technology

Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.

Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.

Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.

And back in 1983, $500 was real money.

I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.

(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)

There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.

Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.

(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)

This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.

More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.

(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)

I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.

The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.

I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.

Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.

I've written before about my enormous respect for Trent Reznor and his impact on popular music. Now, he's raising the stakes for everyone distributing any kind of music on the web.

There was a lot of talk recently about how the release of Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows, on the web before it was released in stores as a traditional disk, and how this was going to shake the music industry to its very foundations.

Here's the exact headline of one such story, one of a gajillion you can find on the topic: Radiohead's Album Threatens Music Industry. No need to mention the name of that news outlet here. You probably caught the story at the time, if not, you can look it up. The fact is that virtually EVERYONE got this story exactly wrong.

Yes, it was cool that Radiohead offered a DRM-free, web-only release of the album, for any price you wanted to pay, including zero. Even so, the band made more than they'd ever taken home on any album before. They haven't said how much money that is, or how much they made, but I love it. I'm a huge Radiohead fan, especially The Bends, which is definitely one of my desert-island disks. Anything that makes them money is a-okay in my book.

Here are the rubs: it was very low bandwidth (160 Mbps) compared to other DRM-free releases --less than HALF of some of them. Also, it's over now. You can buy it digitally from Amazon etc. at 256 Mbps, or as a CDm both at a fixed rate from a major record label. As far as you're concerned today, the web thing never happened. What kind of threat is THAT? None, that's what.

Now our boy Trent, on the other hand, HE'S shaking things up. He left his major label for the express purpose of controlling the distribution and cost of his recordings. He's not at all happy with what had been happening, including the outcome of his direct confrontation of his label regarding what he feels are outrageous pricing.

Here's what he expressed to fans:

"Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that that's not right."

You can see that clip below. I couldn't figure out how to add two movies to the page, so here's the link to

Feel free to disagree, but he said what he said. And indeed, he has put his money where his mouth is. I got my copy of his new recording free, directly from him.  And unlike other digital downloads, it includes ALL THE ARTWORK, including a 40-page pdf of photographs taken alongside the project.

Now the free part is only the first volume of 4: 9 songs of 36. But you can stream the whole thing for free, or buy it for only $5. That includes the release as 320 Mbps MP3, genuinely lossless FLAC, Apple's fake lossless codec (sorry, it's true). For only $20, you get the immediate download now, plus a 2-CD release when it's available: a 6-panel digipack with the printed PDF, along with some goodies like wallpapers and such. The kids eat that stuff up.

Things get really interesting from there. A $75 deluxe edition includes all of that, plus a Blu-ray release of the album in 2 versions, including hi-def stereo. Following a precedent that Trent has set for a few songs, all 36 tracks are available as separate multi-track mixes that you can play with in any audio editor on Mac or Windows. (Trent is a famous Mac zealot, so you can be sure that he had Garage Band in mind), plus all that other stuff.

Most interesting: a 2500 limited edition that includes all of that plus heavyweight vinyl, plus 2 large books of artwork, embossed covers, the whole deal in a fabric slipcase. Plus 2 giclee prints: enjoy as is, or ready to frame. The package signed and hand-numbered by Trent...and more...for $700.

The amazing thing: that edition has long sold-out, long before the actual release. It's among the reasons why Trent was able to take in $1.3 million in the first WEEK of its availability...again, before the releases in April and May of various versions.

Pay for only what you want, as few or as many goodies that you want, entirely outside the label distribution chain. Now THAT starts looking like a threat.

So about a week after my download, Ars Technica ran a pretty cool story about the whole thing...albeit without the link to the thing that I provided above.

PS. Trent wasn't the first to speak out about labels overpricing records. Tom Petty held up the release of his 1981 record Hard Promises because the record company raised the price of it after promising they wouldn't. It was a big deal at the time, but the story never comes up anymore. It had 2 big hits (The Waiting, and A Woman's in Love), but it's still among my favorite of his records.

I had a lot of fun writing the "The Big Dog Gets Off the Porch" article for the newsletter. (Check out my blog post on the topic too.) It took a TON of research, though, and I found a lot of things I just didn't have room to use. It also made me think about some things -- new stuff as well as stuff that's been kicking around forever. So here we go...

This was never about image quality. Sort of.
There were many comparitive issues that factored into the victory, and they never had anything to do with which format looked better. As Joe Kane pointed out in the article, there was a time when Blu-ray was easily demonstrable as having much poorer quality, due largely to seriously nasty MPEG compression.

(Please note: the article I wrote for the main library had a TON of links, and took an acre of work, so I'm not going to repeat any of them here.)

I think it also pissed him off that Sony et al. simply refused to look at new, better compression technologies.  There was much horror from EVERYONE (including me, not that it matters) about this, long before the format even launched. The 2005 reply from Sony absolutely did NOT help:

"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."

As the article mentions, the image quality was SO much poorer that the videophile community in particular felt that Blu-ray was DOA.

So what changed? I think Joe K is right: it was hammer and tongs competition. Blu-ray looks fantastic of course, and compeition from HD DVD chased it far faster than mere consumers ever would have.

