Watching video over the Internet was a major theme at SXSW this week. Today, a panel of industry leaders gathered to discuss why Hulu is so popular, how Netflix can make money, and whether the IPTV processing power should be built into your TV or set top box. They also addressed the looming issue of how to make money when audiences are increasingly streaming, downloading, and time-shifting their entertainment.
"Free works, Hulu is proving that," Colin Dixon, an analyst with the Diffusion Group, who moderated the conversation, said. "The problem is that the revenue that is being generated from advertising is not enough to make it work anyone's worthwhile."
The good news is that there are more products than ever that can download IPTV, ranging from your Apple TV to your PlayStation 3. "The XBox 360 is a classic Trojan horse box, explained Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist for Macrovision."You buy it because you want to shoot aliens and then you realize it can stream Netflix."
I have been testing electronic book readers since the not-so-heady days of NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook and Rocket Reader, and I'm happy to report that the latest generation, the $300 Sony Reader and the $400 Amazon.com Kindle, are undeniably superior. Nonetheless, the general public has received these new e-book readers with profound indifference. Even though I am both an avid reader and a serious tech junkie, after the initial thrill of testing a cutting-edge product passed, I also found these new e-book readers dull. The reason is that their makers are trying too hard to mimic old-fashioned books, when digital readers could be so much more.
Part of the disappointment is my fault, or at least the media's fault. Since the first model rolled off the factory floor, we have compared e-book readers to books. How does it feel in the hand? Is the screen legible? Can it slip easily into a briefcase? Would you curl up on the couch with it? As a result, designers and engineers have been desperately trying to perfect these features. And they have made some progress.
The E Ink display that the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle use is very cool. The screen is filled with small capsules containing charged pigment. When the charge applied to each capsule is adjusted, the capsule appears as black, white, or one of several shades of gray. Turning pages requires power, but once a page is up, the E Ink stays in place without drawing down the battery.
The black-on-gray display looks very newspaper-like, but without the inky smears from your fingers. The screen is fine even for prolonged reading. Over a weekend, I read half of William Gibson's Spook Country on the Kindle, and the experience was pleasant. The Kindle is probably the best e-book reader on the market right now. Yet my ambivalence remains, because as good as the display looks, simply replicating the printed page on a handheld screen lacks ambition. I want more.
On this week's podcast, we're joined first by Tim Gideon, lead audio/video analyst for PC Magazine. Tim talks about what's new in Apple TV and why it may just take over your living room; and he tells us his predictions for the long-awaited Slacker player, due to our Labs any second now.
After the break, Jeremy Kaplan, PC Magazine executive editor, stops in to proudly proclaim some fantastic news about our newest blog, GoodCleanTech. He shares some timely green news and tips with us as well.
Finally, stay tuned for the Top Five in Five and Weird Gear--selected this week by Molly McLaughlin. (Jen will be back next week.)
Although the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show doesn't start until next week, our digital camera analyst David Gussman has the early scoop on this year's lineup of new cameras from Canon, Nikon, and more.
Ever read end-user license agreements (EULA)? You know, those little boxes that make you click yes or no if you agree with the terms of service before proceeding to install software on your computer? Most people don't read them, but host Dan Costa suggests that you do. That's because vendors have the power to decide exactly what you can and cannot do with their products, and you may be agreeing to these terms without even knowing about that.
This week we're joined by Corinne Iozzio, who gives us the lowdown on a range of wonderful gadgets that are readily available--just not here. Then Dan proposes age limits on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace--and as usual, gets argued with. And we dial in Jen's "lovah" Eric, who details the travails the two of them had trying to run Ubuntu on their home machine (call them Windows re-converts).
In the second half of the show, Terrifying Tim Gideon stops by to scare us with a PC Magazine Labs ghost story--and it's all truuuuuue! And Brian Heater talks about what technology companies are doing to help the people affected by the California wildfires.
Of course, we also have Brian's Hot Five in Five--the top tech news of the week, delivered at lightning-fast speed. And Jen's Weird Gear this week is perfect for masochistic FPS fans. Tune in and check it out.
Listen to the podcast here!
Hosts: Dan Costa and Jennifer DeLeo
Guests: Carol Mangis, Brian Heater, Corinne Iozzio, and Tim Gideon
Audio Engineer: Scott Bernstein
Theme Music: Terry Sullivan
On campuses everywhere, Facebook is bigger than binge drinking. That is a good thing, but the company's recent decision to extend beyond colleges presents graduates with a problem potentially even more destructive than underage drinking: overage Facebooking. Facebook's beauty was the community of like-minded users to which it catered. Now, the company has decided to expand its focus and invite users of all ages to join the fray. Bad idea. Facebook is killing the originality of its community.
