Getting less for more with traditional TV

When browsing around iTunes, I saw something that I was shocked by at first. Since most of the TV Shows I have bought are all from the modern era (00s on), I just assumed that commercial-less shows ran about 44 minutes, like Star Trek Enterprise:


But then I saw that older shows actually have a runtime around 50 minutes, like Star Trek The Original Series Remastered:


Let's review. When viewers sat down to watch the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before of Star Trek The Original Series (I picked the Remastered links, running time is no different) on broadcast TV it was free to watch as long as you sat through 9.5 minutes out of 60 watching commercials, between 15.8% of the hour. Not too bad. When watching Broken Bow, Pt. 1 of Star Trek Enterprise, 15.5 minutes out of 60 were dedicated to commercials, 25.8% of the hour, a 10% increase in commerical time over the original Star Trek, even though you were most likely paying for UPN, and thus the show, either through cable or satellite TV. The only real mystery here is why people have accepted the errosion of actual show for more commercials while always paying more for TV?

What happens when your OS X startup volume is full

Once you start playing with Parallels images, ripping DVDs, and maintaining a Windows partition, even the 100 GB drive in my MacBook Pro can feel tight, hence my tip on reducing OS X and application disk space. But even if you take those measures (I clearly have) and still max out your disk, what happens when OS X runs out of space? You might see a dialog like this:


I always find it interesting what a piece of software does when it hits a boundary condition. In my mind, this is what sets the good software apart from the bad. Good software gracefully degrades or fails when it encounters a boundary condition, bad software chokes and gives up for dead. Even good software can choke and give up for dead, but the situations under which it does better be extremely rare.

This Disk Full Alert dialog (with double exclamations) is amusing to me because it's one of two times (that I know about) the OS X end user is even aware that their hard drive might be used for memory. It's only really at the breaking point for the operating system virtual memory subsystem that the user is made aware of it, and this is really the way it ought to be.

By the way, the other time the user might be aware of the virtual memory system is by setting the Secure Virtual Memory preference in the Security System Preferences. I really haven't found a reason this should be an option at all. Apple should just turn it on and take the preference away from the UI. I can see no performance difference all they way down to an iBook G4 933 MHz, why isn't it just on by default?

Internet Explorer 7 just stops working and a fix

It is amazing how timely those Apple ads can be, like this one called Computer Cart. A few days ago, Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) just stopped working on Windows Server 2003 SP2, which is my development machne. Here is what the crazy unhelpful error messages, or lack thereoff, look like:

Incorrect Error Messages

I load IE to a blank site and have just entered where I want to go ;-)

This is what I see immediately after hitting ENTER. Weird how it has replaced the address with http:///

Just entering the address again, because the error doesnt' remain consistent...

Notice one thing in common among the Most likely causes? It can't be IE 7's fault, same thing with the first error message, it's either user error or the Web site must be malfunctioning.

 
 

Troubleshooting

First thing I try is loading anything of Firefox, and of course it works. I remembered that there was an Internet Explorer Event Log. I fire up the Event Viewer, and nothing, dust bunnies and tumbleweed apparently get logged here. I have never seen an entry show up under Internet Explorer in the Event Viewer, what's it for? Do you have to flip a switch? I close event viewer and start thinking, this error smells like a IE network settings configuration error, but I never touch those. Well I guess I can cruise through settings to see if something looks amise.

Unlearn what you have learned from previous IE versions or you won't find Internet Options in IE 7 (I know, hitting ALT will show the menu bar, please most people have no idea that works).

Just for completeness...

That LAN Settings button looks interesting (not really, but I had a hunch

Ah hah! There is no proxy server on my network, I have never changed this setting, but here it is, somehow this got set. And thanks IE for providing such a usefull, not, error message. Couldn't you have said IE is configured to use a proxy server, but none could be contacted?

The way things should be. How could this have been changed? I checked the Group Policies that were being applied to my machine with Group Policy Manager, none touch this setting. I can only conclude then that there is a bug in IE 7 that somehow turns this bit on.

Halo Revisited: Videos, Map Packs, and Betas

My friend at Backhand Volley got me started on another run of Halo craziness. I downloaded all the "vidocs" and trailers again off Xbox Live Marketplace to watch on my new HDTV (52" Mitsubishi 1080p), and then I spent some money on Halo. I must have plunked down nearly $70 in the last couple days, between the Halo 3 Pulic Beta (oops, I meant to say Crackdown ;-)) and the 2 new maps that were released for Halo 2 today, Tombstone and Desolation, remakes of Halo 1 maps Hang 'Em High and Derelict. Hang 'Em High is my all time favorite multiplayer map, I played that map so much when Halo 1 came out, very fond memories.

Just downloaded, and very nice to buy in U.S. Dollars since it's an Xbox Classic game and MS accountants hadn't dreamed up Points yet. Then I finally get into Xbox Live in Halo 2, and it's here where my lack of playing Halo 2 on Live makes me want to cry. Since all my friends that played Halo 2 are offline or stopping playing a long time ago, there is no way to play the new maps since you can only invite people to a custom game from your friends list (or so it seems I could be wrong). According to GameSpot, the new maps won't be cycled into the matchmaking system, really the only thing I can use at this point to play against other people, until next Tuesday, 4/24/2007. Damn, all I really want to do is play Tombstone on a loop, so I guess I am kinda out of luck until then. Even then, playing Tombstone will be kinda hit or miss. I guess I better convince some friends to get back into Halo 2.

