Last night I attended my first session of the New York Tech Meetup, and it seems I’ve found exactly what I’ve been looking for in the city when it comes to a vibrant tech community. I recently moved to New York from Western Massachusetts to pursue a career writing about technology and film–after several years of IT work and dreaming about making the jump to writing full time. I had already gotten my taste of the film blogging world after covering Comic-Con and several press screenings for Slashfilm, but I had yet to get a full sense of what being in New York means for my tech interests until last night.

The first thing I noticed during the evening’s introduction (by NYTM organizer Nate Westheimer) was that New York techies seem to have a major complex towards the Silicon Valley and Boston tech communities. There’s a clear cultural difference between NY and the Valley, but as someone who spent their entire life halfway between New York and Boston (I grew up in Hartford, then went to college and worked for four years in Western Mass.), it never really occurred to me how the NY tech community was different than Boston. Westheimer mentioned one key difference (which he also wrote about on his blog)–that the NY community fails at connecting the university and commercial spaces.

Given the tech titans we’ve seen come out of MIT and Harvard, I think he may have a point. Culturally, Boston tends to focus on academia and intellectualism, so it’s no surprise that their higher educational institutions aren’t ignored when it comes to commercial tech ventures.  Westheimer went on to explain that the scheduled demos (two from Columbia, and two  from NYU) were examples of the innovation coming out of the university space, and that the commercial sector should take note.

Here’s a rundown of those demos:

Green Dot (NYU)

On their site, the Green Dot folks describe their work as “a research project that investigates motion capture, pattern recognition, and ‘Intrinsic Biometrics’ techniques to detect and analyze human movement signatures in video.” In short, their technology resembles the motion capturing we see today (wherein an actor’s movements are recorded via dots placed on their body), except without the need to wear anything. After a video feed is processed by their technology, the end result is a video with green dots tracking the movement in the source. Again, this looks very similar to footage you see from typical motion capturing techniques today.

They demoed some video footage of famous figures and pointed out some interesting factoids based on their visual signatures. The project is government funded, and you can definitely foresee some military uses of this technology once it’s perfected. They describe their current focus as “the analysis of national and international public figures while they are giving speeches, with future plans to investigate many other domains.” Read into that what you will.

On the consumer and professional levels, the technology could be really useful for bringing motion capturing to the masses. Imagine taking a video of your cat walking, and then applying that motion to a 3D figure.  If you’re an iPhone 3G or 3GS user and want to try it out for yourself, you can download their application from the app store, just search for “Dot Show Ian Spiro”.

CuZero (Columbia)

CuZero is an interesting attempt at changing the way we search for images. The presenter points out that image searching in its current fashion simply doesn’t work very well (anyone who has used the Google Images search for any length of time can attest to that). For the most part, image searching today relies on file names, the “alt” tag (which can be placed alongside the images on a website, but usually isn’t), and text surrounding the picture.

CuZero turns this paradigm on its head by allowing you to bring in text and image queries into a grid, and prioritize the different elements of your search in real time. You can also further filter your search results via a similar interactive method. It’s honestly hard to explain in words, so head over to their website and check out a video demo.

I got a very Minority Report vibe from the way they were able to interact with their queries, and the way their system also recognized buildings and other elements from pictures was also fascinating. This research certainly has the potential to change the way we search for images in the future.

Musically Intelligent Machines (Columbia)

Musically Intelligent Machines is a project that aims to automatically classify music–much in the same way Pandora works, except without the need for human intervention. The developers crawled through 15,000 mp3s to demo the service, and you can play with it on their site. The presenter mentioned that he was surprised the software could determine what constituted “British” music. Apparently it’s smart enough to determine British accents, and possibly even British styles of music.

Overall, the software works as advertised, and there is certainly a market for this sort of thing. I’d be interested to see how it would compete on a commercial scale against the likes of Last.FM and Pandora.

Teaching Robots to See (NYU)

At these sorts of events, there has to be at least one project that portends the impending robot uprising, and this project’s goal of creating robots that can see certainly brings Skynet to mind. NYU professor Yann LeCun demonstrated the research by showing how their software can recognize objects (he used a toy soldier, which was recognized as human, and a toy airplane that was recognized as an airplane). He also showed how they’ve trained robots to move autonomously and avoid objects using a dual camera system for eyes.

