NBC is very, very dumb

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From the NYT story on their new video download service, i.e. what they’re doing because Apple wouldn’t follow their stupid ideas:

NBC makes many of its popular shows available online in streaming media, which means that fans can watch episodes on their computers. Under the new NBC service, called NBC Direct, consumers will be able to download, for no fee, NBC programs like “Heroes,” “The Office” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on the night that they are broadcast and keep them for seven days. They would also be able to subscribe to shows, guaranteeing delivery each week.

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Hey, let’s pull our material from the most popular online store EVAR and go our own way with a single-platform option that expires! Consumers will LOVE it!” Really? We don’t think so.

There’s more from Jeffrey McManus over at his site; here’s a great point:

Here’s the bit the writer really screwed up, though: the terms under which NBC wants to “sell” you videos are not just worse than iTunes, but worse than every single video delivery system that has ever existed.

Slick move, boys. Here’s something you should pay attention to: as we’ve said before, the more you make your programming hard to get to, or hard to use like a paying customer wants, the more likely you are simply encouraging folks to seek out the darknets and illegal copies. “Piracy” rates in the UK and Australia for first-run US programming are huge not because they’re all scofflaws, but because that’s the only way they can get crap like “Heroes.” Make it hard to get in the US, and you’ll have the same issue here.

Life in the Future

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This morning, we had a software design meeting via the Internet, between Heathen HQ in Houston, the CEO in Dallas, the Ops guy down in Sugarland, and the dev folks in India.

Usually, the CEO leads, sharing a preso via GoToMeeting. That alone is pretty nice; we’ve seen many meetings get totally ruined with maybe-it-works virtual meeting software, but GoToMeeting just works. It’s nice.

When it really got wacky was when we handed control over to India, so S. could show us what he’d been working on. Now, for background, we should note that we put a new consumer-grade PC on the Heathen network last week for India to access here in Houston, since it’s not practical to move multi-gigabyte files halfway ’round the world on the fly. Another Citrix product, GoToMyPC, allows them to use this machine more or less like it was there in India. It’s neat. Windows being Windows, we can even watch what they’re doing in real time, since they’re really just remote controlling the machine.

So it turns out the screen S. wanted to share with us was in fact his GoToMyPC screen, which shows on our monitor exactly what’s on the monitor on top of the Vista box at the other end of my desk. The screen has travelled from here to India via GoToMyPC, and then back to here as part of the GoToMeeting.

And it gets even wackier when we realize that the screen is also a Virtual PC screen, not the host OS.

Sometimes, there actually IS evidence we live in the future.

Eat it, Redbirds: SabanWatch Week 3

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My, my, my, what a week. Here at Heathen HQ, we view September 15 as just about a perfect football Saturday, and much comeuppance was distributed. But we get ahead of ourselves.

Up first, per the form, let’s do the math. NickyLou started strong against the Razorbacks in his first real game today, opening up 21-zip in the first quarter. It wasn’t to be a rout, however, and Saban’s squad required a nailbiter of a final drive (and an amazing pass completion from John Parker Wilson to Matt Caddell in the end zone) to finish the 16th-ranked Arkansas squad 41 to 38. Alabama improves to 3-0; Arkansas drops to 1-1. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out in the rankings, won’t it?

Last week’s winning point total was 60 (46 from week 1, and 14 from week 2). This time around, we add only 3, but it was enough. The week 3 Nick Saban Points Per Million is now 1.96875.

Now, on to the rest of the fun.

This week’s first surprise: MSU over Auburn, 19-14. The absurdity of this upset — which, by the way, drops the Tigers to 1-2 — is likely to save Syl Croom’s job, assuming he picks up another win or two before Christmas, and includes the rich boys from Oxford in the list. (That seems likely; see below.)

The Commodores — no, not Lionel; the ones from Vandy — gave us our second surprise this week by managing to beat the Rebs, 31-7. Who knew SAT scores could win football games? Despite being the Heathen homeland title school, we’ve always loathed Ole Miss, so we’re pretty happy about this one. Smart kids FTW!

The HUGE surprise of the week was the major upset of No. 11 UCLA by unranked Utah, 44 to 6. We don’t pay that much attention to western football, but we gotta ask: how did a nearly top-ten team get trounced like that? Are the Utes that good, or was UCLA just overrated?

The pointless matchup we mentioned before turned out worse for the Irish than we might’ve predicted. Sure, it’s the battle of the 0-2 starts, but at the end of the day Michigan competes in a real conference and plays drastically fewer creampuffs than the Irish. Lloyd Carr’s got 5 conference titles plus a national. Charlie Weis, on the other hand, is in his first top job, and has yet to win a big game, which is understandable since you generally need offensive TDs to do that, and the Irish have none so far this year. Need we mention again that Notre Dame hasn’t bagged a bowl game since 1994? If you think it might get worse for Weis, you may be right; Notre Dame faces unbeaten Michigan State next week.

(We’ll note, too, that by late in the 3rd quarter, up 38 to zip, Carr was keeping the ball on the ground playing 2nd and 3rd string. There are coaches who wouldn’t have done that.)

Dept. of Predictable and Lovely Outcomes No. 1: Florida over Tennessee by a whopping 59 to 20, which means Phil Fulmer’s having a bad year already. It couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole. It’s also telling, since it means Urban Meyer’s Gators are incredibly strong even after losing so many to the NFL after last year’s championship season. We doubt very much USC could take them (or LSU) at this point but we’re pretty sure the polls will keep USC on top this week for some reason.

Dept. of Predictable and Lovely Outcomes No. 2: We’ve said for years that the high-scoring teams of the Big East are paper tigers in a weak conference, undeserving of their rankings, and that if they played strong schools from strong conferences — like those required of real contenders in conferences like the SEC — that they wouldn’t be able to cruise to 0 or 1 loss seasons.

Turns out, we were right — and we didn’t need a strong team to do it. 9th-ranked Louisville fell to unranked SEC football weakling Kentucky in a back-and-forth battle that looked nothing at all like Louisville’s in-conference routs. Redbirds, if you’re going to pretend to be a contender, you have to beat real teams. Here’s a hint: Rutgers and UConn don’t count. Call us back when you win on a schedule with more than a couple quality squads on it.

Finally, LSU cruised to an easy win over Middle Tennessee (whom, we note, Louisville had trouble dispatching last week). USC, on the other hand, struggled early against No. 14 Nebraska, though they did manage a blowout in the end.

Ira Glass Has No Sense Of Humor

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Michelle points out the tale of This American Jeff, a clever boy in Oxford, MS, who wanted to work for This American Life so much that he put together a hilarious mashup faux-interview in Flash as part of his campaign to work there. Go watch it; it’s great.

They demurred, amazingly, citing insensitivity in humor:

Regarding the flash “interview” on your Web site: While we appreciate the use of comedy and creative job applications, the part of the animation where a candidate was dismissed and was then referred to as “overly gay” was inappropriate, especially for a job application. We at Chicago Public Radio are very proud of having a diverse workplace and that includes sexual orientation. I’m writing to inform you, your resume is no longer under consideration.

Why NBC really doesn’t get it

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NBC has no shows at iTunes now, we hear, because they didn’t like Apple’s terms, and because they wanted stricter DRM. Here’s why this is stupid: they’ve essentially forced anybody who wants to watch something not on the TV to download it. Already, Australia and Great Britain account for an enormous portion of illegally downloaded American TV — not because those places are rife with scofflaws, but because that’s the only way they can get those shows without waiting for them to be released on DVD or shown locally. Taking Show X off iTunes means that folks who want to watch that on their iPods on their morning train ride will have to resort to illegal means to do it. NBC is, in effect, encouraging piracy. Clever move, boys!

As it turns out, all kids aren’t worthless

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When David Shepherd and Travis Price saw the new kid in their school being victimized by bullies for wearing a pink shirt, the decided they’d do something about it.

The next day, they handed out hundreds of pink tank tops to as many students as they could, including the bullied new kid, specifically to infuriate, annoy, and marginalize the bullies. It worked.

“The bullies got angry,” said Travis. “One guy was throwing chairs (in the cafeteria). We’re glad we got the response we wanted.”

David said one of the bullies angrily asked him whether he knew pink on a male was a symbol of homosexuality.

He told the bully that didn’t matter to him and shouldn’t to anyone.

“Something like the colour of your shirt or pants, that’s ridiculous,” he said.

“Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on.”

Travis said the bullies “keep giving us dirty looks, but we know we have the support of the whole student body.

Yet another reason to distrust Microsoft

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They’ve been patching people’s computers without their consent, regardless of what the user’s settings were.

There’s a lot wrong with this, but let’s start with two main points:

  1. The machine belongs to the User, not to Bill. It is ultimately up to the USER and the USER ALONE to decide what goes on the computer. Software that installs itself silently and without consent is, under most circumstances, viewed as malware (at best) or evidence of criminal trespass (at worst).

  2. Building this back door in is simply inexcusable. If it’s there, it’s going to get exploited by black hat types. Period. WTF were they thinking?

Dept. of USB Drive Archeology

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The following were entries written onsite at [REDACTED], our client back during the spring. We’re posting them now mostly because we’ve got a completion fetish.

Things Overheard at Work (5/22)
“Hey, did you know that just anybody can edit Wikipedia?” sigh.
You probably think this is obvious, but you’re wrong (5/21)
Gas is now officially more expensive than ever. The previous high was $1.35 in 1981, which, when adjusted for inflation, comes to about $3.15 in 2007 dollars. The latest reading from the Lundberg Survey puts the current average at $3.18.
REALLY geeky (5/21)
In case you ever need to know this: you can create modern “soft-wrapped” text in Emacs using this technique. So far, it’s working rather well.

Sun is DEAD

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Sun now sells Windows servers.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Let’s lay this out: In the mid-to-late 90s, Sun was the go-to vendor for high-end server hardware, PLUS they had the best commercial Unix by a damn sight. Solaris — poorly named though it was — had it all over the similar offerings from HP (HP/UX), IBM (AIX), and others now lost to history. Add to this their visionary — at the time — pursuit of a cross-platform programming language more or less “native” to the Internet (Java), and you got an image of a company really going places.

Then a couple things happened.

First, Linux happened when a Finnish kid managed to assemble a workable Unix clone from the Gnu project and a new kernel. It started out ok, but improved VERY rapidly; in the 16 years since its first released, it’s become one of the most popular Unix choices even in conservative enterprise situations; of the proliferation of commercial Unixes that Solaris competed against in the 90s, only a few remain, and most of them are weak indeed. Linux gives the user freedoms you don’t get with proprietary, closed choices, and can now boast of a developer ecosystem that pretty much dwarfs that of any closed-source server OS. Even Solaris is now Open Source (or has an OS version), since that’s the only way to compete with Linux.

Second, the commodity Intel box got more and more and more powerful, meaning folks didn’t NEED Sun hardware to do things like run mail and web servers, or even databases, for most applications. Serious hardware just isn’t indicated in 99.9% of situations — and even when it is, Intel architecture boxes have grown up into high-availability tools that cost a fraction of what Sun’s Sparc hardware demanded.

The combination of a free operating system better than Solaris and cheap hardware getting more cost-effective than Sparc has pretty much cut off Sun’s oxygen supply, to steal a phrase.

It’s amusing that Sun’s lasting legacy is Java, but also predictable. Sun realized that for Java to succeed, it needed to be essentially free. Sun makes almost no money from Java, and can’t — if they charged for it, they’d kill it. The era of pay-to-play development environments is just plain over. Java’s still huge, and will likely stay that way for a while, but it’s impossible for Sun to monetize that success. (Even so, the rise of dynamic languages and frameworks will likely mean Java’s time as king of the hill is limited.)

Yay! Police State!

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Reason points us to the sad tale of Erasmo Palacios, as reported in the Sun-Times. Basically, it’s yet another tale of gross police misconduct coupled with yet another tale of property seizure for no good reason:

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help.

It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd Street and Kedzie Avenue last November.

The Palacioses, of Chicago, claim the woman approached their car, parked outside Manolo’s restaurant, leaned in to the passenger side where Rocio was sitting and asked Erasmo if he wanted oral sex for $20 or sex for $25.

The couple laughed, realizing this wasn’t a woman in distress after all.

But within seconds, Chicago police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute

[…]

Eight hours later, Palacios, who has no criminal record, was released from custody. And weeks later, charges against him were dropped.

Attorneys Lonny Ben Ogus and Joe Cavanaugh also want to know what happened to the family’s 1983 Mercedes. It was impounded that November day and, Palacios said, his wife and daughter were even threatened with arrest as they tried to stop police from taking it, as they were left stranded that morning.