Image quality: Microsoft fails to deliver the killing blow
Anybody remember that head to head demonstration of VC-1 and H.264 at NAB? (Both of these are SMPTE names for Windows Media and QuickTime. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There were some other formats too, but it was lights out: None of us had seen anything like VC-1. Even the hardest core Mac fanboys were blown away.

A bigwig in the Hollywood post community (ground zero for Mac fanboys, believe me) said, It's over. Microsoft won. Yeah, it's cross platform and everything, but QT is out of it.

Don't believe the hype about Avid, btw. It's the OTHER ground zero for Mac fanboys. It was started as a Mac-only company, and won 6 technical Emmys and an OSCAR for its products between 1989 and 1998, all with Mac-only products, long before Apple bought the Windows-originated Final Cut from Macromedia.

(The PC hype about Avid is another story. The short version is that the guy who said what he said, everyone he worked for, and everyone who worked for him, was fired in the next year. What he was said was never, ever true. End of story.)

So it was with no pleasure whatsoever that we went on the road with VC-1. We projected it on the top of the line Barco projectors. There were only 3 of them in the world, and we had two. (Barco themselves were stuck with only one.) 

We projected VC-1 playing our 30 minute trailer reel and our 5 minute high-impact demo at 4 megaBITS per second playing off a hardrive on FORTY FOOT diagonal screens. A high quality projector showing a huge image exposed every single flaw...

...and there were none. We invited people to put their noses against the screen (rear-projected) and invited them to look for flaws. LA, NY, Chicago, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich -- nobody found any. One guy (ONE!) claimed to see some compression artifacts, but when it was pointed out that that was the texture of the screen fabric, he relented.

And that was pretty much the end of VC-1. I have no idea what happened. My guess is that Msoft both lost their will to fight in Hollywood (our contacts at MSFT disappeared), and they focused their efforts on Xbox and HD DVD.

The effect in all places was the same: they forced QT, Playstation, and Blu-ray to get much much prettier.

The OTHER result was largely the same: H.264 still has a much bigger footprint, Playstation still lacks basic features that Xbox has, as does Blu-ray re: HD DVD....but they all look fantastic.

This is why Joe Kane thinks the format war on DVD ended too soon, and why the industry as a whole is disappointed as Apple has fewer and fewer competitors -- the pace of innovation is one the verge of winding down to a crawl. Competition is GOOD.

May the best format LOSE
Now, this all played out much, much differently for the TAPE format wars. People lament that Beta was the better format: ridiculously better quality, smaller form factor, more durable tape and shell, and on and on.

These are all exactly the reasons why VHS won. Betamax was too good for the studios to let it live. 

In fact, they demanded that VHS image quality be reduced even further. VHS lived to see the light of day because the picture degraded so thoroughly when copied. No one of good intent would put up with it.

Which is why the Video Home Standard won. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it's why the studios backed it before the market did, even though Betamax came out earlier, and initial sales were much higher.

WHY this happened, and why it also happened in the DVD format wars in exactly the same way, is a conversation for another day. But it's interesting to note that Blu-ray won for many of the exact reasons that VHS won. Certainly following the same pattern. You think Sony might have been taking notes?

We know that Betamax's professional derivative became the professional standard, and the professional derivative of VHS, MKII, died without a trace...for many of the same reasons that VHS won in the home.

Here's a final word about competition: with Betamax, Sony was the first to introduce really high-quality audio on tape. (The professional derivative of "Beta Hi-Fii" was PCM.) VHS had nothing similar...until the year AFTER "Beta Hi-Fi."

Remember kids, competition, even in format wars -- ESPECIALLY in format wars -- is a good, good thing. The tape format wars went on just about the right amount of time. I agree with Joe Kane that the DVD format war probably ended a year early.

So here we are? What next? Walter points to one answer that really, really needs to be found right quick.  There are others....

Shane Ross hipped me to this. Until he posts his MacWorld ruminations, I'll tell you about it.

The Apple Cinema Display is just fine, thanks -- but here's a 30-inch monitor that's faster and brighter, with higher contrast and a wider viewing angle. It can be hardware calibrated - way way WAY overdue for ACD. (Professional monitor? Hmph.)

2560x1600 res, dual DVI including HDCP-encryption and analog inputs, 12-bit LUT...

Now throw in automatic backlighting and pixel-level adjustments to ensure uniform color across the screen and across time. Did I mention killah and crazy? It is.

Of course, MacWorld isn't exactly gizmo central. Not even vaguely close if you compare it to CES. Indeed, CES is where NEC introduced their bigger, beautifuller, even more expensive monitor, a 42-inch CURVED DISPLAY.

Okay THIS is the one that I want at least 3 of.

2880x900 (double WXGA+) panel with a contrast ratio of 10000:1 - yes TEN THOUSAND to 1. DLP, no bezel, 170% of the NTSC color range - hey! even more than PAL! And for you kids with your fast-twitch reflexes -- the pixel redraw time is .016 MILLISECOND!!

My math is pretty weak, but I think of one and a half-ish tenths of a millisecond as FAST.

NEC is pitching it to hardcore gamers, hence CES. The specific pitch: the curved monitor mimics peripheral vision, perfect for shooting things and making them explode even from the corner of your eye.

Oh yeah, and the specs. And how it looks.

