Not only this ad makes a stand in front of Sony and other big TV brands out there telling them “We have just advertised an Internet TV in front of 100 million viewers, you better get something out there soon or we’ll crush you”, but it also should tick you as a software developer. Now you’ll be able write software for the living room.

“VIZIO’s platform also includes support for the Adobe(R) Flash(R) Platform for the Digital Home, an optimized implementation of Flash technology that enables developers and content providers to deliver HD video, rich applications and other Web content to Internet-connected televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other devices in the digital home.”

VIZIO Internet Apps (VIA(TM)) — Connecting to the Future of Television

(Good luck on killing Flash Steve Jobs)

Internet TVs will be huge if/when they support (open) standard technologies for media delivery used in today’s web and mobile devices, e.g. HTML5/JavaScript, Flash, Android SDK. It seems Vizio has gone the Flash route.

Thanks to @gliendo I understand that there’s still room for live tv content (sports, news and some events that are delivered in HD via Cable/Satellite networks), however for the rest of the stuff that I consume the most: TV Shows, Movies, Concerts, Documentaries… all of that I see it when I have the time, I just can’t be in front of the TV when they want me to. If I want to see a show, I don’t need to wait a week to see the next episode and be there like if it was a date, my time is way to valuable for that, I’ll do it when I can, how I can, and the internet has allowed me so far to be free of cable TV for over 2 years now, but that’s me, the majority of people watches TV in the living room, and a TV like this will also free them from cable channels when they figure the possibilities.

Ads on Cable and we still have to pay for it?
If a TV like this has support for Netflix, Hulu, YouTube or other existing online Video delivery services where I can get my favorite movies on demand (in the case of netflix for a flat fee and I can stream all I want from their catalog) why the hell would I need to watch TV on cable channels and with so many ads? you almost feel stupid for paying the cable company after they make you watch so many ads, in the internet world usually if you pay for something you never expect an ad, with such a high CPM on TV ads, why the hell do we pay for cable????

Cable TV Channels are so dead for me, a TV like this gives me hope that they will eventually die for millions of people once they realize this, the more internet tvs that are out there, the sooner it’ll happen.

http://vizio.com/via/

                          

I’ve tried to counter some of your points here as objectively as I could. For the record, I’m a happy Apple user, but consider myself to be open minded to all platforms.

Price
An unsubsidized iPhone is $599/$699 depending on the memory size. This thing is twice the size — physically and in available memory. That’s not that bad considering some sources were saying $999 as a possible price point, though I never believed that myself.

The A4
The chip is a BIG deal. The A4 is actually an ARM processor, just like the chips used to power all iPhones, so no platform switching here. Even so, the OS is platform independent, and they’ve shown they can manage that kind of switch easily enough if they ever want to do so.

PA Semi — the company Apple bought to make these chip designs — have a history with high performance, low power chips. Even the Military loved their stuff. The A4 is clocked at 1ghz — twice the speed jump from the iPhone 3GS than it took from the 3G, and Apple is still willing to claim super-human battery life. Even at a more realistic 5-hours max, that’s a lot of horsepower for a mobile device (though not for a full-sized laptop). Every hands-on account I read points to screaming fast responsiveness, but I reserve final judgement until I have that same privilege.

Connectivity
The fact they will sell a WiFi only model and you’re not interested is missing the point. Some will want the always on connectivity option, but what if you were happy just to play games, watch movies and read books while out and surf the net at home or a hotspot?

Plus, there’s the added cost of the 3G service. Considering my phone already lets me get to the net, I have a harder time justifying the added payments to AT&T. I could really see myself using the WiFi only version — that’s the same way I enjoy my laptop when I’m out and about. ^_^

3G Tax
$130 for the chips and radio equipment for 3G is bullshit, but I can’t say this is unexpected. Just like they get you on the price of memory with the built-to-order, there’s usually one spot where they hit you cause they can.

Storage Size
I would consider myself to be both a power user and a music connoisseur. My iPhone (16GB 3G) has 11 pages of apps and web shortcuts, and my music library is 30,000 tracks strong. I could never get that whole library into my phone, but I couldn’t get the whole thing on a laptop comfortably, either. I keep about 1,800 tracks and rotate albums in and out every few weeks. It’s worked for well over a year and a half.

Now answer this question: If a netbook was your only computer, would you have a music librabry as large as you do now? The large part of us who get a netbook or an iPad aren’t going to use it as their only computer, so I don’t think you should treat it like one in your example.

Flash Support
A whole ‘nother kettle of fish. I will admit that the day Flash is used more for content production and less for content distribution, the happier I will be. HTML5 is being built to supplant a lot of the jobs Flash does, and I think we’re starting to get to the tipping point. Apple and Google both use WebKit at the core of all their browsers — computer or mobile — which means you have two very ambitious companies with huge clout and their own good reasons for making WebKit be the best engine it can be, which is helping to accelerate standards support elsewhere.

In short — unless Adobe opens the source code for Flash like Apple did with WebKit, they will never put Flash on the iPhone OS. Web Devs will find a way around this, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Adobe be the one on the short end.

Netbooks aren’t that bad
Steve Jobs, as with any CEO, needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Netbooks as a platform will remain, and they will still have their advocates. But I’ll bet it’s less than 18 months before someone gets an Android or Chrome-powered touch tablet to market — more hackable and working to compete on merit with the iPad. I’ll also bet Google forms a team to do that ala the Nexus, along with licensing to 3rd parties.

OS Choice
The iPhone OS is a scaled down version of OS X specifically with touch devices and low power consumption in mind. I really don’t see how you could have thought they’d use anything other than that in their tablet.

stevenf has a GREAT piece about “Old World v. New World” computing, which talks a lot about how the device is perceived by those who are used to their computers doing everything vs. those who are used to it doing one thing at a time well. They may be computers at heart, but they are built and designed as consumer electronics, which have higher expectation levels and less tolerances to things not working like they should.

That said, this relatively young branch of the OS X and more will need to be done to flesh out the platform. Moore’s law will help the hardware eventually handle most (but not all) of what one of today’s laptops can do. We know the OS can multitask because the iPod software runs in the background. You can dislike their decisions, but you can’t fault the reasoning: they want stability first, performance second, and multiple background apps put strains on both.

At some point Apple will ease the restrictions and let dev have multitasking apps. But not today.

                          

It’s been only 48 hours and you’re already killing it?
I didn’t even know this was up already.

You have to let the service up for a little longer to make any judgments of these sorts.

However… being Devil’s advocate I’m with you on this one, it’s not gonna fly far, not even with cool blockbuster movies.

You don’t have to be a genius to understand that $3.99 seems a little too high for “renting” a movie to watch it on your computer, specially for a crowd that’s used to come to youtube for a bunch of short free video fixes.

This business model down the line won’t be a significant source of revenue for youtube, they’ll have to revisit their strategy and copy the Netflix flat rate model; Pay every month a flat fee and stream all you want from the ever growing catalog.

The Netflix flat fee model is the best available and the markets also like it; Netflix’s market cap ($NFLX) is now over $3 billion and Blockbuster’s has been reduced to a mere ($BBI) $70 million.

From a customer’s perspective I would never rent “on demand” films at $3.99 each, not even from my cable company and I’d be watching it on a big screen sitting comfy in my living room couch.

I rather stream to my heart’s contempt all I want without having to take my wallet out every time.

Flat Rates FTW.

                          

If you’re giving me a great screen for video, powerful graphic processing capabilities and only WiFI connectivity you must think I will want to have a few movies, pictures and music stored in the device for offline use. WiFI is everywhere right? Wrong, most networks out there are password protected by the owners, so the only places where you’ll have WiFI access for free will be at home, at the office, maybe at your friends or a library. In most of those cases you will have a real laptop with you, or you won’t really be there to use the device.

Given the lack of real connectivity to the “cloud” when you’re on WiFI outside, when you’re “mobile”… you will want to have your entertainment on disk, with so little space you’ll be constantly adding and deleting stuff to it.

Now if you will get the 3G version, don’t even dream of HD streaming over that slow ass unreliable 3G AT&T connection, you will need the storage.

Pricing Pissed me Off

The pricing scheme really got me pissed, the lower end version costs $500 and it only gives you 16Gb; my phone has 32Gb!!!.

So you gotta be crazy to pay so much for the lower end, which is what they know, and they charge $100 for additional 16Gb, and $200 for additional 48Gb putting the 64gb model at $700 bucks.

You would think, “shit, it’s a tablet, multitouch, beautiful, for under $700″, but remember, it’s ONLY 64Gb. My humble mp3 collection alone takes 45Gb!!!.

I can’t even remember when was the last time I bought a 64Gb HDD. It all seems that they couldn’t wait more for SSD drives to finally drop their prices; There’s a big market in Netbooks and many companies are already there so they had to come out with something now, even if the storage will suck balls.

Other important flaws

Then you have to remember other big flaws, it runs the iPhone OS, which still does not allow for multitasking, iPhone users know that this is a bitch when they see Android users switching from GMail, to browser, to maps, to twitter and back all instantly, no need to close your apps and you keep your states.

