Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

I always intend to use the summer to catch up on TV and movies that I haven’t had time for during the school year to watch; even with a DVR I still get behind. Our recent move from Lubbock to San Antonio cut into a lot of that, but I have been watching a few things as Jen and I make an attempt to live without cable. Here is a rundown of what I’m watching, and how I’m watching it.

First, I had already been using Netflix streaming on the Xbox 360 for a lot of my TV and movies. The experience is so good that Netflix is my primary source; if it’s on Netflix, that’s where I watch it. Because of the way Netflix works (these are generally things available on DVD), these shows are older.  So, here are the things I’m watching on Netflix.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a great example of what animation can do.  The show takes place in the near future, as people begin to become more and more “plugged in.”  Some are more artificial than others: cybernetics range from implants that allow a person to be constantly connected to the Internet to fully cybernetic bodies, such as that of the main character, Major Kusanagi.  Ghost in the Shell also represents on of the great failings of anime companies in North America.  This is a show that should have been on TV in the same time slot as 24 or Law and Order, not late night on Cartoon Network.  It’s a perfect example of truly adult animation.

Robotech: The Macross Saga is a beast of a different nature.  This is one of those shows that I have a great deal of nostalgia for as it was one of the first Japanese cartoons I remember watching.  Fortunately, unlike some of my other childhood favorites (G.I. Joe and Thundercats, for example), this one is still watchable after twenty-five years.

Although I didn’t watch all of it, Jen also watch most of season one of Arrested Development, which, despite personal recommendations from my brother David and a lot of positive reviews we never got around to watching.  The show is definitely great, and I will probably go back and watch the episodes I missed as I was doing other things while Jen marathoned them.

The second piece of hardware instrumental in getting rid of cable is a five-year-old laptop coupled with an IR remote sensor.  I’ve had a computer in the living room for years, but we primarily used it as a DVR with Windows Media Center (still my favorite DVR software).  I don’t use Media Center on this computer (I don’t currently have a USB tuner capable of receiving ATSC over-the-air content), but I do have two great pieces of software installed on it: Boxee and the Hulu Desktop app.  Through Boxee I primarily watch internet television such as that from Revision 3 (Film Riot, Tekzilla, and Hak5 are some of shows I watch from them).  Certainly for me Boxee goes a long way to replacing mainstream television almost entirely, but its compatibility with Hulu has been iffy, and that’s where the Hulu Desktop app comes in.

On Hulu’s website, the Desktop app is touted as being a lean-back experience for the PC.  We, however, are using it as a lean-back experience in the living room.  Running it with a remote is really easy (although I’m still looking for a way to start it from within Boxee or Media Center), and they have a lot of mainstream content right there.

On Hulu, I’ve been watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.  I watched a bit of the original version of this show when it aired on Cartoon Network.  I haven’t seen the original in a while so I can’t compare the two.  What I can say is that I really like the show; it’s got a good mix of comedy, action, and drama as the Elric brothers search for the elusive Philosopher’s Stone.  While not as smart as Ghost in the Shell, this show is no slouch when it comes to ideas either, whether it be faith and science, or a soldier’s responsibility in war time.

On the lighter side, I’ve also been watching Sgt. Frog.  I’ve read up to volume six of the comic for this, and it’s really funny.  The title character is Sgt. Keroro, an diminutive frog-like alien leading an advance reconnaissance mission to prepare Earth for invasion.  However, his crew ends up scattered in Tokyo, and Sgt. Keroro becomes the prisoner (or rather housekeeper) of the Hinata family.  The show is goofy and fun, as Sgt. Keroro struggles between his desire to conquer humanity, and his love of Gundam models.

Outside of Netflix, Hulu, and Boxee, I’ve also been watching some shows on Crunchyroll, an anime and Asian drama streaming site.  One in particular I’ve enjoyed is The Book of Bantorra. The show takes place in a world where people become “books” (actually, stone tablets) when they die.  These books contain the life of the person and are stored in Bantorra Library.  Because of the immense knowledge contained in these books, they are defended by the Armed Librarians.  The show has a great deal of action in it while still maintaining some good human drama.  Like Ghost in the Shell, one of it’s core issues is what it means to be human.  The primary antagonists of the show is a religious cult, the Shindeki Church, divide people into “true” men and meats (people used as slaves).  The first story arc focuses on a young man brainwashed by the Shindeki Church into acting as a bomb, and his struggle to accept that he is, in fact, human.

Well, there you have it: my summer watch list for 2010.  The jury’s still out whether or not we can totally go without cable, but we’re well one our way.

From Boing Boing: Big Content’s dystopian wish-list for the US gov’t: spyware, censorship, physical searches and SWAT teams

When George Orwell wrote 1984, he was primarily attacking Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union and warning the rest of the world against following a similar path.  It should be remembered, however, that Orwell also foresaw the possibility of that world coming about not just through communism of the Soviet variety, but also through a combination of large corporations and government.  This story from Gizmodo (which I heard about on the podcast Buzz Out Loud at Cnet, and which originally came from Boing Boing) is fittingly accompanied by a picture from the 1950s movie of the book.

These two organizations have consistently used their influence with many congressmen (and, I know this will come as a shock, those congressmen’s ignorance) to further their own agenda at the expense of our rights of ownership and unwarranted search and seizure.  They have persuaded the government to negotiate copyright treaties in secret, without public oversight, and now they are going even further, enlisting ISPs to spy on their customers and asking for software that could scan users’ computers.

