I Like Searching. But I’d Rather Sit Back and Not Search

Once again, I’ve guest-blogged over at BingTweets about the future of search–or at least the future of search that I’d like to see. This post is called “What’s Better Than Searching? Delivery!” And it’s about the potential for services to get really smart about the things we’re interested in, and really good at delivering information related to them without us lifting a finger. (Yes, I know that alerts services of various sorts have been around for eons–but even the best of them aren’t the result of anything like the effort the world has put into improving Web search over the past fifteen years.)

If you check out the post, lemme know what you’d like to see in an alert service–either over at BingTweets, or right here.

Okay, Sony, Now You’re Definitely Competing With the iPhone

Remember in March, when Sony Senior Marketing Vice President Peter Dille dismissed the iPhone? “The iPhone games and apps are largely diversionary, whereas we’re a gaming company and we make games for people who want to carry a gaming device and play a game that offers a satisfying 20+ hours of gameplay,” he said in an interview with GameDaily.

I’d love to hear what Dille thinks now that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is coming to the iPhone. The game, originally released for Nintendo DS in March, was announced for Sony’s PSP in June and will arrive on October 20. The iPhone version is scheduled for release some time this fall, 1UP reports.

This is the inverse of Sony’s recent announcement of PSP Minis, a set of small-scale, inexpensive games targeted at the upcoming PSP Go. While that move represented an attack on the iPhone’s cheap gaming marketplace (though Sony wouldn’t admit it), GTA’s migration to the iPhone is a counter-assault on the PSP’s 20-hour experience.

The announcement partly suggests that game developers and publishers are getting confident in the iPhone as a serious gaming platform. More importantly, if the iPhone version of GTA proves equal to its PSP and Nintendo DS counterparts, it opens the door for more ports of dedicated handheld console games.

I’m not simply talking about a paring down of big franchise games, such as Assassin’s Creed and Metal Gear Solid, because that’s already happening. What I’m wondering is, how long will it be before the same handheld video game is simultaneously announced and released for Nintendo DS, PSP and iPhone?

And if that happens, how long will it be before Sony finally acknowledges that there’s a third enemy in its midst?

The Future–August 1999 Style!

Way back in August of 1999–hey, that was a decade ago, in a different century!–I was lucky enough to visit MIT’s Media Lab along with fellow members of the American Society of Business Press Editors. We got a bunch of demos of technology that was, literally, still in the lab. I remember the tour vividly, but had forgotten that I’d written it up for the ASBPE newsletter. But the ASBPE rediscovered my old story and has posted it on their blog.

How much of  the vision we saw in 1999 has become everyday reality? Quite a bit, actually. Let’s review.

1999: “The Lab is developing an inexpensive, flexible material that looks and acts like paper, but can display information that can be changed electronically, without the use of consumable materials. Its inventors believe that this medium could eventually be used to produce a computer for about $10.” The ten-buck computer still isn’t here yet, but E-Ink’s electronic paper–based on MIT’s research–is one of the things that makes a Kindle a Kindle.

Continue reading this story…

RROD Explained: You Play Too Much

Microsoft’s never been particularly forthcoming about the Xbox 360′s hardware issues. The company said earlier this year that the worst troubles are behind us, only to see new problems spring up. We’ve never heard an official failure rate (estimates vary, wildly), and after all this time, there’s no way to tell whether a working console is destined to get the dreaded Red Ring of Death.

So Eurogamer did the logical thing and asked a third-party console repairman, and learned that a major problem in today’s console failures is “cumulative damage.” In other words, the longer you own and play a console, the more likely it is to die.

Sony fanboys shouldn’t be laughing: Engineer Darren Thickbroom of Colchester Computers told Eurogamer that he’s seeing more and more Playstation 3 consoles come in for the so-called “Yellow Line of Doom.” Sure, Thickbroom is just one engineer, but his analysis does check out with my own Xbox 360 experience. After almost three years of use, my console suddenly and inexplicably stopped working a couple weeks ago, flashing the three red lights I’d heard and written so much about.

Of course, you can’t blame the console owner for playing the console. What’s really problematic, according to Thickbroom, is the general design of the latest machines, which pack powerful hardware into a tiny container. “Everything’s combined into such a small space, the heatsinks on the GPU are relatively small, there’s a lot of heat to dissipate and it can’t do it,” he said. Over time, the trapped heat warps the console’s motherboard, eventually hitting a breaking point.

