Would you want/need/trust a "computer" controlling your entertainment devices?

I think the situation would be ideal. If everything were connected together, there would be a good chance that someone would develop a sort of "Entertainment Operating System" that was specifically for integrating all your devices together.

It'd be neat to sit on my couch and watch tv, and be able to open up a browser window with PiP and see relevant information to what I was watching - a news story or something. Perhaps download a copy of the TV show I just watched half of and switch to the PS3 and play a game. All this while listening to a music collection with auto-generated play lists until I get bored with it and stream Pandora through the stereo and change the PiP browser to the main screen to search for more music that I might like.

I don't think this could come fast enough, but then again I also don't think any one company will do a decent job of it.

Is Microsoft going down?

Honestly, Microsoft makes a good product. For the most part, they offer attractive, easy to use software for the average user and strive to put it in every home on the planet. The work that they have done to achieve this is simply astounding.

It's true that they have made some bad decisions in the past(Windows ME, DRM Protection), but with the advent of OS's like XP and now Vista, I think they're finally finding what people what and giving it to them. Eventually, what they'll have to realize is that their development philosophy isn't going to work forever. Companies such as Mozilla, Google, Apple and countless Linux distributions are producing software quickly and with great enthusiasm. The stuff just works, and that's what people expect. Microsoft has relied on people putting up with some of the problems with their products for far too long and believing that the trend of doing so will continue for much longer might be their last bad decision.

I can't play video games on a terminal!

I think both web-based and desktop-based applications are needed and will keep their staying power. When working on the desktop, there is no worry of Internet failure, for whatever reason, causing you to lose your work - or worse yet, lose access to it. However, with web-based applications, there's the convenience of knowing that you can create files wherever you might find internet access and places that have access (available for public use or not) are numerous. I think that we need to use both in conjunction though. MS Office is probably the best office suite out there currently as far as the interface and features go, but I would like to see the ability for it (or something similar and preferably free) to integrate online access. It would be nice to be able to access your office files and applications from on your home desktop from the road without the use of 3rd party remote connection software/services or shelling out a large chunk of change for exchange as the next best thing.

Organizing your life: low-tech or hi-tech?

Honestly, I'd love to use a PDA. The only problem that I've found is that they just aren't innovative enough for me just yet. Ideally, if such a device were to organize my life, there would have to be some considerations in the design - it really should be a portable computer without the limitations. It needs to be small, sleek and feature packed. Wireless Internet, email, note taking, camera, mp3s, VoIP and decent storage along with GPS capability and at least 12 hours of power with continuous use. It should have an OS designed specifically for the device and not a neutered version of a PC system. It should have intelligent voice recognition integrated into everything as well, because let's face it, typing with a stylus is only slightly better than text messaging on a cell phone. I think that these devices need to be more intuitive. I should only have to tell it "Important meeting at FCVB at 3PM on Thursday" and it would add a reminder on my calendar for October 5th at 3PM, mark me down as busy for an hour and alert me beforehand to ensure I leave early enough to go the long way to the destination, since it keeps updated with traffic reports and weather conditions and there was a pileup on the freeway. With that in mind, my wife could sit down at the home PC and send me a reminder as well. Towards the end of the meeting, the PDA vibrates because it set itself to silent during the meeting. When I look at it, there is a reminder of the task an hour before its due because the PDA knows what time I normally get off work.

It should support profiles and have some method of user recognition so that when I'm driving and hand it over to my wife in the passenger seat, it saves the GPS map I was setting up locations on switches from the techno-riche GUI I prefer to a bubbly pink Hello Kitty theme. When she's done checking her email and hands it over, it switches right back to where I left off.

The majority of what I've seen so far in the PDA market leads me to believe that you can't have an all-in-one package, sacrificing design for features, vice versa, or neither but with some irritating flaw and still not work exactly how you think it should; regardless of the hefty price tag.

Maybe its just wishful thinking, but until then, I'll stick to post-its.

The next "big" thing?

I think the next big "thing" is going to be coming with this whole web 2.0 movement. A few months back, Google was hiring engineers to pack as much storage, ram and CPUs into large 20X40 shipping crates as was possible. I think what this is gearing up to do is entirely web-based applications. Computers in the future could merely be terminals to access the internet with and all the overhead and processing would be done on the server side. I'm not sure what to think about this just yet, but I suppose if I ever wanted to do any gene sequencing at home, I could log into one of their shipping crates and have at it.

