Live from Austin!

Lack of Information at North Pole Leads Google to Draft New Privacy Policies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15, 2009 UTC – As the holiday season continued, Google Inc. today announced that it is modifying its privacy policies in a new two-part Google Santa initiative.

The inspiration for the Google Santa project came from the realization that Santa has very little information to go on when judging whether people are naughty or nice. Now, thanks to Google’s advanced data mining systems, Santa will be given access to your search history, a log of all the web sites you visit which use Google Analytics, any passwords needed to access them from your Google Toolbar, the contents of your Gmail account, and complete transcripts of any Google Talk IM conversations made in the last year.

“Santa has a clear need for this information,” said Google founder Sergey Brin. “His intuition is unmatched, but his ability to sniff out naughty people will be dramatically improved now that he can search your e-mail and check whether you’ve visited any naughty web sites.”

“Do no evil,” added Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Because otherwise we will find out, and we’ll tell Santa.”

Google also announced phase two of Google Santa, to launch in January. A new area of the Google Shopping site will enable users to sell coal in a global marketplace.

“By aggregating individual users’ stock of fossil fuels,” explained Google co-founder Larry Page, “we will enable ordinary people to participate in the global energy economy by selling their pieces of coal to their local electricity company.”

“In addition,” he added, “a modest 70% cut of the proceeds will be used to purchase carbon offset credits, making the overall operation carbon neutral, and helping me feel better about my personal Boeing 767.”

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative web technologies log the lives of millions of people around the world every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while recording the browsing patterns of users across almost the entire World Wide Web. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the North Pole. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Facebook has recently changed its sharing permissions. A lot of people have discovered that they’ve been sharing rather more information than they intended.

Some of the permissions screens for information sharing are quite well hidden in Facebook’s array of prefence pages and tabs. There doesn’t seem to be a single place listing all the privacy-related settings pages.

I’ve attempted to assemble a list, so you can work through them one by one and make sure your Facebook sharing is set up the way you want.

• Notifications: Choose when you get e-mail or SMS from Facebook.
• Facebook Ads: Select whether ads can show your information to other people.
• Contact information: Decide who can see your various addresses and phone numbers.
• Profile information: Set who can see the miscellaneous information you put in your profile (birthday, workplaces, photos, etc.) Don’t forget to check that your religious and political views are being shared appropriately. In addition, the “Posts by me” button is important, as it determines who (by default) can see whatever you post to Facebook. This can (following a recent change) be altered per post, using the padlock icon underneath the posting box.
• Applications – friends: Facebook allows your friends to share information about you via applications. This page lets you turn that off.
• Ignored invites: Got a friend who keeps inviting you to join Scam Wars or Spamville? Add them to this list to pre-ignore their invites.
• Search: Choose whether you can be found via public search on Facebook, and/or public search engines such as Google.
• Block list: The place to name your ex-boyfriends, stalkers, and other enemies.
• Application settings: Specific settings for all applications you’ve authorized to access your Facebook account. Use the X boxes to delete ones you’re no longer using.
• Application settings – Groups: A specific application you will want to visit is Groups; I can’t link directly to the edit page, but you should find it on the application settings list. The settings for Groups determine who can see which groups you’re a member of.
• Application settings – Photos: Another one to visit, allows you to hide the photos tab from non-friends so people can’t easily find all the photos people post of you. The “publish to streams” option adjusts whether people posting photos of you results in story entries on your profile page, whether or not there’s a photos tab.

There’s one other setting that isn’t on a settings page. On your profile page, the box showing your friends has an icon of a pencil top right. Click that, and a menu pops up. Hidden in that menu is the checkbox that controls whether your friends list is public to the world.

A couple of nights ago, I noticed my TV/DVD combination was acting up. PAL DVDs would play with a horrible irregular juddering motion. I checked broadcast TV and the PS3, and they were both fine; I checked the DVI/HDMI cable, that was fine also. I started to suspect the DVD player.

Friday, I bought a new DVD player. $44 at Fry’s Electronics. It had the same problem. Further investigation and experimentation eventually revealed that the issue was a setting on the TV.

The short summary: If you have an NTSC Sony BRAVIA TV but have no analog video sources, find the CineMotion setting in the TV setup, and make sure it is turned off, not set to auto or on. Even if you have some analog video sources, you should turn CineMotion off if you don’t use analog sources to watch movies. You don’t need it, you don’t want it, all it can ever do is mess up your signal. The long explanation follows…

Conventionally, movies are shot on film at 24 frames per second. When they are transferred to US NTSC video via a Telecine machine, the 24 frames per second must be converted to 29.97 frames per second, or 59.94 fields per second–which I’ll call 60 fields per second for the purposes of this brief discussion.

