Remember this: Homezone and U-verse

I'll make sure I remember NOT to signup for their services. Here's why: both of these video services are provided by AT&T and AT&T's new privacy policy says AT&T will collect "information about viewing, game, recording and other navigation choices that you and those in your household make when using Homezone or AT&T U-verse TV Services."

So AT&T is expecting me to pay them to spy on me? No thanks. Not even if it is free! After all, there are enough free video entertainment from YouTubes already.

Blogger == Journalist? Not so fast

This became a heated topic because Apple's legal team claimed that bloggers are not "real" journalist and thus shouldn't allow to conceal the identities of their sources. This claim is refuted by the judge at the appeal court. And you could read about bloggers celebrating this "victory" everywhere.

Well, as Coach Corso, our friend at ESPN, would say, "Not so fast my friend." It's one thing that bloggers have the same legal rights as journalists but could we bloggers claim that most of our writing have journalistic values? I'm afraid not.

Even reputable blogs like BoingBoing.net publishes garbage some times. And it is quoted by The Digital Music Weblog. The article claims that "[Audio player maker] iRiver gives customers the choice of switching off DRM" but that's not what iRiver did! And I'm not the only one who sees how incorrect that is. Check out the comment by Vinny. He summed it up the best: the issue here is not DRM. iRiver's customers has the choice of listening to non-DRM-ed music all along. All iRiver's upgrade did is to give its users an alternative to Windows Media Player for transferring songs from computer to the device. (For those who cares for the technical details, the upgrade makes the device appear as a USB Mass Storage Device under Windows. So you could drag-and-drop using Explorer)

It's pathetic that most people who commented on blogs/forums like Digg and Slashdot never read the article they commented on. However, it's ridiculous that even the bloggers themselves do not research the subject they write about. The blogosphere seems to be ruled by sensationalism instead of rationalism. Well, maybe journalism is coming down to this level.

Best Practice in Computer Science

What is it? Outsourcing of course!

Wall Street Journal reported some college students are hiring from Rent-A-Coder to do Com. Sci. homeworks for them.

Is there anything wrong with students practicing this "skill" early in college to prepare for their career? I'm sure these kids will do a good job managing offshored projects when they enter the industry!

[via Slashdot]

Too late. You've lost your customer!

If you treat your customers poorly, they'll go to your competitor.

This is not exactly a new concept but Wal-Mart learned it the hard way.

Yet another proof that consumers are sheep

According to a survey about HDTV (high definition TV) done by set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta, a lot of buyers of HDTV don't have a clue about what high definition is and how to get such content. Check this out (everybody could use some good laugh for Friday afternoon):

"23% of HDTV owners did not invest in special equipment to watch HDTV channels because a message at the beginning of the programs they watch tells them that those programs are being broadcast in HD.

Nearly one in five (18%) reported that they believed the HD television would give them high-definition channels without additional equipment. "

There you go. The business model of making up some acronyms and put them on the products actually paid off!

With customers like these, why do businesses need to improve their products/services?

Tech writers' job made easy by Jobs

How? Whenever Apple release something, just sing your praises and your job is done!

For example, check out Apple's Amazing New iPod with Video

This writer actually went one step further by providing statistics! Read "I could count on one hand how many people I see on the train in a given month watching movies on their laptops. " That's supposed to support his argument that there is no portable video player market (of course before Apple launched the latest iPod!)

Another quote: "The other issue is, of course, content. IDC's Martin admitted that he bought an early portable media center, but has had little use for it. There are no short clips to download, so he leaves the device behind." Well, maybe poor Martin hasn't heard of something called cable or satellite TV. The portable media center could sync with a Windows Media Center PC which is capable of recording TV programming.

The notion of no content being available for portable video player is just wrong! Content is readily available, the issue has to do with the ease of use, including recording and transfering, which I have pointed out before, is not implemented well by Microsoft's Media Center solution.

If Apple is truly the maverick, it should have released a Mac based DVR (digital video recorder, think Tivo) solution that integrates with the new video iPod seamlessly.

What happened to separation of church and state?

"Bush: Miers' Religion Key Part of Her Life"

I suppose the constitution is not a key part of USA anymore.

Update: Miers has just withdrawn her nomination. The irony is: no matter how much our President wanted to sell her being a conservative, the ultra-conservatives just won't buy! Even hints of anti-abortion is not enough for them.

I have responsibility but no right

... sounds like slavery, huh?

"Software developers should be held personally accountable for the security of the code they write, said Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity advisor, on Tuesday."

Mr. Schmidt: I dunno what medication you've taken but last time I check at most company developers have no right to code they have written (i.e., code are properties of those company and developers are not allow to "take" it with them when they change job, in most cases)

Let's see who he used to work for... President Bush!

Enuff' said.

American's tolerance level has reached a new low

A lady boarding a Southwest airline flight got booted off the plane.

The reason? She wore a shirt that says "Meet the Fuckers" with pictures of
President Bush, VP Cheney and Secretary of State Rice.

Here is a link to a Nevada TV station with a video clip. The lady, Lorrie Heasley, wore that shirt in the video. Check it out if you wanna see what it looks like.

Southwest said some other passengers complained about that. I think that's a lame lame excuse. It's not like she's bugging people by telling them her political views. It's a shirt for god sake! If you don't like what it says, turn away! No one force you to look at it. In fact, it's never polite staring at women's front side.

I can't boycott Southwest though 'coz I seldom fly it. Its service is below par to me anyway.

No publicity is bad publicity

Some like to diss bloggers as "attention grabbers" that have nothing better to say. As a blogger myself, I usually dispute that claim but I gotta admit some bloggers went over the board.

For example, one blogger claimed that he has "been using Macs for a while ... wondering if they're all that special" and he might switch back from Mac to PC. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions. In fact, I wrote my fair share of criticism of Mac. However, this guy kept bashing the apps because he doesn't use them! Check out his nonsense:
"I really dislike iPhoto. I much prefer the Windows thumbnails."
What's he smoking? iPhoto is a photo management software (it's not perfect but I must say it does a pretty good job.) Windows thumbnails? That's a file preview mode! He's comparing apples to oranges.
"You know, .Mac is interesting, but way too expensive."
Apple's .Mac is a service not unlike the paid version of Yahoo's e-mail and photo storage service. I don't see how .Mac being expensive a reason why Mac is inferior to Windows.
"I'm not a musician, GarageBand to me isn't particularly compelling."
OK. That's as ignorant as saying "I'm not a painter, Mona Lisa to me isn't particularly compelling" as the reason for Louvre not being special.

Anyway, I gotta give him some credits for having the guts to diss Mac. I'm pretty sure he'll be expecting "hate mails" from some unhappy Apple fanboys. To be honest, some of his points are valid: low-end Macs are slow. Text Anti-aliasing do seem fuzzy on my Mac and better on Windows.

Another blogger wrote that phones should be replacing general purpose PC as the main device for computing needs. Well, that's pretty much stating the obvious. I mean, that's the ideal but not gonna happen in the near future! And the biggest disadvantage is giving too much control to your phone company, which has the tendency to charge you for anything you like to do with your phone.

I left out links to their blogs on purpose since I don't wanna give them extra traffic. In the meantime, I'll try my best to come up with more articles with high shock value.

RIP Montana Mazurkiewicz

Most think sport is about machoism most of the time, but it has a touching side too:

Notre Dame Fighting Irish's head football coach Charlie Weis visited big Irish fan, 10-yr old Montana, before he died of brain tumor last Friday. Weis granted him a wish: calling the first play for Irish's next game (vs. Washington last Sat)

Irish's first play was at their 1 yard line. What did Montana call? "Pass right!" That's a dangerous play at that situation but Irish went with it and got good 13 yards out of it.

Good karma working at its best? I think so.

And it's good publicity for Notre Dame, which hasn't had a lot for the past few years when it hasn't won as much as it used to.

You gotta earn your right before you trash talk

Terrell Owens, all-star wide receiver of Philadelphia Eagles, might indeed be a "bad apple" to his team at times (e.g. his feud against his coach, the management and his QB) but it's not something Derek Smith, a linebacker of 49er, who a lot of football fans have never heard of, has the right to say.

That's his comment before the Eagle-49er game, in which his defensive team has given up 143 yards and 2 touchdowns to Owens.

What did Derek Smith say after the game? Well, he still didn't want Owens on his team. Yeah right, like he wanna be on your team!

Man, some people might enjoy publicity like this, but it just sounded stupid to me.

Money can't always buy victory

I'm not talking about sports (where money could buy victory) This is about how a student fought against the almighty Microsoft's army of lawyers who sued him for selling 2 unopened boxes of M$'s software on eBay.

The result? He counter-sued and M$ settled.

Sometimes our legal system doesn't seem that broken.

Update your resume

Have you been wondering why the diaster in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina was handled so poorly? Maybe this explains: Discrepancies reported in Brown [chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency] resume.

Assistant to Manager, assistant manager, what's the difference anyway? (That reminds me of an episode of "The Office")

And at the highest level of academics, teachers always learn from their students. So you might say a student is also a professor!

Let me see: I have been working as assistants to CEO, directors, architects...... I should sign up for a Harvard distant learning class ASAP so that I could put Harvard Professor on my resume!

Wait a second! I wasn't on President Bush's campaign team before. (New resume now in trashcan)

Do you Yahoo? No thanks.

Yahoo is accused by a media watchdog of becoming a "police informant" for the Chinese government that led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets."

Yahoo's practice is widely criticized by members of the media. While they acknowledge the need to comply with local law, most question whether such action is ethical. After all, the "state secret" here is an internal Communist Party message that warned journalists of the dangers of social unrest resulting from the return of dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in June 2004. Isn't that kinda obvious?
See "Yahoo business ethics sorely lacking" (Infoworld)
and "Web of complicity" (Telegraph UK) Don't forget this is a company that was willing to buy the notorious spyware writer 3721 in order to "compete in the China market." I still remember how bad I felt when my computer was hijacked by 3721.

Surprisingly, there are quite a few netters (on popular website slashdot.org) defending Yahoo, saying it's nothing wrong with taking care of shareholder's interests.

I don't know about them. To be honest, I'm a heavy user of Yahoo's services: My Yahoo, email, fantasy sports...... Now I'll think twice before using any of them. I've already switched my homepage to My Netscape, even though it's inferior in terms of features. And this will be my last season playing fantasy sports on Yahoo. ESPN: here I come!

It takes less time than a commercial break (almost)

... To assemble a Dell! That's what I've just learned from this article: "...PC assembly time down to less than four minutes..."

Incredible!

Even more amazing is that 30 seconds were wasted every time they put those annoying Intel and Microsoft stickers on the computer!

Maybe we could save $100 off the price if they don't have to do that :P

The market of MP3 player is just as bad as the NL West

... where every team commits one blunder after another!

First, Rio is gone due to lack of QC and marketing. (They made it official last week.)

Second, Apple settled the lawsuit over its poor battery.

Now Creative is shipping worm with its player!

Is it that hard to make a decent player? I wonder.

Good bye UGL

UGL = Undergraduate Library, at University of Texas, my alma mater. This is one of the places in Austin where lots of my fond memories are associated with. (Yes, I met pretty gals there >:)

The university is moving the books out and converting it to a student center this Fall. It will be a place for students to hang out and study.

Well, actually that's what we used to do over there anyway (minus the study part :P) The books were useful to kill time when waiting for the "target" to leave.

I've never knew why it's called undergraduate library 'coz most libraries let undergrad in but I just found out that's not the case in the 50s. Interesting!

Microsoft makes baseball exciting

Aren't they? Here is their patent.

Well, kidding aside, it's not that bad. I guess MLB.com is actually using it now. I'm a subscriber of MLB.TV which streams video of complete or highlights of baseball games. Before I learned of this patent, I thought they must have hired a bunch of low-paid kids to cut (i.e. edit) these video. And I have been wondering how boring that job must be :P Looks like it's more automated than I thought.

Good bye Rio (the MP3 player pioneer)

See "Death bells ring for Rio as they are cut up and sold to SigmaTel"

It's sad 'coz I still believe among all competitors of Apple iPod, Rio Karma has the best features, design and UI, in fact, even better than iPod. This is based on my experience of owning one for 2 weeks (returned for battery life issue)

So, once again it proves that it takes more a good feature set to win in the consumer electronics business. You'd need marketing, marketing, marketing (yes, it's so important that I have to repeat it again and again), quality control and customer service as well. This is reinforced by my recent good (surprise!) experience with getting my iPod fixed (the headphone jack has bad connectivity) at an Apple store (BTW, there was no service dept at Apple store. Apple named it "Genius Bar." The name is a bit too arrogant and exaggerated but that's Steve's call, not mine. The service rep was actually a very helpful gentleman. He looked at my iPod and found that the remote control was the culprit. He simply swapped it with a new one.)

If fixing my Rio was this easy, I would have kept it and won't even consider iPod! Apple opening all these retail stores over the country turned out wasn't such a bad move.