So here's the business model:

1) Show 'em the cutting edge.
2) Charge what you want.
3) Get very, very rich.

Since there aren't many meaningful games on Mac, it's easy for Mac users to forget that GAMING is the dominant force driving computer innovation. Period. It's also easy for video guys like us to comprehend that video games generate more money than theatrical movie releases, DVDs, music and books COMBINED.

Having said all that, why would you NOT want to have a monitor this purty that's 2880 pixels wide?

And having said THAT, I admit that the first one is more practical. So I buy 2 of those for the office, at only $2200 each. Don't know when it will ship or how much it will cost, but I don't care. I'll get the curved one for the game room. Wait! I don't play computer games! So I need to buy some computer games too.

Looky there - I have at least 3 NEC monitors, mixed and matched. Sweet.

Or I could change my mind and go on vacation for a month. Which assumes I could stop working for a month. Which means that buying the monitors is the only smart thing to do.

...in, uhm, 2007. It really did make a huge splash at that show: in addition to MacWorld naming it best of show, I love this article from Ars Technica called "ModBook Rules MacWorld." It's easy to see why - this is the super cool thing that Apple should have released this year...if not last year...if not before. Yeah, yeah, laptops get all the buzz right now, but I'm telling you, tablets have been rocking the PC world for years because for a dramatic part of the laptop market, tablets work so much better. By such a long shot it's ridiculous.

Perhaps not for most folks here, but nobody here, including me, is in anything more than a teeny tiny niche of the market, even with the Apple ecostystem. So when I tell you that tablets are better than laptops for a large part of the market, "large part" by definition excludes us. :-)

(BTW, our boy Gates is on record saying that the tablet form factor will surpass all others....of course he said that would happen by 2006. Yeah yeah, evil empire, borg, whatever. The man knows something about selling massive numbers of things.) 

One of the easiest ways to understand the ModBook is as a cross between a laptop with a rotating screen, and a Newton on nuclear-strength steroids: touch sensitive screen designed by Wacom, handwriting recognition that actually WORKS, 25% higher contrast ratio than any MacBook, a bigger screen and faster processor than the Air, GPS, and on and on.

As for the Newton part, the CEO of Axiotron is the guy who KILLED Newton, so if nothing else, he has a good idea of what DOESN'T work.  And along the way, he's picked up on some things that do. Here's a more recent Ars Technica article, an interview with said CEO, Andreas Haas.

One of the most interesting things about this story is that Apple signed these guys up as an official Apple Proprietary Services Provider, and have made clear that they're just not interested in tablets.

"Apple just isn't interested in this type of thing, and that's why we're fulfilling that need. We're thrilled about it, and we are not going anywhere."

Of course the folks at Digital Voodoo and Matrox probably said the same thing, so whatever.

In any case, I think one of the things this shows is that Apple is only marginally interested in expanding its reach into new markets in the computer biz. Even if it's not at all useful to YOU, I think that the ModBook will be around longer than Air, which I think is destined to join Mac models like The Cube on the list of interesting failures.  

First, I want to underscore Shane Ross's outstanding, super-critical advice on upgrading your operating system. Although he wrote it in the context of upgrades to Leopard affecting your Final Cut Pro installation, it applies much more broadly of course. What he recommends is the right thing to do for any OS update, on either platform.

(Yo, Mac users...of whom I'm one. Following Shane's directions, the upgrade to Vista is smooth as silk. Certainly no more disruptive than OS 10.2, less disruptive than the migration to Intel architecture, and FAR less disruptive than the first OS X....which doesn't even hold a candle to the transition from System 6 to System 7, the worst OS update EVER. If you were using Macs then, you know I'm right.

BTW, this is neither a pro Vista or anti Mac observation. I'm just saying.)

Since Shane covered the OS, I'm going to focus on applications.

I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines that nobody who loves them should ever watch the making of sausages or democracy.

The same is generally true of software. It can be fun, but it’s always messy. My observations below don’t necessarily reflect anything I saw at the companies I worked for. I've had product manager pals of both software and hardware in a variety of industries for 10 years. They've told me stories far worse than these.

These are bad enough.

1) Nobody has tested your configuration.

Think about what you've got at the absolute core of your system. Drives and drivers. IO, QuickTime. OS, plug-ins... You think anybody inside a company has a configuration exactly like yours? I can tell you now THEY DON'T.

I'll go in reverse order, and start with the computer. Companies don't get these for free. They MIGHT get a loaner when they're testing the computer itself...but don't count on it. The absolute worst, worst WORST for this is Apple.

Which means that most third-party vendors, Windows or Mac, has to BUY EVERY configuration they want to test. Every computer, every array, every IO. What do you think the odds are that they've tested a system even a LITTLE like yours? Trust me, they probably haven't even gotten close.

No need to ask whether they’ve tested every camera and deck. You know the answer

2) Nobody has tested your workflow.

Yes, there are plenty of things every workflow has in common….and those are pretty much the only things you can guarantee have been tested: cut, copy, paste, save, open, close, capture, render, output.

Every format? Every frame rate? Every conversion between them? If you live in Europe but your software is developed in the US, I'm telling you now: PAL gets nowhere near the testing NTSC does, and yes, PAL-only bugs pop up plenty. I've never even heard of SECAM being tested...but surely somebody does, right? Right?