His work actually comes out of the same place that Green Dot calls home, the Vision Learning Graphics group at NYU. With their technologies combined, we could easily see some very important future developments emerging.

Dan Bricklin was also interviewed by the great NY blogger Anil Dash. Bricklin was both hilarious and insightful, and I now feel compelled to grab his new book at some point. There’s something about tech history stories that I find completely fascinating, and as creator of the spreadsheet (among many contributions), he must certainly have some good stories to tell.

Check out Dan’s interview, along with the rest of the event, at the NYTM video page.

More than 1,000 words later, I realize now that I could write about this Meetup for several more pages. I take that as a good sign. The NYTM makes me excited to be a techie in New York, and I’m proud to be the third person to RSVP for October’s event. If you’d like to join, simply sign up via their Meetup page. I would love to have some Meetup buddies!

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Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?

Okay, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’m working on remedying that right now. Without revealing too much, let’s just say I’ll be making some time to do a lot more tech writing in the near future. If you’re interested in what I’ve been working in for the past few months, check out my work on the /Filmcast podcast, /Film, Twitter, and my Tumblog.

Along came the Palm Pre–a phone I like to refer to as the first real “iPhone killer”. I know that’s a loaded statement, but in this case I think it truly applies. The Pre is of course building on the iPhones success, but its improvements over Apple’s platform are fairly significant. Whereas the iPhone is media and gaming focused, Palm is taking things back to what made them famous with the Palm Pilot–productivity.

This may just be me, but I find the focus on productivity is something I’d appreciate on my phone moreso than (battery draining) media and games. Palm’s emphasis on getting things done starts with the Pre’s physical keyboard, and continues to the phone’s multitasking capabilities and the Synergy data sharing across a variety services. From everything I’ve seen, the Pre’s aim is to make your life in our information saturated world a bit easier. It’s an objective that directly builds upon Palm’s beginnings in the PDA market, and it also shows how serious they are about reclaiming smartphone marketshare from the likes of the Blackberry and Windows Mobile.

I know I’m late to the party with covering this, but I just had to express my excitement over the Pre. Not only is it a great looking device that could give the iPhone some much needed competition, but it’s a great story as well. Palm’s future is based upon the success of this phone. So just as we geeks are eagerly anticipating every bit of information about this device, I’m sure that Palm is anxious to see how well it performs.

Palm’s been very careful about releasing any information on the Pre’s pricing and availability, but word is that we’ll finally know the details in the next few weeks. I should hope so, because Palm is surely working hard to get this thing on the street in June. The release is perfect timing for me since I’m looking to replace my Helio Ocean, and it should also coincide with Apple’s latest iPhone refresh.

Like many, I will be making an epic purchasing decision between the Pre and iPhone, and I can only hope that the Pre lives up to the hype.

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My Thoughts on the Palm Pre

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care

As you can see, it sports some clean lines, and an easy to read format. It’s definitely text-heavy, but then again so was October Special. My big motivation for switching themes was due to October Special’s focus towards long posts. I’ve realized that sticking to long posts was one of my weaknesses as a budding blogger. To train myself to get used to smaller post sizes, I needed a theme that could make small posts look good as well as long posts.

Also, I decided to shorten the name of this blog to “The Far Side of Tech” on a whim. I think it rolls off the tongue better and creates a more informal and conversational atmosphere. We’ll see how well this hypothesis works out…

I appreciate any comments that you all have regarding this new theme. In all of my work I try to keep users in mind, so it would be extremely helpful to gather some user feedback ;)

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New Blog Theme

• The Nanda Alarm Clock eBay Fail
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla
• Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution

Since Daily Bits is a technology blog, most of the work that I would have normally published here will be going there. I don’t see the need to abandon this blog entirely yet though. There are still many topics that I’m interested in that don’t quite fit the Daily Bits mold, so you can expect to see those here. Those include topics like the consumer technologies, the Singularity, and video games.

