If you have one of the hot new game consoles (Wii or PS3) then you’ve probably heard about the blinking screen problem. It seems that with certain televisions, after a time the screen would start to blink on and off, making the console unusable. Now the folks at Popular Mechanics have discovered the source of the problem. Once again, a scheme on the part of hardware and software manufacturers that assumes users are thieves has caused a problem for legitimate, honest users.

There are several lessons that come from this particular set of circumstances. First, if you’re going to have any process that depends on the timing of signals between hardware from different vendors, you’d better make darned sure that every vendor commits to fulfilling the timing requirements. Next, if you’re going to ship a product that includes firmware, you should have a simple field-updating process in place before you ship the first unit to customers.

Finally, I’m going to give away my secret plan for the ultimate copy protection plan. Ready? Create content that people are willing to pay for. There it is. Lots of artists and musicians find this plan works quite well. It’s positive, not subject to technological revolution, and places no undue burden on your users (or customers, or fans). Any content distribution scheme built on the assumption that everyone who pays for content is, at heart, a lying thief, deserves the failure it will ultimately find. Most of the content moguls know this, which explains the time they spend in Washington, D.C.: they want the government to slow their march to failure by limiting their customers’ ability to choose options.

What can consumers do about it? Try saying “no”. Don’t buy products that come with stupid, restrictive technology built in. Support artists and technologies that treat you (the person who gives them money and lets them pay the rent) as a supporter instead of an enemy. And speak up–write a letter, especially to your elected representatives. Let them know that your rights matter just as much as the rights of media companies. They really do, you know.

Categories: Entertainment, Media
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I’m finding more that I like about Office 2007, though there are still plenty of things that puzzle me. OneNote is on its way to becoming an indispensible research and organizing tool, though I can’t say that there are enormous changes that I see from early versions. It is integrating very well with IE7, and moving notes back and forth between OneNote and Word (with formatting intact) is pretty much effortless.

The latest pieces of the Office puzzle I’ve started working with is Groove. A writing partner set up a Groove server and we’ll be using it for a large project that’s coming up soon. I’m looking forward to seeing whether it’s as useful in practice as it appears it might be…the key will be to see whether there are mysterious functionality holes once we get into it. I’ll let you know.

I’m becoming more comfortable with the new Word, though it still has traits that mystify me. I like it when font size and style temporarily change when you hover over a new option, and that the formatting commands pop up right where you need them. Building a document that has a lot of links in it is dead simple. All that is good. I’m still amazed, though, that opening, saving, and printing documents don’t involve commands that are available on any of the ribbons. Moving from older versions of the software, you can remember and use commands like Alt-F-O to open a document or Alt-F-P to print. If you’re coming to the program as a new user, though, or if you just never bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts, I’m not sure how you’ll figure out what to do with your first document. I keep harping on this, I know, but these are basics. Perhaps I’m missing something critical, but I’m amazed at some of the decisions the programmers made.

Categories: General computing
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So we’re about two weeks away from when everyone in the known universe switches to Vista (yeah, I know…), and the third-party software vendors are starting to line up in the starting gates to be ready for the onslaught. Security software vendors are no exception, and their products’ availability is going to be critical for the early success of the new operating system.

Remember the early days of air bags? The original idea was that these “passive restraint systems” would be so good that no one ever had to remember to buckle their seatbelts again. You know how that turned out. Vista security is similar. For the last couple of years we’ve been hearing about Vista’s new security capabilities, from least-privilege user modes to enhanced use of processor no-execute flags. Early in the development process, there was some chatter about Vista being the end of the line for software concerned with things like anti-virus and anti-trojan. More recently, there has been the frank admission that, in spite of significant improvements in the basic security structure of the Vista, you’ll still want to have a solid anti-malware suite on your system when you hit the Internet with your shiny new OS.

News.com has an article that looks at the suites that will be available on January 30. It’s a list of the usual suspects, but in a new role with the new OS. Expect lots more on this topic, especially when the first wave of adopters sees the first real exploit of consumer-side Vista.

Categories: Security
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We owe a debt to the war correspondents of this decade. They’ve put themselves in harm’s way to bring us critical stories, and they’ve shown what can be done with equipment that is far below “commercial grade”. For on-line journalism, you don’t really need a studio-quality video camera for your vlog–you need something like AipTek sells. Their cameras sell in stores like Target and other high-end establishment at prices even free-lance journalists can afford.