The other obvious thing every conscientious NLE developer tests is the export/import tango with Adobe After Effects. Beyond that, maybe yes, maybe no.

We’re mostly talking about NLEs here, but let me add a speedy note about OS software for pro users. Not registered users of the big pro software packages, which is north of a million each. I’m talking about real live editing pros – no more than a few tens of thousands, maybe a couple of hundred thousand tops, for everyone combined.

Any of you kids beta tested an OS? If it was Windows, you might have. Love those public betas, baby.

But Mac or Win, you think they’ve gone through everything you might do with their shiny new operating system?

3) Nobody has tested your features.

Shhhhh. Not every new feature is tested in every new release. The big ones, yes. One hundred percent, in every possible way they might be used? Uhm, not so much.

You'd be amazed how often you hear the phrase, "It should just work" bouncing around the software world. We don't need to test everything because "It should just work."

So let's pretend that all the new features get tested. The new ones get most of the attention. Everybody loves shiny babies. But what about the gawky adolescents known as old features? Which is to say, THE FEATURES YOU USE MOST.

Maybe the old features work with the new ones. Maybe not. Early adopters will find out the hard way if older features get broken by new ones. They do. Do you want to be the one who first tries to get it fixed?

Which brings us to,

4) New software can break your old stuff.

This one truly doesn't happen much at all, but when it does, it's heinous. I've never heard of things like entire projects getting torched, but presets? Absolutely. Keyframes? It’s happened with software I’ve bought. Thank goodness it’s rare, but it really is a heinous experience.

Don't forget: if things get hairy in your new version and you decide that the only way you can finish your project is in the old software, you're hosed. Opening new projects in an old version is a no can do.

Bailing on a new OS to go back to the old one that worked? Truly ugly, unless you followed Shane's absolutely critical advice for upgrading.

OS or app, back up everything. Trust no one.

5) Where'd I put that thing?

Unless you need a new feature or a specific old problem is fixed, adding new software is a guaranteed productivity killer.

Among the best-tested, most-reliable applications ever is Photoshop....which is the WORST application about moving features, changing toolbars, changing what's on menus. That would all be survivable if keyboard shortcuts stayed the same. Oops. Photoshop is the worst ever about this, too.

(Love ya, P-shop. I’m just saying.)

It’s just one example to illustrate the rule of Upgrade Inverse Proportion: the importance of the software is inversely proportional to the speed with which you should upgrade it.

In other words, don't upgrade if you need to get work done NOW.

6) Testers? What testers?

The industry's dirty little secret: many applications barely get any testing at all. One Very Famous Product has had outside testers in the single digits.

A product manager from the same Very Famous Company bragged to me about a release that “nearly 24” testers. Nearly?!? He clearly didn't want to just come out and tell me the real number...but he thought I should be impressed.

I was DEpressed that anyone thought this was a good idea. See numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, above.

BTW, if you're reading this, you almost certainly use this Very Famous Software.

(No, not that one. Not that one either. Yep, THAT one.)

7) There are lots of reasons to ship a product. The product being ready isn't always one of them.

Did you ever say to yourself, "Wow, who tested this stuff?"

My observation from many, many companies, is that even the best beta testers are nowhere near as diligent and thorough as the company’s internal QA (quality assurance) folks. They find a ton of problems that beta testers don't.

(You’ll also find a ton of problems they won’t. See numbers 1, 2 and 3, above.

There's even sophisticated, AI software to automate the testing of every single button and slider, as well as stability across hundreds of hours. In fact, they generate a number called MTBF, or Mean Time Between Failures. They almost know EXACTLY when and where things are going to go wrong.

Which is why I’ve seen QA folks practically chain themselves to the loading dock to try to keep software from shipping.

You should let developers off the hook a little here. I'll bte that everything you've ever "finished" -- term papers, projects for clients, mopping the kitchen -- could have benefited from more "finishing." Sometimes you have to say "enough already" and move on.

As they say in the game, "Shipping is a feature." Maybe shipping is what will give the company money to actually finish development.

How badly do you want to find out?

8) Third parties get the final product when you do.

There’s the software itself, then there’s all the people besides you who rely on it to create drivers, plug-ins, and all that good stuff. When they ship their compatible products, they need them to actually BE compatible.That’s why the REAL testing for those applications begins when the shrinkwrapped version of the software or hardware hits the streets. There's simply no other way development and testing can happen with a realistic chance of success.

Yet another reason to avoid overly-early adoption.

[edit, 10/30] A number of sites (here's one) report that Apple first released its developer build on 10/26....the same day YOU got it.

As mentioned above, there are obvious exceptions, but not many...and for Apple, far fewer than with other companies. Not passing judgment here, because it really is true for everyone. I’m just saying.

9) They don't always tell you all the bugs they know about. But they tell you plenty.

This one isn't as bad as it sounds. There really truly are edge cases, with combinations of genuinely obscure circumstances. They hope that you don't have them. Odds are better than even that it's not in the release notes.

There are other bugs that they hope to have fixed not long after shipping. The odds are about even you'll see it in the release notes.

