Went to
Robert Scoble`s geek dinner tonight. Those are always fun, but honestly, I think that they are better with a smaller group of people. For instance tonight I thought the number of people that were there was nice. It was still too large for everyone to be in the same conversation, but I had the advantage that I was sitting in the middle of everyone and could choose which conversation to listen to. I tried to do as I usually do, which is listen to both. This is done by primarily listening to one conversation while listening for specific key words in the other conversation, and then switching if necessary. Thats still not fair to everyone, but this is a product of the number of people there and simply the size and shape of the tables at
crossroads. Sometimes I think that the tables in our cafeteria would be perfect (they are round and can seat 8-11 people at them. This works very well for discussions.
John Porcaro also
talked about it.
Ok, on to other things:
Via
Scooblog:
"What technology is not up to your standards yet?"
Well, first of all I should go over the "rules"....I tend to be a perfectionist and idealist when ic comes to computers and technology. Some who know me IRL may find this ironic because in some areas of my life I am anything but that...anyways, just keep in mind that my views really look for any improvement I see and what improvements I would make.
I will start with his categories, and then expand.
I agree on the PVR front. I have a tivo series one. It has personally redefined how I watch television. No longer do I just tune in and see whats on, but I always have something to watch that I know I will like because I either have asked for it to be recorded, or based on my feedback (I REALLY use the thumb buttons) knows what I want to watch. I always have programs waiting for me to watch, and sometimes it seems like I have too many. This is where my critique begins. There are several ideas that others have had related to PVRs and there are also lots of various features spread across PVRs, it would really be nice to see a FLUKE of PVRs come out which really had everything that was needed, and was just SOLID as far as bugs go. (For those that don`t know, Fluke makes network and electronics testing equipment and is regarded as not just the leader, but almost the ONLY high quality tester manufacturer in the market.) What am I going to do to fix this? I am thinking of buying tivo hacks (its a book). I have also read a lot about various tivo modifications. What is the biggest goal/peeve of mine? I tend to watch LOTS of various episides, and have lots of season passes to these. In some cases, this means I get 5-6 episodes on the tivo a week (which takes up space fast), it would be nice to have something that could use a NAS (I have the tivonet upgrade) for storing some of the archived items, and then copy specific ones back if you want to watch them. Esentially, I think that PVRS need to improve in the following areas:
- input, output, and recording quality (I have 720p native HDTV, so I can notice the quality if its good).
- Support for OTA and cable HDTV...coming, I know....but still
- Show backup onto other mediums
- Reading shows from other mediums.
I know that some of these features are on a few DVD players, but ubiquity is important.
PDAs.....well, I had a pda once. The situation though was that it took more time to enter the information into it compared to any time that it saved me by having it. This was a palm pilot 3, and at the time, there was no common network tools, and syncing was not as easy. (Maybe its still that way?) Anyways, until I can honestly say that the time that it takes to ENTTER EVERYTHING AND ORGANIZE EVERYTHING is MUCH less than the time that it actually takes to enter and organize, then I am not interested. This means that when there are implants, or skull caps where my thoughts are transfored into writing, then I might actually be interested but until then, or while it takes longer to add an item than having the item there saves, then I will shy away from PDAs.
Tablet PCs....ok, I dont have one, they seem cool, but I really can`t comment. Other than to re-iterate that good Handwriting recognition is key.
Broadband.....ah yes, the blessing and bane of the tech community. I currently have broadband, but had to give up some really kick a$$ broadband that I had at my last place (up the street) to move here. When I moved, it turns out that for various reasons, I could not get the same service at my new place (althought the company...Earthlink...did not mention this, and just changed my service over to another DSL company without asking me or telling me. Then when I did not have a static IP address as I did before, I called and found that it was not that type of an account....and why? Because the old dsl provider (Covad...awesome) could not provide service here. After talking with Covad, they said that the reason was that there was no direct copper line from the CO to my place. This means that there was a fiber loop between the CO and a green box, and then in that box somewhere, the actual phone lines split out. What this meant for ME though is that there was only ONE dsl provider that could even technically use, and that was Verizon. And, I was very unhappy with some of the stunts that company pulled. Also as JLedgard mentions, the speeds are not that great either. the dsl speeds that I left were 3Mb down and 384Kb up. I am on cable now and nowhere close to this, but am closer than on verizon. It seems like there is much that can happen to improve the scenarios for the customers....since there are SO many other channels to go through as well. For instance here is a case that will be interesting to monitor:
http://news.com.com/2100-1034_3-5163739.html. That sounds like good speeds, but sometimes politics can kill things as fast as the technology can. There need to be some speed increases and law changes around to make this better.
Cell Phones.....I wont talk much on this. My focus on these is different than most peoples. I like cool, but I prefer coverage and cheap, and other simple features like color screen, and quality over most other options like an organizer or a camera. Some day, maybe, but not today.
RSS/Blogs...ok, this section will get a lot. I completely agree that this needs much work, but probably for different reasons. 1. Just look at the rss protocols out there. Which one do I use? 2. How do I convert it to the other flavors? 3.How do I include information that I want while blocking out some, and leave something behind? For example... why can I not include the date on most RSS posts? Only a few versions support this. Why do people want the whole entry? Why must they force my web server to serve hundreds of MB of space a month, just for one file that people are requesting. Why can I not allow a time based request and implementation which uses the date that the RSS was written to report to the aggrecator to use the cache. This would save my site from serving up
hundreds of MB in requests per month hopefully. I think that there are many things in RSS that need to be changed. Before anyone asks, I have not looked at atom yet, but I am afraid that it would suffer from the same version rot that the other versions had/have. Similar to this, the whole comcept of just reading the text from someone`s site seems backwards to me. I think that if I wanted to just read the text, there are so many better ways to do so. But if I get in my car and work on something, or go across campus and come back, then I would think that there are certain actions that spell trouble.
Public security trust mechanisms.....PGP is "pretty-good"...hehe, but honestly everything is based on X.509 v2 certs, so that seems to be how our world focusses.Migrating from this could be difficult. These are as I said: "pretty good", and there are still vulnerabilities. HOWEVER, there are vulnerabilities elewhere as well......TBC
....Well honestly...I am tooo tired to finish this. I know there are more items that I want tocover, but it will have to wait till I have slept since I was dozing off while typing, and sometimes that can jus tbe scary, since I often dont recognize or understand whats on the various paperwork. Look for me to talk in other areas too: itunes/napster/music match, There are probably more areas that I will think of as well. Until then though. Good night.
J.P.
References:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2004/02/23/78893.aspx