Microsoft is Dead, or is it the desktop?

Paul Graham says Microsoft is Dead. Paul Thurrott says Microsoft is Dead?. Paul G will look like a fortune teller if he is correct in predicting that the last few years of Microsoft losing its' edge were the tipping point to a larger irrelevance. But Paul T. is absolutely correct in saying the beast from Redmond isn't dead yet. You simply can't discount the financial resources and the large number of very smart people there. One thing that Paul G. says which I don't agree with is:

everyone can see the desktop is over

Sure, some future version of the Web may in fact consume all applications that previously didn't run in a browser, but I don't see it happening for a long time. In my view, the Web will lag behind what is possible with an actual desktop application. We have been waiting for the WebOS (what would that even mean anyway?), or Web applications to fully replace desktop apps for a lot of years already. This is some interesting thought on why desktop email cruxifies browser based mail. Also, would Adobe be spending as much time and money as it is on Apollo if the desktop were dead? That answer seems obvious to me...

Adobe Air, formerly Apollo, Runtime should consume Flash Player and Acrobat Reader

Update
Robert Scoble broke the news for me that Adobe is working on a full fledged Media Player, the succesor to the Flash Player, and Scoble is the only place I see mention that it is going to be built on Apollo. Well it's on the Adobe Labs Media Player site. I swear, I had absolutely no insider information when I suggested Adobe should do this on 4/10/07 (Scoble blogged it on 4/16). Now where is Adobe Reader ;-)?

Original Post
Mike Chambers from Adobe had Apollo engineers Oliver (Goldman? He commented on this post) and Ethan on his July 14, 2006 podcast, and Oliver said something interesting, well more interesting than the rest which was also pretty good:

Flash is on like 98% of computers, [Acrobat] Reader is on like 80%, most machines already run 2 pieces of software from Adobe at least...

Those are pretty exceptional distribution numbers ( if true ;-), ), so if an end-user installs the Apollo run-time, they would then have 3 seperate pieces of Adobe software (that was hard math right!)

Why not bundle it all together? Both Apple and Google have started doing this. Apple obviously, for architectural reasons (iTunes uses Quicktime), bundles Quicktime+iTunes together. They could do more, putting the iDisk Utility, Airport Utility, and Bonjour for Windows into one big bundle, but those things have a far less logical connection, so I can understand not putting them together.Google Pack put together most Google software you might need or want, and hey it includes non-Google software, like Adobe Reader!

So why not distribute the Apollo runtime with Flash Player and Acrobat Reader? One anti-reason could be size of the combined distribution. Reader is 22 MB, Flash Player is 4 MB, Apollo Runtime is 8 MB, so that's 34 MB (all OS X Intel sizes). That is hardly worth a second thought, put it all together! One thing that also need's to be included is Adobe Update, which would work across all Adobe products that makes sure all Adobe software on a box is up-to-date. Apple has ported their Software Update over from OS X to Windows to do this, Microsoft has Microsoft Update on OS X.

But when I said Apollo Runtime should consume, I actually had the another meaning in mind, which is why would I need Flash Player or Adobe Reader at all? Couldn't they just be Apollo applications? Reader seems much harder to do, and I understand not wanting to just through away good working software, but it would be a powerful statement from Adobe if this were done. Same problem Microsoft had at the beginning and still does to some degree, if .NET is so great, how come you haven't rewritten at least some of Windows in .NET? I know, right tool for the right job, and it all depends on how Apollo is sold, but you are going to get some using this as a con against Apollo (not me!).

One more thing, .air as the Apollo app install extension is cool, don't change it!

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Secret Feature: Beautiful Scalability?

Tom Yager on the InfoWorld Enterprise Mac blog drops a near throughaway line about Leopard in a post calling the 8 core Mac Pro a stepping stone. Here's the line:

Leopard scales so bloody beautifully

I have seen very little of Leopard in person, so I have no way of saying if this is true or not. But I think Mr. Yager is coming close to some kind of NDA violation. I wonder if this has anything to do with his speculation that Leopard would replace/augment the XNU kernel with a hypervisor...

User experience installing Apollo applications

If you haven't heard of Apollo, it's Adobe's new cross-OS runtime for what is being calling Rich Internet Applications (RIAs, yeah another acronym) built using Flash, FLEX, HTML, and AJAX. That means you use the same skills you have been using to build Web applications to build desktop applications that run on the big 3 OSes, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Adobe released Alpha 1 a few weeks ago.