If you don’t read the release notes, thoroughly, TWICE, before you even THINK about installing an upgrade – well, as my man Scooby Doo would say, “Ruh-roh.”

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The actual process is scary, but you know what? Things mostly turn out okay. Developers are almost all very smart people full of the best intentions. I know it can seem hard to believe when you’re on the receiving end, but they have more at stake in the product’s success than you do.

Upgrades usually go fine. As long as you’re only changing one thing at once.

Upgrading an OS, though? That's a whole lot of moving targets to hit.

You can avoid almost all of the pain by doing two things. The first is following Shane’s advice to the letter.

The other way to avoid the pain? Keep reading the Cow, and learn from all the people who’ve ignored all this.

PS. I'm about to install Leopard, and install Vista into Boot Camp. Two new OSes on the same day, on the same computer. Woo-hoo!!! Can't wait. Obviously. Stay tuned.

Okay, unlike last time, I'm right on top of this one. PayPal founder Elon Musk founded the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation in 2002, "developing a family of launch vehicles which will ultimately reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten." Gotta give the man credit for having a much, much better looking rocket than Jeff Bezos.

More credit (appropriately enough) where credit is due.

First, can't say he exaggerates: Of the 3/20 launch of Falcon 1, he says, "The launch was not perfect, but certainly very good." (This is actually from the SpaceX blog. Blogs rule.)

Actually, PayPal's performance kicks Amazon's ass. Bezos doesn't give details about his January launch, but observers speculate it got maybe 500, 1000 FEET tops. I emphasize feet because Musk's rocket got 200 MILES in the air.

Falcon flew far beyond the "edge" of space, typically thought of as around 60 miles. Our altitude was approximately 200 miles, which is just 50 miles below the International Space Station.

How are they doing it? Like The COW itself, Space X is doing big things with a small team:

Our company is based on the philosophy that simplicity, low-cost, and reliability can go hand in hand. By eliminating the traditional layers of management, internally, and sub-contractors, externally, we reduce our costs while speeding decision making and delivery.

Unlike Amazon's rocket, PayPal isn't for sightseers. This one is all about the work. Starting with one for the Defense Department, they plan a heap o' satellite launches later this year, and get this: they've already won a NASA contract for delivering and returning goods for the International Space Station!!

They've clearly moved beyond the stage of interesting hobby. As the our boy Elon writes in his blog:

I'd like to thank DARPA and the Air Force for buying the two test flights and helping us work through a number of challenges over the past year.

Is it okay if I'm getting a little freaked out by all this rocket stuff?

A final, truly tangential postscript: SpaceX is based in El Segundo, CA. I can never hear that name without hearing Q-Tip's unmistakable voice in A Tribe Called Quest's second single, "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo."

You can read the whole story at Wikipedia (yes, really). You've also got, got, got to

Since the issues surrounding rights and fair use come up at The COW all the dang time, from various perspectives, here are some of my very favorite web resources.

The Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center has a heavily scholarly orientation, maybe moreso than you'll find useful. But the coverage here is certainly exhaustive.

One of the coolest things about it is a free, digitized version of Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, called Free Culture. He's been a pioneer on rights in the electronic age from pretty much the beginning, and has fought vigorously against the rapidly diminishing rights that we have, both as creators and consumers of media. Gotta love this:

As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom--freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Like I said, you can download a free copy of the book with rights to reuse and remix for non-commercial purposes, so he's putting his money where his mouth is.

If you're going to get into a fight about rights, definitely better to know the real lay of the land. Even if you're not a scholar, definitely a site worth checking out.

More oriented toward practice than legal underpinnings or broad social examples, the Center for Social Media at American University is amazing. They offer what they call "Fair Use and Free Speech Resources." Note that they, like Lessig, equate the two.

Some great articles for documentarians in particular. Although this one is from 2005, it's got great information on efforts to expand the rights of documentary filmmakers wrt copyrighted materials. In the meantime, this article describes best practices for fair use as defined today.

People ask all the time about where copyright fades into the public domain. The guidelines are pretty clear, and you can see them here.

I could continue, but you get the idea. There's no reason for you to have any major questions about rights, and certainly no excuse for crossing the line. These two sites will help shine a light on the right path forward.

I've got one of them here, of our boy Derrick (really?), eating his toast. Really. By itself, it's not much. Unless you're Derrick or love toast. But it's part of an online mystery unspooling around the iPhone.

Quite the saga behind this. The Mobile Guerilla had been searching online for "taken with an Apple iPhone." Good for MG! This one of Derrick was the first of two posted to Flickr, marked private, then removed. I'm still not exactly clear what happened from there to make them public, if obscure. But whatever it was, I came across them, which means they weren't all that hard to find.

Although getting harder. One of the Flickr pages had a comment that I was going back to bookmark, but even the comments have been deleted now. Eerie.

[Update: found this in the Google cache, although it too may be gone by the time you get there. This, btw, is where I found out that the name of the dude eating toast is Derrick.