Here’s what I have at Daily Bits so far:

• Coming to Terms with Windows Vista
• The Dangers of the Blogging Rumor Mill
• Inbox 2.0 = Netvibes?
• The Failure of a la Carte Cable is a Boon for New Media

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Changes on the Horizon

• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging

For this Blog Action Day I wanted to discuss an issue that I’ve been pondering for the past few years. Growing up I’ve always had a fascination and concern for the environment. Yet I realized early on that despite my adoration for nature, I never really agreed with the philosophies and tactics of so-called environmentalist activists. I particularly hated the luddism, or anti-technology tendencies, inherent in many of their beliefs. Perhaps it was just the budding technologist in me, but I’ve always held the notion that we should be looking towards technology to help us save the environment instead of rejecting it.

To be clear: I hate to generalize and I’m sure there were some environmentalists while I was growing up that weren’t complete luddites, but the overarching opinion among the environmentalist crowd that I gathered was certainly anti-technology. It’s the sort of thinking that led Greenpeace to fight against the proliferation of nuclear power, even though the only viable alternative power back then (and remaining until today) was coal power–a far dirtier and less controllable option.

Patrick Moore, a controversial ex-founder of Greenpeace, has long touted the fact that nuclear energy is our only realistic primary power source until green technologies become more viable. His entire argument is laid out clearly in a 2006 Washington Post article, “Going Nuclear.” Even though he has seen his share of controversy, and his views on global warming have been undeniable laissez-faire, I find it hard to ignore the strong case he makes for nuclear power.

Imagine what a difference a pro-nuclear power mindset would have made for our country. While it certainly has its share of risks, there is also the guaranteed reduction in CO2 emissions and all of it’s effects on nearby populations. While nuclear waste is tremendously dangerous as well, at least we have a fair amount of control in handling it.

Back to the main point: I’m less ashamed to consider myself an environmentalist now that they view technology with less fear. Pro-technology environmentalism is a relatively new thing, but I attribute the rise of the Internet and the apparent exponential growth of technological progress as reasons why this new trend has sprung up. This new generation of environmentalist is aware of the benefits of conservation, but also equally aware that new technologies can help increase conservation efficiency.

They’ve made the Prius trendy, shop locally at organic-friendly stores like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, and have made environmentalism a somewhat chic lifestyle choice instead of an activist position.

With less technological fear, we’re seeing more ingenious inventions like the Windbelt, a tiny wind power generator that promises efficiency gains in the 10-40% range compared to competing microturbines. There’s a great video demonstration on the site that doesn’t embed well on this blog, so be sure to check it out!

This thesis is unfortunately too vast to cover in a single blog post, but consider this the basis for all of my environmental posts (in the Green category) on this site. There isn’t much content in that category yet, but with the unstoppable force of green technologies gaining steam I suspect it will fill out quickly.

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Why I Believe Technology Will Save the Environment and Environmentalism

• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• Cheap Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Coming to a Backpack Near You
• Why Xbox Live Can’t Be Free… Yet

I came across this seemingly typical Engadget story today, announcing yet another 1 Terabyte external hard drive solution that utilizes dual hard drives, when I realized it was time to speak out out against these inane devices. These external hard drive setups have been marketed for the last couple years as a foolproof storage solution, but I would recommend them as the last place you’d want to store your precious digital wares.

The Trouble With RAID 0

The key to their troubling nature lies in their “ingenious” method for increasing disk capacity: Literally sandwiching hard drives together. External solutions such as these rely heavily on a geekilicious technology known as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). The technology is typically found in servers and desktops. It’s used to make several smaller hard disks appear as a single entity by “striping” the data across all the drives, something which also gives a boost to their overall performance. But it can also be used to insure the integrity of the data by automatically building a recovery structure within the array of discs.

This latter function, known as “Raid 1″, allows you to easily swap out a broken hard drive from an array of discs for a working one. Once a new hard drive is installed, the RAID array instantly repopulates all of the data that formerly resided on the old drive. This is what the paranoid geeks consider the good sort of RAID.

