| I haven't blogged in a while, but today is another inflection point along the expansion of the internet as we know it and it was certainly worth blogging about.
As many know, ICANN, short for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is in charge of managing top level domain names and corresponding root servers. In short, all domain names, while individually managed by the respective ISP's through delegation, are ultimately registered and referenced by one of ICANN's root servers.
Today, Oct 30, 2009, ICANN voted for allowing non-latin characters. This simply means domains, which now must have characters from A to Z and numbers from 0-9 and some basic symbols, can now have characters from any foreign language. So pizza.com in theory can be πίτσα.com in greek, or 薄饼.com in chinese.
While this move is great for the world at large from a freedom perspective, allowing countries to interact and express themselves with native URL's, one must question what impact will this have with regards to information availability. Today, if it were not for translators, languages present a natural barrier to communication and information flow. Internet names would logically have the same barrier as a latin based keyboard would have an extremely difficult time typing in Chinese or Greek based url -- let alone the natural barrier itself.
How many languages are there in the world? How many times would company now have to seek out and preregister in other languages to keep the trademark safe? I see this as simply a metastasis of domain names in the making.
Is this really a good move? |
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Continuing with the inertia of all things digital movement, we are now approaching the official transition of electronic books into the mainstream. Yes, we have had ebooks and ebook readers, but there were always obstructions preventing them from reaching critical mass. Digital rights & copyright surely have their fair share objections, however technology has also been an inhibitor. Take for example low resolution screens. The human eye, when compared to traditional measurements of resolution, can process the equivalent of "324 megapixels" (1) camera. So transitioning from reading magazines, with a relatively high print resolution, to a low resolution screen would be a painful experience for long periods of reading. On the flip side, the benefits of digital reading are profound. The ability to select a word and obtain it's definition on the spot without much effort or interruption is a dream to any highschool student -- at least that was my biggest complaint back then. How about searching for a specific section of a novel to extract an excerpt? How about simply accessibility -- who would want to lug around 4 or 5 books. Now with technology all caught up -- extremely high resolution screens, awesome processing power with advanced CPU's, and great battery technology and the connectivity of the cloud thrown in to boot -- the time has come! Let me break away for a sec to compare this to CD's. When compared to music CD's there was a time where we would pack our CD boxs on our weekend trip -- not all, but your favorite set for sure. Today, you surely carry hundreds of albums on your iPhone (yes, I'm biased) as a second thought. Well, books are on their merry way too -- and with a vengence IMHO. Music took a while too take a foothold to digitization primarily becuase the world was simply adjusting to the digitization shock. I recall first hearing about MP3 around the middle of my BS degree around 1995 to 1996 time period -- yet the first mover risk syndrome still took a heavyweight like Apple an additional 5 years to release the first iPod. Now, roughly 14 years after mere MP3 awareness, we have a proliferation of digital music to the point where by the music titans are forced to rethink the concept of the album and the CD album insert, etc. from a digital perspective and make it a reality by collaborating with the new digital music titan -- Apple and iTunes (2). So, I feel we are just at the beginning of a similar digital turning point with books. Amazon, naturally and without much turbulence, took the first step with their Kindle in late 2007 early 2008. Their reader suffered from what I would call the newcomer syndrome. Amazon is not known for building hardware nor software, yet here they are with a device on center stage. With sufficient top down support (Bezos practically reserved Kindle as his next child's name) adoption is certain. The level of endorsement has parallels with Bill and his digital ink / tablet initiatives. In short, what struck a chord to write this blog is Sony's entry into the market. Sony's is known for building hardware -- particular for consumers with their walkman of the 80's and other eletronic devices having a sliver of software with them as their modern handycams. Sony just yesterday announced a economically priced eReader for just $199. Price attracts and with a brand like Sony, surely it will sell and will be a prominent second footing (3). My bets however are with my good old trusted expert in hardware/software combos with a keen focus on consumer -- yes, Apple. Apple has been on the rummor mill now for years with a tablet -- even having a patent exposed for a tablet with touch screen. My guess is they have no choice but to introduce a tablet or some type of reading / entertainment device leveraging their touch experience with the iPhone. Perhaps even by the holiday season if rumors have their way this season unlike previous failed attempts to resurect it. As a shareholder, I would almost be disappointed if they don't given the feaverish rush in this arena.