Maybe instead of wishing for ultrathin consoles, we should by lobbying for the Playstation 3 Big and the Xbox 360 Fat. I’d rather have a fully-functional colossus in my entertainment center than a slim and sexy brick.

Find My iPhone Busts Burglars

A man in Shadyside, PA corralled some crooks using the Find My iPhone feature of his iPhone’s MobileMe account after he was robbed on Sunday. Local police worked with the man to make the arrests and recover his property.

Of course, the thieves simply could have turned off location tracking, or just shut the phone off. John Dillinger they were not.

I don’t pay for MobileMe, because I get most of its features for free through other services. Apple’s addition of Find My iPhone to the iPhone 3.0 software almost enticed me to pay for it, but MobileMe still wasn’t a good fit for me.

My main concern is losing my phone–whether it’s damaged, lost or stolen. It would be great if Apple could provide a product to fit that requirement. I’d be willing to pay for insurance, and for the Find My iPhone feature of MobileMe. I’m sure that I’m not the only one. How about it Apple?

Snow Leopard: The First 72 Hours

This isn’t a review of Apple’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard–here are a bunch of those–but rather just some notes on my first three days with it. (I showed up at my local Apple Store at 10am on Friday to buy it, and was on the way back to my car at 10:01–sure beats waking up at 3am to buy an iPhone.)

Herewith, random musings:

Installation on my MacBook Pro went well. It took 38 minutes (less than Apple’s 45-minute estimate) and required virtually no input from me.  Snow Leopard reported almost 11GB more free disk space than Leopard did, which got me all giddy. I’ve since learned that Snow Leopard, like hard-disk manufacturers, defines 1KB as 1,000 bytes rather than 1024, and some of the reclaimed space is therefore imaginary.

I’m still getting a sense of its speed. It’s always dangerous to read vendor claims about performance increases–unless you’re a really skeptical sort, being told that an OS is zippier may have a placebo effect. Overall, this MacBook was pleasingly speedy under Leopard, and is pleasingly speedy under Snow Leopard. The one place where I know I see a performance increase is one that’s important to me, but one which Apple makes no claims about in its discussion of speed improvement: Spotlight searches, which were sometimes quite slow in Leopard, are reliably quick now.

Continue reading this story…

Can You Trust Wikipedia?

Wired has an interesting story about Wikitrust, a new technology that will color-code material in Wikipedia in an attempt to indicate how trustworthy its author is. It’s an intriguing solution to a real problem, although like all articles on Wikipedia accuracy, Wired’s piece makes a reflexive-but-misguided reference to Encyclopaedia Britannica being the paragon of reference-work trustiness. (Which it isn’t–or at least wasn’t when my father reviewed it back in the 1970s and found some jaw-dropping errors.)

Anyhow, I feel a T-Poll coming on…

The T-Grid: Mickey Mouse vs. Spider-Man

It’s not the biggest media merger ever, but it may be the most intriguing one: The Walt Disney Company has agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. Which means that Mickey Mouse, Goofy, the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Pinocchio, the X-Men, Gus and Jaq-Jaq, Kermit the Frog, Captain America, the Little Mermaid, Ghost Rider, Buzz Lightyear, the Dazzler, Dr. Strange, Hannah Montana, all 101 Dalmatians, and both Donald and Howard Duck will work for the same company.

I’m reporting on this here mainly because it seems like a safe bet that Disney is putting down its four bil in part because of the potential it sees for Marvel characters in digital form: in games, on the Web, via digital distribution of movies, on mobile devices, and more. But I’m also covering this because I felt like doing a T-Grid. After the jump, a quick comparison of two legendary characters who will surely meet before too much time has passed.

Continue reading this story…

5Words for Monday, August 31st 2009

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Mickey Mouse meets the Hulk.

Inside Microsoft and Apple’s advertising.

Wikipedia to rate authors’ credibility.

Lost or stolen Kindle? Tough!

BlackBerry Storm is now $50.

Canadian Pre ad insults everybody.

Please don’t call them smartbooks.

Samsung’s opening an app store.

Mac Security Improves with Snow Leopard

While Apple still has significant security work ahead of it, its Snow Leopard operating system makes prudent progress toward securing Mac OS X. But a security expert says that Apple is still playing catch up to Windows.