Another great flaw comes because of Apple’s desire to destroy Adobe Flash. Steve Job has some motherfucking balls calling this device a better device to browse the web, even in his demo we could see a “missing plugin” on the New York Times. Every website out there embedding videos will have a flash player in it. Every social game in Facebook that attracts millions of players a month happens to be made with Flash (Farmville, Typing Maniac, Bejeweled, Biggest Brain, etc), but it’s the damn need to control what we do with our own computers that will make Apple force the stupid restrictions of the iPhone to this new device.

Thanks but no.

Netbooks aren’t that bad
Steve Jobs said that Netbooks aren’t better at anything, he’s right on that, but his new device sucks at storage and it’s not that great at web browsing either, no Flash support, no multitasking. Netbooks are not better, but they’re just as good as lots of high priced laptops a few years back, so I guess they’re better at doing the same job for a lot less money.

iPad’s limited storage capabilities for this first generation are a deal breaker for many of us that will wait for round two to see what they come up with.

Most of the things that the iPad does can be done with Netbooks, and Netbooks can do a lot of things that the iPad can’t, like multitasking for example.

Next version will probably include a web cam (would’ve been a great feature to use it with Skype), it’s an old trick of apple to not release stupid features at once so they can have you buying the whole thing again just for a few changes here and there next year.

What’s up with the CPU?
Did Intel get stabbed in the back? or it’s just an Apple branded / custom designed Intel CPU?

We’ll probably be hearing more about once it’s released.

$130 more for a 3G chip
This is probably Broadcom’s fault, but I refuse to believe that a 3G chip is that costly, they have to bank on that extra microchip and integration I suppose.

In the meantime I’ll keep using my lovely Asus EEE pc 1005HA, with 160Gb HDD (slower than SDD but hey, I’m not running mission critical apps here), multitasking, freedom of choice in free software, and a webcam.

Do yourself a favor, go to the Apple Store, test it, then think all the stuff you can’t have stored in it, and other things you could buy with those $700+taxes (2 netbooks, a ps3 with a bunch of games, $300 more and you could get an actual macbook, a kindle reader and shitload of books)

iPad, iPass

Update: Now read Andrew Fischler’s Point of View on each of my issues.

                          

Si no has probado la marihuana (después de los 21) por miedo a todo lo que has escuchado y creído, deberías estar tan súper molesto o molesta como yo porque hemos sido victimas de viles mentiras para privarnos de uno de los placeres mas sanos de la vida.

La verdad es que no hay un motivo verdadero que me pueda convencer de la ilegalidad de la marihuana, y personalmente no solo estoy extremadamente molesto por su ilegalidad, lo que mas me incomoda es que tuve una opinión errada toda mi vida, donde veía con miedo, y donde juzgaba en forma despectiva a las personas que fumaban marihuana, todo por falta de pensamiento critico y de información.

Tantas veces repitieron la mentira que pensé que era verdad y no cuestione.

Mito #1: La Marihuana causa daño cerebral.

El uso a largo plazo y el uso diario de la marihuana no causa ningún tipo de daño cerebral. Expertos del gobierno de los Estados Unidos admiten que la marihuana no mata las neuronas.

Este mito vino de un pequeño numero de experimentos con animales en los cuales se observaron cambios estructurales en las neuronas de animales que fueron sometidos a tanto humo de marihuana que fueron depravados de oxigeno.

Este trabajo científico perdió todo crédito. El Dr. William Slikker del Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Toxicológicas y Charles Rebert y Gordon Pryor de SRI International no han podido encontrar en sus estudios sobre el tema ninguna evidencia de alteración física de las neuronas en monos expuesto a dosis diarias durante un año.

Estudios en Humanos de uso pesado de marihuana en Jamaica y Costa Rica no encontraron evidencia de anormalidades en el cerebro.

Vale la pena acotar que el uso de otras drogas, incluyendo el alcohol si causan daño cerebral.

Una forma de verlo mas fácil es la siguiente. Es fácil conseguir documentación de miles de personas que han muerto por sobredosis (envenenamiento) con alcohol, cocaína, heroína y otras drogas químicas.
No existe un solo caso documentado de sobre dosis con marihuana.

Mito #2: Si fumas marihuana caerás en otras drogas mas fuertes

Este es uno de los mitos que tiene mas éxito en asustar a la población de disfrutar de la marihuana. También es uno de los mitos mas persistentes.

Un ejemplo real de lo que sucede cuando permites que la marihuana sea accesible a la sociedad puede verse claramente en Holanda. Los holandeses legalizaron parcialmente la marihuana desde los 1970s. Desde entonces el uso de drogas fuertes como heroína y cocaína han DECAÍDO SUBSTANCIALMENTE.

Si la marihuana fuera una droga de introducción a las drogas mas fuertes, el uso de heroína y cocaína hubiera incrementado, no disminuido. Este efecto también ha sido observado en los Estados Unidos. Estudios realizados en los 1970s mostraron una co-relación negativa entre el uso de la marihuana y el uso del alcohol.

En 1993 un estudio de la corporación Rand comparo el uso de la droga en estados que habían de-criminalizado el uso de la marihuana versus otros estados que no, se encontró que donde la marihuana tenia mayor disponibilidad el numero de casos de emergencia en los hospitales por el abuso de drogas fuertes había disminuido.

En resumen, el uso de la marihuana, científicamente y en la practica tiende a remplazar el uso de drogas mucho mas peligrosas como el alcohol, la cocaína y la heroína.

En todo caso, cuando la Marihuana es prohibida te puedes ver en contacto cercano con drogas como cocaína, crack, heroína porque la persona que trafica la marihuana puede ofrecerte estos otros productos, es decir, una consecuencia directa de la prohibición, cosa que no sucediera si pudieras comprarla en cualquier tienda axial como compras una caja de tabaco.

Los cigarrillos en USA tienen 599 aditivos aprobados por la FDA, y crean unos 4,000 componentes químicos cuando los fumas.
Monóxido de Carbono, Oxido de nitrógeno, Cianuro de Hidrógeno y Amonia están presentes en el humo del cigarrillo.

En mi experiencia, la ultima vez que fume marihuana fue hace como 4 meses [es decir no es adictiva]. Me considero una persona sana, corro entre 15 a 35 millas semanales, No fumo cigarrillos (solo si estoy con amistades que no he visto en años), Casi nunca consumo bebidas alcoholicas, solo una copa de vino en una cena especial o una cerveza en casa de una amistad que me la invite. Nunca he probado cocaina, heroina, crack, speed, ni extasis.

Mito #3: La marihuana es mucho mas peligrosa que el cigarrillo

Para empezar el cigarrillo (tabaco) es la droga mas adictiva conocida por el hombre, mientras que la marihuana es menos adictiva que la cafeína.

La marihuana FUMADA contiene la misma cantidad de agentes cancerígenos que el tabaco, sin embargo dado el factor de adicción mencionado anteriormente la cantidad de tabaco consumida por el fumador pesado es mucho menor que la cantidad de marihuana consumida por el fumador pesado de marihuana.

De ser legal también estuviese disponible en bebidas, o en tes (legales en algunos países del medio oriente), lo cual es perfectamente seguro, libre de agentes cancerígenos.

Mito #4: La marihuana hace perder la memoria temporal

Esto es cierto pero mal entendido. Cualquier efecto negativo en la memoria desaparece una vez que el efecto de la marihuana ha pasado. No hay ningún daño permanente.

Mito #5: La marihuana “aplasta” las ondas cerebrales

Esto fue una mentira barata preparada por el Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Hace unos años pusieron un comercial en la TV que mostraba primero una onda cerebral y luego una onda cerebral mas plana de un adolescente de 14 años bajo los efectos de la marihuana.

Cuando investigadores llamaron a las televisoras para quejarse de la falacia de este comercial no tuvieron mas opción que quitar el comercial del aire.

En realidad, la marihuana tiene el efecto de incrementar un poco la actividad de la onda Alfa. Las ondas Alfa son asociadas con estados meditativos y de relajación, los cuales son asociados con la creatividad humana.

En mi experiencia personal intento hacer juegos mentales cuando estoy bajo los efectos de la marihuana y muchas veces termino sorprendido de las cosas que logro visualizar, recordar o entender desde perspectivas muy diferentes a cuando estoy completamente sobrio.

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A veces intento diseñar abstracciones complejas (como hacer software para interpretar la realidad visual) preguntándome preguntas difíciles y llegando a un nivel de detalle impresionante en mis reflexiones. Conversaciones sobre el concepto de realidad, del tiempo y cosas no tangibles puede ser realmente estimulante.

Realidad: Nadie ha muerto por una sobredosis de marihuana

La cantidad de canabinoides para que una persona se intoxique, es decir, empezar a “volar” tiene una relación de 1 a 40,000 para la cantidad necesaria para matar a esa persona.

En otras palabras, para sufrir una sobre dosis de marihuana tienes que consumir 40mil veces mas de lo que necesitas consumir para estar “en la nota”. Algo imposible en la practica, podrias fumarte 40,000 rolls en unas 4 horas? Y si pudieras de donde los sacarias?.

