Cloverfield = Godzilla + Blair Witch Project?

I hope not.

Why Zune is failing (and why that won't change anytime soon)

You can understand why Zune is such a flop when you hear the new boss of the Zune platform (the guy who's supposed to save the product) saying things like this:


"We have to augment our capability from a business standpoint."


You can bet your money on the competition. This guy doesn't know his customer, doesn't know his business, and has no idea what it's all about.

The mice and keyboards are nice, though. Maybe he should go back to those...

Tony Wilson dies

Tony Wilson died today. Don't know, but it made me pause and think of this verse:

A valueless collection of hopes and past desires.

Rest in peace, Sir.

Apple has a problem: they need a new iPod right about now

Apple's problem right now is that the iPhone makes the iPod look really old.

I know, I know: they are different products. But using the iPod functionality in the iPhone feels a decade ahead of the "old" iPod. I have both the iPhone and an 80 GB iPod. I no longer carry the iPod with me on a daily basis, and it feels weird to use it's little screen that you can't touch and that can't even do the cover flow trick.

Apple created a chasm in their product line: the iPhone is way too expensive as an iPod, but the video iPod is not so cool anymore.

The reason the iPod sells so much is because you don't think you're getting a second-class product. Apple killed that impression when they introduced a new coolest kid in the block.

If Microsoft was smarter and had better taste, now would be the perfect time to release a Zune 2, while Apple struggles to fill the void between the way-too-expensive and the not-so-cool-anymore.

Hi, my name is Pop and I'm an addict

It all started yesterday when I read multiple reports that the iPhone was living up to the hype pretty much.

Then there were the pictures. iPhones being used everywhere, and the ultimate geek porn: iPhone dissection pictures!

How can one resist? Yet I did.

I thought it was safe to go up to the Apple store this morning. I thought they would be out of stock by now and that I would be able to safely handle a demonstration unit for a few minutes, being unable to buy one.

A quick fix, as we addicts refer to this sort of thing. Just some juice to get me going for a few more weeks.

No such luck. There were still some units in stock and I was in and out the store in 2 minutes, carrying with me a few ounces of the stuff.

So there you have it. I'm an addict.

They say admitting you have a problem is the first step towards a cure. I hope this keeps me from buying the 30 GB model as soon as it comes out.

Instant Karma

What I see when I go to instantkarma.org:

Instant Karma requires the Adobe Flash Player version 9.

Instant Karma indeed.

Phishing: companies don't care as much as they should

I got an e-mail pretending to be from Yahoo! security. It had a link to a page hosted overseas. In that page there's a link to a Windows executable (a virus, keylogger, or whatever it is). Doesn't bother me much because I'm on a Mac.

But I try to be a good guy so I forwarded that to Yahoo!, and I got this answer:

"Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Care.

Thank you for contacting us about your concerns regarding this
possible abuse of Yahoo! services.

Since the apparent instance of abuse is not hosted by Yahoo!, we are
not able to take direct action on this complaint. (...)"

Sounds reasonable, right? It's not. Here's one truth about phishers: they don't like to pay for bandwidth. And if they're using someone else's compromised system, they don't want the page to load slowly.

However, they still need to make their fake page look like the real thing, right? One thing they like to do is link (a lot) to the original website they are trying to forge. So Yahoo! may not host the page itself, but it does host many elements referenced in it. Images included.

So why doesn't Yahoo! replace this image file (which is linked directly in that forged page) with a phishing alert? That would tell users "Do not download the file. It's a virus!".

Of course it's not a perfect solution. For one, Yahoo! would have to stop using the image in their legitimate pages. And the phishers would get smart eventually. But it would save some people a lot of grief, and that makes it worth doing.

If you care, that is...

Huge piracy bust in Brazil. No help from DRM or DMCA.

See?

Brazilian police just busted a huge piracy operation in Sao Paulo.

Police in São Paolo, Brazil conducted a raid today on four locations used to manufacture counterfeit CDs and DVDs. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the MPAA, which supported the police action, over 30,000 pirated CDs and DVDs were seized, along with 200 burners.

Funny thing is: DRM didn't help prevent the widespread piracy at all. DRM is not made to stop criminals like those guys that got arrested in Sao Paulo today. It's made to stop honest people from making good use of something they own and enjoying it fully.