That is the opinion of Charlie Miller, a leading Mac security researcher. Miller is co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, and is also known for discovering critical vulnerabilities in the OS. He told CNET today that Snow Leopard “made some improvements,” but has not implemented some of the security features that Microsoft built into Windows Vista in 2007.

After being slammed with a series of major security incidents at the start of the decade, Microsoft made security a part of its development lifecycle. Products cannot ship from Microsoft unless they have gone through a review process, and consequently, the number of security vulnerabilities in its products has dropped markedly. It was tough, expensive work, and required a strong commitment from management.

Microsoft is now making its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), as well as some of its internal security tools, available to developers in an effort to secure Windows applications as well as the OS itself. Apple has not taken similar steps.

To the best of my knowledge, Apple is still lacking an SDL-like approach to software development. That might be why I’ve had to download several massive security roll ups to patch my Mac over the past two months. As much as I love my iMac, the experience reminds me of Microsoft just a few years back.

However, Snow Leopard demonstrates that Apple, like Microsoft, has made security a higher priority. To thwart attacks, Snow Leopard introduces limited malware protection, and other protections including improved Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and Data Execution Prevention (DEP). It also sandboxes applications, which is made possible through mandatory access control that was introduced in Leopard.

I have made no bones about my opinion that Apple has done a lackluster job at security, but it deserves credit for moving in the right direction.

iPhone App Store Approval Process: Apple’s Whitewater?

The appearance of wrong doing can create a perception that trumps reality. Apple has needlessly tarnished its reputation in the industry by shrouding its iPhone App Store approval process in secrecy, fomenting speculation that it is deeply flawed and unfair. Only transparency will rebuild trust.

It took Apple eleven days to certify Facebook 3.0, which debuted on App Store yesterday. That’s less time than the two-week period that Apple says 95 percent of apps are approved within. But Facebook is one of the App Store’s most popular programs, and lots of iPhone owners were waiting for the new version.

Apple’s prolonged approval process drew the ire of lead developer Joe Hewitt, who blogged publicly about his frustrations and said even two weeks are two weeks too many. Facebook is a high profile App Store developer, and Hewitt’s criticism cast a negative light on Apple that was intensified by press reports.

It might seem like an odd comparison, but I’m reminded of the Whitewater investigation that plagued much of the Clinton presidency. A friend who used to work in the White House told me that one senior adviser told the President that the scandal would be defused if he made documents available for review. Secrecy is what gave Whitewater a life of its own, and the President’s opponents exploited the ensuing distrust.

Apple has had numerous Whitewater moments. There are numerous rejected apps, and there isn’t always a clear reason behind Apple’s refusal to publish them. Now the FCC is investigating Apple, and Microsoft is appealing to forsaken Apple developers to develop for Windows Mobile.

Like the Clinton administration before it, nothing is stopping Apple from clearing the air– except for its deeply rooted penchant for secrecy. If Apple can embrace transparency, it might even come off looking good. The perception couldn’t get much worse.

The company has said that every app undergo a security review. That’s great–I’d like to hear more about it and other steps that Apple takes to deliver quality applications for the iPhone. Until it does, the controversy will continue.

Building a Kindle Killer. Or Several of Them

Slates Farhad Manjoo has a good story up about how Sony in particular and e-reader makers in general can build an e-book device that’s better and more popular than Amazon’s Kindle. One graf that left me mentally applauding:

I’d counsel Amazon’s competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they’d be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he’s got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I’d prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with most online music—but many in the publishing industry would never go for that.) Kindle’s rivals could also get together to create a huge, single ePub bookstore. Publishers would have a big incentive to feed this store with all their books—if they provide books only to Amazon, they’d be helping to create a monopolist in their industry, and that’s never good for business.

Manjoo says he hopes that Sony and/or other players provide Amazon.com with intense competition. So do I, for the same reason–I don ‘t want Amazon or Google or anyone else to dominate electronic books any more than I’d have been happy if Random House (say) had cornered the market on dead-tree tomes. Right now, Sony seems like the best hope for a strong Amazon alternative (Plastic Logic is a fairly promising dark horse). The upcoming Sony Reader Daily Edition leaves me cautiously optimistic, but I’d love to see more companies leap into the action…

Facebook and Twitter Will Cost Money on Xbox 360

One of the nice things about Facebook and Twitter is that they’re free to use, but won’t really be the case on the Xbox 360.