Now, for what it's worth, the iPhone-ishness of the image was "verified" by the EXIF info, which can of course be edited...but here it is: 

Camera: Apple iPhone
Aperture: f/2.8
Orientation: Rotated 90 degrees clockwise [which means the image was saved to disk horizontally oriented, but rotated in the phone, i think]
Date and Time: 2007:04:21 10:23:45
Color Space: sRGB
Tag::EXIF::0xA500: 11/5
Compression: JPEG
Image Width: 1600 pixels
Image Height: 1200 pixels

Okay, so how'd the photos get taken in the first place? Has to be a hoax, right? Well, no. Somebody at Apple's been testing it of course. And the taker of the pictures is indeed someone at Apple...or so it seems.

The Flickr page with the second photo, also deleted, had a comment from a visitor, also deleted, but copied in a comment elsewhere: "The Flickr account however belongs to an individual who can be tracked down to a LinkedIn profile which reveals that they are a Program Manager at Apple in the Consumer Electronics industry." I took a gander at her LinkedIn profile, and that is indeed what it says. So there ya go.

Of course, since her profile is private, she might be funnin' us all the way across the board. Maybe she's just good at Photoshop (not all the EXIF fields are easily or obviously edited), and her boy Derrick just dig toast. Which is probably the case, hoax or not.

Then again, maybe she works at Apple. It's happened that Apple (like every company you know) has had a "leak" that they've had to "plug," intended all along to say exactly what it said. In this case, that the iPhone is very much on the way, demonstrated with a feature that we've not previously seen in action.

All of that said, I truly hate phones with cameras. Many companies won't allow them on the premises (too easy to document and disseminate things that shouldn't be), ditto gyms (same reason), and one of my favorite pastimes, movie sneak previews (hey, same reason, although this one's especially stupid. The movie's going to be in 1500 theaters in two days! BTW, I'm not a supa-dupa secret insider any more, just an Entertainment Weekly subscriber.) I've even gotten turned away from some concerts, although fewer as time goes by. In any case, I got tired of having to put my phone in a bag at the door...or just flat being turned away...so no camera phones for me.

And I'm sure there's an amount of money that can get me to switch to Cingular...but nobody has offered me that much yet.

So let's say that ain't you, babe. Don't forget that you can register at Cingular to be notified by email when it's ready.

PS. My favorite thing about the iPhone is something that didn't come from Apple, but from Jeff Han and the geniuses at Cornell.

PPS. The saga of iPhone sneak previews continues to continue, although this one's a Photoshop job.

It's the George Foreman iGrill, model number GIPOD200. (Did I miss the 100 model?) Okay, on closer examination, it's a George Foreman grill that you can plug more or less any MP3 player into. But the ad and the model name namecheck iPod by name. Built in speakers and amp, too. Gotta love that. You could go to George's site to see it yourself, but I've been thoughtful enough to save you the trip by pasting the picture here:

My favorite part is "Knockout tunes! Knockout the fat!" at the bottom.

He's such a sweet guy now...and maybe he was a sweet guy then...but I've never seen anybody hit harder than George Foreman in his prime.

Uhm, you kids know he was a boxer, right?

One of his biggest fights, the one documented as "The Rumble in the Jungle" in the fantastic documentary "When We Were Kings," resulted in a hard loss to then-underdog Muhammed Ali  -- one of only 5 in a career that included 68 knockouts in 76 fights. These weren't against palookas either -- back then, heavyweight championships meant something serious. These guys were arguably the most respected athletes in the world.

One of George's most famous victories came in the first HBO boxing transmission, with Howard Cosell's call becoming, as Wikipedia reminds us, one of the most famous of all time: "Down goes Frazier!, Down goes Frazier!, Down goes Frazier!" George knocked him down 6 times, with the last blow actually lifted Frazier's feet off the floor. Gotta give our man Joe credit for getting up all six times before the fight was declared a technical knockout. Another non-palooka: "Smokin' Je" Frazier knocked Ali out in the 11th round in "The Fight of The Century," which I think probably was...although I didn't see them all.

Since he retired, my favorite thing about George isn't the grill. It's that he named all five of his sons....George.

BTW, little known fact about me: I used to box. Loved it. Nothing brings clarity like being punched in the face. A finite number of times I suppose.

George Ou over at Real World IT talks about his quest for a universal power adapter. Wouldn't it be loverly? Then he observes that USB is becoming the new standard for charging devices including iPods and other portable music players, portable GPS, and an increasing number of phones. All true. He leaves out PDAs and portable gaming devices like PSP  and Game Boy.

Then he says, Now all I need is a single cigarette to USB adapter and a single 110 V to USB adapter where ever I travel and I don't need to worry about forgetting a proprietary adapter. 

Done and done, my man. I've had USB-charged devices for 3 years, and have found all kinds of goodies. The exact chargers that George is talking about have been around well longer than that. (Yes, you can find white ones designed to work your iPod, for which you'll pay way, way too much.)

After trying the offerings from a handful of vendors, I highly recommend Boxwave. Here's the link for the wall adapter, which I've used more often than I can count in the last three years. The same page has links to other handy devices, including a USB adapter for cigarette lighters.

My very, very favorite device is the miniSync retractable USB cable. The one I have both connects my iRiver "multi-codec jukebox" to my computer and charges it at the same time. There are similar cables for every USB iPod, and even the iPhone. Again, I've used my USB chargers more times than I can count. Even if it's just a few minutes in the car, or a few minutes from a spare laptop, I can keep going.