The former function of RAID (”Raid 0″) is less beloved among geeks. Performance enthusiasts like it for the speed boost, but overall those in the know would steer general users away from a RAID 0 array. This is because when they crash, they crash hard. Losing a single drive from a RAID 0 array makes it nearly impossible to recover any data because the data is shared across all the drives. Therefore, if you have a RAID 0 array with several drives and one happens to die–you can pretty much forget about the data on all the working drives as well.

Unfortunately, these external hard drives are of the RAID 0 variety. And not only that, these drives are often so closely sandwiched together in the external cases that they end up having a higher failure rate than normal due to the increased heat.

Recovering RAID 0 Data? Think Again!

As I mentioned above, it’s nearly impossible to recover data from any RAID 0 array — one used in an external hard drive is no different. I’ve written about recovering data from trashed hard drives in the past. It’s usually just a matter of finding a decent scanning tool (in my case “Handy Recovery 3.0“) and letting it seek through the remains of your hard drive to find any salvageable data. Sadly, the process is not so simple with RAID 0. If it dies, your only option is to send it to some sort of professional drive recovery outfit and be prepared to absorb the $1000+ repair fee.

And yes, you read that right. These recovery companies can often reclaim some of your data, but their prices vary depending on how much data is being recovered. Recovering much of a 1 terabyte era may very well cost you the same as a decent used car!

Avoiding Raid 0 External Hard Drives

Now that I’ve thoroughly struck the fear of the hard drive gods in you, let me leave you with some tips on avoiding these sorts of external hard drives in the future.

• If an external drive is 1TB or more, it is probably running RAID 0. At the time of this post, only one internal 1TB drive is publicly available. This means that the technology is very new, and most external hard drive manufacturers haven’t yet included this drive in an external case on its own.

  The above tip is not necessarily true any more since individual 1TB drives are actually common now.

• If the external drive weighs 5-6lb, it is probably running RAID 0. A typical external hard drive running a single hard drive is only about 2.5-3lbs. Logic would have it that anything twice that weight is probably that way for a reason ;)
• Research the drive. Most often you’ll find a review explaining the innards of the external drive.

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Why You Should Never Buy Dual Drive (RAID 0) External Hard Drives

• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla
• Asus Starts the USB 3.0 & SATA 6Gb Hype Train
• Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?

While I’d love to see HD-DVD bring an end to this idiotic format war (I vastly prefer their special features integration, as well as the possibility of hybrid HD-DVD/DVD discs), I don’t think that this move will bring anything more than a mere numbers victory for Toshiba. The Inquirer points out that Toshiba sold around 9.2 million laptops in 2006, and Sony has shipped around 5.5 million PS3’s according to March ‘07 numbers (although they appear to have sold only 3 million of those). It’s clear that if Toshiba manages to pull this off, they will have the upper-hand in the hardware rat-race by the end of 2008.

Number wins are all well and good, but will that actually mean anything for the HD-DVD platform? Functionally, the inclusion of HD-DVD drives in laptops is not nearly as useful as having Blu-ray in the PS3. People like to watch movies (especially high-definition movies) on their TVs, and while it’s possible to configure your laptop to output to an HDTV, the process isn’t entirely foolproof. Then you have to worry about making sure you get digital audio outputted to your surround sound system, assuming your laptop even has that capability at all.

Basically, the process isn’t as entirely seamless as it is with the PS3. Sony’s console is already connected to your HDTV and surround sound system. There’s little difference in using it to play a game or watching a Blu-ray film. While I loathe the inclusion of Blu-ray in the PS3, it does seem that Sony’s Trojan horse tactics served the Blu-ray platform well in this respect. It’s not hard to imagine people amassing a library of Blu-ray titles to watch on their PS3, it is considerably harder to think that Toshiba laptop owners will find a good reason to build up an HD-DVD collection.

Not only are laptops the completely wrong hardware vehicle for HD video, the audience isn’t ideal either. Think about it: Who really watches movies on their laptops? For the most part, it’s college students. Many don’t own TVs, and in this day and age, who really needs one? They have access to all their entertainment needs in a tidy little box. But while college students are laptop equipped and tech savvy, they aren’t the best audience for HD-DVD to tap into for market dominance.