Sound kinda like Java right, except its more about pushing browser technology down to the desktop. Why should you care, isn't everything going to be all Web x.0? Desktop apps are dead right? I don't think so, they are a bunch of use cases that are too dangerous with the Web right now. I think of this as the Persistant Storage and Local Device Access (PSALDA, wow that even has a nice ring to it, and I just made it up) problem. If we can't even view text, images, and video in a container (the browser) with some interactivity without risk of losing our entire machines with the Web stack right now, prospects don't seem good for solving PSALDA without a serious rethink of the Web platform

Apollo then is about going the other way, leveraging developers investment in Web technologies and making their reach even larger. The value proposition would be: You already have to develop for the Web, everyone does, why not use the same skills for the desktop instead of forking your own knowledge base to figure out desktop development in Windows Forms/WPE/Java/Cocoa and a bunch of other sub technologies to make that work? Use what you know and extend it using the Apollo runtime to create richer user experiencies through desktop applications. Sounds like a very compelling proposition, and one I think may hit the sweet spot for the next deep knowledge dive for a lot of developers. I haven't dug in yet to see how close Apollo's promise is to reality, the first thing I did was install the runtime and then a sample application. Here is what the end-user experience looks like:

Yes, this was running on Mac OS X 10.4.8, and no I wasn't being cute (yet) and running it on Windows in Parallels. Did Adobe lift the Windows Scary Security Shield straight from XP or Vista? I am not sure I like where they going with this. I know, what can you do with this? How can you install applications downloaded from the Internet with any sense of security? It's a tough problem to solve, and I can't be too critical about it since I can't come up with a great solution right now, but having Mom or Grandma evaluate this dialog and make a trust decision is still kind of crazy. Hell, I thought about cancelling when I saw all those Stop signs.


Uh, why didn't I see some of this information on the first dialog so I had a better idea what I was installing instead of just Application: Fresh


You can't see it here, but this took all of 15 seconds to "install", which is great of course.


Hey that is not bad at all. It looks a weird on OS X though with the title bar and jelly beans in "unified" mode, and then the light blueish tones that look more at home on Windows.

I actually haven't used the application much, but is seems to work. Here is the Preferences dialog:

This looks like nothing on any platform, so maybe the main application window feeling like Windows is partially unintentional. The Preference dialog though feels wrong on the Mac, the Close button is in the wrong place, window title should be centered. And what does that other button do? Not minimize, its like a window shade, how odd.


There is definitely a lot of promise with Apollo, and I am going to take a much closer look.

Demographic busting shocking DVD watching behavior

I had trouble even coming up with a title, this one is so bizarre

I am on the train home tonight writing this post, and sitting next to me are a pretty hot girl and a guy in his early thirties. I wasn't really paying attention to either of them, except when I closed the laptop as the train was pulling into my stop. It was then that I noticed the early thirties guy watching on his portable DVD player The Golden Girls!

I felt like the space-time continium was about to explode, I did a double, no a triple take. I couldn't wrap my mind around how this guy could decide that on his train ride home, yeah, he was going to get him some Bea Arthur geriatric action. If I was on a desert island and I had to choose between The Golden Girls and watching the waves, I take the waves every time.

Problems with Macworlds Apple TV wish list

Macworld has their Apple TV wish list, and I think there are just some flat out dumb suggestions on the list, in their order:

• Internet streaming support. I have no problem with this one, streaming support for live evnets would greatly increase the devices utility, but doing this without sacrificing simplicity would be a challenge
• Browsing Web video libraries. This makes absolutely no sense when you actually think about it. YouTub style video is all crap quality, far lower than what you buy on iTunes right now, and if you think that is not acceptable (the article says it doesn't, I think its acceptable), this will look absolutely terrible.
• Buying and browsing via the Apple Remote. I agree with this one too, but I can see NOT doing it because it could be confusing as hell to the normal consumer
• More podcasting. Sure why not, I am all for making all the categories (Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts) more alike than different
• Photo flexibility. I have no problem with iTunes and Apple TV syncing completely, not content fractured off one library, video from another, music from another. How could you keep track of it all? Streaming photos though, that needs to be implemented.
• More HD video. Patience young one. HD from iTunes is certainly coming, but 1080* content instead of 720p, I don't care at all. Downloading 720p is already going to be a chore for a lot of people.
• DVD quality audio. You might as well call this More HD video part 2. Guys its all about file size, if you have 2 channels of audio now in iTunes Store bought content, and you want 5,6,7, well do the math.
• Support for optical media. This is the one were the list goes off the rails. It is like asking for a CD player IN an iPod. And I don't think Apple wants you to buy everything from iTunes, I bet they WISH they could rip DVDs into iTunes, uh again just like the iPod and CDs, but it is currently illegal to sell software to break the encryption, even though us geeks have found ways around that and ripped DVDs work just fine in Apple TV. Apple TV will replace your DVD player, just not the limited vision way most are thinking
• TiVo support. According to Wikipedia, Tivo has 30-40% of 10-12 million DVR market. That's between 3-5 million boxes total, and Apple is going to spend engineering dollars on a box that is not dominant by any stretch for the last gen delivery system Apple is trying to replace?!?! Not a chance it will happen.

Apple TV isn't perfect, nothing ever is, you can always add/tweak features, but some of Macworlds just don't make any sense.