Con el alcohol esta relación es de 1 a 4 y de 1 a 10 dependiendo la persona.

Anualmente mas de 5,000 personas mueren por sobredosis de alcohol, nadie, NADIE NUNCA HA MUERTO por sobredosis de marihuana.

Adicionalmente anualmente 440,000 personas mueren (en USA nada mas) por causa del cigarrillo, en promedio hoy moriran 1205 personas y el gobierno anda preocupandose por los terroristas? Esto es un 9/11 cada 2 dias!!! WTF…

Si has leído este post y has estado conmigo durante la lectura, la pregunta mas obvia que te debes estar haciendo en este momento es la siguiente

“Entonces porque carajo es ilegal?”

Por muchos motivos, pero eso será tema de otro post.

Atribuciones Fotograficas
Pink por “thöR

Peazo Cogollo por r0bz

C A N N A B I S by Fucking Fantastic (*)

The Link Between Cigarettes and Cancer Illustrated by vvanhee

                          

If you’re not scared it’s my intention to shake you up a little bit. Let’s see what Google has done and what it’s trying to do.

Google controls over %70 of the Web Search Traffic, and over 57% of all advertising on the internet

Google started as a Search company and they’re supposedly great at it (until someone else can show us better) so everyone uses their search and that means Google knows what everyone wants on the internet, therefore giving it one hell of an advantage over everyone else when it comes to decision making of any kind. What technologies to build, What websites are successful (which services should they buy or compete against). They know about all trends of all kinds. From lottery ticket search, to medicine search, to what new website is being searched for.

Their great search capabilities made them hit gold when they started advertising next to search results. They made so much money that they were able to buy lots of ad networks including very powerful ones like DoubleClick ($3 billion, April 13 2007) which together with Adsense control 57% of the market share of Internet advertising.

Just know that pretty much almost every ad printed on the web puts money in Google’s Pockets, the company that controls search. I wonder if their PageRank algorithm also includes the eCPM of the ads shown on the target sites, if not, it’s a direct consequence of being on the top search results that you’ll get more visitors thus making your CPM pay higher… it’s all a little fucked up the amount of control they have.

And let’s not to forget that the little publisher on Adsense Gets Pwned with probably less than 10% of the cost of the click (Google gets $2 a click, you get less than $0.20 for that click), a percentage that is never shown to the publisher, a percentage that Google can adjust to their liking however they want. If you can sell your own ads, do so (and then tell me how).

On top of that, there’s tons of money to make on statistics for all of that search data. You may want to read about a company called DemandMedia.com , in short they buy a lot of search engine data (probably Google’s included in there) so that they can generate a list of the things people want to know about every day, then they match that data to marketing databases (to see what the highest priced keywords are, data which may come from Google Adsense statistics) and they make a list of about 4,000 video titles, which they shoot and distribute EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Internet Video

YouTube… owned by Google, gets close to 100 million unique visitors every month. They’re the most influential video service on the internet. There are companies that exist and thrive (making millions a year) only because youtube is there (think again if you believe youtube is not making money). Oh and they know what you’re watching.

Privacy Stuff
Let’s forget about Search and Ad Monopoly, that’s their money maker, let’s start thinking about the creepier stuff, power.

GMail alone as of July 2009 had an approximate of 146 million unique users during one month. That’s a lot of conversations being tracked in one way or the other. Can’t imagine all the money they make on Gmail alone, since it’s one of the applications that people keep open most of the day, and that’s a lot of contextual ads right there, plus a lot of tracking on clicks to external sites linked inside the emails you read.

So they did Email great, you gotta give them that, but then they also have Groups, GTalk (instant messaging) and more recently they were talking about redefining email with Google Wave (which has been in my perspective a total failure, nobody is ever logged in or replying to the waves, it needs to integrate with email in order to replace it, maybe that’ll be the key and since they’re smart they should know this but they’re waiting for the right time…)

This year Google has gotten super scary with all the announcements they’ve made, one of the scariest is Google Public DNS, the service that converts a domain name like “google.com”, into an IP address so that your computer can connect to it.

Boasting on their excellence and good performance they’re trying to convince system administrators to switch over to Google Public DNS.
What do we know if already our local ISPs have turned off their own DNS servers and just redirected all requests to 8.8.8.8 (Google’s DNS) to save on costs and to have one less thing to manage?.

This is pretty scary because Google now would know where you go, even if you don’t use Google.com

Another really scary thing is having this company also build for you the web browser. Not only they control all the traffic, but they want to control the application that you use to browse the web. They already own Firefox (a nice +$50 million dollar/year tax deduction) whose default search is, you guessed it… Google, and now they even want to make an Operating System that runs only their browser with the purpose of having you log in with your Google Account every time you turn on your computer (currently aimed at Netbooks, please install Ubuntu Netbook Remix and be safe)

If their plans go accordingly, they’d be controlling everything, from every request that comes out of your internet connection (DNS), to the kernel and browser in your computer, to your email, to your documents (Google Apps), to where you go (Google Maps), to where you are (Google Latitude).

And if that’s not enough, they want to give you a phone number (Google Voice) and transcribe your conversations and voice messages… but wait I forgot they’ve also built an operating system for your phone, Android, and next month they will sell their own phone.

Are you scared yet?

Other Services:
Google Healthcare (They want your medical records too)
Google URL Shortener (They want to track all the clicks inside Twitter and Facebook, they couldn’t let other companies deal with this, bit.ly FTW!)
Google Finance (They also know what stock quotes a lot of people are looking for)
Google Reader (They know what news and feeds you’re reading)
Google News (They want to control what news are read)
Google Blogger (They know what you write about, and bank on you)
Picassa (They want your pictures)
Google Maps and Driving Directions on Android (They want to know where you’re going)
Google Product Search (They wanna know what you’re shopping for)
Google Checkout (Do they have your credit card number yet?)
GMail (They know your contact list, who you talk to, who you do business with, what you want, what you hate, everything)
and so many other scary things… they must be so pissed they don’t own Facebook. Way to go Mark.
Google Buzz (They want to know conversational trends and what people are linking to amongst themselves, They couldn’t let Twitter take that piece of the cake)

The scariest part however is that everyone is just looking at how convenient all this free services are, praising Google but not thinking if there’s a hidden agenda, it’s like nobody could ever suspect the real intentions. At least with Microsoft you knew what to expect. Doesn’t it all sound like an internet monopoly? It’s becoming impossible to compete with such a big monster… however like a friend said “History repeats, all Giants fall eventually”

Google wants every byte coming in and out of you, they own every major piece of the action, it’s all becoming like big media and newspapers, like the food industry which is controlled by only a handful of corporations and we really have no choice in what we eat because everything is so cheap and convenient.

Google at this pace will own the internet, or should we call it The Googlenet.

Suggested Reads

Google Hypocritical on the Importance of Privacy (Superb read)

                          

The purpose of this post, is to keep track of those “a-ha” details as I come across them. I’ll update this post as more details come along on my day to day.

• The Power Adapter of the Mac is magnetically shielded. You can put it on top of your computer while it’s still on and you won’t be afraid of loosing data. Not IBM’s Thinkpad’s power adapters are magnetically shielded
• The Ethernet port on the Macbook PRO makes regular ethernet cables work like Cross-over ethernet cables. This really comes in handy if you have another computer next to you and there’s not an ethernet switch nearby. You can just connect directly to that machine, share your internet, transfer files, no need to ask anybody for a cross over cable. This has been this way for years (at least since 2006), I’m not sure if HP or other laptops have these super duper ethernet cards in them.
• Back-lit keyboard. A blessing when coding in the darkness for those of us that sometimes need to look down for a special key. Oh and it will light up when it’s actually dark, freaking awesome.
• Multi touch touchpad (way before many other laptops started implementing it). Double finger tap for right click? can’t live without it
• Awesome battery life, and this is a pretty known fact about macbooks
• I haven’t had my OS crash in … I can’t remember last time it crashed fully
• Very quiet fan
• The power adapter connector has that little magnet, people can trip over it and it won’t pull your laptop to the floor




• The power adapter is modular, basically you can decide whether or not to carry with you a long ass cable or keep the adapter with the smaller patch cord that goes to your computer. Also you can switch it’s connector to the European style connector which comes with the computer. It seems apple knows its user base might travel abroad sometime




• The power adapter has these two ears which can open and close. Their purpose is to let you wrap the thinner cable that goes to the computer. It’s great if you don’t want to have too much cable laying around or when you’re on the go and you need to wrap up things inside your bag. Kudos to the designers of the Power Adapter