Also, notice that no new legislation was required to prosecute the pirates. Read: no need for the DMCA.

So if you can bust pirates (that DRM didn't stop in the first place) without help from the DMCA, then what's all that crap for?

Cheating the do-not-call registry

And the weasel oscar goes to... The Dove Foundation.

Yesterday I got a call from someone saying they were calling on behalf of the Dove Foundation, but the call was actually an advertising campaign for the for-profit company called "Feature Films for Families".

Here's why I'm upset: my number is in the do not call registry. "Feature Films for Families" couldn't lawfully call me, so they contracted the services of a tax-exempt charity to talk to me about them and get my permission to then continue to call me.

Here's how I interpret this: it is (or should be) unlawful for a non-profit to call me if it's just to advertise for a for-profit organization. I will report this to the FTC and I will post this information in the pertinent forums and send it to relevant lawmakers.

After reading the paragraphs above, I decided to search Google for "Dove Foundation Feature Films for Families". I shouldn't be surprised that the first link was this Wikipedia article.

Heh.

Doing some further searching I learned that they actually use a computer program to talk to you (there's a human operator selecting what the voice will say). You would think I'd admire the use of technology. I don't. When they call they expect to talk to a human being and when I answer I expect the same. It's outrageous.

Don't you hate self righteous people that think that anything they do is justifiable if it's for (as they see it) a good cause? It's not. No good can come out of offending and manipulating people or finding loopholes in law. Dove Foundation should stop this practice immediately.

Open letter to TiVo: I Want my Apple TV

Here's Robert Scoble's take on Apple TV: It rocks, he says. Why? Because he can watch his video podcasts in it.

TiVo had until February to provide the video podcast aggregation feature now available through iTunes and Apple TV. Instead, you wasted time with "TiVoCasts", with limited selection of questionable taste.

Here's what you guys need to understand: the trick to retain the living room is to provide enough features so that your customers won't seek new devices to fill their needs. In the case of videoblogs, you had until February to come up with that feature, because now we have Apple TV.

And now I want one. Once I have it, all bets are off. I may be tempted to buy videos from iTunes instead of from Amazon Unbox and I may even decide to get rid of my TiVo box as a result. You had me as a loyal customer, but by not providing the features I needed, you pushed me towards your competitors.

Smart.

And let me push this one point further: I have way too many media devices already. Soon I'll be looking at getting rid of one or more of them. By pushing me to buy an Apple TV through inaction and bad decisions such as "TiVoCasts", you increase my need to get rid of something and of TiVo being the box to be ditched.

Thrill seekers and Fear avoiders

Seth Godin makes a point that some people are thrill seekers and others avoid fear. True. And he also mentions that some people fall in between those two categories.

He then comments on how important thrill seekers are for the evolution of companies. They want more, they want growth, they want change, and when they succeed at that you have a story worth telling and we may all be better for it. Also true.

However, any healthy organism needs both components to function correctly. People like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison love to boast that they are college drop-outs, even recommending that people stop studying.

But here's a question for you: how many employees at Microsoft and Oracle (or Google, Yahoo!, etc) don't have a degree? How well would any large company survive if you can't rely on the boring people (like accountants and payroll clerks, for instance)?

Here's my counterpoint to Seth Godin's excellent article: your reliable heart needs your adventurous muscles as much as those need the heart. Your heart will keep you alive and provide the sustenance your muscles need to take you places where you can find food, shelter, etc.

Healthy organisms (or successful companies) need both elements to cooperate in order to achieve long-lasting success. The trick is in balancing those two types of elements.

Here's to the thrill seekers and to the fear avoiders!

The whole Google+Orkut+Brazil affair

Just read an article on Boing Boing by Bernardo commenting on Google's Orkut collaboration with Brazilian Police and what's seen as censorship.

I agree with most of it, but there's one point that bothers me: the article says that corporate bashing is illegal speech in Brazil. It's not. What's illegal is slander/libel, which by the way is illegal here in the US as well. You can say so and so sucks, but you can't say they eat little children (unless they do, of course).

