AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

AT&T (T) is planning to put some extra shine on the even sleeker new Apple (AAPL) iPhone. When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy. AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499. AT&T and Apple declined to comment.

[From FORTUNE: Techland AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone «]

I want to say that I'll believe this one when I see it, but it is just too god damn attractive. I have with AT&T for years (well, with the company that keeps getting renamed and remerged and it is currently called AT&T) and we have two iPhones, so the contract shove is not that big of a deal. Plus we can still sell our current 8GB iPhones to somebody that wants to run them unlocked for at least $200 each.

This is of course relying on the reports that the phone will include true GPS. 3G by itself is just not enough motivation to ditch our first generation iPhones so early, and the slimmer casing is a non-issue, since we don't mind the size of the current casing.

Politics are funny

These are my results from the survey at http://www.politicalcompass.org :

The idea here is that a left/right plot is not good enough, and that the historic left/right alignment is actually an economics measure, so they added the second variable for Authoritarian v. Libertarian. It gets interesting because the survey is designed to take into account your subconscious efforts to tweak your answers so they fit what you think is your political stance. I tried to, and I failed.

This is their sample plot with some historical figures for comparison:

UPDATE: Brad just answered the survey too.

South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives

INCHEON, South Korea: The country that created the world's first cloned canine plans to put duplicated dogs on patrol to sniff out drugs and explosives.

The Korean Customs Service unveiled Thursday seven cloned Labrador retrievers being trained near Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul. The dogs were born five to six months ago after being separately cloned from a skilled drug-sniffing canine in active service.

Due to the difficulties in finding dogs who are up to snuff for the critical jobs, officials said using clones could help reduce costs.

[From South Korea to use cloned dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives - International Herald Tribune]

I had tuned out these cloning-related news in the past because they all seemed to focus in pure academic research and the morons that oppose it without as much as trying to read the description of what is it that the scientists are trying to do. I have no idea if this is the first mainstream announcement about cloning animals for a practical purpose, but if it is I hope they get away with it.

Of course, this is the kind of thing that we can't do in the United States. Even if the dogs in question were trained as guides for the blind, or as rescue dogs, a political element in this country will effectively seize the opportunity to crush the scientists simply to make a few cheap headlines.

This is a real world application to a controversial scientific discipline, not one more attempt of soulless Science trying to destroy God, or whatever the hell is it that these people think cloning is all about.

I am eagerly awaiting for South Korean scientists to find the perfect pig with the perfect body composition for maximum bacon processing. Then it can be cloned and we can solve world hunger with delicious bacon.

I have The Moose

In programming circles, it is common to keep a small stuffed animal to be kept by whatever team member has done something gloriously stupid. Some places use a Big Mouth Billy Bass, but most of my friends use a moose. Whenever one of us screws something up big time, we request possession of The Moose.

Today I took a double possession. The first incident involved a boolean function. Here is more or less a breakdown of what I did:

[20:40] <VP|bofh> function returns true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> function uses sproc to return true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> sproc uses a record count to decide true/false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> zero records = true

[20:40] <VP|bofh> > zero = false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> the ACTUAL function returned zero records = false

[20:40] <VP|bofh> > 0 records = true

This basically means that my true/false function was returning false/true instead. This ate two hours of work last night, and another hour this evening.

The second incident was subtle. I had a sequence of events:

1. Check authentication status

2. Check secondary authentication status

3. Execute a function

4. Execute another function

5. Execute another function

6. Auto-login

And it wasn't working. Since I was still reeling from the boolean error, I started adding breaking points and checking every line of code. One hour into it, I found the culprit: when I copied the function I needed to use for step #4, it had a built-in self-authentication check, which made sure only logged-in users could run the function. This meant that even after I had checked the two authentication methods, I had a rogue third check within my code that was raising all sorts of hell.

So now I have The Moose.

Photo Credit: Photo by grizzbass, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

What Happened In Piedmont

There is an Andromeda Strain remake in the works, this time as a miniseries. It is one of my favorite Sci Fi movie/book pairs, I really hope they don't screw it up.

A cool thing I noticed already is that they are going the viral marketing route for the promos, since there is already at least one fake blog that is clearly part of it.

Moo

Slow news week, so here's something that Alec Esotérica sent me:

I am under the influence of prescription narcotics (got snipped on Monday), so I have no idea if the video looks *that* weird to somebody with a clear mind.

