1. Genius this and Genius that. Genius is a recommendation engine. Which makes it more of a marketing tool than Apple might admit. Genius mixes are like Pandora, last.fm or Slacker, except it only plays the music you own instead of introducing new stuff.
2. OMG Ringtones!!1 Wait, $1.29 is revolutionary? I’ve been making my own ringtones for free for half a decade. And with the Blackberry I have now, I can just drop whatever MP3 I want on it and then tell it to play that as the ringtone.
3. Home Sharing: Sounds a lot like Windows 7′s HomeGroup feature.
4. LP Content: Cool, I guess. Not particularly useful, though; more of a gimmick.
5. Boasting how great the iPhone is for games. Ironic considering you wouldn’t exactly see that sort of boast for Apple’s computer lineup…but it doesn’t matter in that context, right?

Conclusion: Free and Open technologies have offered most of these things for years. I’m unimpressed.

Macs are less prone to these issues (so far) simply because they represent a much smaller target to malware authors. For those who are trying to create a botnet or otherwise generate revenue from these nefarious activities, a target with 88% market share is much more appealing than one with just under 10% (2). However, I believe there is a critical mass in the 10-15% range that will lead to a significant increase in attacks against this platform.

For many years now, Microsoft has been hardening Windows against these attacks and responding with patches and other security measures. Apple has been much more lax, patching the occasional vulnerability, but not as promptly or thoroughly as Microsoft. But the fact of the matter is when the fecal matter hits the air-moving device, Apple is going to be wholly unprepared.

Apple’s security stance is antiquated and dangerous in this era. The only reason they haven’t been plagued with vulnerabilities yet is because they’re still a relatively small target. But we’ve begun to see the first signs. In the PWN2PWN 2009 competition, Apple’s Safari browser fell victim to Charlie Miller’s hacks in seconds (3). To be fair, Internet Explorer 8 (Beta) and Firefox also were compromised later that day. There has also recently been a trojan lurking in pirated copies of iWork ’09 (4).

The greater the popularity they gain, the higher the risk becomes. I have to wonder what will happen to this house of cards once the wind picks up.

References:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHFy6egYcUg
2. http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8
3. http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2009/03/18/pwn2own-2009-day-1—safari-internet-explorer-and-firefox-taken-down-by-four-zero-day-exploits
4. http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126609

Unrelated Thoughts:

Apple Geniuses are anything but. One of my friends recently related a story of her iPhone where the screen would periodically turn off while she was trying to use it. She found that AT&T stores wouldn’t service it; she had to go to an Apple store. Then Apple told her she had to schedule an appointment to even get it looked at. Which she did. Then they gave her canned instructions on resetting the phone, apparently without even trying to diagnose the problem itself. And if that didn’t work, to come back. She tried that, and of course it didn’t work. And she was furthermore told that she would have to make another appointment to receive further tech support, at which point she decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. She related all of this to me while we were having dinner with some friends. My friend Jeff (who is a longtime PC user but has an iPhone) and I (never owned an Apple product) solved her problem in minutes while eating dinner. Apple support gets an F for that one.

For a brief time, Apple’s own web site suggested its customers install anti-virus software. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10110852-83.html)

IT Enthusiasts commonly butt heads with DRM in the realms of music, movies and video games. Spore, for instance, shipped with DRM that consumers felt was so restrictive that many actually pirated the game BECAUSE of it. Many more who were on the fence–like myself–chose to simply not buy it. Whereas the paying consumer was required to activate the game upon installation, and was limited to being able to install the game only three times, the cracked versions had none of these limitations.

The protection on some discs has been known to be unreadable by certain CD/DVD drives, crash the computer, or, in Sony’s case, install dangerous rootkits. You’re also at the mercy of the DRM issuer, so if that issuer decides to stop maintaining the DRM servers, as Wal-Mart did (which they later rescinded), your music will cease to work.

Consumers are finally making some headway, with services like eMusic, Amazon, and even Apple offering high-quality DRM-free music. Apple charges more for it, which, at least from a business perspective, makes sense; it’s a better quality product. However, from a technical standpoint, it should cost less, since it is simpler and easier to manage (requiring no DRM servers or licensing fees).

There is a continual struggle between the studios who create DRM schemes and the hacking groups who remove the protection. DRM almost invariably loses. A good example of this is when Blu-Ray’s BD+ protection was introduced, with Richard Doherty claiming, “BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.’ Just eight MONTHS later, the protection had been circumvented by Slysoft.

When you consider all of these caveats of DRM-enabled media, can you really blame the consumer when they choose to download the free version that’s better quality?

So we’ve been getting some decent snowstorms here in Michigan lately and I’m convinced through this year and all of the past ones that the way MDOT handles clearing the roads is wrong, at least if you drive like me.

Typical MDOT response to a snowstorm is to send out the trucks at, say, noon-ish the day after a snowstorm to plow the roads and lay down some salt to melt the ice. And by roads I’m just referring to the main roads. Side streets and suburbs where, you know, people actually live will have to wait until the following week.