The city wants more than $4,700 in towing and storage fees if he wants the car back.

Nice. Go get ’em, Palacios. Police involved in situations like this must be held accountable; Heathen is official in favor of imposing personal liability for this degree of Kafkaesque misconduct.

The Onion: Still Winning

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Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8:

Schreiber’s semi-favorable review, which begins in earnest after a six-paragraph preamble comprising a long list of baroquely rendered, seemingly unrelated anecdotes peppered with obscure references, summarizes music as a “solid but uninspired effort.”

“Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably ‘Liebestraume No. 3 in A flat’ by Franz Liszt and ‘Closing Time’ by ’90s alt-rock group Semisonic,” Schreiber wrote. “In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement.”

HAHAHAHAHA!

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Political blogger Tbogg agrees with us that the Michigan-ND game is pointless. We can’t tell where this quote is from, as his link is broken, but it’s a winner:

Who will be the biggest loser of the Fighting Irish-Wolverine game? ABC, which is under contractual agreement to televise the game between two teams who have now lost four in a row dating back to last season, and whose defenses have allowed 37.3 (U-M) and 36.8 (ND) points in their first two games.

SabanWatch: Week 2

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Well, it looks like ol’ NickyLou made it past the gauntlet of his first actual SEC game, but don’t celebrate yet: it was perennial SEC football whipping boy Vandy, where the players are actually expected to score 4 digits on the SAT. (The only sadder squad in the region is in Starkville (which is hard to imagine, since MSU is in no way as handicapped by “admission requirements” as Vandy(HDANCN?))). Even so, a win’s a win. Let’s do the math:

Last week we determined that we’d purchased 1.4375 winning points per million after the Tide somehow managed to rout the I-AA Western Carolina team. We reached this figure by taking the margin of victory in that game (46 points) and dividing it by 32, the number of millions of dollars Saban’s contract is worth. This week, our winning score was 24-10, creating a 14 point margin of victory. 46 + 14 is a nice, even 60. 60 / 32 gives us the new Nick Saban Winning Points Per Million Value: 1.8750. We look forward to this reaching more promising levels later in the year.

Up next: a real, ranked squad in the No. 16 Arkansas Razorbacks, followed by No. 23 Georgia on 9/22. Saban doesn’t get another gimmee until late this month, when there’s a 3-week respite: Florida State on 9/29 (not even that much of a gimmee), Houston on 10/06, and Ole Miss on 10/13.

Things we don’t understand this week:

Joe Pa earns encomiums for beating the helpless Irish 31-10, this time with commentary on his “stout D.” Were the sports cognoscenti just not paying attention when then-unranked Georgia Tech kept the Irish out of the end zone entirely last week in their 33-3 rout, while the Lions gave up a TD? How is that “stout D” from a top-20 team? Even so, as we predicted last week, the Lions move up from AP 14/USAT 15 to No. 12 across the board on the “strength” of this win.

Once-mighty Michigan flopped again, losing to Oregon 39-7. They’re quoted as saying, however, that they’re “pretty sure” they can beat the Irish next Saturday in a contest that promises to be an utter waste of pigskin, time, and TV-time. The last time Michigan opened with two losses was 1959, while the Irish have been outscored by 51 points in their first two games. We’re sure it’ll be on TV. Whatever.

Third-Party Contract Oil’s favorite squad — still ranked, for some reason — showed they’re all offense on Saturday by allowing Middle Tennessee State to score 42 points; Louisville required 58 to seal the deal. Put those boys in a game with an SEC defense and we’ll talk, Danno.

This week’s vote for “least relevant televised game” goes to the prime-time contest between powerhouses Rutgers and Navy; Rutgers won, 41-24, and is apparently still ranked. For some reason. See above re: playing a power school.

Speaking of strong schools, what the fuck happened to Auburn? Jesus, people, it’s SOUTH FLORIDA, and you (a) go to OT aand (b) lose? You’re killing us, here. Christ. (Of course, the other side of this is that perhaps it means Saban’s got a good shot at his most important game, but that remains to be seen.)

Oh, and LSU — who routed No. 19 Virginia Tech this week 48-7 — is still only number 2, while the idle Trojans continue to enjoy their top rating. At least some of the votes for USC are defecting; USC was down to 40 first place votes, from 59. LSU picked up the difference.