Since my iRiver has a dandy built-in mic that records to both MP3 and WAV (among others), I've used it for interviews at tradeshows (easy enough to slip the USB connector into any laptop, especially the ones at the Apple booth -- shhhhh!) I've also used it in press briefings, plugged into the interviewee's laptop.

The most life-saving feature is drawing power for a phone over USB. I'll bet you've been in situations where your phone is dead, your laptop has juice, but the phone number you need is on your cellphone. Connect the phone to the laptop, and you're back in business. 

Of course, for regular travel, this also means that the only adapter I need is for the laptop. I can charge both a music player and a phone from a USB adapter the size of a 50-cent piece....if you're old enough to remember those...which means you're probably old enough not to say "fitty" every time you pronounce 50.

There are a ton of these little adapters that handle USB 2.0 transfers from the Canon XL-1, hundreds of digital cameras, and much more.

Anyway, Boxwave has a ton of such things: replacement styli for Palm and Treo; dual Firewire-USB adapters for car, wall, and planes; high-quality retractable earbuds (no more tangles!); international power adapters, and on and on. They're cheap, fast, and a pleasure to deal with: the road warrior's best friend since Odwalla Superfood juice.

Not a paid spokesman, just a satisfied customer.

Hacking was a term originally coined at MIT to descrive such classic pranks as emptying the deans office and reassembling it -- complete with rug -- in the middle of the frozen Charles River. (That illegal software thing is more properly called "cracking.") Hacking Apple TV is an entirely legal activity that makes it truly useful, starting with a bigger hard drive -- child's play for anyone reading this. A blog by the fine folks at makezine.com offer a fully illustrated tutorial called "Violating my Apple TV warranty in 4 easy steps."

Legal yes, warranty-voiding, yes, but seriously, dude. If you can find your way around a ribbon cable, you can do this. You should do this.

If you want to get really serious about hacking, like adding other applications (start with Firefox for browsing, Joost for free TV, and Quartz for added performance), the fine folks at the Tutorial Ninjas blog will happily help you out. Not child's play for everyone...but definitely a breeze for anyone who can use a command line in OS X.

This is just the very, very beginning of what's available from Apple TV hacks, with many more coming I'm sure. One of many blogs to keep up with Apple TV Hacks is (naturally enough) Apple TV Hacks. Another good one is AwkwardTV.

Note that ALL of these are blogs. When I tell people that virtually all of my time online NOT in The COW forums is at blogs, this kind of information is one of gazillions of reasons why. Blogs are where you'll find the best information breaking fastest -- one of gazillions of reasons why I'm so happy to see blogs at The COW.

Okay, final example of brilliant hacks presented via blogs, this time the Hack A Day blog. Decide in advance what you want to be drinking when you visit this page, because when you play the movie, you're going to laugh so hard that you'll eject said liquid through your nose. Appropriately enough, this hack is the robotic beer launching refrigerator. The movie takes a while to get interesting, but the accuracy tests will blow you away. THIS, friends, is a useful hack!

PS. re: MIT: you can get MIT's ENTIRE CURRICULUM, both undergrad and graduate, onine for free. It's the whole magilla: required reading lists, examples of student work, some (not all) classroom lectures, and more. Here's my pass/fail grading: the curriculum is awesome, but because MIT FAILS by only offering lectures in Real Media, you should PASS on those. But the curriculum is way cool.

Well, to be precise, Jeff Bezos has a rocket. He's the founder of Amazon.com, and he's apparently been working on this for a while. It's not a big rocket, but it's really, truly a rocket. Its first successful launch was in November.

He's got pictures and a movie at the project's website, Blue Origin.

How the heck did I miss this story at the time?!? It turns out that I'm not the only one. It didn't get wide coverage until January, when an FAA notice from November was published, warning air traffic to stay clear of the launch area. But I still missed it in January!

Anyway, you might ask yourself, as I did, "Why?!?" My first assumption was...because he can. He's got a ton of money. I'm inclined to think that Amazon.com is very nearly as big a deal as the development of the World Wide Web itself, so no matter how much he's made, he deserves more.

So what does Jeff have to say about this? He says it's the first step toward affordable space travel.

We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. [...] and we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along. Smaller, more frequent steps drive a faster rate of learning, help us maintain focus, and give each of us an opportunity to see our latest work fly sooner.

They're hiring too. Doesn't matter if you're not a rocket scientist. "Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme," says Jeff, so even if you don't qualify for one of the 17 jobs posted at their website, feel free to forward a resume.

They're also looking for interns for summer 2007, so if you're a student, or know one, you'll definitely want to look into this.

Now, when Jeff talks about affordable space travel, he's definitely contrasting himself with gazillionaire (and occasional space case) Richard Branson. Branson has a pair of big brass ones, though: he's already taking reservations! (It's a Flash site, so I took a screengrab.)

Find your nearest space agent! Like I said, a pair of big brass ones.

 BTW, I checked. Virtouso.com ("We Orchestrate Dreams") based in Fort Worth, TX of all places, is the exclusive North American, uhm, space agent. Operators are standing by.