I consider myself a good driver–safe and defensive and all that jazz–but when the snow flies, I like to have some fun, too. I have a rear-wheel-drive truck, so a lot of corners are taken in an entertaining power-slide. It makes me happy. (I also pick my locations with care, so I minimize the risk of sliding into anything if things go wrong.)

• Snow provides some traction and rolling resistance. Up to a certain point, having that layer of snow will actually help to slow you down and offer some control, as opposed to the layer of ice beneath it.
• Salt is only effective down to about 15?F. Below that, it won’t melt the ice, or the ice will refreeze. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/question58.htm). A 10% solution is effective to 20?F, while a 20% solution is effective to 2?F. But how do you maintain a consistent solution across miles of roadway?
• Repeated freezing and thawing contributes heavily to degraded roads. Michigan is already fighting an uphill battle, having repeated freezing and thawing over a normal winter. Adding in the potential for salt to thaw/refreeze only exacerbates the problem. Combine all that with the fact that our weight limits for trucking are twice what they should be and it’s no surprise that our roads are crumbling beneath us. (http://www.waynecounty.com/dps_roads/potholes.htm)
• Inconsistent traction is more dangerous than consistent ice. If the roads are obviously slippery, a wise driver will govern their speed to an appropriate value. But if you have a few hundred feet of good traction, leading you to believe you can go 50mph, followed by a sheet of ice, you’re put into a dangerous situation.
• Accelerated degradation of vehicles is both expensive and dangerous. The use of salt (Sodium Chloride) promotes rust at a faster pace than normal, reducing the lifespan of a vehicle and costing consumers money. It can also increase the likelihood of failure. [There are supposed safer alternatives such as Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA), but they can cost upwards of 15x as much as salt and I'm skeptical whether they could provide the volumes needed and whether there may be yet undiscovered environmental impacts. (http://nwc.ctgaia.net/drupal/articles/road%20salt.pdf)]

So I can’t list so many faults without trying to suggest some improvements. Essentially, I think we need to drive smarter and stop trying so hard. We’ll expend a lot of energy trying to outsmart nature. Or we can learn to adapt better.

First, a couple inches of snow is acceptable. With the time that would be spent removing it, try to shore up some of the side streets that would otherwise be neglected and impassible. Second, we should primarily use sand, not salt. The Upper Peninsula already does this, for example. It will improve traction on ice–though it will not melt it–and the life and reliability of your car will be improved. Finally, and most importantly, drive accordingly to compensate!

ATI and nVidia have both developed technologies (Avivo and PureVideo, respectively) that seek to offload this processing to the video card, which is a more logical place for it to occur for a couple reasons. First, today’s powerful video cards are completely underutilized most of the time. Second, these programmable GPUs are capable of taking some specific tasks and performing them at rates that would make your CPU whimper softly in the corner.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that these technologies are completely unintuitive to make work, although progress is being made. You can’t just install the video driver (which includes the Avivo/PureVideo technology) and automatically have accelerated video, although that’s exactly how it SHOULD work. What they don’t tell you is that you also have to have a properly accelerated DirectShow codec, supporting application, and some magical settings in place for it to finally feel like offloading the processing to the right place.

PowerDVD 8 is a popular choice (I think it was the only choice for a long time), but it doesn’t support MKV files, which was something I required. Renaming them to MP4 seemed to sidestep that limitation, and PowerDVD would play them with a marked improvement in performance. However, I don’t like PowerDVD, nor do I have any desire to shell out the $80 to make this all work.

However I stumbled upon a better choice. I’ve used Media Player Classic and the K-Lite Codec Pack for a long time now, but hadn’t seen the latest version. I noticed that K-Lite now included a forked version of MPC called Media Player Classic – Home Cinema, modified to accelerate video just as I’m looking to. I used K-Lite 4.4.5.

In the components section, I used a default install. However, you need to enable a few extra things in the Additional Tasks area:

• Video Renderer set to EVR Custom Presenter
• Use Internal subtitle renderer (instead of DirectVobSub)
• Enable internal H.264/VC-1 DXVA decoders

The installer takes care of the rest, and I definitely want to thank the K-Lite guys for putting that together. They’ve done a good job at making this process actually possible to do for the average person, instead of the impossible situation I was running into before.

On my quad-core/GeForce 8800GT, this dropped CPU usage from 13-20% to a mere 0-1%. For my Opteron 2.2GHz/GeForce 7900GS Media Center, 1080p video that wasn’t playable before would now play correctly using about 85-90% CPU.

I hope this information helps someone. I wanted to write it out because it took many hours of researching, testing, and playing with settings in Media Player Classic to actually get this working situation. I’m glad it does now, but I wish the companies involved had made things easier on the consumers. Most people will never know the capabilities that their computer may have and it’s a shame to have a useful technology like this go to waste.

So what’s wrong with HD? Why, I’m glad you asked!