• As for the OS goes, I consider it a Linux where everything works right off
• In Mac OSX everything just works as expected or better. Some good examples of things that work better than in other OSes are Wireless configuration, Internet Sharing, Multiple Display configuration is amazingly intuitive to set up
• My last Macbook PRO I’ve been using it for almost 3 years and there’s no real need to get a new one, it’s still pretty fast after 2 major Mac OSX upgrades
• The Sleep and Wake up functionality actually work, I can’t say the same for my Alienware and Vista, where sometimes it will never wake up, or it won’t really be sleeping and it’ll get all hot and kill the battery
• If you ever open the Macbook, it’s a like a “work of art” inside. The way they’ve arranged everything, changing a hardrive or the keyboard is very easy and quite fun
• The native tool for screen shots is really convenient, not only for all the different ways in which you can snap your screen, but it’s also a nice pixel measuring tool for web developers and graphic designers
• Having a console, which comes with all the standard linux tool makes you remember windows and it’s cmd.exe and laugh about how arcaic it is
• Being able to have the Automator to Visually Script things like Resizing a Bunch of Pictures and copying them somewhere else once you’ve downloaded big resolution images from your camera and you want to upload them to flickr… priceless
• /Applications/Utilities/Console.app – a debugging blessing to find out why things might be going wrong with a specific process. I should probably not brag about the software since that’s getting into Mac OSX realm and that’s a whole different subject of why you can’t go back, again Linux that works right off, or Linux for Dummies.
• Pressing Space bar over files on the Finder brings that super fast preview for Images, PDFs, Videos and even audio files
• Being able to Customize the Finder adding and removing buttons to simplify or specialize it (equivalent of Windows Explorer)
• Burning CD/DVDs is amazingly simple, no need for 3rd party software
• Typing on a Mac keyboard is addicting, feels really good on the finger tips, the sound of it is music to my ears
• No more viruses to fear, or antiviruses to slow you down

                          

Today Techcrunch posts how Twitter is closing a New Venture Round at $1 billion valuation.

                          

- Traffic lights would have sensors for about a mile before each on every direction, no need to have people sitting at red lights when there are no cars coming. Current sensors suck balls.

- All highways would have 50mph minimum speed limit, and optionally a 90mph speed limit.

- To get a driver license you’d have to complete an obstacle course at a speed of at least 60mph. People who can’t do this should not be allowed to drive.

- Cars would Jam Cellphones Signals as soon as they start moving. I’m sick of stupid people on zombie mode when driving, they’re damn dangerous for everyone around, not to mention the ones texting while driving, those probably deserve to have accidents and die or get a big scare as a process of natural selection, too bad that when it happens they kill innocent people along the way.

- If you waste 3 seconds to get your car moving when a light turns green, the traffic light will take a picture of your license plate and send you a ticket for wasting 3 seconds times the number of people you have behind you.

- Drawbridges would be disabled everywhere between 7-10am and between 4-7pm. It’s ridiculous how many man/years in productivity are wasted everyday when these things open up and hold up hundreds of cars so that one stupid boat can pass, specially at peak hours.

- In the future, if cars are to drive themselves, there’d be controlling computers at intersections making sure cars don’t have to ever stop, coordinating car speeds, making them go from all directions at the same time and trying to keep a minimum separation between them only by a few feet. It’d be pretty exciting to go through an intersection on a world like this. No more stupid traffic lights.

If I think of more I’ll keep updating this list.

                          

Repost if you can. This ad is the first TV Ad ever to be run nationwide in Pro of Marijuana legalization. It started today, 4/20 “four twenty” a date that matches the pot-iconic number. It’s time it’s legalized, it’s not like they’re not smoking, you might as well tax it, create jobs, export it and explode a billion dollar industry. If America does it, the rest of the world will follow, and damn it, it’ll be cool as hell.

                          

• American Airlines for the first time had really good food during the flight. Also the movies on demand rocked, I could watch Valkyrie and Yes Man.
• As we started to descend I realized I would not see the sun again during the whole vacation. Anywhere from 10,000 meters to like 100mts from the ground there were layers and layeres of clouds and fog.
• Subway cars are tiny



• The subway system is a piece of cake
• Every thing is twice as expensive as in New York, and it pisses me off
• There’s a never ending drizzle
• At first I thought the whole place would sound like I was in a harry potter movie, so far I’ve only heard Polish, German, Portuguese, Italian, and very little English with British Accent
• Everything reminds me of my wife, traveling with her is 10 times more fun than traveling alone
• It’s been only a few hours, hopefully I’ll get used in a couple of days on how crossing the street works, even though there’s signs in most places “Look right!” “Look Left”, I still have to think hard to figure out where cars are coming from on some streets. It’s all so crazy, they should switch.



• I forgot my power adapter
• Everything is too expensive, 20 pounds for the internet connection on the hotel is not good at all, that’s like $30 usd. In 2 days I’d pay my monthly ISP with that amount of money back home
• I still think the US is the best fucking country in the world, no matter how much people hate it, I find everything in america so convenient it’s hard to change it for any other country, at least for me

Update
In the afternoon after I walked more then I got more excited after I went to a few landmarks like the London Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Picadilli Circus (below). I finally got some sleep, but I still feel that I’ve some jetlag on me, so I’ll take more of this sunday to sleep it off, that’s what vacation is for, resting.

The conclusion of the first day, most things in this country are backwards. I’ll try to make a list of them, it’s not only the driving. The bread toaster this morning was backwards, you’d get the bread down by pulling a lever up… wtf.

                          

That’s a screnshot of my wife’s iPhone finally running skype.

We just tried it for a few minutes and:

Good

• Looks and feels like skype. It evens has all the sounds you’ll hear on the desktop client
• There’s no lag when it comes to Instant Messaging
• Sound Quality is Great
• It’s a great option to make calls when you are traveling outside of your own country. Now you can take your iPhone with you and not pay for international roaming to effing AT&T (or your carrier) and use any internet enabled WiFI network to make your calls. It will rock even more if you have SkypeOut. Update: According to GigaOM the application works only over WiFI, which is great for me. When you’re out you use the regular phone. If you travel abroad, just piggyback on some WiFI network you find.

The Bad

• We could call from her iPhone to my Skype client running on MacOSX, but I couldn’t call her back
• The iPhone’s lack of background application running kills the purpose of skype. You’d have to have the application open all the time for it to be useful. As soon as the app closes your session dies, so there’s no way to get notified if someone called or messaged you
• The contact list (if you have hundreds of contacts) was very laggy to load

So far this is just a glimpse of what phones will be able to do in the future when wireless internet will be as common as electricity. When I first heard about WiMax the first thing that came to mind was “No more cellphone bills!”. The day we have broadband internet access everywhere for free (think the wireless spectrum that will be left for grabs once the TV stations go all digital) all we’ll need is an iPod (since it supposedly runs on the iPod too) or internet mobile phone and Skype or similar VoIP software.

Related Posts
Review: Skype for iPhone. Verdict: Awesome.
Skype calls over 3G working on 3.0 Beta
Skype Now Officially Available for the iphone

                          

I feel it’s my geek given duty to make a post about this presentation. I was lucky to finally have the time to watch their hour long presentation and Q&A session at the Game Developer Conference 2009 (which ends a couple of days from today). They could have not picked a better place to finally demo their technology.

In short, they’ve introduced a huge new concept to the video game industry, I’d call it “Cloud Gaming” to not only host the games, but also host the processing juice. You won’t need a console anymore, they keep the hardware to execute and stream the game to your screen. They support TV (with a miniconsole), PC and Mac.

So bear with me, they say they have solved the issue that you’re thinking about now, Lag. The people behind this worked on apple to create Quicktime, and they identified differences between what it takes to compress linear (regular) video, vs Interactive Video. They say their compression algorithm doesn’t take seconds of lag (like when you stream over a webcam), but miliseconds. They have custom chips to process the graphics, and I bet they might even built their own network protocol right on top of IP.

So what are some of the implications of this:

• We’ll all be able to finally play Crysis and even more demanding games on low end PCs
• No more buying more hardware, no more upgrading your PC to be able to run games, no more buying consoles
• All your games live on the platform, so you can play from any computer, and you’ll keep the state of your game until the last time you hit the Pause button
• Your friends can see you play, live. I bet we’ll be able to see live tournaments, we’ll start seeing a new breed of famous people get more attention, the Elite gamers. Imagine seeing the best Call of Duty player in the world playing live
• New Genres of video games will emerge on this platform, maybe even new genres of entertainment, think new Live Broadcast shows where participants use an avatar to either act or compete (game show)
• Game Developers not need to think of the rendering limitations that they might have nowadays, and will be able to design games that could only be imagined in the past. Render quality only thought for movies will now exist for video games, think of virtual reality now
• There’s about 100 million PCs/Macs/Laptops out there that are not ready today to play high end games, now they’ll have the possibility of playing virtually any game by installing a 1Mb plugin from OnLive.com
• Takes Piracy out of the Business Equation
• A bigger gaming audience makes an even better case for companies placing advertisement in video games, maybe there will be a lot more high end free games with bigger audiences, think the next Grand Theft Auto coming out for free with superb real life like graphics rendering, all ad sponsored and free to the consumer. The amount of people that you could have playing a great game for free would make other developers think twice about charging for their games and having their virtual worlds ad sponsored.
• No more installs
• Now multiplayer will have almost no latency since all players live inside their datacenter, you only get the latency of your ISP if there’s any
• Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft must be shitting their pants
• Services that sell used games are going to be selling vintage and their business will be reduced

However I think there will always be room for the old consoles. This is the biggest entertainment industry in the world, we have grown up with consoles for almost 30 years and there’s a lot of changes to push into people’s minds:

• How do you convince me, that finally made up my mind after years and dropped $500 on a PS3 to play with my friends in latin america online to switch to this, if my friends will probably have no way to even have access to the system in years to come?
• How do you convince PC gamers that rather pay for the hardware and pirate the games? (There’s plenty of those, probably the majority of the PC gaming population outside the US never plays for a PC game, and doesn’t get into consoles because they pirate the games) into renting or buying games on the cloud?
• How do you convince all the people that they should switch when their gaming experience depends entirely on being connected to the internet. So If the ISP is having issues I can’t play? isn’t my console awesome?