At least the $20,000 deposit is refundable. He doesn't mention how many miles on Virgin Atlantic you'd have to redeem to get a seat on Virgin Galactic, but I suspect it's a bunch. Certainly cheaper to stop whining and pony up the $200,000.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I trust the guy who made his fortune in online retailing more than a former record company weasel who laid his money on bricks-and-mortar retailing...but I'm sure it says something.

CNN reports that Apple has started charging credit cards for the shipment of Apple TVs. They continue, "Analysts say it's likely to sell well initially." Wow. You think so? The same analysts believe that Apple has taken pre-orders for more than 100,000 units, and, well, since I read it on the internet, it must be true.

Blog pioneer (he was doing it 10 years before blogging had a name) Dave Winer reports that one of his readers says he got a notice from Apple that his has actually been shipped. I got Dave's link from NewTeeVee, who quotes Dina Kaplan of Blip.TV: “The impact of Apple TV is going to be pretty big.” You think?

I'm not mocking Apple TV, just the analysts. And not even all the analysts. Jonathan Hoopes is an analyst for ThinkEquity, and has been bullish on Apple for a long time. (He rates Apple a buy, with a target of $120/share. You can look it up.) He sent a letter to his clients with a slightly more articulate take on the potential impact of Apple TV:

"In addition to sharing digital content within the home, we believe investors should understand the value of the various potential business models that Apple TV could enable.

As a digital media content delivery vehicle positioned in users' living rooms, we think the AppleTV/iTunes combination could become as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior as the iPod/iTunes combination has been to the traditional music business model."

Ah, disruption! Now we're talking.

Jeremy Horwitz adds another dimension to the picture:

Apple has quietly added an “Export to Apple TV” feature capable of creating high-definition videos viewable on the Apple TV accessory. Unlike Export to iPod, which currently creates sub-DVD-quality 640 by 480 videos,

Export to Apple TV creates not only full DVD-quality 720 by 404 videos, but also 1280 by 720 videos.

He's done a little experimenting with this, and observes that a 90-minute movie weighs in at about 3 gigs. That sounds about right, but it also sounds a little heavy for Apple TV's initial offering of a 20-gig hard drive. (Oops.)

Still, check this out: the video from Jeremy's experiments so far only plays back in iTunes! It seems to herald HD delivery through iTunes. I don't think our boy Hoopes was even aware of this when he wrote in the article linked above that Apple TV is poised to blow Netflix clear out of the water, and is a step away from torching TiVo too.

That said, Apple is quick to admit that the average iPod user has bought 20 tracks from the iTunes music store. Which suggests to me that the stunning majority of iPod users have bought nothing from iTMS.

So this is one area that Hoopes is clearly flat-out wrong. iTunes isn't disrupting the music industry's basic business model. I don't think it ever will. Disrupted the portable music player industry that iPod was so late to join? Absolutely.

Is it going too far to say that iPods have taken off because you don't need to buy anything from iTMS to get a dandy experience? iTunes is awesome software for ripping your entirely legally purchased CDs and elegantly getting them on your iPod.

Unlike the iPod, Apple TV will require payment to view content on a big screen. Apple can't include DVD ripping tools in its official software so you're going to be limited to viewing content purchased from the iTunes store.

That's Jason O'Grady, one of the hardest of the hardcore Mac users ever. Like Hoopes, I think he lets some of his arguments take him off course, but I think he's zeroed in on this: Apple TV takes off when I can use it for my media.

Anyway, we're about to find out, ain't we?

One of the favorite games of Mac Kremlinologists is looking under the hood of new releases to find "hidden" text strings for hints of what's coming. Monday's release of QuickTime 7.1 hints at a whopper: Apple TV could be doubling as a game hub.

What Apple has not yet said, but is quite apparent from Monday's iTunes release, is that Apple TV will also sport some rudimentary gaming capabilities. "Are you sure you want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV," reads a localized string file hidden in the software. Another reads, "Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV [...] because they cannot be played on this Apple TV."

 

In total, iTunes 7.1 includes a little over a dozen text strings relating to game management on the new Apple device. In addition to syncing, the strings offer user prompts for various other operations such as removing games, preventing unauthorized games from making the sync, and warning users when their Apple TV can no longer accept new games due to a lack of space.

 

Note that this is still a long way from becoming a full-bore gaming console a la the Wii, et. al. Instead, it looks like a way to sync your iTunes games with your Apple TV.

Wait, iTunes games? Apparently so. On the one hand, this suggests something pretty lightweight, not nearly as intense as a console experience. On the other hand, two developments shed still more light on this.

In an interview with Wired, the former general manager of Xbox's online download component now works for a gaming company in a role that includes porting games to new platforms:

It will be about taking the stable of franchises and games out of PopCap's studio and adapting, customizing it for different platforms -- adding multiplayer, new play modes, HD, customizing the user interface and display for Zune, ipod, Apple TV, Nintendo DS, PSP.

 

And how's this from Apple Insider?

Students at the Savannah College of Art and Design reported today receiving an e-mail from a recruiter working directly for Apple, Inc., who appears to be actively tracking down skilled graphics designers among those enrolled in the school's Fine Arts programs. Those hired for the summer program would be tasked with creating "consistent, high quality 3D and 2D art for games," the message said.