If Facebook wants to use its technology to help people who aren't college students network, it should rebrand itself or even launch a separate site. Perhaps to TheBigChill.com? Maybe give users the option of connecting across networks, the way The Knot does for wedding planners. Once married, they are dumped into The Nest.
I am not trying to keep the 50-something, married software engineer away from the 17-year old coed cheerleader majoring in Art History—although maybe I should be. I simply believe there is far more value for the people of the Facebook community if Facebook the company continues to focus on the college students who made it successful.
Social-networking sites want as many people to sign up as possible, so they can make the most money before they sell to Google or Yahoo!. But that doesn't mean you should join. My advice is to follow a few simple rules before you sign up for any old network. Bear in mind, these aren't the companies' stated rules—they are mine. They tend to break down by age range. Check them out, after the jump.
Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game is practically required reading for high-school students these days, and that's probably a good thing. Just like the book's Ender Wiggan, today's young people are being trained to wage war by playing video games.
This past summer Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Islamist paramilitary group, released Special Force 2, a first-person shooter based on its pointless 34-day war with Israel in 2006. In the game, players are asked to destroy Israeli tanks and launch Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns. Hezbollah even held a launch party in Beirut for the game's release, decorated with disabled tanks and Israeli helmets captured during the conflict.
Hezbollah has gone to great lengths to declare the war a victory for its side. Most estimates put the death toll at 158 Israelis, mainly soldiers. More than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Lebanon.
But that is in the real world. In the game, the more Israeli soldiers you kill, the more weapons and points you get. And whoever gets the most points wins. Evidently, Ender's Game has been translated into Arabic.
If this sounds like a blatant propaganda tool for reaching a new generation of potential militants, it is. And a statement from Hezbollah's media official makes the game's purpose clear. Oh yes, Hezbollah has a media official. In fact, it has an entire Internet division dedicated to getting its message out to the world and attracting supporters. The official, Sheikh Ali Daher, said, "This game presents the culture of the resistance to children: that occupation must be resisted and that land and the nation must be guarded."
The news coverage about Special Force 2 elicits two responses from the American public. The first is something like, "Wow, they can make video games over there?" To which the answer is clearly yes. In fact, they've been doing it for years. (The original Special Force came out in 2003, but no one cared because the graphics were hopelessly unrealistic, even for jihadists.) The second response is, "Whoa, what kind of morally bankrupt society would produce such a product and then sell it to kids?" To which the answer is: a society a lot like ours.
My stepson Emmet's 13th birthday present from me this summer was a video camera. He's been "making movies" using the Logitech QuickCam attached to his PC for the last six months, and it was high time for an upgrade. Instead of loading the bundled software onto his computer, however, he went straight to my computer to do the job. Why not use his own? It doesn't work, he said. Of course not. It has been a few weeks since I cleaned his. Unfortunately, PCs still aren't owned as much as they are constantly maintained.
These days, it isn't enough to get your kid his own system to keep him from screwing up yours. You have to do the maintenance, too. For me, this means monthly sessions at each PC in the house, removing unused applications, updating virus definitions, purging spyware, and maybe defragging the drive for good measure. It is a pain, but in return I get a solemn promise that no one installs anything on the family's primary (read "my") system.
This summer saw the release of two great, innovative products. One launched with a media blitz that rivals anything the industry has ever seen: Apple's iPhone. The other--less well known but just as innovative--was Microsoft's Surface. Neither may look much like your old desktop PC, but both are just computers. The important difference is that these are computers you're really going to want to touch.
Both the iPhone and Microsoft Surface use touch-sensitive screens as a primary interface. Instead of employing a mouse, stylus, or keyboard, you use just your finger and the screen. It may seem like a small thing, but it is the most important concept to hit computing since the modest mouse.
Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani recently fumbled answering one of the dumbest questions asked since "boxers or briefs?" Campaigning in Alabama, he was asked, "What is the price of a gallon of milk?" He was off by a buck or two, thus failing a tiresome common-citizen test. But far more important questions need to be posed. Let's start with asking our future leaders about how affordable PCs, broadband Internet connectivity, and other information technologies are transforming the lives of every American.
The standard for poli-technical cluelessness was set last year by Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). In a speech opposing Net neutrality, he infamously said, "The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes." Now, our senators don't need to be regular Slashdot contributors. Net neutrality is a fairly complex issue, and, as metaphors go, there are worse comparisons than a "series of tubes." Still, Senator Stevens was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which controls telecom regulation. He's regulating an industry he simply doesn't understand. We have to demand better.
Today's campaign managers know how to use technology to get their candidates elected. What steps do they take in order to do so? Find out after the jump.