Microsoft confirmed to G4 that an Xbox Live Gold subscription will be required to use either service, at least beyond a “free trial period.” A Gold subscription costs $50 per year, and also includes online play, access to Netflix streaming and other perks.

I understand what Microsoft is trying to do here. Xbox Live, traditionally, has been a venue for fiercely competitive online play. Despite most games’ ability to match players based on skill, it can be difficult for a casual player to find fair competition. I consider myself fairly skilled at video games, but I’ve been beaten down countless times in Street Fighter IV, Gears of War and Fight Night Round 4.

That’s not a bad thing, except it doesn’t appeal to the so-called casual crowd that Microsoft will be trying to attract in the years ahead. Slowly, we see that Microsoft is trying to build a compelling case for Xbox Live Gold even if you’re not an online gamer. Aside from Twitter, Facebook and Netflix, Gold subscribers will soon be able to stream music using Last.fm and play in the 1 vs. 100 online quiz show (currently in open beta).

But unlike those other services, Facebook and Twitter aren’t worth paying for. Microsoft can talk all it wants about how the social networking is “seamlessly integrated” into the console, but I don’t think they’ll gain many converts with a free trial.

A better solution might be to offer “Lite” versions of Facebook and Twitter. We know that the services will include advanced features, such as the ability to upload game screenshots into your Facebook profile, so maybe Microsoft should withhold those features for Xbox Live Silver members. That way, people could slowly become persuaded of Xbox Live’s overall value, instead of being forced to make a decision when their trial period runs out.

Courts Throw Out FCC Cable Market Share Limits

In a potentially huge victory for Comcast, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC threw out a rule limiting cable companies to under 30 percent of the market. The courts claimed that the FCC failed to take into account competition from satellite and fiber-optic providers when considering competition.

Comcast currently controls about 25 percent of the cable market, with about 23.7 million customers. With the law now vacated, the company will have an easier time looking for potential acquisitions to expand its reach.

The rule has an interesting history: it was first implemented in 1992 as part of an effort to control monopolization of the cable industry. The court declared the law unconstitutional in 2001, and had it set aside. That didn’t stop the FCC: in 2007, on a 3-2 vote it re-instituted the policy.

Analysts say that its unlikely that Comcast will acquire large cable operators, as there is not a significant enough benefit to doing so. However, with no roadblocks, the nation’s largest cable operator is pretty much free to get as big as it wants.

A Tale of Two Receivers: XM Skydock vs. XM Onyx

Sirius XM announced two new XM receiver devices this week – the Skydock ($120) and the Onyx ($80). Both are scheduled for a fall delivery and, I’m guessing, they’re targeting different audiences. While choice is good, I’m not sure the Skydock will be worth the 50% premium over the Onyx for most.

The XM Skydock essentially turns an iPhone or iPod touch into a satellite display and controller tethered inside a car. Whereas the Onyx, for $40 less, sticks with the more traditional plug & play receiver form – and is bundled with a vehicle kit, but presumably home kits and maybe even boombox accessories (like this) will be available. Making it a more practical option for many. One device, one subscription, multiple locations. Additionally, as most folks know, the iPhone has a small problem with third party multitasking. Meaning, that while an iPhone may make a great satellite receiver when paired with the Skydock, you’ll have to stop the music to navigate or take a call. (Sirius XM could have minimized this limitation by integrating some sort of speakerphone functionality, perhaps utilizing the car speakers.)

I’ve got XM built into my vehicle, so I won’t need to make this decision. But I’m wondering which side other folks will fall on. Assuming you find satellite radio worthwhile.

[This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.]

In Case of Emergency, Should the White House Control the Internet?

Cnet’s Declan McCullagh has a good story up on a Senate Bill sponsored by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) which would give the White House the power to disconnect private computers from the Internet in the case of a cyberemergency. McCullagh says that the bill, a revised version of one floated last spring, remains troubling to Internet and telecommunications companies and civil liberties groups, who say the the new version remains vague about the powers it grants.

Let’s take a T-Poll on it–and just to remove politics from the issue (and despite my silly piece of art), let’s make this question about a fictional President of the United States of unspecified political party, not the guy who happens to be there right this very minute…