(1) http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
(2) http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/55013/report-apple-music-labels-hope-to-revive-the-record-album/
(3) http://www.dailytech.com/Sony+Announces+199+Pocket+Reader/article15887c.htm |
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Since I feel we will be having higher inflation soon, I was interested in identifying the relationship between stock prices with inflationary periods from the past. I initially thought stock prices would trend upward with inflation similar to consumer products however I found this analysis pretty interesting indicating the contrary.
http://rack1.ul.cs.cmu.edu/sinflat/
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| One must ask, should I go or not? If I don't then the others will get all the show and will take the lime light as the innovators. If I do, then I am implicitly validating their business model by merely presenting an alternative.
For quite some time, Microsoft has resisted the open source movement with Linux calling it a "cancer" as Balmer once said to openly adopting it in others. Evidently they switched their tactic numerous times, even internally creating rift between those who agree and disagree with the model.
Similarly with web based applications, or cloud computing as commonly referred to, Microsoft has had it's fair share of decisions to make. Google innovated quite some time ago with the opening of their online Gmail. The splashing surprise was the 1GB of storage they were offering all users -- leap and bounds beyond Hotmail and others which averged a mere 10mb.
Slowly but surely, additional apps followed branded under the Google Docs -- an excel equivalent, a word equivalent, etc. Under this type of pressure, after months and perhaps years of discounting the threat and trying alternatives -- ultimately caved in on July 13, 2009 and decided to officially offer a free web-based office suite. Interestingly enough, it was only a few days after Google removed the "Beta" tag off theirs.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200907131014DOWJONESDJONLINE000386_FORTUNE5.htm |
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| Google claims it sometimes hits a snag when pushing Google Apps products like Gmail to enterprises, meeting major resistance from users comfortable with the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook. So on Tuesday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant unveiled Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, a plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007 that presents users with the familiar Outlook user interface but runs e-mail through Google's cloud rather than Microsoft Exchange.
http://www.crn.com/software/217800408 |
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The C# 2.0 (and newer) compiler is smart enough to determine the type of delegate with which a particular event is implemented. This "delegate inference" capability enables you to omit the declaration of the requisite delegate in the code that registers an event handling method with an event.
Consider the following 1.x code that registers an event handling method with an event. This code explicitly instantiates the event handler (delegate) in order to register the associated method with the event.
thePublisher.EventName += new MyEventHandlerDelegate(EventHandlingMethodName);
The following 2.0+ code uses delegate inference to register the same method with the event. Notice the following code appears to register the event handling method directly with the event.
thePublisher.EventName += EventHandlingMethodName;
When you assign the method name directly to the event like that, the C# compiler ensures that the method signature matches the signature of the event handler upon which the event is based. The C# compiler then inserts the requisite delegate registration code (i.e., ... += new MyEventHandlerDelegate(EventHandlingMethodName);) in the output assembly.
This simplified syntax is made possible by the C# compiler, and not by any change to the fundamental ways that events are implemented in the .NET Framework. To be clear, it is not the case that events in C# 2.0 (and newer) can directly reference methods. What the compiler is doing for us is supplying the [still] requisite delegate syntax in the output assembly — as if we had explicitly instantiated the delegate.
Clipped from: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/event_fundamentals.aspx |
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| Google today has officially thrown it's knock-out swing at Microsoft with the release of the official Google Chrome browser. This is not a knock out punch, but a definitely a knockout swign destined to be a punch over the next few months.
For an entire overview of Google Chrome and it's advance features view this mini overview in the form of a comic:
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
To download now:
http://www.google.com/chrome
One thing to note, Google Chrome has following user agent which indicates it's based on the well known webkit open source browser commonly used by Apple Safari browser.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13 |
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| While I have enjoyed the recent Hollywood iteration of Marvel comics with movies such as Superman, Spiderman, Hulk, etc., I have never been a reader of comics books themselves.
Reading through my typical news articles I found an intriguing article about Apple banning a comic book based app called Murderdrome. Apple, according to the SDK guidelines, reserves the full right to reject any application which may be offensive to some people. It's very concerning to me when content beyond the obvious porn and blatant gore is blocked from being available through the App Store.