#1) Closed Standards
If it wasn’t such a closed standard, the market might be more accepting. The level of DRM just doesn’t make it worth it for me. I have an early “HD Ready” TV which supports 720p, but doesn’t have HDMI or HDCP. “Sorry, you don’t get to play the movies you paid for at full quality.” All the technical capability is there, yet the companies have imposed a false limitation. Meanwhile, the pirates are taking their product, making it better, and giving it away for free. Now, I can totally understand the company expecting to receive compensation for their product, but with respect to their competition (legalities aside), they’re trying to charge more for an inferior product.

#2) Expensive and Unnecessary Hardware Upgrade Paths
My TV is hooked up to a Media Center PC that I built. If I wanted to move to HD, I’d need an input method–either Blu-Ray or an HD Tuner. Over-the-air HD is unencrypted and good for local channels, but that’s all the good news you get. Blu-Ray drives suffer from the aforementioned false restrictions, and to get HD Cable, you need what’s known as a CableCard. Want to buy a CableCard and put it in your current PC? Too bad. It’s “against regulations.” More false limitations. I think I could get a block of enriched Plutonium easier than a CableCard.

Now, even if I did have one or both of those things, to fully output my spankin’ HD signal, I’d need a new video card that has HDCP support (even though my current one is absolutely capable of handling HD-level video). I’d also have to get a new TV that has HDCP support (even though my current one still works okay). That’s about $1200 in unnecessary hardware. Does that make sense to you?

#3) Failure to promote upgrading existing collections
I believe the film studios should have set up an upgrade program, where you can send in your DVDs and get Blu-Ray versions of your movies for a modest upgrade fee. Being able to upgrade an existing movie collection easily and at minimal cost would help acceptance of a new format immensely.

What sort of things piss me off in this world? Here’s a short list I made a while back….

1. People who don’t use their turn signals. Really, they’re there for a reason.
2. Anything prefixed by ‘i’. iPod, iTunes, iGeneralCrappyElectronics,
   iI. Get over it. How about i_YourMom? Fill in the blank.
3. And speaking of iPods, must everyone listen to their MP3 players 24 hours a day? I feel tuned out by these people, like I’m not good enough to exist in their Hip-Hop-soundtracked world. Also, it’s kind of hard to get someone’s attention when they’re too busy listening to P-Diddy instead. Enjoy reality for a while…we keep it around for a reason.
4. People who are “Married” on Facebook but have really only been dating for about two fuckin’ weeks. It just bugs me. Where’s the “Twice Divorced with Two Kids and One On The Way” option so I can mess with people, too?
5. And what about people who, first of all, don’t use English correctly and second of all, abbreviate everything possible? I can tolerate lack of capitalization, but when someone tries to start conversations with sentences that go something like ‘wut u up 2′ I want to fucking hit them. With a board. With a nail in it.
6. MySpace. I know it’s “just another social networking site” but I don’t think you’ll find a bigger collection of bad web sites and child molesters on the planet. Seriously, everyone seems to operate on the principle of ‘the more animated gifs, video clips, and obnoxious backgrounds, the better.’ Maybe I’m just not one of the cool kids, but I can’t even view 90% of the MySpace profiles out there without at least disabling the background first.
7. “Reality” TV. Do some people not see through the transparent acts and overdramatizations? Is it actually entertaining to watch people sing and do other things poorly, and more often than not, to hope they fail at it so you can make fun of them? (Like any of us could do better.) And finally, why is Reality TV so fucking important to America’s culture that more people voted in the last American Idol than in the presidential election? What the fuck, people?
8. People who, when the song Piano Man comes on, and they don’t know the words, just sing “PIANO PIANO PIANO” at the top of their lungs, and think they’re clever for it. The song has words for a reason, you commies. Stop ruining it or I’ll shove my clever boot up your clever ass.
9. When I’m minding my own business, on a nice summer day, just enjoying the weather, and I go inside a house or business and for some reason they have felt it necessary to turn the air conditioning down to the “Arctic” setting. I mean, I order food and it’s cold before I can eat it. There are penguins walking around, and instead of a “Wet Floor” sign, they need a “Caution: Floor May be Icy” sign. And the part that pisses me off most is amidst all of this…the temperature is absolutely perfect outside.

Fuck that.

I’ve never entered one of those codes. I’m not going to support what was previously a perfectly consumer-oriented process, and which has now been bastardized to even further promote the company running it. I’m already drinking/eating your product. What more do you want from me? Of course, anymore, I only get those codes when I buy a product I would have bought anyway, so they haven’t promoted squat. I completely ignore the contests.

Of course, if I had entered all the codes, I’d probably be a millionaire by now.

It’s kind of amazing me right now. Simply put, if students put half as much effort into things like presidential elections and protecting their privacy legislatively as they put into protesting facebook, we might actually have a say in where this country is headed. Of course, I think that direction would still suck, but that’s not the point.

Maybe Generation Y just need to hold our elections, debates, and discussions on facebook. At the end of election day, whichever candidate has more people in their group wins. You can track the process through the feed: “Al Gore posted on George W. Bush’s wall, ‘You so did not win. I’ve got this in the bag. I invented the internet!’” And ‘Jack Thompson’s acting up again. Everybody give him a mean poke!’

I guess I just don’t understand why it’s causing everyone to get bent out of shape.