Ready to play with PlayReady? Maybe Not.

Microsoft announced that they will be implementing their new DRM, called PlayReady. I really wish the world would just wake up and realize that information is going to be shared, paid for, shared, licensed, shared, stolen and shared again. Does anyone else see the trend here?

Humans, being the social creatures that they are, are going to share information with one another whether a management system allows them to or not; they will find a way eventually.

The kicker to the new PlayRead DRM, is that it will be managing other codecs, such as AAC and H.264 as well as M$ proprietary formats.

I still believe that one day we won't have to deal with this bureaucratic crap.

1.01 Teraflops - Oh My!

Intel announced today that they have designed a processor capable of 1.01 teraflops. That's over one trillion calculations per second. What makes this innovation even more interesting is that it runs at a clock rate of the average Pentium 4 - 3.16 MHz. Unlike the P4, however, it uses a mere 62 watts of electricity to do it.

In the past year, we've seen the outstanding clock rates of the Pentium series jump by leaps and bounds over their predecessors. Then came the advent of dual and multiple core processors that literally doubled the efficiency, though the clock rate was almost halved. Not we see an astronomical increase in efficiency. From the 12 gigaflop (12 billion), 3.06MHz Pentium 4 to the new Intel processor of the same speed up to over a trillion.

So what does this tell us? Well, internal clock rate only goes so far. Perfecting efficiency is working out rather well. It would seem that the guys down in Santa Clara are working smarter and not harder, after all.

Expect to see multiple core 1.0TFps processors at a higher clock rate within the next five years or so. It's only getting easier.

Windows Vista

So the latest Windows operating system was released last Tuesday, along with Office 2007. I must say that the new Aero interface is rather nice, but I am otherwise unimpressed. If Windows XP Professional were to have the Aero interface added, along with IE7, Office 2007 and Windows Defender (which I'm sure most of you already have already) I don't think there would be much of a difference.

What bothers me is the amount of time and resources that Microsoft spent on developing this "Nextgen" OS and the obvious lack of anything tangible being produced. This has been a trend with MS for the past decade. While it is true that XP was much improved over previous versions, it still took quite a long time for them to get it secure and even now, it's not as secure as it could be.

One thing I noticed on Tuesday was that Vista was not flying off the shelves. As a matter of fact, I didn't see very many copies sold at all, even a week later. I hope people are being smart and at least waiting until the eventual first service pack appears before installing it.

Bloggers, journalism and Media Giants

If you remember back in 2001 when AOL and Time Waner merged, you'll get my point quickly.
AOL Time Waner susidiaries Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema are among the top 10 motion picture poducers. Warner music group artists account for 38 of the top 200 best selling albums and 16% of all US album sales. Time Waner Cable provides channels such as HBO, TBS, CNN, TNT, Nickelodeon and I believe the WB as well. Other media giants like Walt Disney that holds ABC, ESPN and Lifetime and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. that includes Fox, book publishers and a ton of newspapers, magazines and Twentieth Century Fox are in the same scale. Sony of Japan owns Columbia Pictures, IMAX, CBS and Columbia records, and Square-Enix. Viacom owns Paramount, MTV, CBS, Simon and Schuster, and blockbuster.

That's five corporations that own just about everything in the media that you'll ever see.

What will happen to our "respected" and "established" journalism when these corporations decide that the public just doesn't need to know something? What if they want the public to believe that the world was going to end and crammed their entire media-scape with made up stories and facts full-force into our heads? They can do it because we have a freedom of speech that allows them to tell us whatever they want. Bloggers have the same freedom and can easily express it on the Internet. Who the public chooses to believe is a different matter.

Are bloggers REAL journalists?

The answer is yes and no. While bloggers do have to work their way up from being an unknown writer to a respected one, they are still viewed as just bloggers. What's the distinction then? The line is pretty vague. No they aren't journalists because they report news with no compensation and aren't screened to some extent by an established media source such as a newspaper or television station. Then again, they are journalists for the same reason. The best kind in fact. What bloggers write while usually just opinion, there are no restrictions to what they say. You will never, ever see the anchor on MSNBC reporting on the lax security of Microsoft operating systems or how their products are half-assed at best. The only form of mass-media that exists without explicit gatekeeping is the Internet. People can say whatever they want, whether it is offensive, pointless and not remotely true in any sense. Whether or not it's really accurate is irrelevant. Who's to say what we see on "established" and "respected" media is true at all?