The idea of “good enough” is going to define a lot of the news coverage in coming months. I’m not talking about the quality of the ideas or the research–competition and near-infinite numbers of fact-checkers will help keep that quality relatively high. No, I’m talking about the quality of the images and sound recordings used to tell the stories. An army of j-school students armed with the AipTek cameras could be a dissembling politician’s worst nightmare–and a corps that might just make more citizens excited about the news once again.

Categories: Media
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If you’re interested in your computer’s security and you haven’t started reading Bruce Schneier, well you should. He’s one of the most lucid, readable experts on security you’ll find, and his advice is well worth taking. You might start with his latest article in Wired. He talks about the importance of choosing your passwords wisely, and doesn’t have to resort to the math of 128-bit keys to make his point.

After the Wired introduction, head over to his blog and keep reading. You’ll be glad you did.

Categories: Security
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Sorry about the brief break in blogging…between the holiday and the simple joy of sitting in 80-degree weather while watching news stories about ice storms, I didn’t get to the keyboard as much as I’d planned. More stuff coming soon.

Categories: Housekeeping
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Earlier, I mentioned that Popular Mechanics had some of the best coverage I’ve seen of this year’s CES. Of course, they weren’t the only crew covering the show–my second place vote goes to the gang at Gizmodo, who get a special nod for doing a super job at the MacWorld Expo while CES was going on. In particular, if you’re interested in the new Apple iPhone, they’ve got blanket coverage going, including hands-on impressions.

It was interesting seeing these two shows run concurrently. By any objective measure CES is by far the larger show, but MacWorld had the big news splash based on the iPhone and an SEC investigation of stock options awarded to Steve Jobs. That these two things dominated electronics news this week says a lot about the industry and its product cycles. Here’s what I think:

It’s getting easier for “just folks” to create high quality audio and video. CES saw scores of companies presenting their small form-factor HD camcorders, podcast kits, solid-state camcorders, and digital cameras. The result is a rising corps of people who are learning audio and video production, just as desktop publishing tools in the 1980s brought out an army of paginators and publication designers. As was the case with desktop publishing, 90% of the audio and video produced will be crap, but with so much to sample, we’re in for a great world of creativity and citizen journalism.

I’m like a lot of people in that I’ve had an HD television for a good while and have yet to receive an HD feed. The DVD vendors are ready to fix this, though first there’s the small matter of which HD DVD format to adopt. This edition of the CES didn’t do anything to resolve the issue. Sony is pushing Blu-Ray as hard as it can, while a consortium of other manufacturers wants the world to watch HD DVD. If you’re old enough to remember the Beta-VHS wars, this has a disturbingly familiar ring. Since I don’t have to own one or the other right now I’m going to wait for things to settle out, but if I had to bet it would be on HD DVD. Why? It seems to be the format of choice for the early adopters in “adult films”, and that market can drive an awful lot of hardware sales.

Between increasing LCD yields and improved HD projectors, home theatre screens just get bigger and bigger. Me, I want to be the first on my block with a drive-in screen. If you know a good source for the awful-quality speakers that clip onto your driver door window, let me know…

There’s more to come, in the consumer market and in the blog. More of both, later.

Categories: Entertainment, Media
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I’m moving through the applications in 2007, and so far it’s a decidedly mixed experience. Outlook doesn’t show you a radically new interface until you’re ready to write an e-mail message, though I found a couple of small kinks in the way it works with servers–I had to fiddle with the mechanisms used to authenticate to an outbound server for sending a message to work in two of my accounts. I like the way the calendar works, and the journal still makes my life easier, so overall I’m happy.

Word is still the big enigma for me. I’ve got a couple of big writing projects coming up, so I’ll get much more experience with the ribbons, though I suspect that most of my writing will barely touch the surface of what the application will do. Paradoxically, folks who do serious and complex document formatting will probably benefit most from the new way of organizing functions, though they’ll also have to eat the steepest learning cure to get there. I suspect that Excel is going to be similar.