College students are rightfully credited with being the driving force behind MP3, Divx, and and all sorts of other “free” digital formats. Paying extra for an unproven movie format, the benefits of which are tough to notice on a 15″ widescreen compared to downloads and cheap DVDs, is simply not in their DNA.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like this move is going to win the HD format war for Toshiba and HD-DVD. If anything, it will just prolong this idiotic battle for several more years…

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HD-DVD’s Secret Weapon? HD-DVD Standard on Toshiba Laptops Come 2008, And Why It Probably Won’t Matter

• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Will Sony Ever Stop Playing Catch Up with the Playstation 3?
• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care

Welcome to another leisurely stroll through my recently collected del.icio.us links. As always, feel free to add me (”Tenken” on del.icio.us) to your network if you’d like to share your own links with me. You can also subscribe to this RSS feed of my del.icio.us findings.

• How Google Gears Could Foreshadow Death for Microsoft: I’ve recently rediscovered Slate after spending most of my time over at Salon these past few months, and it’s articles like this that make me kick myself for ignoring Slate for so long. Here, Slate’s Harry McCracken argues that Google Gears introduces functionality that will be key to dominating the web application market. Chiefly, with the integration of online content with offline functionality. It’s a really interesting thought that I had never considered until now. Expect this theme to pop up in a future post.
• Google Explains Net Neutrality in Simple Terms: Google’s Public Policy Blog is quickly becoming one of the best sources for easy-to-read public policy discussion online. Here they offer a clear definition of what net neutrality proponents are fighting for, and makes the case about what exactly they feel ISP’s have a right to do with their networks. Perhaps if some politicians understood the issue as clearly as this there would be much less support for telco’s and net neutrality opponents in Washington.
• Judge Says Students Can Respond to RIAA “John Doe” Lawsuits: A federal judge in New Mexico has declared that RIAA must allow alleged copyright infringers in that state to be notified before receiving settlement letters in the mail. These letters are of the recent breed that the RIAA has been sending out wherein they basically tell the recipient to cough up a settlement fee or face a full-on lawsuit.

  They are, in actuality, a way for the RIAA to overstep the legal system altogether since most of the recipients decide to settle. This has been saving the RIAA a tremendous amount in legal fees, but with this new ruling they are going to have a much harder time pulling the same stunt in New Mexico–hopefully others will follow suit.

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Del.icio.us Link Stroll: How Google Gears Could Kill Microsoft, Google Elucidates “Net Neutrality”, Judge Makes Life Difficult for the RIAA

• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?
• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution
• Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean

The International Herald Tribune has a great article up regarding a recent survey that puts media and entertainment industries among the lowest trusted when compared to about a dozen other general industries like insurance and health care. This result is hardly surprising. After treating all of their customers as potential criminals with rampant lawsuits and DRM constraints, how else would consumers react?

The article also makes an interesting point when it notes:

In follow-up studies in Britain and France of consumers under 35 years old, the world’s first generation of “digital natives,” the company found that many say they will not buy an entertainment company’s products because they don’t believe they are getting good value for their money. Four out of 10 in Britain said that, while more than half did so in France.

In a world where pirated material can be had free or for next to nothing, “value for money” takes on a new dimension: What value is a record company giving me when I pay full price for a CD, for instance, compared with when it’s free?

While this may just sound like a self-serving excuse by media thieves, I think there’s much more to it than that. The piracy movement is pressuring the media companies in ways that they’ve never been before. Without Napster, would the RIAA have been so ready to work together with Apple to make the iTunes store the premiere source for legitimate digital music? The same holds true for Bittorrent and Apple’s recent addition of TV shows and movies to the iTunes store.

Would we even be seeing TV networks streaming recent episodes for free without Bittorrent? Now that the entertainment industries have adopted these new forms of distribution they seem fairly obvious, but let’s not forget what made them a necessity in the first place.

The distrust of media companies by young people is even more telling when you look at the sort of brands they actually trust. This recent article at Marketing Daily lists the top fifteen trusted brands by “Gen Ys” (uhg), and makes the not-so-stunning observation that we trust brands that communicate in a “straightforward and stripped-down way, use plain packaging, and avoid excess.”

Who would have thought that being straightforward and honest to your consumers would make them trust you?!