It seems that many of these complains are similar to all the complains brought upon business models that didn’t exist online and that are now thriving. This presentation left me with my mouth wide open, and I highly recommend you watch it. You’ll be blown away by the power of the UI, and how as you Browse for games, you can even see how other people are playing live, it’s like streaming video is nothing for OnLive. Really sick technology.

In the case that they succeed, I just can’t wait for them to have competition by the existing big brands, it’s going to get so interesting once cloud gaming becomes the defacto platform, maybe we as consumers will end up playing games for free, all sponsored with in game ads.

Just by listening to the guy if you’re a techie, your mind will start to fly to barely start to imagine the awesomeness of the technology that should be behind this. I can imagine anything from custom virtualization technology, to custom GPUs, custom network cards, custom network protocols on top of IP, deals with major internet backbone networks, ISPs, deals with game publishers, sick level API development, incomprehensible comprehension technology for my retard brain… when I see shit like this, I always think… how the hell is there people that still believe in god? Mankind is the closest thing there is to something like that! I’m thankful for people in this world that can think so big.

The service is supposed to launch next Winter 2009, but you can sign up to be a beta tester

                          

Having all this money, there’s an ingenious evil marketing strategy you can implement that will make you look good, get your free press and it’s only going to cost about $150,000, which is the equivalent of let’s say 3.6 hours worth of your revenue, so think about it, in 3 and half hours from now you should have the budget for it.

If you have made up your mind 3.6 hours after reading this, here is what you need to do:

1) Start modifying the logo of your company on every holiday or special occasion.
2) Create and promote a competition in all schools across the country for kids to redesign an “out of the box” version of your logo, and offer $50,000 in prizes.

Open the competition to all U.S. residents between the ages of 5 and 18 who attend elementary and secondary schools (i.e. grades K-12) in the U.S. The National Winner will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to your main Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. Also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab. (This is where you’ll spend roughly $50k)

The Prizes will go as follow:

What your company gets in exchange:
Free Press on all major media outlets TWICE, once when the competition is announced and once when the winner is announced. You know that if you wanted to get that amount of attention it would cost you millions of dollars in advertising. Nothing beats free press baby!

Best of all, you will inspire millions of kids ages 5 to 18 to admire your company and your brand, you will imprint your logo in their brains permanently, they will redraw it over and over while thinking how to make your company better. They will even write essays about you.

All the kids get to think they’ll make the best logo and win the first prize (poor bastards). This is the best time to create an image of trust in their minds when they think of your brand. In the future it will be hard for them to pick any other competing company over yours. In the end they will also be more than willing to work for you once they’re old enough.

And remember… Don’t Look Evil!

                          

Starting with my personal Twitter History
According to TwitterHolic, I joined Twitter on February 28th 2007 at 7:53:01pm. Since then I’ve sent 9,880 updates (as of this blog post), or about 13 Twitter updates a day. That probably makes me an addict since day one, and I admit it.

First Twitter was fascinating because it was a lot of fun, sharing and getting to know a little better how some “internet friends”’s lifes were like, and sharing mine with them. Now, I find myself using it in more advanced ways, and trying to analyze how trends are spread and what causes you to have an ever growing number of genuine loyal followers.

Twitter didn’t invent the idea of Micro blogging, I believe Jaiku has the credit for this, at the beginning we all opened accounts on as many services as possible (Jaiku, Twitter, identica, plurk, pwnce, friendfeed,…), but it seems Twitter’s simplicity (and board of directors and contacts) had the magic to grow virally like no other service in its field.

One thing they did right from the beginning is that they opened up the service with an accessible API for developers available from the very early days. I remember using a Python-Twitter and being fascinated with how easy it was, then I wrote integration scripts for (the almost deceased now) wedoit4you.com’s blog directory and twitter, for MyBloop.com, and scripts to send me direct messages which twitter would send to my cell phone via SMS when my linux servers were having trouble.

They had a very rough first year in terms of scalability (they still have some issues), the service was always going down, and for a time, I found myself cheating on it on plurk, service which I also found fascinating until I reached it’s “Nirvana“. Along the worth mentioning competitors there was also Pwnce.com which closed up shop last December, and I don’t blame them, they were probably in this to be number one, and they realized they just couldn’t keep up with Twitter’s popularity.

Many Twitter based services came along, and also many competitors including Facebook which copied the whole notification thing and put it on the facebook timeline feed, and it became really annoying cause with Twitter being down all the time you would be tempted to try Plurk for a while, and then ping.fm came along to post on all of them from one place.

Introducing Power Twitter
About a month ago, I found a Firefox extension called Power Twitter that made me abandon ping.fm for good, and therefore all the other micro blogging services. I’m doing all my micro blogging on twitter now.

Twitter likes to be proud of it’s simplicity, but I think little by little they will have to add functionality that us addict/advanced twitter users appreciate from extensions like Power Twitter. They should thank Power Twitter for bringing back some of us.

Where Twitter is now
So now that the Twitter service is a lot more stable, and it’s grown a lot in the past two years, it seems that it’s becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Every day you hear something on the TV, and Google News is a good way to see how much web press they get every few hours. This in my Internet business experience is the best thing that can happen to your company. The amount of genuinely interested traffic that press can get you can’t never be matched to any publicity campaign, so I’d say Twitter is already profitable by not having to spends tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in publicity.

But let’s see a little bit of numbers.

The following graphic is why I think Pwnce’s board made a wise decision to leave the race and move on to other things, they were in it to be number one or a close number two, but it didn’t happen, Twitter has no match in its arena as it is right now, and it’ll be very hard even for a company like Google to build something similar and compete, they’d be better off buying Twitter (but twitter can’t sell out for less than a 10 figure sum).

Monthly Visits: Twitter vs Jaiku vs Plurk. 54.2M as of Jan 09

As you can see, it’ll be very hard for the competitors to catch on, even for Jaiku which was the first to do this, and which got acquired by Google. As it is, they’re clearly the number one by several orders of magnitude. The others might have decent businesses going for them, but they won’t be a billion dollar landmark on the internet. Competition will always be good though.

So they beat everyone in their field very early, now it’s time to take over the world, let’s see what Twitter has to do to become a billion dollar company (be it on their own, or by valuation and acquisition)

Uniques: Twitter vs Facebook

This graphic shows unique visitor count according to compete.com for Twitter and Facebook until January 09. Twitter had 5.9 million unique visitors monthly at that time, today analysts are talking about 7 million uniques a month. Twitter is not a fool and that’s why they dind’t sell out to Facebook, they’re going for an user base as big (and of course bigger) than Facebook’s, which shows here some 68 million users as of January 09.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder has said it clearly too (and that’s why he didn’t sell out either), his goal is to connect EVERYBODY, so he’s probably looking to get traffic like that of Yahoo’s or Google’s 131 million unique visitors a day, and of course the whole planet the day we’re all finally using the internet the way we use electricity (that’s going to be a really interesting to live on).

So how can it make money you ask
Before you read this section, keep in mind that Twitter has already achieved $55 million dollars in funding. To have an idea how much this money can last, try to remember how YouTube used to spend around $1 million dollars monthly in bandwidth alone right before being acquired by Google. Twitter by no means eats that much bandwidth, and it’s a small operation of 29 employees. Making things expensive, put each employee at an average salary of $100k a year, plus let’s say $20k a month in (bandwidth, hardware, office) expenses to cover my basis, that would put their costs in around $4 million a year (I believe it’s much lower if they run things cheap like we do). They got enough money to run for 13 years if their costs didn’t grow, so let’s say they have enough money for sure to run for the next 5 years without making a penny, 5 years is a long time to make things happen on the internet. So in response to Neal’s Post, the internet and the whole financial system would have to go down for a Twipocalypse to happen, not even this economy, or a depression would make it go away, the service is FREE, and they got plenty of money to run it for a long time.

This graphic shows the number of Visits per month the site it’s getting (according to compete.com, it could be more). As of January 2009, this was 54 million visits a month. That makes around 10 visits a day per unique visitor, not bad at all, almost like email.

So let’s do a simple exercise, thinking very very small. If Twitter was run by a couple noobs that weren’t really ambitious and just wanted to make a good living off of it, they could be raking in right now, easy $12-$50 million a year without being very creative.

I’ve seen way smaller sites with good sales team selling CPM campaigns at $20, $25 and even higher. I cannot imagine a good sales team selling CPM campaings on a site like Twitter, which could be perfectly well targeted based on reading your twitter update history and that of your followers, your re-twitts, etc. Let’s use the numbers of January:

With only ONE Ad, and without growing the traffic:
54,000,000 visits at $20 CPM => $1,080,000

A small minded biz model with just ONE ad would bring now $12.96 million dollars a year minest $4M in costs and then effing taxes, would leave them with abour $4M cash in their pockets. Some people would settle for $4M a year, but this is petty cash for what it can make, and you could argue that it’s a very high CPM with this economy, but even with a lower CPM still it’d make enough to make the founders a decent living with a couple million dollars a year, my point is it can be monetized and run profitably without doing anything out of the ordinary. But of course, Twitter is not a million dollar business, it’s a billion dollar business.

Since they don’t show any obvious business model to the public now, there’s a lot of morons out there thinking the site can’t make money, or that Twitter “doesn’t know how it’s going to monetize…” YEAH RIGHT.

Still thinking on Ad-Revenue based business models, let your mind fly now, and think how much money they could make if they slowly showed us that they’re building a more powerful search engine (before Google deploys a Twitter search) and they had targeted ads on their search results just like Google’s #1 income source.

As they have more users sending updates, they’ll have more and more information about everything happening in the world, url recommendations from all over the world for the content that matters, from respectable twitter users, showing us the latest and most relevant content. If they could manage to index all of this information this information and searches would yield results as good as Google’s we have in our hands a billion dollar business with sponsored ads, just like Google’s #1 source of income.

I personally do a lot of searches every day on Twitter as it is and find a lot of stuff that’s more up to date than Google’s results, plus you find related people that know about the subjects you are looking for. That’s gotta have tremendous value for the company given that Search Traffic is the traffic that it’s monetized the best today on the web since it’s the one with the highest conversion rates for advertisers.

With it’s API alone, there’s already an ecosystem around it building companies, some may even be monetizing already and keeping it quiet. Twitter also, in another non-creative way, could charge for use of its API, but I think this would cripple their grow and deter companies away from using it. However it’s possible in the future they will have enterprise access to their API for large amounts of transactions per second and they could make a fortune on this alone, without even altering one bit the current user experience.

Another way it could be making a lot of money without ever changing the user experience would be to have data mining services for marketers. Subdivisions of Nielsen make hundreds of millions a year on data analysis services that big corporations pay for every month. Twitter has an awesome potential to analyze what people love, hate, want, bought, sold, go, read, do… only doing this I think it has one hell of a business model. It just needs to focus on growing enough so that they can have enough data to make it a really valuable source for analysis. And they’re focused on growing, growing, growing, that’s all that matters at this point.

Then, there’s other business ideas I won’t mention because I might pursue them myself, and there’s also the obvious exit strategy of getting bought by bigger companies when you have a billion dollar valuation. Potential buyers… Yahoo! for example is looking to grow it’s search by getting into social networks, I think Twitter is both an amazing social network and the next tool for searching the most up to date information. I’d even dare to call Twitter “a human powered search engine index of the most current information in the world”, and that also has to be appealing to @Google which only a week ago has created a few Twitter accounts and it’s a little scary to see Google for the first time interacting live with people, doing replies, and even RTs (Re-Tweets, a name for forwarding what others have twittered).

I hope that after doing this very simple analysis you also find it funny when you read or hear people saying that “Twitter doesn’t know how it’s going to make money”. No VCs in their right mind, in this economy, would drop $55 million dollars on a company that didn’t have their shit straight.

When I hear these kinds of comments, I feel glad there’s very naive or short sighted people in this world.

I feel better now, I just wish I could invest money in it. For now I’ll be glad to have a few more followers

                          

Last week I traveled by car from Washington,DC to New York, and on every service station I stopped along the highway, it was pretty much impossible to get a starbucks coffee because the lines were ridiculously long.

I thought it was a Manhattan phenomenon that so much people would want to pay for expensive coffee, given that you can actually have really good coffee for $1 or less if you think about it.

Has the dollar lost so much value, or we no longer think about how much things are worth?

To put it in perspective, I often think about the cost of energy and all of the things you can do with a gallon of gas.

The most expensive gallon of gas I’ve seen so far in the United States has been about $5 and we were outraged. But seriously, we’re paying way more for coffee.

To get a gallon you’d need about 16 cups, let’s say each small cup of starbucks costs $3, that’s $48 a gallon. The average car holds up to 15 gallons, you’d have to pay about $720 to fill up the tank.

Coffee is a freaking renewable resource, it can grow on it’s own for all we know, why do we accept to pay so much for it?

Oil heats your home, Oil is used to make electricity so you can read this, Oil can transport you and your family with a lot of shit in the car for miles, it’s been extracted out of the earth, it’s been processed by super expensive technology, there’s shitload of R&D to find it, if it wasn’t for it, pretty much billions of people wouldn’t even exist, we couldn’t travel or transport goods, and best of all, it’s non renewable… why the hell is it so cheap? or is the right question, why is coffee so damn expensive?

Fashion, laws of reason don’t apply

If George Boole would enter Lord & Taylors, he’d come back 15 minutes later with an Ak47 after loosing his mind and shoot everyone in the store for being so stupid.

If I showed you this, how much would you say it’s worth, a black jacket and white shirt for a woman, that pretty much looks like an every day use garment

$50, or maybe even $150 for the whole thing (and I still think that’s expensive) right?

Think again…

$200 for the shirt, and $500 for the jacket, $700 fucking dollars! And that’s without shoes, skirt and jewelry, seriously women, what are you thinking? are you thinking?

And then I looked around me, and there was this herd of women lurking around the store, looking at all the clothes like if they were hunting for their prey, they had this twisted look in their eyes as they checked every piece of clothing.

And why? Why do they even there pricing a jacket for $500 (or more, I saw even more expensive ugly crap in there) Because I think that Fashion companies rely on the fact that there’s dumb ass people that have no clue on what to do with the money, and who have lost perspective of all the things they could be doing with the same amount of money, or who really don’t have a clue of basic aritmetics, or the “greather than” operator, and that a higher numbers on a price tag means more money?

Sometimes I really feel like saying Recession my ass, and I often wonder if all the people being layed off are just suffering the consequences of the irrational fear on investors, which has been manufactured by the media puppeteers, who sometimes decide to sell us Britney’s clubbing stunts and another day scare us with “the crisis”.

And Fucking Christmas, every year I see how much faker it gets. With so many layoffs the TV should be telling you to keep your money for food, and to just go and enjoy your family and plan on what to do next year. But that’s a whole different subject for another post.

                          

Well over a year ago I asked a Joost executive why not use some of that money they recently had gotten in funding into going for the living room via Xbox or PS3. I got a politically correct answer about yes, we’ll do it eventually, but that’s not our focus right now.

In the meantime, Hulu was building their platform for the web, and 4 months later it was king of the hill. Joost then had to rethink their distribution and ditched their p2p client for an all Flash streaming based approach, which seems to start picking up traffic but the differences in the audience sizes are ridiculous. A tip for your current approach, and it has to be done a month ago: Allow non-signed users to watch your some of your content (short-clips), and allow for embedding, worked wonders for YouTube, it’d be awesome for all that niche oriented content you have. (Update Nov 22 2008: Joost has just released video embedding!)

But even though Hulu has almost 10 times more traffic now than Joost, it’s earnings are still a joke compared to the advertising earnings of Broadcast and Cable, it’s just peanuts. With Ad Spending going down, it would make sense to me as an advertiser to somehow stay in the living room, with cheaper CPM, and better targeting. Hulu & Joost on the Xbox could do that for me, if only they were available in the living room.

Netflix on the other hand, monetizes month to month, and they also saw the opportunity of getting to your living room in different ways. They’ve tried with their own $100 box, but I find the most interesting and convenient way to get an audience of at least 15 million people that spend hours and hours wasting their time in front of their TV playing video games (with barely any ads) in the Xbox console.
They give me as an Xbox Live customer yet another option to keep my Xbox Live subscription and think twice about getting the PS3 and ditching the Xbox live payments since my Netflix subscription gains added value cause I don’t have to plug my laptop anymore to the tv. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have all those Hulu and Joost shows there too?

Netflix has released their stream service this week via Xbox, and it’s exactly the way I suggested to Joost, make it a free download, negotiate with Microsoft an ad revenue agreement, I can think up so many business models from this partnership… I wish I had super powers.

In any case, pictures speak louder than words some times. I hope bizdevs at Hulu & Joost take a look at this and remotely consider this as a probably great channel for content distribution. This could be your chance to grow your audience several orders of magnite, just become a Microsoft Live developer and port your technology (wish it was as easily done as said, I know), Internet Video needs to compete in the living room, forget about mobile for now, the living room is here now.

See More pictures of my Xbox Live update experience.

                          

About Strands

Strands is a life streaming service that helps users discover new things based on what their friends like and do, and allows them to see what’s hot among the people they care about.

                          

This article is about why I think they will be the real winners of Internet Video, with a different business model than the free/ad based approach of Hulu and Joost.