Oh, the Irony

So here I am struggling with post-op recovery, insomnia and probably sleep apnea, and I ran into this:

Image Credit: Comic by xkcd, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

MetaX

It is obvious that my most common complaint about the iTunes and AppleTV platform is encoding issues. Still, there is a second aspect that most of us find annoying: proper tagging of media files.

iTunes simply can't deal with all of the tags that can be used in the movies that it can play:

1. You can't toggle video type.

2. You can't add a rating. You can add your own rating, but you can't mark a movie as PG-13, etc.

3. There is no way to mark a movie as multiple volumes. TV shows have seasons and episodes, movies don't have parts.

4. You can't change the artwork of movies with AC3.

I bet there is more, but those four are the most obvious. I was able to deal with #1 through an AppleScript, but until today I had no way to deal with the rest in a mechanical fashion. Today I learned of a donationware application, MetaX, that does most of that work. I just tested it with a half dozen movies and so far the results are beyond of what I expected.

Not only will it allow me to deal with these issues, but it automates them by both allowing a queue, and implementing automated lookups to both Amazon and the Internet Movie Database.

Kickass.

It even fills the description fields, ratings, etc. The only problem is that in the interest of paranoia, it rewrites your video file, then after completion it deletes the old one and adds the new one to iTunes. It makes for a slow queue, but at least if it fails you won't lose the original file.

The Reluctant Shopper

Over the past week or so I have been pushed to do something that I really despise: I am the designated shopper in my household.

Ivette has been sick for almost two weeks, and it got to the point where she could barely leave the house. She does all of our shopping, the only time I go to a store is to pick up something very specific, like a computer-related item, a book, etc. Before last week I was averaging less than one trip to the supermarket PER QUARTER.

Not anymore.

It only took me a day to figure out why I never go shopping: because I really despise it. I hate the parking lots, the stores, the crowded aisles, the merchandise selection, the checkout process, etc. Basically everything.

The worst thing is that no matter how much I insist, either Ivette can't put together a shopping list if her life depended on it, or she does and I can't find half of the things she asks for.Or worse, she won't believe me when I claim that I did not find the item:

Me: I couldn't find the Cascade dishwasher pellets with bleach.

Her: You sure?

Me: Yup, all I found was the ones with Dawn.

Her: Those are the ones you idiot!

Me: Nope, they said Dawn, not bleach.

Then two days later I found the real item: Cascade dishwasher pellets with bleach AND Dawn. Victory!

Then there's the weird. At Target there's this weird pecking order thing, for example during the afternoons women shoppers frown at men of working/married age shopping for household items. They look at you like you are some kind of intruder, or that you are doing something wrong, like keeping your woman chained to her bed, or worse.

Then there's the pharmacy. The moron that laid out the store did not allow for room for the two lines, so you spend most of your time moving back and forth to allow shopping carts to roll by. Yes, because everyone that walks into the store decides that she HAS to roll her cart thru the god damn pharmacy line even if she needs nothing from that corner of the store.

Two weeks with the ElGato Turbo.264

It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.

The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.

The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.

Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.

After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.

I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.

The Craziest Thing Gary Busey Ever Snorted Cocaine Off Of

Best headline of the day, courtesy of Wired Magazine:

"I was interviewing him once and asked him, what's the craziest thing you ever snorted cocaine off of? He couldn't think of anything, but afterwards his publicist called me and said, you know that question? And I thought, oh man, they want me to pull the question. But no, they said that Gary remembered he had a better answer for me."

[From The Craziest Thing Gary Busey Ever Snorted Cocaine Off Of | Game | Life from Wired.com]

You gotta read the article, it did better to wake me up than my first cup of coffee of the day.

Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Actor Charlton Heston died at Beverly Hills home at the age of 84 Saturday, his family said.
art.jpg

Heston was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston, known for portrayals of larger than life figure including Moses and Ben Hur, was suffering the late stages of Alzheimer's Disease.

Heston's wife of 64 years, Lydia, was by his side at the time of his death, according to the family statement.

[From Hollywood legend Charlton Heston dead at 84 - CNN.com]

The god damn dirty apes never got to take away his guns, no matter how hard they tried.

Heston is one of my favorite actors of all time (both Omega Man and Soylent Green are in permanent rotation in my household). Good Night, Funny Guy.

Adobe to Mac-Bound Artists: No 64-bit Photoshop CS4 for you

(the Soup Nazi, picture related)

Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop

Posted Apr 3rd 2008 1:00PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: OS, Software, Developer

Adobe's announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on OS X has the Mac web buzzing today. Accusations of blame are being shot at both Adobe and Apple by various pundits (though notably not by the companies themselves). Fortunately, some of the better Mac pundits are also weighing in with interesting opinions on this development.

