Technology

Just got home from Bar Camp Austin III. I had a phenomenally good time.

You usually hear at gatherings like this that the interesting stuff happens in the hallways, and the sessions just fill the time between. Well, not here. The sessions were excellent. I didn't have to suffer a single product demo. Every session was well facilitated, the participants engaged, and nobody boorishly hogged the discussion.

One of my favorite sessions was titled something "Weblog Vanity Sites and Thought Leaders". No, I don't know what that means either. The organizer never showed up. So a bunch of us just talked about blogging, circling the topic back to how to make a difference (and be noticed) with our blogging. The group conclusion seemed to be that being "A List" (or noticed by the "A List") is becoming less important to getting ideas recognized. What's most important is becoming a respected authority in a niche area--which may involve an offline presence in addition to your blogging.

Congratulations to whurley and all the organizers on a job well done.

Thanks to GSD&M for hosting the event. One of the things that made the day so great was the large number (five) of session rooms, and plenty of room to mill about between.

I am so sick to death of the content cartel telling me what I can and cannot do with my legally purchased media. No wonder illegal downloading is displacing legitimate content. Sometimes it's the only way to get movies and music without all the bloody stupid restrictions that Hollywood and Nashville force down our throats.

It seems to get worse every year. When our trusty old Panasonic DVD player croaked, we replaced it with a new Toshiba HD-DVD player. What a piece of engineering suck that unit is.

It has a number of hateful misfeatures common in current DVD players. We can't watch foreign discs due to region encoding. We can't upconvert conventional DVDs because my TV doesn't have HDCP (a function that does me no good). On top of it all, the Toshiba unit is slow to boot up and clunky to operate. It felt like the Windows Vista of video players.

I finally said to hell with it and ordered a Helios H4000 DVD player. When I read the specs I was amazed that somebody is actually producing video equipment to serve the customer and not Hollywood. It plays any disc, regardless of region code. It upconverts to whatever resolution you want on any video connection it has. It's got features like bookmarks and "skip the crap at the front of the disk" that any DVD user would obviously want.

The unit is bit more expensive than a low end 1080p upconverting player ($140 versus $80). I think it's worth it for a unit that's well designed—and prioritizes the needs of its owner above those of the content cartel.

A year from now, your television is going to break.

Over-the-air broadcast television is changing from the current NTSC analog broadcast standard to a new digital transmission mechanism. There are several significant reasons why this is a good idea. Broadcast television will become HD quality, with improved video and audio. Television stations will be able to transmit additional information, even multiple channels, in their allotted space. Also, this will release a large piece of valuable radio frequency spectrum, which will be used to raise money for the Federal government and open up the airwaves to exciting new services.

I hate to do gadget porn, but I've got a new addition to the A/V equipment stack that's been making me very happy. (Plus, it's Holidailies time and I need to write about something every day.)

The new device is a Logitech Harmony 880 Universal remote control. Although my Denon A/V receiver has a multi-device remote control, it wasn't doing the job. Some tasks, like TV watching, required juggling multiple remotes. The one task we could completely do with that single remote was play DVDs—at least we could until the new HD-DVD player arrived. The Denon remote didn't understand the new player.

Sometimes you just have to roll your eyes at phone company stupidity. I'm thinking of the sort of thing like when AT&T started sending huge 45 page itemized bills to iPhone customers even though they had an unlimited data plan.

This month's "Where Did We Hide the Clue?" award goes to Sprint PCS.

I use Sprint PCS for my mobile phone service. Sprint recently moved to a new portal and forced me to re-register. Nearly an entire month after creating a new login, I got an email from Sprint with an RTF-formatted word processing attachment saying:

I've been test driving an HD-DVD high definition video disc player this past week. I wasn't planning to go HD, but it turns out the HD-DVD player fell into my lap not a week after the beloved Panasonic DVD-RP62 finally gave out.

Prior to the test, I was unenthused about HD. After the test, little has changed.

As you may know, we are in the midst of a HD-DVD versus Blu-ray format war. The cautious person is advised to stay off the battlefield. If you think otherwise, ask the poor sods who bought into Betamax during the VCR format wars.

Also, the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) functions proved as bothersome as I feared. All the things you hate about DVD are here—only worse. You can't skip unskipable content. Can't make backups. Won't play on my Linux computer. Can't do screenshots.

My cell phone is an old Samsung SPH-i500 smart phone. I like it a lot in spite of its deficiencies—which are startlingly significant. I've been watching for a replacement, but so far I haven't found it.

Here is why my current phone is so awesome:

• It has smartphone functionality and Internet capability.
• It runs PalmOS, which is an open platform for developers and has a rich software ecosystem.
• I can sync the contacts and calendar to my Linux desktop.
• My phone looks and feels and works like a phone, not a brick.
• It uses the Palm Graffiti system so I do data entry with a stylus, not one of those micro keyboards.