So, we’ve been away from Outlook for a while

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And we like it that way. In the new job, though, we’ll have to at least be aware of it even if we don’t use it, so in order to facilitate some user migrations, we spooled up a virtual XP box and installed Outlook 2007.

Holy. Crap. This thing is totally broken. Here’s two bits we’ve run into right away:

  • First, if you go through the setup and elect to create an Exchange account, but get it wrong, you’re in a dead end — Outlook will really, really want to connect to the Exchange server, and if it can’t for whatever reason, it’s going to fall over. We couldn’t find any config files or Outlook folders in our home directory to zap and start over, so we asked the tech. Turns out, to make Outlook ‘start over’, you need to go into the frigging Control Panel, to the Mail option, and delete the bolloxed profile. Then you can start over.

  • It gets better. If, later, after getting Outlook running without an Exchange account configured, you decide you want to try to add one, you can’t — at least not from inside Outlook. Exchange accounts have to be added through the self-same Control Panel -> Mail -> Profiles mechanism we mentioned above.

Who thought this was a good idea? Is someone at Microsoft just trying to create absurdist, unfriendly, unintuitive, totally b0rked interfaces comprised entirely of Fail? We understand they want to tie everything to Windows so it’s impossible to switch, but come ON, people, the whole rest of the universe understands that a mail program is just a mail program, not something that should need to be managed from our operating system’s byzantine configuration tools. Sheesh.

This is an excellent example of why open tools are better, by the way. With an open tool — not just open source, but any software designed to be flexible and friendly to the user — you can use it while following your own software plan. With a closed, locked-up tool like Outlook, you’re definitely being coerced into following Microsoft’s business plan, which is probably not yours.

PATRIOT smackdown

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From the AP:

NEW YORK — A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible “far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

More:

The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of an Internet service provider, complaining that the law allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court supervision required for other government searches. Under the law, investigators can issue so-called national security letters to entities like Internet service providers and phone companies and demand customers’ phone and Internet records.

In his ruling, [U. S. District Judge Victor] Marrero said much more was at stake than questions about the national security letters.

He said Congress, in the original USA Patriot Act and less so in a 2005 revision, had essentially tried to legislate how the judiciary must review challenges to the law. If done to other bills, they ultimately could all “be styled to make the validation of the law foolproof.”

Noting that the courthouse where he resides is several blocks from the fallen World Trade Center, the judge said the Constitution was designed so that the dangers of any given moment could never justify discarding fundamental individual liberties.

He said when “the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution, it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

Regarding the national security letters, he said, Congress crossed its boundaries so dramatically that to let the law stand might turn an innocent legislative step into “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

Thank GOD someone is paying attention. Perhaps the best part of the article, despite the awkward phrase in re: the role of the judiciary, which we’re pretty sure the judge didn’t botch:

Marrero’s lengthy judicial opinion, akin to an eighth-grade civics lesson, described why the framers of the Constitution created three separate but equal branches of government and delegated to the judiciary to say what the law is and to protect the Constitution and the rights it gives citizens.

Marrero said the constitutional barriers against governmental abuse “may eventually collapse, with consequential diminution of the judiciary’s function, and hence potential dire effects to individual freedoms.”

In that event, he said, the judiciary could become “a mere mouthpiece of the legislature.”

Dept. of Topical Onion Awesomeness

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For Joy and Boogielips: Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite:

NEW BRIGHTON, MN–Immediately following a physician’s examination for her menstrual cessation, 37-year-old events planner Janice Crowley told reporters Tuesday that she is “ecstatic” with her diagnosis of a rapidly growing intrauterine parasite.

[…] Studies have shown that while the disorder strikes without prejudice across racial, ethnic, and class lines, it bears a very high correlation with the consumption of alcohol at the time of infection. Although there is a low-cost daily medication available that can prevent the harmful symbiote with 99 percent efficacy, many women inexplicably choose not to use it.

[…]

“We’re thinking of naming [the parasite] either Robert or Lisa,” Crowley said. “I just couldn’t be more excited!”

Among the many signs that Crowley’s condition is deteriorating rapidly is a frequent compulsion to consume foods in unorthodox and often revolting combinations.

“For some reason I can’t stop eating olives dipped in chocolate cake frosting,” Crowley said cheerfully. “And the other day I just had to have sardines with butter and jam. Crazy!”