I do agree, however, that giving the cops the key to shutting down any content they feel objectionable is a very bad idea and I'm convinced it immediately leads to censorship, which is a dangerous proposition in Brazil, considering the country only emerged from dictatorship 20 years or so ago.

Cingular iPhone? No thanks.

iPhone requires Cingular, which is AT&T, which is not worthy of my trust.

There goes my iPhone...

Amazon video downloads + TiVo: where's the value?

I was working at Amazon when they first released the Unbox video service a few months ago. It ended up being one of the reasons I left. To me, it showed that Amazon had forgotten that it's the customer they work for, not the distributors.

To be clear, I don't hate Amazon. Quite the opposite. I worked with lots of smart people there, and for a long time I really felt that the company cared a lot about the customer. No matter who you were, you could win an argument if your idea was the best for the customers. It made me feel proud of working there and I'm still proud of saying so. But I can't understand and explain why Amazon would even offer the Unbox service under the stupid terms of their license. Cory Doctorow was right on cue when he wrote about this subject.

The extremely flawed service, with it's incredibly unfair license and high prices was less than compelling, to say the least. And I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't selling many movies that way.

But when Amazon announced the availability of Unbox downloads directly to your TiVo, my curiosity got the best of me. Plus, they were giving a $15 allowance, so I thought I could try it without cost.

The first thing I decided was that I was going to rent a couple of movies (since buying one would basically drain that $15 allowance).

So I rented the movies one night and the next morning the two movies where there, ready for me to watch them. So far so good, but they came with a huge caveat: once you start watching the movie, it will become unavailable in 24 hours.

That's right. If you start watching a rented Unbox movie on a week night, you better sit there and finish it, because you won't be able to come back to it the following night.

This sucks, and it completely destroys the little value I could possibly see in a service like Unbox. Most rentals cost between $3 and $4, and you know what? Netflix is looking like a better deal every day.

Let's compare: for $15/month, I usually rent 8 movies from Netflix, and I usually keep a movie for at least a couple of nights or for the whole weekend.

For the same $15, I can rent maybe 4 or 5 movies at Amazon, and each of them will vanish in 24 hours.

So what does Amazon need to do if they want to go back to being customer-centric? First of all, lower the prices. Then relax that 24 hours expiration date for rentals. Another idea: allow people to buy 24-hour extensions to their downloads for a lower price. Say, an extra dollar for every 24 hours. Makes sense, since it wouldn't require any extra bandwidth.

I still have $6 to spend, but after that I doubt I will use the service again. Let's see if they decide to improve the rules and provide more value to the customer...

Kate and Jed can go to hell for all I care

Yep, this is a rant. TivoCast seemed like an interesting idea. You can subscribe to video podcast like channels, and download short programs to your TiVo that you can watch when you want.

Of course the same could be done if TiVo could simply subscribe to one of thousands of video podcasts (like it can already with audio podcasts), but hey, why give customers any choice if you can keep them a while longer in the silo, right?

So I subscribe to a couple of channels, and one of them is the New York Times. Boy, was that a mistake!

At first, it seemed ok. Cooking instructions, some recipes, then some movie trailers (useless, but still not a big deal breaker).

Then, to my horror: The Vows of Kate and Jed. I will refrain from using the F word in describing how I feel about Kate, Jed, and their vows.

I have no idea who Kate and Jed are (nor do I care), but they appear to have paid the NYT a lot of money to have their wedding vows broadcast to the winds. Well, it seems they got a good deal for their money, as they ended up in my living room.

Sorry, Kate and Jed, but I couldn't care less about your vows. And sorry, New York Times, but you crossed the line. Now none of you will ever be invited into my living again.

Fool me once, shame on you...

By the way, I would have just sent both TiVo and NYT an e-mail about this, but they don't seem to want to hear my opinion on this subject, so here's hoping they read this post...

Squirrel Bait

I know, I know: music blogs are dead.

I need to say this though: if you like rock, you owe it to yourself to go to emusic.com right now and download Squirrel Bait. Thank me later.

SXSW 2007 torrent is out

Don't let the whole DRM, piracy, RIAA lawsuits thing distract you from grabbing the new torrent from SXSW 2007, showcasing artists:

[link] [torrent]

By the way, it's 100% legal. I haven't downloaded yet, but last year's had no DRM either.

