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EPIC FAIL. Microsoft Zune music players are failing en masse. It's distressing that a bug of this magnitude could escape into the wild. It smells to me like the sort of bug that might have been caught with good unit test cases.

As I noted in my blog http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/577 "The Wrestler" is my favorite movie of 2008. We all know how professional wrestling is fake and they really aren't hurting each other. The shock of "The Wrestler" is the extent to which the characters bloody and hurt not the other guy, but themselves. According to this article in Slate, other than the fact that a headlining wrestler may not stoop to all these shenanigans, it's not unauthentic.

Article identifies some of the difficulties and opportunities online media presents for old-style access television production. Several Austin producers are identified. Article notes a big difference between online and access is that access television brings in a variety of viewpoints, both from the producer and viewer perspective. That's different behavior from online, where people tend to seek reinforcing viewpoints. That suggests access television may still be the best mechanism to fulfill the original goal of creating community discussion.

I've been watching the economy, wondering what impact the tightening credit markets would have on the burgeoning development in and around my neighborhood. Especially the reviled, giant (although less giant than originally planned) Wal-Mart Supercenter planned for the Northcross property. Unsurprisingly, the first shoe has now dropped, with this reported slowdown at the Domain, the flagship North Austin vertical mixed use development.

I haven't given up on this linkblog. I'm a little pre-occupied with Holidailies 2008 right now. I'll probably be posting more to my main site http://www.unicom.com/blog and less to here over the next month.

Ok, I found this very humbling. (It also reminds me of the experience I had reading G-E-B so many years ago: challenging to get through, but ultimately satisfying as the pieces fit together.)

Regarding my post earlier today about the lost tool bag during the space excursion, Adam Rice pointed out to me the "Asoh Defence."

What strikes me about this article is how often in the news do we see somebody actually standing up and taking responsibility for a serious ($100K in this case) mishap?

University of Tennessee has a $43.7 shortfall and is faced with cutbacks and layoffs, but at the same time the recording industry goons have gotten a law passed that forces them to shell out $9.5mil for anti-piracy programs that include "monitoring" software and hardware. I've got an idea: how about more cutbacks. Get rid of all the students and the priacy problem is solved.

There are two kind of people in the world: those who see a dire message in the US ranking on the ITU broadband penetration statistics (fallen from 3rd to 40th under Bush), and those who dismiss it. The current FCC leadership is in the latter group. Susan Crawford, co-leader of the Obama FCC transition team is in the former. This could portend a sea change in net neutrality and broadband policies. People are also reading the tea leaves in areas such as media consolidation, telco friendliness (the current FCC couldn't be nicer to them), and cableco friendliness (the current FCC couldn't be nastier to them).

While walking through Fry's DVD section a couple weeks ago, I commented to my wife that the studios seem to be doing everything in their power to ensure Blu-Ray fails. The pricing model seems all wrong to move the titles from early adopter status into the mainstream. Leave it to the black market to give movie viewers what they want. What's interesting here isn't that the pirates have cracked Blu-Ray (which they have), but that they've invented a new format that provides enhanced def in a more affordable form (albeit one that you'd play back on a media PC rather than a commercial disc player).

Researchers take over a 'bot network to determine the response rate of spam. It's inordinately low, which explains why spammers have to flood their messages so heavliy for the scheme to work. The results are interesting, but there are ethical concerns. I'lll assume CAN-SPAM labeling requirements did not apply, because the messages only appeared to be commercial. Still, I'm not comfortable spamming 12.5 mil unconsenting subjects.

I was impressed that the President-elect had posted such detailed policy initiatives at the new change.gov web site. I returned this evening to do some research on the Obama "Open Government" policies--but it's all gone. I suspect the reason is mundane: the policy content may have been a campaign asset which may not be transferred over to the government operation. I do wish, however, there was some explanation for the disappeared content. (If it really is a campaign asset issue, wouldn't it be a viable workaround tor release such content under a Creative Commons license?)

Austin just went with "single stream" recycling, so the issue has been on my mind. I've heard most of these but didn't really know whether they were true or not.

Last week, I linked to an article claiming Apple was keeping a competitive web browser out of their iPhone App Store. This article backs up on that claim, and then in a later update, backs up on the backup. The situation isn't clear at this time.

You've probably heard that the electoral college favors small states, giving them undue influence over the election result. (The two Senate seats each state gets means two additional electors, and those two electors mean a lot more in Wyoming than they do in Texas.) This article has an interesting chart that shows how extreme the effect is. The scariest part, however, isn't that. It's the observation that if the numbers fall just right, a person could become president with just 22% of the vote.

Nat Tuck is right, Mozilla screwed up badly in the way they handle self-signed certificates. All this policy does is tighten control of the SSL cert cartel.

Apple won't allow a competitive browser into the iPhone App Store. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft tried to block OEMs from loading competing browsers under Windows. Oh yeah, they did do that, didn't they? That's why they got the big anti-trust bitchslap. Apple is engaging in clear anti-competitive behavior, and that's wrong.

Wal-Mart is planning to build a supercenter in the middle of my neighborhood. A year ago the plan was for a huge multi-story building, the second largest retail store in central Texas (first is Ikea). Due to a number of reasons (including the economy), the plan has shrunk to a single-story supercenter under 100,000sq ft. This article shows that the economy is impacting Wal-Mart plans across the country. I wouldn't be surprised, if conditions continue, if they mothball the project entirely. One surprising thing in the article: it says Wal-Mart plans to ramp up the small neighborhood market stores, but we were told during the local fight that those were being cut back. I guess tough times change minds. (Or the developer lied to us.)

Interesting demonstration of why circular "pie" menus are better than conventional pop-ups. The article explains this result using "Fitt's Law," which is one of the best pieces of good, hard science in the field of "Human-Computer Interaction". Thing is, I don't totally buy the argument. The time to perform a task has two components: a cognitive element where the subject determines which action they want to take, and then a physical element where they execute that action. Fitt's Law only describes that second half. I don't think you can waive away the cognitive component like this. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that was the predominant part.