Good parenting, like good government, is all about transparency. Recently, I had to lay down the law for my 13-year-old stepson, Emmet, and I tried to be as clear and as open as possible. He wanted to hang out with some friends after school before attending a dance, and I needed him to understand where he could and could not go. "You can play football at the field and then go directly to the dance," I said. "Okay," he replied, staring at the TV in his usual distracted, uninterested way. Then I dropped the bomb. "And I'm going to use the GPS chip in your cell phone to check up on you." That got his attention.
In doing this, I'm jeopardizing a long history of left-leaning inclinations, a few friendships with Electronic Freedom Foundation staffers, and possibly my American Civil Liberties Union membership. But I take some solace in knowing that the ACLU will gain one rabid supporter in return (Emmet is suddenly very political). And I know that this is something I have to do. Emmet is like most teenagers. His taste for adventure occasionally overwhelms his common sense. He needs supervision, and tracking his cell phone can help with that. It's no substitute for trust, but safety comes first.
The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD is in full swing, with each side issuing almost weekly statements claiming that the tide has turned its way. Which side is really out in front? Neither one. The products we've tested are pretty evenly matched in performance, and with players selling for more than double the price of a standard DVD player, most consumers are taking a wait-and-see approach. In fact, who's out in front doesn't even matter. Once this format war is over, the industry will come to a sad realization: Most people will never buy high-definition movies on disc.
Sure, the quality is great, and with all that capacity, studios can include all sorts of interactive goodies. But no matter how you dress up a disc, it's still a physical entity that needs to be mastered, packed, shipped, sold, and stored on a shelf--and that's not what consumers want. They just want the movie. They just want the media file. They just want the bits. And when it comes to moving bits, packaged media just doesn't make sense.
After some delay (due to Dan's hair-raising schedule as a senior editor here at PC Magazine) we bring you the next installment of his exciting experiment with the HairMax Laser Comb, purported to stimulate (at least some) unproductive follicles into activity again. He managed to find time to get another photo; this one's from June 10. We will follow up soon.
If you need to catch up with this saga, here's a link to Part I and Part II. To make life a bit easier for us all, I'll post the pictures from those two items after the jump, so we can compare and contrast.
I want to break the cycle of e-mail abuse. And I need your help.
I'm not sure when it started, but for the last few months I have been checking e-mail before I go to sleep--not from my computer, but from my Treo. Often while I am actually lying in bed. This is a problem, I know, but there is something worse than checking e-mail before bedtime, and that is sending email before bedtime. All it does is perpetuate the sick culture of non-stop accessibility.
In these days of ubiquitous connectivity and Crackberry addiction, it is possible to send e-mail anywhere, anytime--but that doesn't mean you should. In fact, I think there are as many reasons NOT to send that e-mail as there are to send it.
In an effort to help clarify the ever-fading line between healthy productivity and seriously obsessive behavior, I have compiled this short list. The first ten are mine, but then I cast out a request for more reasons to all of Gearlog's esteemed contributors. Turns out they are getting (and sending) too much e-mail as well. As I expected, their reasons are just as good as mine, and funnier to boot.
Your reasons may even be better. Please add them in comments; just don't e-mail them to me.
1. You're drunk.
2. You're slow. By the time you finish typing your message, one of the twenty other people on the list has already responded and made your response outdated.
3. Their reply will be better than yours anyway.
4. You're not funny. If you were, you would be writing "The Office," not working in one.
5. You didn't run Spell-check yet. Even though all of the words in your e-mail seem like easy, short ones, you could still makem bare ass sing mistakes.
6. Reply All includes the subject of your e-mail.....yes, Stephanie Chang, Editor of PC Magazine, I am talking to you.
7. Reply All often includes your coworkers, subordinates, and superiors and can easily be forwarded to their family and friends.
8. HR is on there, too.
9. If it's not worth your time to crop and compress that 7MB image, it isn't worth their time to download it.
10. Everyone got that joke, saw that video, and sent money to that dying kid two years ago.
After the jump, lots more reasons not to click on Send.
Despite grave concerns about the current state of copyright and free speech on the democratic process, Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig says he has reason to be optimistic. Lessig spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum, a conference dedicated to how technology is changing the political process, today at Pace University in New York. At the most fundamental level, Lessig says that broadcasts of our political debates should be freely available to bloggers, comedians, and academics.
Lessig's multimedia presentation involved multiple clips of remixed active political commentary, including several segments of "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, which is ironic given Viacom's position on the shows clips on YouTube.
"We shouldn't be fighting in courts about the right to speak, and it would have been guaranteed in any sane time in history," Lessig said.
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On campuses everywhere, Facebook is bigger than binge drinking. That is a good thing, but the company's recent decision to extend beyond colleges presents graduates with a problem potentially even more destructive than underage drinking: overage Facebooking. Facebook's beauty was the community of like-minded users to which it catered. Now, the company has decided to expand its focus and invite users of all ages to join the fray. Bad idea. Facebook is killing the originality of its community. 