Their current business model
I’ll attempt to disect their current business model, which has proven to work, they now have over 8 million subscribers and a catalog of over 100,000 movies, revenues of over $1.2 billion, and a net income of $66.9 million last year.

But the goal has always been to deliver the movies instantly, the technology wasn’t there, but now it seems to be here, and probably it’s also gotten to the point that the bandwidth of delivering a movie is cheaper than the associated current costs of delivering a real DVD to your door.

Being a customer for many years, I can guess some of the costs involved per movie are:

• Custom Envelopes (which also make money cause they add advertisement in them)
• Employee Processing costs (cataloging, putting cds in envelopes, receiving CDs in envelopes)
• Shipping costs (at least $0.47 for USPS)
• Replacing costs (many DVDs break, scratch, and get stolen, boy have I gotten my DVDs stolen)
• Royalties costs (no clue, but they must be there)

Somehow, Reed Hastings and his team figured out a way to make money after these costs, maybe from the people that pay every month who don’t really have the time to watch 12 or more movies a week.

Let’s do the actual numbers to get the average customer price.

REVENUE PER CUSTOMER:
$1,200,000,000 revenues /8,000,000 subscribers = $150 a year avg. revenue per subscriber

$150/12 months = $12.5 avg. subscriber monthly rev.

NET INCOME PER CUSTOMER:

$66,900,000 net income / 8,000,000 subscribers = $8.36 a year avg. cost per subscriber

$8.36 / 12 months = $0.7 avg. subscriber monthly rev.

If we substract the net income from the revenue, we’ll get the average costs monthly per user, that’s
$11.8 a month, in costs.

Estimated Cost Per Movie (Now, CDs shipped)
The company ships on average, 1.9 million discs a day, that’s 57 million discs a month. They have 8 million users, that makes the average user watch around 7 movies a month. (I watch at least 3 a week, that’s 12 movies a month, 3 times more than the average user).

So, let’s say the average subscriber watches only 3 movies per week, that’s at least 12 movies every month. We grab those $11.8 and divide it by 12 movies

Average Cost per Movie $11.8/7.125 movies monthly = $1.65

The Online Business Model

Netflix has understood that the key to evolution on the TV/Movie business does not lie on the browser, it’s right there on the TV Room where we have been trained to sit and be entertained for hours. Only us early adopters, or people with no TV really have the adaptation capabilities to watch content on our computer screens, or we know that we need an HDMI cable and can do the whole setup to get our computers to play video on the living room.

This means the audiences for video on the internet are considerably smaller (Today) than those of TV, the best way to put it is by grabbing the numbers of the biggest internet video audience so far, The 2008 summer olympics… they only generated $6 million in ads, vs $1 BILLION that the broadcast generated… why? cause the big audience lies right there in the confort of the Living Room, or wherever you have your tv.

Netflix knows that there’s a great deal of people that have:
– TiVO
– XBox
– Other video game consoles

They made a first step when they came out with the RoKU, their own way of putting Netflix on a box in your living room. They’re cutting out deals with Samsung to put the same technology on Blu-ray players.

They will come out this Nov. 19th on the revamped Xbox Live which sits already on 10 million households with XBox Live Gold Subscriptions. I already have a Netflix subscription, but my guess is that at least 4 million of those 10 million XBox live subscribers don’t have it, and they will be tempted to subscribe. If Microsoft and Netflix are smart, they will allow those users to give it a try, and once they see the benefits, those $9.99 will be worth their while.

Xbox Live gets to keep the user base that’s doubting if its time to buy that PS3 and toss the subscription. Netflix on the other hand will almost double it’s customer base, if it manages to convince 1/2 of Xbox Live subscribers to give this a try.

(I wonder where Boxee stands in all this, they could also cut a deal with Netflix if they amass a millions of users at some point, although they seem to be doing something with Apple, and this would compete against the Apple Store per per view model, which BLOWS!)

At what price?

Here’s where the analysis gets tough. Microsoft has huge infrastructure, and Netflix just announced another partnership with TiVO (see, they know the war is won in your living room), but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth.

Engadget also confirmed that their streaming quality will be nothing but HD! (only 300 titles to start though)

So we estimated that currently netflix has about an average cost $1.65 per movie shipped (might be less if the average user watches less than 12 movies a month) and we see that bandwidth costs are dropping. Let’s take Amazon EC3 (which is expensive to me, given we can do it at a much lower price at MyBloop.com):

“Over 150 TB per Month $0.10 per GB”

If you’ve ever watched a movie compressed in DivX, you know you can get a feature film at very good quality eating up only 700Mb… let’s say that Netflix will actually do this in HD, and they had films in double the DivX quality, and each film would be 1.5Gb, it would only cost them $0.15, hell, even if it was 3 Gb or even 5 Gb per movie, you’re still below the 50 cent price, add to that royalties and other costs, at you are still way below the $1.65 cost per movie of today. Let’s say it’ll cost $0.65 per movie streamed.

That’s a saving of $1 per movie, however this convenience will make the number of movies delivered (streamed) to increase, but this might mean they’ll cut better deals in bandwidth getting the costs even lower.

Not to mention the savings to the environment, less DVDs would need to be printed, less paper and ink wasted in envelopes, no gas burnt by USPS, and all the carbon emissions generated in each step of the CD delivery process.

What this means also, is that Netflix will probably get rid of many of its +2000 employees, bringing costs further down, I will add less and less DVDs to my queue as the online catalog grows.

Helps fight Piracy

Another big plus of a full blown catalog (maybe available a few years from now) is movie piracy mitigation. Instead of the MPAA suing their customers, or making things hard for everyone being forced to distribute content with DRM based solutions that never work, what you need to do is have your product easily accessible to as many people, legally. I strongly believe most people are good, otherwise you couldn’t go out on the street and make it back in one piece every day. As a side note, I find it very funny that the MPAA is always asking Internet Video distributors (including netflix) to add DRM to their streams, but they don’t put DRM on their DVDs, anyone could get the 6 DVD subscription to Netflix and copy all the DVDs, there’s just no need to do it, cause Netflix makes it so convenient for you to get more and more movies.

So Why do I care?
I’m just very interested in what happens with TV, how it will manage to survive or evolve, but in this case, there’s a financial incentive.

Ladies and gentlemen, just check out the price of netflix on the stock market, we’ve been blessed with a recent crash, If I were you, I’d be buying NFLX right now.

So the question is, what’s gonna be the price of NFLX a few months or years from now? I’ll leave that answer to Henry Blodget, I think it all depends on execution (get XBox right and then expand to other services and the user base will easily double or triple for Netflix, then go international), they’re targeting the biggest audience ever, the living room audience, the one that makes billions of dollars in the Olympics, the one that’s fed up with the passive entertainment model and who wants to see what they want whenever they want, to share this experiences with friends.

I also care since I no longer have cable TV and I’m constantly looking for legal video entertainment of professional quality. Companies like Hulu and Joost should follow the same steps and try to go to our living room, Netflix not only has a great catalog of movies, but they have entire shows, some you can already watch, for example I got to stream 2 seasons of the office back to back on Netflix, before they were available on Hulu.

(Hulu || Joost) for Free TV streaming on the living room

As for Joost, they should probably acknowledge they’ve lost a great deal to Hulu, which streams 100 million videos a month, it would take a major breakthrough in content to beat Hulu, and even though Hulu is putting big numbers, they just can’t compare with the ad revenue that you can generate on the living room. For Joost (if Hulu didn’t start already) there’s still the opportunity to port their tecnology to PS3, to Wii, why not even come out with an Xbox free download that will allow you to watch Joost on your living room. There’s certainly going to be a lot of people not willing to sign up for Netflix, and the Free TV offer Joost has would be of interest to this audience. If I were Michael Volpi I’d try to use a considerable part of my resources geared in this direction, If Hulu gets in the living room before Joost, it’s game over.

                          

With your help, we can deliver high-speed Internet access to more New Yorkers.

What if I told you we could use empty TV channels to connect tens of thousands of New Yorkers to the Internet?

The technology exists today. But some members of the New York City Council are trying to stop us from using it.

The Council has bought into a corporate misinformation campaign, and is now holding a public hearing next Monday to consider a resolution that would keep this technology from the New Yorkers who need it most.

You can help the Council make the right decision by speaking out at the hearing:

WHAT: NYC City Council Hearing on White Spaces
WHEN: Monday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m.
WHERE: City Hall Committee Room, enter at the Intersection of Centre and Worth Streets

The latest front in the battle over universal Internet access is “white spaces” — empty frequencies between TV channels on the public airwaves. In New York City, 20 percent of these television airwaves sit idle. New technology can open this unused spectrum to powerful high-speed Internet services, bringing ubiquitous and affordable broadband to tens of thousands of New Yorkers now left off the grid.

Here’s the problem: Councilmember Gale Brewer and Speaker Christine Quinn have sponsored a draft resolution claiming white space devices could harm the Broadway industry in New York City. They, along with the Broadway League, maintain that white space devices will disrupt the wireless microphones used for Broadway shows. Numerous tests conducted by the FCC show, however, that this is not true.