So what to do? I’ll echo the Ars Technica analysis of the Herald Tribune article and say that rethinking the whole DRM mindset will go a long way towards making consumers value your products. If we buy something from you, we’d like to actually own it and do what we like with it. The last thing consumers want is for the line between “rental” and “ownership” to become so entangled as to be indistinguishable. If you don’t trust us with your content, how can we trust you?

Oh, and the indiscriminate criminalizing of your customers? That doesn’t really inspire the warm and fuzzies on our part.

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Does Distrust Explain the Psychology of Piracy?

• Why Xbox Live Can’t Be Free… Yet
• Will Sony Ever Stop Playing Catch Up with the Playstation 3?
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success

Ask yourselves this, when last have you been able to find a decent tech review on Google? Sure, sometimes you may come across one or two reviews from major sites, but in my experience it seems that every time I try and Google for a tech product review I get inundated by dozens of search results from price comparison sites. Pricegrabber, Bizrate, Shopbot–how many of these things do we need?! Even Reseller Ratings, a site which originally served to review online stores, has dedicated much of their site to price comparisons. I’m not at all against consumers empowering themselves by making well-informed purchases, but after a certain point it seems that these sites have become more of a hindrance to consumers than a benefit by making it harder to find legitimate reviews.

You can see the problem for yourself by looking at this search for the Samsung 906BW monitor. My search string was simple: “Samsung 906BW Review”. The search may have changed since I ran it at the time of this post, so I’ve provided a screen shot just in case. As you can see, the entirety of the first results page points to stores and price comparison sites. You can also see why those results rose to the top; many of the links plaster “Review” across their title even if they contain no reviews.

This is especially disheartening for the results from CNET and ZDNET. These are sites I normally trust for product reviews, but when I click on one of their links and end up with price comparisons and a few user reviews, I end up feeling somewhat cheated. They are gaming Google, but it seems that no one has complained about it yet.

So what is a consumer to do? Initially, I thought up the idea for a review aggregator site that would compile expert reviews in a social format. This was to be my Web 2.0 cash cow until I realized that Viewscore and Wize already beat me to it. Both sites seem to be doing basically the same thing by compiling expert and user reviews and bestowing an aggregated rank on the product. Thankfully, they seperate the user and expert reviews, which is another one of my problems with running a Google search for reviews.

I prefer Viewscore’s granulated approach to review scoring compared to Wize’s pass/fail system which seems often to oversimplify many reviews. Review aggregators have existed for a while now in other mediums (Rotten Tomatoes, for example), but I’m glad to see that tech reviews are finally getting the same treatment. My only worry is that the average user will not pick up on these sites and will be stuck with awful search results until Google and other search providers step up. They may be under a professional banner, but most are just as much spam as that Viagra email waiting in your inbox.

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How Price Comparison Site Results in Google Hurt Consumers

• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?
• The Nanda Alarm Clock eBay Fail
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging

Last Friday we finally got the go-ahead to download the media at work, and I spent the entire weekend testing the final build of Vista Enterprise. Having tested both Vista RC1 and RC2 these past few months, I pretty much knew what to expect. Still, even with those diminished expectations, I was shocked to see Vista completely install in only 15 minutes. After sitting through ~40 minute XP installations on a regular basis this was pretty refreshing, and hopefully a sign of things to come.

After logging in for the first time Vista appeared to be pretty similar to RC2. Overall things look a bit more polished, and the system on the whole feels rock solid. The 3D Aero interface worked automagically with the built-in driver for my Radeon X800, but my networking driver (for my onboard NIC) and sound driver (Creative Soundblaster X-Fi) were both dead in the water. Networking is always the most crucial driver because without it you really can’t proceed to do much. I hopped back onto my XP partition and grabbed the ethernet driver, then rebooted back into Vista and installed it.

The driver looked to be written for Win2k only (it’s a 3 year old Abit IS-7 mobo), but it had worked fine for XP and proceeded to install without a hitch on Vista. That’s the greatest part of Vista I think–the backwards compatibility is a lifesaver. I grabbed the beta Creative drivers for my X-Fi, but they’ve ended up being the weakest link in my current Vista installation. It pretty much always sends my comp to blue-screen if I try to enter the “Audio Console” application while playing any sort of audio. Creative isn’t always known for the best drivers, but they’re never this bad. This driver is something they’re probably feverishly working on as you read this, so I’ll cut them a bit of slack.