Over at Ars, John Siracusa has penned an interesting historical account of the relationship of Adobe and Apple, and the Carbon API which is at the center of the controversy. He somewhat grimly sees this Photoshop development as the furthering of bad blood between the two companies and suggests that "the real storm may be yet to come" as Adobe and Apple clash over Flash and Air, etc. (witness the Flash on iPhone kerfuffle).

[From Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

I think somebody at Adobe forgot who butters their bread. They still have the balance sheet mentality of picking which side of the house will bring the best short term return, screw the other side. The problem with this is that they are missing out on the opportunity to exploit on the newest bang-for-the-buck shifts between PCs and Macs. Had they decided once and for all to drop Carbon, they could have used that risk to show off to their users what the can really do. It would not surprise me if the Mac 64-bit version would slaughter Vista, but it would surprise people spending $4000 on high end PCs only to find out the same money could buy them a monster Mac rig.

Idle

Waiting for a med switch consult.

An Open Letter to Verizon's FIOS division

(picture related)

A month ago I decided that it was time to put Comcast to rest and move on to Verizon FIOS. There was nothing really wrong with Comcast, but the FIOS offers were simply unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I ordered 15MB/15MB Internet service and was told that my delivery/installation appointment would be one month away. My appointment was today.

For the past month I was getting automated recordings from Verizon at least every week, reminding me of the installation date. I even took the afternoon off in advance, since I expected it to be distracting enough.

Then the shit hit the fan.

For starters, the installer was over an hour late. Once he showed up, he proved to me within minutes that he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He insisted on going to my master bedroom closet, even after I told him three times that each of the 300+ units in our condo complex uses the HVAC closet as the communication lines tunnel, all lines enter each unit through the HVAC closet.

The installer got a little hostile, and insisted on checking the deployment box outside. Before I could open my patio door, he had walked out of the building and tried to walk around, which is really stupid since that had him walk 10 buildings down the street before the first opening that allows access to our back yards. Dumbass.

After some lecturing, he told me there was no way in hell he could get the job done. The fiber was in the attic, four stories above, and he would need access to each of the units above mine so he could pull the cable down. He also needed a power outlet in the HVAC closet, since there was none his solution was to run a power cord out of the closet, stapled to the god damn ceiling, across and into my living room and plugged into one of the outlets in my living room.

Dumbass x 2.

I offered him to get the engineering/facilities guys for help. After all, we have an agreement that allows them access to any unit for this kind of emergency. No, he replied, he would absolutely refuse to enter a unit unless the owner was present.

He ranted for a few minutes while Ivette was having the engineering guys get permission to enter each unit. She even got them to put a proper power outlet inside of the HVAC closet, something the Verizon guy did not think about. He left before she was back. Before he left he handed me a phone number to call to re-schedule.

It took one hour, and four calls, to make it to the point in which I could pick a new appointment.

"The next appointment we have available is April 27."

Let me get this straight: I had to prequalify to order this service. I ordered this service on March 1st, 2008, and I have to wait two months to have it installed because Verizon did not finish their cable runs as they should had?

Why the fuck do I get letters from Verizon every two weeks begging us to switch to FIOS?

I told her sorry, that's not going to work. Please cancel my order. It took another half hour, and two people, before I was done with the cancellation process.

Now, I am willing to allow the one-month wait to install the service, but them walking in here and deciding the place is not wired is just bullshit. If they know they are going to run a 4-6 hour service call (their estimate, not mine) then why the fuck can't they send a guy sometime in the four weeks before, to do a site survey?

How to do a timesaving FIOS site survey:

1. Hand a qualified tech the address for a potential installation.
2. Tech drives to the address, then asks the customer to allow him to walk through and look for the wiring cabinets, closets, etc.
3. Tech inspects the point in which FIOS hits the property and sees if there is any work left to do before he can do the end user installation.
4. Tech says goodbye and goes to the next address.

I imagine that for most inspections the tech can be done in 15 minutes or less. If he didn't find anything wrong, he can write a service note for the actual installer, to save him the hassle of figuring out where the cabinets and the entry point are located. If he finds something wrong, he has plenty of time to arrange for Verizon to fix whatever needs to be fixed.

Instead, we have technicians running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Assholes. And worse, they try to make it look like it is the customer's fault that there is a problem.

As soon as I was done with Verizon, I called Comcast and had them upgrade my Internet tier to 16MB/2MB, a $10 upgrade. This 16MB is before any speed boost. The funny thing is this is the third time in less than two years that I ask for the upgrade. For some reason they keep dropping it from my bill. The guy from Comcast was extremely nice, even after I told him that I almost deserted to FIOS.