In the torrent, you'll probably find one song from each artist (almost 800 songs in total). You will have to do your own digging, and I'm sure you won't like most of it, since SXSW is eclectic to the extreme, but it's loads of fun to search for what you like. Some of the songs in my top 10 list came from previous SXSW torrents.

On a related note, you should check KEXP's coverage of the event and their podcasts. You can fill up an iPod with free (and legal) music. Good stuff.

The H1-B debate again

Ars Technica has an article about Bill Gates' latest statements regarding the need to raise the H1-B cap.

It is clear the debate is far from resolved, but I think Ars is going in the wrong direction. Microsoft has development offices all around the world. If they want cheap labor, they can hire and keep their employees in their home lands. Their need to hire employees has less to do with wages than their extreme need to hire people for their Redmond office. I can think of many reasons why a large software company would want to do that.

Just consider this as an example: Amazon is hiring more than 500 people right now. Many of the positions have been open for months. Even if you buy the argument that H1-B workers are simply cheap labor, don't you think Amazon would prefer to hire American workers if they could find qualified people?

I've been working for large corporations for a long time as an Oracle DBA and I have interviewed many candidates in my time. My experience is basically the same that Joel Spolsky reports about here and here.

Basically, almost everybody you phone screen or interview is someone who just read that one book and don't know any more about Oracle than what their memory can recall. I once did a phone screen where I could clearly hear the candidate typing some keywords on his keyboard, then pausing before answering my question by reading the Google results. By the third question, I was doing the search myself and even reading directly from the same pages as the candidate. It turned out to be an entertaining experience for me. I rejected the candidate, but gave him high points for his Google skills.

Believe me, it is very hard to find good IT candidates. Maybe you have luck if what you're looking for are Excel macro experts, but the highly skilled candidates necessary to carry out complex software development projects (people who actually understand pointers, recursion, algorithm complexity, etc) are rare. And if you find people who are very good at those things but live in Kenya, Brazil, France, India, etc, why not bring them over?

Having said that, I do agree that the system is open for abuse. I don't think the problem is Microsoft or Amazon or Google, though. I think the problem are some of the hundreds of consulting companies that care only about the difference between how much they charge their clients compared to how much they pay their employees. Some of them really do a good job screening candidates and do bring good people over, but some are just abusing the system.

I think the trick is to improve the quality control of the H1-B approval process. And I don't think this can be done by simply restricting the number of visas granted per year. Whether you think the cap is high, it is actually a very poor mechanism to begin with.

Going to the bottom of things

So this guy whines about Home Depot's credit card receipt. The receipt indicates that the buyer agrees to the purchase terms and directs the buyer to complete an online survey. The blogger complains that doesn't know what he's agreeing to, and doesn't know where to go to for the online survey.

Then Boing Boing picks it up, calling it a "bullshit EULA".

But it appears it was just a case of lack of Google skills (just search for "Home Depot Survey" and you can tell them exactly how you feel about the damn receipts) and a misplaced sales receipt, which would have contained both the details of what was sold and the website for the survey. Proof here, which I found using Google's image search for "Home Depot Receipt".

So the "agreement" is just the sales agreement, a.k.a. receipt.

I think the moral is that we should always take the time to investigate things a little further. I'm not defending Home Depot or attacking Boing Boing. I just think two Google searches is a very little price to tell a better (at least more complete) story.

Suggestions to detect spam

Spam filters have been losing ground lately. I use an Yahoo! account and every day I get more and more undetected spam in my inbox. The Bayesian filter doesn't seem to be detecting all of them.

So here are my 2 cents:

- If the message that just arrived is old (3 months or older), it's spam. Trust me on this one.

- If the message only contains a stupid inline image, it's also spam.

I don't understand spam. I don't know who in their right mind would buy anything being advertised in an e-mail that starts with these lines:

Rocks appearing show series remarks by, sex.
Mentioned being member, brat. Bald failed box office garnered mixed
nude pregnancy famous.

Seriously. How stupid do you have to be?

What's wrong with Microsoft?

Microsoft bribes students and professors.
Microsoft bribes lawyers.
Microsoft bribes bloggers.

A note to Microsoft: Just because you do it all the time everywhere, it doesn't make it less unethical. Quite the opposite.