If an international news application, not bound by domestic censorship rules, posts a graphic image of a war scene in their news application as part of an article -- can this now embody Apple to remove the application from the App Store?
Due to lack of access, I have yet to preview the Murderdrome app to determine how graphic the scenes may be, but based on the YouTube video below it's plan comics and far from any graphic or questionable content.
Presuming Murderdrome simply has a controversial name and their content was actually quite the contrary to from the name's suggestion, would Apple have accepted the App? And if so, would they take it out afterwards when the content transitioned slowly to the more murderous scenes as the name implies. As you can see, it's a very blurry line Apple has their work cut out for them if they are going to play the "Content Cop" in their App Store.
The matter of fact is this App is very revolutionary. Just by watching the YouTube video, I learned about the way comic are from pencil, to ink, to color -- granted, one could have derived this through simple thought and this should probably indicate how distant I am from comics in general.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CecFio3gIOA
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CecFio3gIOA]
Bottom line though, Infurious, the makers of Murderdrome, decided to exploit the iPhone features to expose the entire process to the reader -- an innovative feat clearly seen in their YouTube video.
In essence, they capture the three representative images for each scene during the stages of development (the pencil, inking, and final colorized step). As you interact with the comics by flipping through the screens, you can drill down to either of the three images by dragging down or up. So if you like comics with the pencil look, you have it. If you like comics in their full color mode -- you have it to. If you are simply the curious observer on how they created a particular screen, stop and flip through the three versions accordingly.
This is simply another demonstration of how digitization enhances the experience of a traditional medium beyond a simple port.
References:
http://www.macworld.com/article/135205/2008/08/comic.html?lsrc=rss_main |
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There is great debate still with the delays and times the iPhone takes to backup. I myself had the excruciating waits of 2-3 hours for a simple backup as well as apps crashing.
I am not going to speculate exactly why the delays are, however after extensive research I concluded iPhone 2.0.2 has cleared the backup delays. Since I am not sure if the backup delays are also remedied by the version of iTunes I am using, I would like to emphasize I am using 7.7.0 (shown as 7.7 in the about iTunes) instead of 7.7.1 which is the currently available version.
iTunes 7.7.1, again after extensive research, lead me to conclude it also has problems with the digital rights management applied to the applications. If you download Apps from iPhone, this app may have trouble synching back to your computer. I quote "may" because I have had mixed results. Similarly, your apps may simply start crashing from one day to another without warning. In my case, I was comfortably using my apps and stopped to show the lighter to my brother. The lighter app froze (didn't crash; just froze after a few frames of the flame video) requiring me to cold boot the iPhone. Upon rebooting, none of my apps would launch -- they would immediately quit.
By downgrading to iTunes 7.7.0 as some have indicated, I have resolved all these app problems. I believe Apple is not as quick to update iTunes, even though they are aware of via a blanket email from Steve Jobs on the matter. I feel this is mainly due to the fact they may be hard at work with 7.8 for a September announcement of a new iTunes subscription model (rumors have it at $100/year for full iTunes music access).
Anyhow, just to dispel any concerns I decided to perform a sync which should cause an automatic backup to occur as the conclusion of this post and these are the results. My iPhone is pretty loaded too as you can see from this picture:
Backup started first, so will list times for this:
01:21:30am - started
01:22:30am - 33% done
01:23:30am - 50% done
01:24:10am - 80% done
01:24:30am - 80% done (stuck there a bit)
01:25:00am - 85% done (moved a few notches)
01:25:45am - 95% done
01:26:03am - 100% done (backup complete)
Sync started:
01:26:15 - Started Updating Apps
01:27:30 - Sync 80% done (Stylem only apparently)
01:28:55 - App Sync completed
01:29:00 - Pod Casts synching started
[Note: I was wondering why iTunes seems darker here than the previous and this was due to the fact I had iTunes selected as the foreground window for this screen shot and those that follow]
01:30:55 - Photos Synching started
01:31:00 - All SyncComplete
I highly recommend you download the 7.7.0 version of iTunes for PC & Mac from my other postings or other sources on the internet and recommend you do a clean slate starting with a 2.0.2 factory restore using 7.7.0.
http://mike952.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/iphone-app-crashing-issue-resolved/
Cheers,
Mike |
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