Overall, I’m confident enough in this build of Vista to move towards it as my primary OS. Now all I need is for Windowblinds to get on Vista, and I will be a happy geek.

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On Windows Vista (Final Build)

• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?
• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!

It seems like design, especially simplistic design, is something that isn’t taken seriously enough in computing these days. I always appreciate it when someone makes a wholly original design such as this. Expect further design updates over the next few days. And yes, the sidebar will be updated soon.

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Site Design Updated

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?
• Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!

KRT Wire | Vending machines offer plenty in Japan

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Vending Machines in Japan

• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• The Nanda Alarm Clock eBay Fail
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain

What is there to say? These students obviously can’t deal with the fact that they were caught red-handed, and they’re now playing ignorant as a way to distance themselves from their responsibility. Given the litigious frenzy of the RIAA these past few years, I think it would be extremely unlikely that these college-aged students were completely unaware of the legality of their actions.

From comments I gather around my campus, which is just down the street from UMASS, students are more interested in knowing how to download safely. This leads me to believe that many students are well aware of what they’re doing, they just don’t want to get caught. These i2Hub users probably deluded themselves into thinking they were completely safe by sharing on Internet 2, which is a seperate network from the general internet and pretty much inaccessible for people outside of academia. In their shock at actually being targeted by the RIAA, they decided to go after the creator of i2Hub instead of accepting that they were at fault. Somehow, I find this scenario far more likely than plain ignorance.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. I still don’t agree at all with the RIAA’s sue-happy campaign, I’m just more annoyed that these students are trying to blame someone else by playing dumb instead of owning up. There were times when sharing data used to be completely safe, but those days are gone. I’m not a stranger to the world of file-sharing, neither are most of the people I know, but it is certainly a more dangerous game now than it used to be. Until the MPAA and the RIAA stop their blindly ineffective lawsuit campaign, anyone using P2P will just have to be careful; you’re still technically at fault, even if the lawsuit is unfair.

WSJ.com – Students Want File-Sharing Site To Pay for RIAA Settlements

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Students Suing i2Hub for RIAA Settlements

• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• Finally, Netflix Streaming is Coming to the PS3
• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?
• Do Verizon’s “iDon’t” Ads Miss the Point?
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging

Yes, there are free options out there, including complete explorer shell replacements, but WB offers simplicity and stability that you can’t get from any other option. Believe me, I’ve spent way too much time during my undergrad career trying to make Windows look just right. I settled on WB about two years ago, and never looked back. With great skin repositories like WinCustomize, I always have new ways to change the look and feel of my UI. Not only does WB offer incredibly simple customization, it also speeds up the way Windows runs. Its methods for painting the interface are significantly more optimized than Microsoft’s standard APIs, and it even uses your video card when necessary.

WindowBlinds 5, the latest version that comes out today, improves upon these features and also does an excellent job of emulating the “Aero” effects that we’ll be seeing come Win Vista. WB 5 is also the first version to be exclusive to XP, so you know that whatever legacy support that has been holding it back is now gone for good.

If you’ve ever thought about changing the way Windows looks, there’s really no other option that’s as simple and efficient. It costs $20 to buy, but you can get a basic version from Download.com.

As a side note, I really wish something similar existed for Macs. While OSX’s UI is all great and minimalist-like, it does get boring after a while.

Read more about WindowBlinds 5

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WindowBlinds 5 is Out!

• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come
• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!

This was bound to happen, but it’s still remarkable. The CRT has served us for more than half a century now, and despite various technological improvements, it simply can’t keep up with the new flat trends. In the next few years we’ll see newer and better flat-screen technologies coming out which will most likely fix all the issues current flat-panel technologies have. SED technology looks to be the rightful successor to the CRT television. Moreso than LCD and plasma, the SED resembles the CRT with it’s low response times and deep blacks, but they are also just as thin as flat-panel displays today. SED technology is also rumored to be very cheap, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they just came out and took over the market in the next few years.