"Uh, you don't want to do that."

Speed tests throughout the evening show me pulling 22MB/2.7MB. Fuck You, Verizon.

Questions for Verizon, not that I give a shit anymore:

1. Why does it take a month to schedule an installation in the wealthiest county in all of the United States?
2. Why are multi-unit dwelling deployments not going through some kind of quality assurance process? At the very least, Verizon should send somebody to make sure that their wiring contractors are deploying the right equipment.
3. Why not spend some money to train your customer support personnel?
4. Would somebody post a memo that just because a phone number is used for the account it doesn't mean the phone is a Verizon account?
5. Do you find it acceptable to have technicians that refuse to listen to knowledgeable customers? Especially when the customer has information that can make the installer's job easier?
6. How come Comcast has service appointment time guarantees and you don't? Comcast techs (at least here) are very timely and courteous. Your installer was sort of an asshole.
7. If a customer calls complaining about a fucked up installation about waiting for a month, is it wise to tell said customer that the next available appointment is almost a month away? Shouldn't this be a red flag situation to try to appease the customer by trying to right a wrong and come up with a better service appointment reschedule?
8. How come you guys spend so much money sending those begging letters without checking if the service is really available at that unit?
9. How come you guys spend so much money on marketing and can't afford a site inspection ahead of an installation appointment? I am guesstimating an expense of up to half a billable hour per each installation, which is already budgeted at 4 to 6 hours.
10. How come Verizon doesn't talk to condo associations and their engineering folks to preempt deployment issues at large condo complexes? All it takes is to send one engineer to visit each condo area and take a look at the possible floorplans. A recent college grad should have been able to come here and, in less than two hours, visit the three standard unit layouts, and maybe write a half-page cheat sheet to be used for any FIOS deployment to any of these 300+ units.

ElGato Turbo 264: First Impressions

There is a downside to having an AppleTV, iPhone or video capable iPod: converting videos to a compatible format is always a hassle. There are plenty of applications to handle this problem, no two of them are alike.

I have tons of DVDs, ripping them turned out to be quite the adventure. I did the first few dozen or so one by one, with Handbrake. I wouldn't know until I got an AC3 receiver that I ripped all of these DVDs wrong and will have to eventually re-rip them because the default Handbrake conversion for AppleTV converts the AC3 tracks to AAC. Ouch.

VisualHub is great, but it is slow. It doesn't have a pause button, which is really stupid: if you have a big batch of files to convert and you are using too much power, you can't pause the job, you have to kil l it, then remove from the queue whatever is good to go and then start again.

I didn't know I could use Handbrake to process files from a DVD already ripped. The time needed to rip a DVD with Mac The Ripper, then convert it for the AppleTV with Handbrake is usually less than if you let Handbrake do the whole job. More ouch.

Roxio Popcorn, for some really fucking stupid reason, won't allow you to pass-through the AC3 from a DVD, instead you are forced to convert to AAC. The interface *is* better, and it queues nicely, plus it has a proper pause feature. And it allows for hardware acceleration.

That's when I learned that ElGato has a hardware accelerator for h.264. I spent a week or so scouring the web for reviews and hate posts about it, and overall it seems to have a good reception. It is universally accepted that if your mac is not very new, the performance improvements are dramatic. But, what about recent fast macs?

After grinding through about 15 hours of video, I can tell that even in a Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 3GB RAM, Leopard, and while Time Machine is running, iTunes is streaming to my AppleTV over 100BaseT, and Parallels Desktop is running XP Pro over a Cisco VPN, it is running a hell of a lot faster than VisualHub.

The best part is that the resource utilization of the Turbo.264 application is very low, most of the time I can't tell it is running. The USB dongle with the hardware encoder doesn't even get warm. Right now I am seeing consistent 40fps or better encoding (the source material is 29fps, if you can't crank out at least that much, it means it will take you longer than one hour to encode one hour of video). In real life this means that I am cranking out avi/divx to h.264 conversions at about one hour of encoding for every two hours of video input. I imagine this is going to depend wildly on the source material.

So yes, even if the machine is fast, you can at your very worst expect it to use very little resources to crank out the same workload that would usually max out a multiple core mac.

The Rat in the Dishwashing Machine

So I reach into my dishwasher machine, and I see a frickin rat in the cutlery caddy:

I was of course half asleep, so it took me a split second to realize it was nothing more than a butter knife from a Ratatouille dinner kit.

It's BACON!