Here is what's so awful about it:

• The SMS is crippled. It receives text messages but doesn't tell you who the messages are from. It can't send SMS at all (without purchasing add-on software).
• It's a WAP web browser, not full HTML.
• PalmOS is a dead product.
• No Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
• My phone is five year old technology. All the cool kids laugh at me when they see it.

A current Business Week article notes the growing pressure to open the iPhone.

William Hurley loves his iPhone. But he'd love it even more if he could write software for it.

He's not alone. Hundreds of programmers showed up at an iPhone event organized by Hurley, an executive at software maker BMC (BMC), even though Apple hasn't released the source code they need to exploit the device. That was in July, and the criticism of Apple's refusal to open the iPhone hasn't died down.

Austinites better know William Hurley as whurley, an organizing force behind events such as the local Bar Camp.

Me, I'm waiting for a truly open platform before I give up my Palm-based phone. I've been keeping an eye on the Neo 1973 phone, currently released in an interim developer version.

Read the entire Business Week article here: Will Apple Open the iPhone?

I'm working from home today. Earlier in the week, I got a wild hair to buy a pile of CDs from Amazon. I've done that a couple of times since I unloaded my vinyl on Craig's List. I find myself, in equal measure, replacing missed favorites and acquiring classics that escaped my collection. So I've been multitasking between my day work and the occasional trip to the living room to switch a CD in the ripping tray.

Somehow, this whole process is making me feel dated and archaic. Little discs of aluminum—how precious!

It's clear that the days of CD purchasing, let alone CD ripping are numbered. Some recent articles in the news suggest the process is hastening.

First, there is the big, recent news that EMI is going to allow their catalog onto iTunes with higher fidelity and no DRM, albiet at a higher price. I'm unwilling to purchase digital music that's licensed and tethered to a device. This, suddenly, makes things interesting. I'd be curious to hear how the higher fidelity recordings (256-bit AAC) compare to the (FLAC) lossless compression I'm using. And I'd need a web-based iTunes store, so I can access it from my Linux workstation. If those happen, I'll be ready to start buying digital downloads instead of the aluminum discs.

Then, there is this op-ed in the Times that lays out just how bad and stupid the music industry is being.

The major labels wanted to kill the single. Instead they killed the album. The association wanted to kill Napster. Instead it killed the compact disc. And today it's not just record stores that are in trouble, but the labels themselves, now belatedly embracing the Internet revolution without having quite figured out how to make it pay.

The final thing, not related to CD marketing but to general music business stupidity, is the new royalty scheme that threatens independent net-based radio. This is one of the last remaining ways for me to discover new music. I think once that's gone, it's game over.

All this makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing still buying and ripping CDs. What's the sense when the music enjoyment comes wrapped in such a crappy experience?

5:15pm update: Christopher Beam at Slate weighs in on the 256-bit AAC issue and suggests it's mostly not noticable. I'll believe it when I hear it. Sure, it probably makes little difference when you are listening on a portable player with $12 ear buds. I want digital tracks that are good enough to play on my home stereo.

I'm sorry to see that AMD has abandoned the PIC—the Personal Internet Communicator. It's an appliance computer: just add keyboard, display, and network and you have a nice Internet terminal. My first exposure to the PIC was a year ago, in the shelter for Hurricane Katrina evacuees. AMD generously donated dozens of the devices, which we used as Internet terminals. I was impressed at the ruggedness of the devices.

I was not, however, as impressed with the ruggedness of the Windows/CE operating system. It seemed like reboots were too frequent.

Which leads me to the reasons why the PIC may have failed.

The first problem is that the PIC was a closed platform. That made it hostile to open source development.The PIC had a locked down BIOS, which prevented alternate operating systems, such as Linux, from being used. It was married to Windows/CE (abbreviated "Win/CE", pronounced "wince"). Accordingly, there was never much interest in developing interesting applications for the device.

The second problem was AMD's refusal to market within the United States. They limited sales to overseas markets, probably for fear of cannibalizing PC sales. There was some talk late last year about finally trying to enter the US market through Radio Shak. Still, it's hard to understand how the PIC could be considered competitive when it's being sold at about the same price as a low-end E-Machines PC.

Either of these alone would put a damper on the product. In combination, however, they ensured that no robust community would form around the device. Compare this to the Linksys WRT-54GL router, which has become a platform for all sorts of exciting community development. So much, in fact, that when Linksys designed a cost-reduced version of the router, they still maintained production of the community hackable version.

The PIC is a really cute device, and I could have imagined all sorts of cool things people might have done with them, if they had only been given a chance.

The final problem, and perhaps really the most fatal one, is the price/performance of the device didn't measure up. The unit cost of $250 is hard to justify for a low-low-low end headless computer. It seems to me that you'd need get it down to half that, before there was significant uptake. Compare this, for instance, to the OLPC project, which is shooting for $100 price per laptop (in quantity).

In the end, it was an awfully cute device, but there were a number of problems that kept it from living up to its potential.

(There is a Slashdot thread on this topic.)