I know this sounds a bit alarmist, but this is the sort of thing we criticize the Communist government of China for doing.  The Bill of Rights protects us from the federal and state governments’ overreaching their power, but we (as a people, not a government) need to keep a critical eye on these large corporations.  This is not capitalism; this is not a free market.  This is corporate welfare of the worst sort.

I was listening to The Dana Show Podcast, and Dana Loesch brought up the FCC/Comcast decision, in which the court decided that the FCC did not have the power to regulate Comcast regarding the latter’s restrictions on certain types of Internet traffic (BitTorrent traffic in this specific case).  On the show she had Michelle Moore from Smart Girl Politics, who explained “net neutrality” simply as the federal government trying to control the Internet.  Since I’ve seen some similar comments from others in recent months, I think it’s important that we look at the different facets of this issue.

As far as Ms. Loesch and Ms. Moore go, they are correct.  The FCC’s attempts to gain more power for itself (outside of Congress’s mandate) and the calls for more government regulation of the Internet are a bad thing.  Unfortunately, their description of net neutrality in just these terms mischaracterizes the issue.  I’ve been following this for years, and I think we need to spell out the issue completely to understand it.

We can approach net neutrality in two different ways.   Loesch and Moore look at this way: companies should treat every application (Skype, http, bittorrent, whatever) exactly the same.  So from this perspective, an ISP cannot give more priority to Skype (which uses a lot of bandwidth) than it does to a basic webpage.  From this perspective, net neutrality doesn’t make any sense, because ISPs would be unable to manage their network to give users a smooth experience.  And they’re right; this doesn’t make any sense.

But this isn’t the only way to look at it.  Now imagine that an ISP (say, Comcast for instance) buys a TV network (crazy, I know), and that they decide, “Hey, you know that competing TV network?  What if we slow their traffic down so that users have a bad experience on their website, but we give more priority to our own offering?”  So Comcast buys NBC, and then shapes their traffic so that visitors to CBS or ABC have their traffic slowed, while traffic to NBC or Hulu is prioritized.

I’m all for companies making their own business decisions, and if they feel they need to do traffic-shaping, that’s  cool.  I also understand the idea of giving themselves an advantage.  But there’s a couple problems with all this.

First, this all needs to be done upfront.  I’m not that interested in the traffic-shaping for network stability, but if Comcast is going to give priority to something, we need to know that upfront.  Second, there’s very little real competition in the ISP space.  What this means is that if I, as a customer, don’t like what Comcast is doing, I have very few choices about going somewhere else.  And without choice, the customer cannot put pressure on the company to get what they want.  This situation, by the way, was created by government intervention, a legacy of the old monopolies of the cable and phone companies.

So what’s the answer?  For the conservative, I think it’s clear.  We cannot trust the government to regulate net neutrality, but we also need to expand competition by further getting the government and corporate welfare out of the way.  This way companies will be forced to compete, and the Internet can remain truly neutral.

This isn’t going to be some long anti-Apple treatise, or even that profound. It just struck me that anyone seeing the iPad as “transformative” (a word I’ve heard bandied around for the last several months) has missed one huge, gaping hole (and no, I don’t mean a lack of Flash support).

When the iPad was announced, many (myself included) were amazed that the starting price was only $499. Most estimates were putting the price at $800-1000, which, given how much Apple charges for relatively underpowered computers was very likely. I believe, however, that this price, combined with the device’s limitations, will prevent it from being as revolutionary as its proponents make it out to be.

The iPad, quite simply, is not a need. This isn’t a new criticism, of course. Even those most wanting one will acknowledge that everything you can do on the iPad can be done on a much cheaper netbook, or a much-more powerful laptop. However, given Apple’s penchant for elegant design, most of us acknowledged that doing those things on the iPad would be a better experience.

The catch, however, is that price. I have a fairly powerful desktop-replacement laptop (a Dell Studio 1735) that I use for the majority of my mobile computing. It’s big, heavy, hot, and the battery life sucks. The iPad would be so much better for so many things. But I can’t do without my laptop. I use it for too many resource-intensive activities: it’s a video editor, a music studio, a game console, and a photo editor. The iPad will be be able to do some of this in a basic way, but it will never replace my laptop.

At $499, I would need something that could reasonably replace my laptop. In fact, I can buy a laptop for that price. Thus, until the iPad comes down in price, the choice is going to be to get the iPad and a laptop, or just a laptop. It’s a pretty clear choice.

Despite the fact that I have never owned a piece of Apple hardware (although I did buy Snow Leopard to attempt a ‘hackintosh’ PC), I was eager to see what Apple would announce on January 27. My interest was not really in a product that I would buy, but in what their announcement would herald for consumer electronics. And the introduction of the iPad is just the sort of announcement I was hoping for.

While Apple has not created a new category (despite their PR), Apple might just do what tablet makers for years have failed to do: create a market for tablets. That’s necessary because without a market, developers have little reason to enter a space and because it will help to lower prices (most tablets before were over-priced and under-powered laptops).

I also think that Apple’s potential entry into the tablet space has helped spur other companies’ development of tablets, as companies want to have something to offer in the marketplace.

Now, I won’t buy the iPad for the same reason I won’t buy an iPhone: I don’t want Steve Jobs or anyone else dictating how I’ll use a product. (I’ve already been burned by the Zune on that front.) I want to use my devices the way I want to, and I enjoy playing around on them to see what they can do. Jobs’s mentality on products is too centrally focused, too technocratic for my tastes.

But despite that, I’m glad they entered the space, if only to spur other companies to give me the device I’m looking for.