The process used is called 3:2 pulldown, because the first frame of film used to end up turning into 3 fields of video; the second frame of film ended up as 2 fields of video; the next was 3 fields again; and so on, alternating. Nowadays, frame buffers allow the 2 and 3 field allocation to be varied, so you tend to get 2:3:3:2, which results in fewer video frames whose contents are taken from two different film frames. But all pulldown options share the same fundamental defect, which is that the frames of the movie are no longer all of the same duration. This tends to make tracking shots and motion look somewhat odd.

Modern digital HDTVs don’t need pulldown. The HDTV standard, ATSC, mandates that TVs support 24 frames per second–and also 23.976 fps, which is the speed 24fps movies used to be slowed to before performing 3:2 pulldown, so as to end up with 59.94 fields per second. So an HDTV can display a 24fps movie at 24fps. If it’s a 120Hz set, it can even display movies with no split frames at all, as 24 goes evenly into 120.

Sony BRAVIA HDTVs therefore have a feature called CineMotion buried away in the setup menus. This detects incoming 3:2 pulldown video, and dynamically works out the pulldown pattern, reverses the pulldown and recombines the fields into 23.976 frames per second, buffers them, and then shows the result at exactly 23.976fps. Your movie motion looks smoother and more natural as a result.

My DVD player only pumps out a progressive signal (480p or 720p) via HDMI, so the TV never needs to do reverse pulldown. If the DVD is a movie, the MPEG-2 video file is 24fps, and the DVD player turns that into 24fps digital stream to the TV. So I have no use for this advanced CineMotion feature. It’s only applicable to analog interlaced video sources, and the only analog video source I have is the Wii–and that’s 480p via component cable and never shows 24fps movies, so it doesn’t need processing either.

Somehow, CineMotion got turned on in the setup menu–either as a default, or maybe I was playing with settings and turned it on without realizing what it was. And sadly, there’s a bug in Sony’s TV firmware: it doesn’t seem to check whether the source is interlaced before applying CineMotion post-processing. Instead, it just checks the frame rate of the decoded frames to decide whether to buffer them.

PAL video is 50 fields per second, or 25 frames per second. This seems to be close enough to 24 frames per second that it triggers the CineMotion buffering. The TV tries to take the incoming 25fps video, and show it at 23.976fps. This results in disaster; every now and again, the TV realizes it has fallen too far behind the incoming data stream, and drops an entire frame to catch up.

So that is why my UK DVDs were looking like crap. I turned the CineMotion feature off, and now everything looks good again.

So I have a second DVD player which is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. However, there’s an upside. My original player was state of the art 4 years ago, but technology has marched on. The new $44 DVD player upscales to full 1080p, the native resolution of the TV. This seems to give a better picture than upscaling to 720p and then having the TV upscale again. The fancy noise reduction and motion smoothing of the old DVD player are also unnecessary, as the new TV has even better implementations. As a final benefit, the new player has true HDMI out rather than DVI, meaning I get audio and video through the same cable, with no need to adjust timing between the two. I also notice that the new player is very light and runs cool, whereas the old one had a lot of circuitry packed in and would get hot. So, I’m keeping the new DVD player and retiring the old one.

Ah, technology, where the state of the art from 4 years ago is today’s doorstop.

Oh, and if you want a region-free DVD player, pick up a Coby DVD288 at Fry’s.

From gameinformer.com:

The thing that old people don’t understand is – you know if you’ve never heard Bob Dylan, and someone listened to him for 15 minutes, you’re not going to get it. You are just not going to understand. You have to put in hours and hours to start to understand the form, and the same thing is true for gaming. You’re not going to just look at a first-person shooter where you are killing zombies and understand the nuances. There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to The Rite of Spring once and understand what Stravinsky was all about. It seems like you should at least have the grace to say you don’t know, instead of saying that what other people are doing is wrong.

That’s basically why my plan to write an article titled “In defense of GTA” turned into a three part epic. I wanted to try and explain to people who haven’t been playing video games for 30 years, why GTA is not just a dumb game about shooting prostitutes.

He continues:

It just seems so simple, and yet I’m constantly in these big arguments with people on the computer who are talking about, “I would never let my kid do this and this in a video game.” And these are adults who when they were children were dropping acid and going to see the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead is provably shitty music. It’s impossible – it’s theoretically impossible to make a video game as bad as the Grateful Dead. I throw that out there as a challenge.

