Happy Birthday HijiNKS Ensue!

One of my favorite web comics is one year old today. Happy Birthday!

In Memoriam: Dell Computer

Fake Steve Jobs wrote a fantastic essay on why Dell is on its way down:

To think Michael Dell can do at Dell what I did at Apple is like thinking that if you give Michael Dell a striped shirt and put him in Picasso's old studio and let him buy supplies from Picasso's supplier then you'd have another Picasso. No. Apple is just that -- it's my paint store, the place I get my brushes and canvases and frames and smocks and the metal or clay or whatever Picasso used to make his sculptures. Apple is the loft where I do my work and make love to my nude models. Figuratively speaking. It's the kitchen where I pose for wacky photos with loaves of bread.

The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.

[From Fake Steve Jobs]

I have a love-hate relationship with Dell computers that goes back more than ten years. It always frustrated me that their servers and desktop machines were so good, while their laptops, well, at least every single Dell laptop I have ever used, are shit. My last Dell laptop was less than one year old when handed to me at work, it was twice as thick as my previous laptop, a 15" Apple Powerbook G4. It also weighted about 10 pounds and its battery was already fried. The LCD screen eventually died, but at least it was replaced under warranty. The chassis CREAKED (I had an Apple iBook, which was mostly polycarbonate shells around a magnesium space frame, and that damn thing was sturdier than the Dell).
Still, it bothers me to see the company sucking on it, because they are my preferred source for cheap and reliable servers.

Transmission Bittorrent client, now with built-in IP blacklists

I was delighted to learn that the new version of Transmission now supports black listing using the Bluetack level 1 list. What this means is that with the black list engaged you will not get hit by scan attempts from certain known IPs that frown on Bittorrent usage. This was already available through PeerGuardian, but it is nice to have it built into the application.

Assholes of the Week: The Myanmar Ruling Junta

YANGON, Myanmar - Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

The United Nations sent in three more planes and several trucks loaded with aid, though the junta took over its first two shipments. The government agreed to let a U.S. cargo plane bring in supplies Monday, but foreign disaster experts were still being barred entry.

State-run television continuously ran images of top generals — including the junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe — handing out boxes of aid to survivors at elaborate ceremonies.

[From Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals' names - Yahoo! News]

This is far beyond irrational. First their country gets slaughtered by a natural disaster. Then they refuse the free flow of aid workers, and refuse the shipping of help shipments. Why? Probably paranoia that the powers-that-be are going to try to use the disaster as an excuse to topple the junta.
Then they allow aid flights, but confiscate the material. Why? This one puzzled everyone, until now. The aid was eventually distributed, only plastered with pro-regime propaganda.
This is just plain dumb. All they had to do was allow the shipments, then after the aid was distributed use their monopoly on communications to claim that it was the regime that helped their people. The UN gets to help people in need, the local ruling group gets to save face, and the victims get some relief. Everyone wins.
But no. With fatality figures approaching the 500,000 mark in a country with an estimated population of almost 48 million, these people decide to run a political exercise.
Assholes.
The sad thing is that with China sharing a 2,000 Km border, it makes you wonder why the Chinese haven't sent a subtle word to these people to get their acts together and stop drawing so much attention to the area. They are just probably straddling the fence, seeing how this mess develops to see how THEY can take advantage of it.

(dumbass) Yahoo CEO Yang is now on the hot seat

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang has gotten what he wanted: a chance to prove his company is worth more than the $47.5 billion that Microsoft Corp. offered to buy the Internet pioneer.

It will be a daunting challenge, as Yang will be pointedly reminded Monday when investors are expected to show how little they think of Yahoo without a takeover bid on the table. Faced with resistance from Yang and the rest of Yahoo's board, Microsoft withdrew its offer over the weekend.

[From Yahoo CEO Yang is now on the hot seat - U.S. business- msnbc.com]

Let the lawsuits begin.

Jerry Yang just turned down an offer to buy Yahoo for $47.5 billion. This was the second offer, which was still lower than what he counter offered to the original bid. Microsoft walked away, since their second offer was already a stretch.

The anti-Microsoft camp is delighted, being too god damn stupid to realize that this could easily be the end of Yahoo as we know it. On Monday morning Yahoo is going to take a nasty dive, which will trigger the first shareholder lawsuits against Yahoo for not doing what was in the best interest of the shareholders. Microsoft is going to recover a little bit from the egg in their faces from three months of saber rattling.