I still use a CRT monitor at home, mainly because it’s a gorgeous 19″ display and I still can’t justify replacing it, but I would be lying if I didn’t say I’ve been eyeing those 20″+ widescreen LCDs. It looks as if the breakdown for future flat panel displays will look something like the following; SED, LCD, and plasma will be fighting for control of the television market, LCDs have already pretty much conquered the PC market, and if all goes well, small screens for portable devices will begin to move away from LCD and towards OLED. All of this points to a brighter and flatter future in the end.

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Ode to the CRT

• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Cheap Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Coming to a Backpack Near You
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain

I’ve been thinking recently that there doesn’t seem to be much point in owning a desktop anymore, at least for the average consumer. It’s gotten to the point where laptops are competitively priced (you could pick up something decent for around $1000), about as fast as desktops for typical PC uses, and carry the added benefits of being portable. Portability has become more important lately since wifi has come into the picture, and now we have reports of entire cities wanting to blanket themselves with wireless access.

In this scenario, the desktop user does not receive much benefit. He is still stuck at his desk, most likely in a building too old to receive decent reception from the wireless network. He is also missing out on the freedom laptop/handtop users have. This has been said recently on slashdot, with wireless internet, coupled with an efficient webcrawler like Google, we can know practically anything. They even went as far to say that Google may be god. While Google is still restricted by what we humans know, it is still a revolutionary method of finding specific bits of knowledge. While Google may not be god, it certainly is ushering in a new way of using technology. It has become so essential to the web browsing experience that it sits right next to the address bar in the better browsers, and for good reason. Never before has humanity been able to find information so quickly and easily, but I’m getting off topic right now so I will end the Google love here.

Simply put, with laptops as they are today, the only people who really need desktops are the techy types like myself who want the latest multimedia peripherals (namely graphics and sound cards), and businesses that have a need for terminals. The desktop may eventually become more invisible in these terminal spaces, but the hardcore geeks will always want their machines to be prominently seen. Still some of us are moving towards the mini-ITX setups made so popular with the Shuttle cases, but this movement hasn’t been significant enough yet to sound the death knell of the desktop. It’s merely a branch of desktop fandom, I personally see a great use for these in portable frag boxes and, in particular, multimedia centers. Who needs a set top dvd player and all that other home theater junk if your mini-ITX system can handle it all? My perfect home theater will simply consist of a decent amp, a mini-itx system with dvi out to an HD display, connected to the standard 5.1/6.1 set of speakers. There really is no need for much else if you’re only concerned with the digital realm.

Anyway, I should be reading now, this thought just occurred to me as I was randomly browsing the web. I guess it’s best to get the ideas out when they first appear…

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Amherst Bytes #3 and the Death of the Desktop

• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution
• Why Xbox Live Can’t Be Free… Yet
• Looking Forward to the Android Takeover
• Why The Magic Mouse is the Most Important Apple Announcement Today
• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come

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Amherst Bytes #2

• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come
• Do Verizon’s “iDon’t” Ads Miss the Point?
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Why The Magic Mouse is the Most Important Apple Announcement Today

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Amherst Bytes

• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support
• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care

I’ll start things off with a company that can do no wrong, Google. Everytime these guys are mentioned lately it’s always in relation to some amazing product. For what it’s worth, I think Google is important to take note of because it harkens back to the success of the (now seemingly mythological) internet tech-bubble. Google just released a beta version of their new map service and (unsurprisingly) it completely blows away everything that came before.

The map setup is so very intuitive it makes me wonder why no one has attempted this already. It’s fully draggable, and the zoom goes all the way down to street level. The quality of their maps seem to stem from their recent purchase of a sattellite imaging company (Keyhole). Finding directions has never been easier; of particular usefullness is the ability to zoom in on every step of the directions. With Google consistently churning out quality products like this it’s only a matter of time before we start to see weaknesses in the perfect facade. Honestly, I hope that day is a long way off –

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Hello World! & Google Maps

• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• Will Sony Ever Stop Playing Catch Up with the Playstation 3?
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution