelihood, Quo will be the target of Cupertino’s legal guns next.

Quo is run by Rashantha De Silva, a Sri Lankan immigrant who has used Macs for nearly 25 years. A search on his name shows that he is a fairly frequent contributor to Apple’s support forums, so he’s no stranger to the Apple platform.

Sure to upset Apple even more is Quo’s business strategy: targeting education. This is one of the company’s most lucrative channels, and De Silva wants to put these clones in the hands of teachers and students.

While I commend companies like Psystar and Quo taking on Apple and forcing them to become more open–I am one of those Mac folks that believe allowing quality clones would be a good thing for the platform–they’re still breaking the law.

Apple’s EULA specifically forbids the use of the software on non-Apple machines. Until the courts find this clause illegal, it is pretty much akin to theft and prosecutable.

I’m fairly confident that the courts will rule against Psystar barring some unforeseen circumstance. Maybe future cloners will learn from the Psystar case and apply it to their efforts at breakng Apple’s grip on its OS software.

(Hat tip: CNET)

5Words for Friday, May 29th, 2009

HDMI is changing? Again? Already?

New HDMI is too complicated.

Page’s Law: It’s so true.

Are Twitter’s “Trending Topics” useless?

Huge news! Pre’s default ringtone.

Should Microsoft surrender on search?

Qualcomm: Get ready for smartbooks.

Alienware is Dell’s gaming brand.

Pirated Sims 3 a hit.

Is Wave Bloatware?

Google has published a video of this morning’s demo of Wave–its radically ambitious upcoming service which aims to be what e-mail should be and meld it with IM, allow for real-time document sharing, provide instant photo sharing, revolutionize spell checking,  provide on-the-fly translation, and allow developers to either build on top of the service or replace it with their own underpinnings, among other things. It’s an hour and twenty minutes long, and doesn’t get through all the things one might want to know about Wave. Here, I’ll embed it right here and wait while you watch it:

All finished?

Among the many interesting questions about Wave is this: Is it bloatware? It’s not ready for release yet, and it appears to already be bursting at the seams with functionality. Screenshots show a service that crams dozens of features, options, and snippets of information onto the screen–less an example of Google-esque minimalism and more like a Microsoft app that’s been through a few versions and is shoehorning stuff in.

Unlike my friend Jordan Golson, I don’t see Wave as a sign of breathtaking Google arrogance–at least not if the company comes up with a reasonable game plan to roll it out to the business users who are apparently its primary target. But I do worry about it suffering from Kitchen Sink Disease. I’m looking forward to trying it out soon and forming opinions based on actually using the thing…

Big Hair’s a No-Go In Video Games

Ever notice how your favorite video game characters wear close-cropped ‘dos, shave their heads, tie their locks back in a ponytail or just wear head dressings? They may be doing it for style, but they’re also conveniently hiding the difficulties of rendering lifelike video game hair.

This isn’t a new revelation, but the issue came to light again this week when Fight! Magazine learned about the exclusion of big hair in an Ultimate Fighting Championship video game. Fighter Clay “The Carpenter” Guida’s hairdo is so massive that the developers of THQ’s UFC Undisputed 2009 had to exclude him due to clipping and collision detection issues. Reportedly, THQ even offered Guida money to cut his hair, and he refused.

Earlier this week, I wrote about photorealism in games, and how one developer thinks video games could accurately depict thousands of facial bones in 10 to 15 years. But what about the tens of thousands of hair strands that adorn human heads? Apparently, gaming is pretty far off from nailing the art of beautiful, flowing locks.

For fun, here are a few other facts about video game hair:

• Mario, famously, sports a cap because designer Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t like creating hairstyles and wanted to save his programmers the trouble of animating the hair during jumps.
• Electronic Arts’ chief visual officer, Glenn Entis, said in 2005 that hair and facial expressions would be a focus of graphics in the HD gaming era, calling hair “such a communicator of style” and referring to past efforts as “laughable.”
• Even the latest graphical advances simulate less than a couple hundred strands of hair. A real human could shed that amount in a day.

5Words for Thursday, May 28th 2009

Wave? Makes me think Jobim…

Nice detailed Google Wave overview.

Verizon will get the Pre.

Steve Ballmer demos Zune HD.

Palm Pre syncs with iTunes.

Palm Pre very first impressions.

Review: Google’s developer conference phone.

Chorme for Mac: still coming.

Eighteen Android phones by December.