Quite a challenge. It is, however, possible to make The Grateful Dead interesting: I quite like Grayfolded.

Giles Bowkett is the person Zed Shaw wants to be when he grows up.

On Slashdot and similar sites:

When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren’t really free – they cost time. If you do the math, it’s actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be.

On TechCrunch:

There are a ton of people who would love to find out what the people scaling Twitter know. There isn’t any blog that tells you. But there is a blog which leverages all that public interest and turns it into income – not by getting the actual answers from those guys, but by calling them names. Because that’s where the money is. Or, more accurately, because that’s the only way TechCrunch knows to monetize that ambient public curiousity.

And in fact this flaw is everywhere. The whole blogosphere is a festival of bullshit, where people search for truth and meaning despite the total absence of economic incentives to produce it. It’s a goddamn communist party.

[You might be wondering how his logic applies to my web sites. The answer is that it doesn't, really, because I'm not looking for a better job, I don't make any money from my web sites, and I don't need page views or converts.]

I just went through my Google Reader subscriptions, and removed everyone who hasn’t posted anything in over a year. It seems like the majority of the LiveJournal users I was following have jumped ship. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t post anything saying where they jumped ship to. Some of them are on Facebook, but most aren’t, so I suppose my notional social network just shrank.

Shrank, not shrunk. It should have been “Honey, I Shrank The Kids”. I note this because last night, we got into a discussion of span vs spun. It was one of those situations where I was sure of the correct answer right up until I paused to think about it carefully, at which point the word ’span’ suddenly seemed totally made up. The OAD lists it as archaic. I don’t have an OED subscription, but apparently both words are listed as synonyms there. Since I switched to doing my best to write in US English when I emigrated, I guess I’ll have to get used to ’spun’.

A classic from 1994:

What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

–Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Is it possible to be so wrong that you loop all the way around and become right again?

I’m currently playing Fallout 3. I finished the actual game months ago, but the extra downloadable content packs were released for PS3 recently, so I bought a couple and returned to the post-apocalyptic wasteland. So I’m not inherently against the idea of paid-for add-on downloadable content packs for games.

However, I skipped buying any add-on content for LittleBigPlanet. Frankly, I don’t need tons of outfits or in-game stickers, and dozens of little $1.99 transactions add up quickly. I also skipped The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion until the Game of the Year edition came out with all the add-on content included. Why buy, only to have to pay extra for the full game later?

The newest RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, has gone even further. Controversially, paid-for downloadables were available on day 1, and included a storage chest for inventory items that many say is really hard to do without. The game developers have revealed that they plan another two years of DLC, including packs of in-game items. Worse still, NPCs will try to persuade you to buy the DLC while you’re playing the game.

It seems to me that game developers themselves are playing a dangerous real-world game here.

If you buy a PS3 game new, play it, and then sell it second hand, you can work out how much it’s costing you: $60 for the game, of which you might get $30-40 back, for an overall cost of $20-30.

DLC dramatically changes this. $60 for Fallout 3, plus 5 downloadable content packs at $10 each is $110. But by the time you come to sell the game, the Game of the Year (GotY) edition is out, which bundles the content and drops the price to $30, so you’ll be lucky to get $20 for your used copy with no DLC (since it’s not transferable). Overall cost to you, $90.

Sure, you don’t have to buy all the DLC; but even if you skip all of it, the existence of the DLC and the inevitable GotY edition with it bundled in will reduce the resale value of the game, increasing your overall cost.

This means that more than ever, the smart move is to wait for the game to be released as a GotY edition, whether you want the extra content or not.

In a sense, this doesn’t matter to me. The people who feel they must have the very latest game on release day get to pay 3x more, I wait and get the full game for far less, everyone’s happy, right? Except I can’t help wondering how many people are going to reach the same conclusion as me, and skip buying games with DLC until it’s bundled.

So, no Borderlands or Dragon Age: Origins for me. I look forward to playing them in a year or two, though.

Once upon a time, Apple developed an amazing OS with a revolutionary graphical interface. They started selling devices which would run this OS. The devices were practically sealed units, and the OS would only run on Apple’s hardware. If you wanted to develop for the devices, you had to pay money to join a developer program.

Some other companies approached Apple and asked if maybe they would license the OS and software to run on third party hardware. Apple considered the matter, and decided that they were so far ahead in user interface and technology that the competition would never catch up. They decided to go it alone, Apple versus the entire rest of the industry.