When I have to do major-league formatting , I turn to Microsoft Publisher. Here’s the interesting thing: It still has the old interface. I suspect that’s because it’s not a high-priority application for the Microsoft team, and I find that fascinating. Publisher will do most of what PageMaker was doing for me years ago (and is sufficiently similar to PageMaker in philosophy to make the shift between apps painless), and is a very nice way of creating newsletters, brochures, and other complex documents. I now wonder how long it will be before Publisher goes away completely…

The final application I find I’m using often is OneNote. There are a lot of ways to keep the kind of information you come across while doing research, but OneNote has become one of my favorites. The new version has better integration with the rest of the Office suite, and even synchronizes with my cell phone (the Samsung BlackJack), so it’s become even better. I suspect it would be truly invaluable if I were using a Tablet PC, but I’m not, and it’s still a great tool.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg has written his take on the new version of Office and, as usual, he has some valuable insites. I suspect that convincing people (especially those in large organizations) to update their productivity suite is going to take a very serious marketing effort. Not everyone is as eager as I to list “guinea pig” as one of their essential skills.

Categories: General computing
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If you’re interested in finding out just how green your technology is (or, conversely, the extent to which you and your toys are despoiling the environment), then you should make TreeHugger a regular stop on your daily e-travels.

One of their more interesting recent articles looked at the amount of power used by the servers for Second Life and its avatars. It turns out that the 4,000 servers consume a substantial amount of electricity, with a correspondingly large carbon emission. I’m not in the camp that says it’s time to go back to a cave-based economy, but I do think it’s good to think about how our various activities–especially those that are optional, rather than essential–have an impact on the environment.

Categories: Entertainment, General computing
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If you can’t wait to learn more about the iPhone than you get from the Apple web site, then the folks at Gizmodo have got you covered. They’ve actually put their hands on one of the sexy phones, and you can tell that they like the unit. Me, I’m just jealous that I don’t rate a review unit…

Categories: Mobile, Wireless
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Some of the best CES coverage I’ve seen is coming from Popular Mechanics. They’re doing blanket coverage, with reporters, editors, and bloggers at the show.

Categories: Entertainment, Media
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I review Procurve SMB switches for InfoWorld. While switches at the home office/small business level are generally in the realm of commodity, I’ve found that I’m much more comfortable with a managed switch–I like being able to see what’s moving across my network and having control over what goes where. The price is really coming down on some very good switches, and this review picks out some of the issues that I’ve found important. 

Categories: Networking
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To the surprise of absolutely no one, Steve Jobs used his keynote address at the MacWorld Expo to unveil the iPhone. It’s a slick-looking device that Apple has positioned to be iPod, cell phone, and Internet communicator (web and e-mail) rolled into one. The bad news is that it will almost certainly become the cool-geek status product for the next few months. The good news is that it should ignite a serious battle of manufacturers building better and more feature-rich mobile devices.

Categories: Entertainment, Mobile, Wireless
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I’ve recently updated my Microsoft Office suite to Office 2007. My initial reaction? You see it in the title. The new interface, with its “ribbons” that change in context may well turn out to be the greatest boost to personal productivity since the ballpoint pen, but right now I’m happy not to be in the middle of a large, complex document project.

The Office application I use the most is Outlook. It is my mail client, keeps my contact, to-do, and appointment information, synchronizes with my cell phone, and generally helps keep me moving forward through the day. My first impression of the new version of Outlook is that it is noteably slower than the Office 2003 version I’ve been using. Startup takes several seconds longer, and switching from message to message has a meaningful lag. When I went through the updating process I added the instant desktop search feature (at Outlook’s suggestion), and that may account for much of the slowdown. Regardless, I’m less thrilled than I’d like to be.

The other thing that strikes a discordant chord is the new Office color scheme; it’s a pale, icy blue that doesn’t make me happy. I had used Windows’ Display app in the control panel to change the earlier version (and most other applications) to colors that please my eye, but Office 2007 has (so far) stubbornly resisted my attempts to alter its appearance. If I figure this one out, you’ll be the first to know.

Much more to come on this, but right now I’d say that the Office 2007 migration might well be much more painful for most users (and especially for enterprise users) than the Windows XP to Vista shift. 2007 is going to be such a fascinating year…

Categories: General computing
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I had planned to be a little heavier on the blog today, but tonight is the BCS championship and all of Gainesville is atwitter. Nevertheless, looking at some of the coverage of CES by folks like Glenn Reynolds it seems that computing in service to media creation (and consumption) is the big story here at the beginning of the year. I’m going to be looking at some of the media creation tools, and how they can (and should) be used in the coming months. Drop me an email and let me know how you’re getting busy creating your own media conglomerate.

Categories: Media
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