And the next high profile company that receives an unsolicited offer from Microsoft is going to be a hell of a lot more receptive about it than Yahoo. The problem right now is that even if somebody were to step up and offer more than the $47.5 billion for Yahoo, it would be a stupid deal. There is no way the company is worth half of that.

MADD v. Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA 4 barely launched and the politics have already started. The problem is when good intentions clash with misinformation. I support MADD 100%, they are one of those precious few special interest groups (yeah, MADD is an interest group) that are no brainers: drunk driving kills.

The problem this time? Somebody at MADD did not bother to play the game before they put out their official stand against the game. Had anyone bothered to play the game first, they would had noticed that "drunk" mode in GTA 4 is a complete pain in the ass. I tried it last night and for the first few minutes I could not even play, the screen shook so much that I was a hair away from motion sickness. And even after the character felt like he had sobered up, within seconds of getting into the car it was already surrounded by cops. I don't know how the hell one can hit drunk mode and actually drive more than a street or three.

Been there, done that (no t-shirt yet)

Dilbert is (c) Scott Adams.

Gladly this doesn't happen in my current job but I clearly remember that situation right around when the dot coms were in the free growth stage.

Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs

I bought my first DVD about 10 years ago. At the time, they were a technical marvel:

* 8.5 Gigabytes per side
* 720 x 480 MPEG-2 video at 30 frames per second
* Dolby Digital (AC-3) or Digital Theater System (DTS) digital multichannel sound

Today, those specs are rapidly becoming pedestrian in the face of high definition cable, broadcast, and Blu-Ray discs. A few of the video sharing websites offer something perilously close to DVD quality already.

I say the DVD is the new MP3. We’re going to start tossing these things around like candy.

Unlike audio CDs, DVDs are already compressed digital data. You could extract the files from the DVD as-is, and play them back to your heart’s content. No re-encoding required. But like The Six Million Dollar Man, we can rebuild them better than they were before. Video codecs have advanced tremendously since the heady days of MPEG-2. These new codecs take a lot more playback horsepower than MPEG-2, but offer comparable quality in about one-fourth the size. We can turn our digital DVDs into better digital DVDs through superior computer science.

[From Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs]

The article is right on the money. I am going through that exact experience: I have tons of DVDs scattered all over the house, and (exercising my fair use rights) I am slowly converting them to h.264 for our two AppleTVs. Once you get used to picking your DVDs off a menu, there is no turning back, especially if you use MetaX to pull the DVD’s cover and main information off Amazon. It looks no different than browsing for movies through the iTunes Music store.

The main problems to doing this are logistics:

1. Using my particular settings for Handbrake, it takes about 1.5GB of disk space for each hour of DVD video. Thanks God 1TB external drives are affordable now.

2. Limitations of the Mac Book Pro Superdrive. It is a bit too slow to do a real time rip + encode. That means using Mac The Ripper first, to rip the movie, then Handbrake to convert it to h.264.

3. Some DVDs are using protection schemes that are not part of the DVD specification, so these may not be ripped consistently. Not the end of the world, all it means is I have to keep the DVD at hand instead of buried into a closet.

4. I have a hardware accelerator for h.264, but it doesn’t allow me to do AC3 passthroughs. This means if I want to use the encoder, I will lose 5.1. Not cool.

5. 3GB per movie is kind of large when you are trying to move it across a home network to a different machine. My piece of shit wireless G router would choke on it, same router with everything on 100MB ethernet seems to work OK. I expect this to stop being an issue once I upgrade to wireless N.

The Other New iPhone?

Remember last year, when a little-known company named Uniea announced new iPod nano cases—with correct physical dimensions—before the new iPod nano was ever shown? As we mentioned shortly afterwards, readers were quick to slam Uniea and its mock-ups, but the cases proved perfect fits when the new nano was released. Now, there are all sorts of friend-of-a-friend stories swirling around about the second-generation iPhone, and perhaps not surprisingly, they contradict one another.

[From The Other New iPhone? | iLounge Backstage]

We are now in the minor Apple rumors season, which is the month before WWDC (Major Apple rumor season is the 5-6 weeks before MWSF). The current focus of the rumors is the second generation of the iPhone. We already have plenty of noise making the rounds about the subsidized phones, so now the focus is in specific leaks about changes to the design of the device. It is still a little too early for leaked photos, that's not going to happen until about a day or so before WWDC starts.

WIth the leaked templates we'll have 3D mockups in about a week (the 3D mockups are another tradition since there are always plenty of talented Mac-using artists with the skill and imagination to put together some fantastic what-ifs).

Five minutes after the iPhone presentation in WWDC, the Mac Crying Game starts yet once again.