The year was 1985. The devices were Macintosh computers. The companies who wanted to license MacOS were Philips and Sony. The people who decided that Apple could afford to go it alone against an entire industry were Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Jobs.

Denied the Mac OS, the rest of the industry settled on MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS layered on top of one of a number of competing BIOS programs cloned from IBM’s original PC BIOS. Thus there was basically an open ecosystem of devices from many vendors, running OS variants from multiple vendors, but all able to run the same software, more or less. (I recall that the gold standard at the time was Flight Simulator–if your PC and DOS couldn’t run that, they were considered not-really-compatible.)

Apple continued to innovate throughout the 80s and early 90s, but they couldn’t out-innovate every other company combined. If you wanted a pocket-sized PC, you could get one; but there was never a pocket Mac. If you wanted a PC that was portable or had a color screen, you could get one years before you could get a Mac with those capabilities.

The same was true in software. The larger install base of PCs, and the cheaper and easier development process, meant that lots of weird niche programs appeared for the PC that didn’t appear for the Mac. That’s why even today, with the resurgence of OS X, it’s still hard to do CAD, circuit board design, 3D rendering or HAM radio stuff on a Mac. Some solutions exist, but few compared to on Windows.

Ah yes, Windows. Sure, Apple’s UI was years ahead to start with, but over time the rest of the computing world caught up. Windows is still not quite as slick as the Mac, but it’s good enough–the UI alone is no longer a compelling reason to get a Mac.

My feeling is that Apple is repeating the exact same mistake all over again with the iPhone, and then some. At least the Mac was an open platform.

The iPhone didn’t do anything that other phones couldn’t already do; what it had going for it was an incredibly slick UI. But Apple has locked down the iPhone and made it painful to develop for, with mandatory code signing and a bureaucratic approval process. They’ve prohibited entire classes of innovative application, and have a single hardware form factor. Want an iPhone with a replaceable battery, a flip-open form factor, or a hardware keyboard? Hard luck. Want to run Google Voice, a file server or the cult game DopeWars on your iPhone? Apple says no.

Android phones are now reaching iPhone-like levels of slickness. Android phones are being released by HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, Kyocera, and others. There are also non-phone devices running Android, such as the Archos tablet. Every major US cell phone network has Android devices on the way. The dev kit is free, and runs on every major platform. There are also a lot more Java developers around than there are Objective-C programmers.

So once again, I foresee Apple becoming a niche player. It might not get as bad as the days when the Mac had a single-digit percentage of the market, but I don’t see how they’re going to beat 15-20% with closed, locked-down hardware from a single vendor, when they couldn’t even beat MS-DOS with an open Macintosh OS.

Apple haven’t even beaten BlackBerry yet, in spite of the BlackBerry OS’s glaring defects–perhaps because of Apple’s refusal to ship a phone with a keyboard, an ironic move given that Steve Jobs famously ridiculed the Apple Newton by saying “Apple makes computers, computers have keyboards”. In some social circles it may seem like everyone has an iPhone, but the reality is somewhat different.

I’ve been thinking these thoughts for a while, but recently Gartner agreed with me, predicting that Android will come to dominate the iPhone and BlackBerry, because of its openness. Apple isn’t doomed; they can continue to turn a healthy profit with a small slice of the market, as they’ve proved with the Mac. But the iPhone’s days as the hot device where the innovation happens are numbered. Right now it has a lot of software–but then so did the Mac at first, but that changed by the 90s when Mac market share dropped to 5%.

I’m a Mac user. I like the iPhone UI. If they sold the phone completely unlocked, I’d probably have one now, in spite of the lack of keyboard. But instead, I’m looking ahead and predicting that my next phone will run Android. In particular, the Verizon Droid looks interesting. Time to experiment with the dev kit…

If there is anything else that I can do for you, which is required by law, don’t hesitate to call my office. If it isn’t required by law then don’t bother asking, because I think that you’re a worthless piece of s**t and I wouldn’t p**s on you if you were on fire (my opinion). You’re a poor, lonely, jealous, old man with aspirations of being a writer. You write your lies and uneducated opinions on people and issues from behind the safety of your slobber stained keyboard with the hope that somebody will read them that doesn’t know you and believe that you’re more than the pitiful, broke-down, lizard-looking thing that you are, in my opinion. Get a life old man. On second thought, don’t bother.

I do have a question for you. Do you have family and if so do they even like you?

—Mayor Jim Kalb of Portsmouth, Ohio.

Followup story:

Asked if he regretted his language, Kalb replied: “I regret that he made it public. That was between him and me. It’s a bit harsh, but it was between him and me.”