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters and cell phone companies have been blitzing federal, state and local governments with misinformation to prevent white spaces from bringing the benefits of broadband to millions of people. They want to hoard this spectrum to stifle innovation and competition. If they win, we all lose.

Too many in this city have been left on the wrong side of the digital divide. The answer to getting New Yorkers connected is right in front of us:

Attend Monday’s Hearing

The hearing will be open to public testimony. Please come and urge the City Council to reject the resolution and speak out for opening up white spaces for a better Internet.

With your help on Monday, we can help deliver the Internet for everyone in New York City.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
http://www.freepress.net/
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

1. Learn more about white spaces at www.freepress.net/whitespaces

                          

I recently had the privilege to attend the US Open for the first time in my life, and as with everything I started questioning things:

Scoring

What’s with the ilogical scoring? Who came up with 15,30,40,Deuce, Advantage…
Why such an almost random sequence… why not, 1,2,3 ? or if anything 15,30,45!!!

Why when a set is tied 5-5 do they have to do it till 7 (tie-break)?, just let the first to go to 6 win that set, as if the matches weren’t long enough.

Callings

So 0, is not called zero, it’s called Love? wtf
Update: Simon expained it’s “L’oeuf“, which means “Egg” in french, probably a relationship between the shape of a “0″ and an Egg.

When a serve hits the NET, they call it LET? wtf

And when they go into “deuce” it always sounds as if they’re calling the players Douchebags…”Douche!!”

Other than that, it’s one hell of a game, one of endurance, precision, technique, focus, strategy, excitement, I loved it.

Thank you wifey for taking me there for my birthday, it was awesome.

                          

This probably means:
– No StumbleUpon toolbar :( (I’m a stumbleupon.com addict, I feel crippled with chrome because of this)
– No Cool Iris
– No Twitter extensions
– No weather extensions
– No firebug-like extensions
– No toolbars of any kind
– No Synced bookmarks

This means a lot of businesses would die if people were to embrace an extension-less browser. I think it’s a little scary when you allow one of the most important websites of the world to run the browser industry. Let’s hope people will stay distributed around IE, Mozilla, Safari and chrome, and that they don’t become the defacto browser, cause then they would really run the show.

Remember Google, don’t be evil, right?

Update:
Confirmed, no extensions as of this writing are available.

Taken from the Chromium developer FAQ:

Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?
A. Chromium doesn’t have an extension system yet. This is something we’re interested in adding in a future version.

To Mac Geeks
If you want to build it for mac, you can (supposedly, I’m in the process off, I’ll post screenshots or video if I manage to do it sucessfully)

Here are instructions

                          

I went to look for the definition of the word that’s in everyone’s mouth nowadays:

“In macroeconomics, a recession is a decline in a country’s real gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year”

Source: wikipedia.org

Aha, so recession is the consecutive decrease of the real GDP.

Then I went and looked for the GDP numbers to see if the real GDP of the US has had any negative economic growth during the last 4 quarters, this on the BEA website (U.S. Department of Commerce – Bureau of Economic Analisys)
Here are the GDP growth quarter to quarter since 2006

2006q1	4.8
2006q2	2.4
2006q3	1.1
2006q4	2.1
2007q1	0.6
2007q2	3.8
2007q3	4.9
2007q4	0.6
2008q1	0.6

These numbers from the BEA show the GDP rate of change in respect with each last quarter. If you look at the classical definition, there’s just been a slow growth, not negative grow, so we’re still not technically in recession, just in an economic slowdown.

The 0.6 growth has happened before (2007q1) and after that the q2 and q3 showed decent growth.

Maybe the economy can only grow so much its reaching a peak, what scares me though, it s the low interest rates added to the rising prices of OIL, they probably go in hand since we’re putting cheaper dollars out there so OPEC doesn’t want to loose the real value of their OIL, plus they like to abuse prices every now and then.

One thing is for sure, every world wide recession has been followed by the whims of the fuckers at OPEC whenever they decide to peak prices.

I believe a lot of this recession buzz has to do with the US elections, fear to get votes (they got us with the terrorists last time), it’s true there’s been a lot of shit happening with the mortgage crisis but that was something just waiting to happen when you give high risk loans to so many stupid people that can’t do basic math to consider all costs associated to purchasing a home while they already are deep in debt. Sadly most people in this country have no clue on how to manage their money, but I guess that’s good for the smart ones, you can sell anything to a lot of people.

In a real recession you don’t have movies with opening weekends of +$100M while the same week people sleep inline on video game stores to get the latest video games. You go out at night, and every restaurant is crammed with people, most businesses are doing good, at least in NY I don’t see the signs of recession anytime soon, what I see if probably a little inflation coming soon if something isn’t done.

You don’t see economy sectors like clothing and electronics have the growth they’ve recently had on a real recession (like the one I lived for years in my own country, where you have to worry about buying food day to day, and companies are closing left and right and finding a job is a blessing)

OIL Prices & US Presence in Iraq
The US is sitting in Iraq, “a country with at least 150 billion barrels of crude, and except for Saudi Arabia, the cheapest production costs in the world” – (Paul Roberts, The End of Oil), I believe it’s a good thing in a way that we’re there (for the economy, I’m against war by all means), but it seems even though there’s a strong US presence in the area, nothing can be done to mantain oil price stability and that could well send us in recession. Wish the government would explain one day in plain english “hey buddies, we’re gonna cut the bullshit, the war on terrorism was a nice lie we came up with to protect our economy, terrorism is the least of our worries compared to an energy crisis, we just need to keep the oil flowing at a decent price, please let us do our thing in Iraq, it was either us, or Saddam taking over Kuwait and maybe Saudi Arabia, and then we’d be in deep shit”

Let’s look at the GDP during and after the Golf War ((2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991)

1990q4	-3.0
1991q1	-2.0
1991q2	2.6
1991q3	1.9
1991q4	1.9
1992q1	4.2
1992q2	3.9
1992q3	4.0
1992q4  4.5
1993q1	0.5
1993q2	2.0
1993q3	2.1
1993q4	5.5

During the months of the war, we had negative growth, but look how nice growth was later down the line…, and we’re still growing, little but growing. Try to grow a trillion dollar economy quarter after quarter like the US, who’s your daddy?

Does the current administration want oil price stability?
The last 8 years of this nation have been run by two Oil men, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, you’d think one of their goals would be to keep oil prices stable… or maybe not ;)

Let’s hope the next president of the U.S. will be able to do something about oil prices, they’re the one thing that can bring this nation down, terrorism is probably a minor threat compared to a $200 oil barrel.

Maybe now it’s a great time to invest, maybe not, I’ll just quote two things Warren Buffet said to Fortune Magazine in April 2008:

“…when people panic, when fear takes over, or when greed takes over, people react just as irrationally as they have in the past”

I believe the media, and politics are trying to scare people with this whole recession buzz, we have to think and act rationally.

the second quote goes:

“You should get greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy”

Let em buzz about recession, maybe it’ll affect some stock investors, prices will drop, and it’ll be good for greedy people during fearful times. Might be good to look at that cheap YHOO now that MSFT supposedly dropped their offer, but that’s another story, and probably unrelated since the stock market is a different beast and shouldn’t really be that much coupled with macroeconomics.

                          

Today I read about the new updates, and I read something that caught my eye at Mackinando.com.

it executes JavaScript six times faster than the rest

I go to the Safari Site, and they compare themselves with a previous version, Firefox, and Opera (not IE, not even worth mentioning)

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so I googled for “JavaScript Benchmark“, and tried the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark onboth Firefox 2.0.0.12 and the shiny new Safari 3.1.

The machine used for this test is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM.

Here are the results side by side:

FIREFOX 2.0.0.12
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 15365.4ms +/- 1.7%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   2386.6ms +/- 7.9%
    cube:                733.0ms +/- 20.8%
    morph:              1269.8ms +/- 9.4%
    raytrace:            383.8ms +/- 37.1%

  access:               1386.2ms +/- 4.8%
    binary-trees:        201.6ms +/- 0.6%
    fannkuch:            294.8ms +/- 5.4%
    nbody:               691.2ms +/- 8.9%
    nsieve:              198.6ms +/- 1.5%

  bitops:               3461.2ms +/- 0.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   275.8ms +/- 0.6%
    bits-in-byte:        248.2ms +/- 0.7%
    bitwise-and:        2765.2ms +/- 0.5%
    nsieve-bits:         172.0ms +/- 4.7%

  controlflow:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%
    recursive:           153.4ms +/- 0.7%

  crypto:                527.2ms +/- 0.5%
    aes:                 230.8ms +/- 1.2%
    md5:                 147.4ms +/- 0.5%
    sha1:                149.0ms +/- 0.6%

  date:                 2551.8ms +/- 0.3%
    format-tofte:       1449.6ms +/- 0.3%
    format-xparb:       1102.2ms +/- 0.8%

  math:                 1312.6ms +/- 12.8%
    cordic:              497.4ms +/- 12.0%
    partial-sums:        501.6ms +/- 1.6%
    spectral-norm:       313.6ms +/- 36.1%

  regexp:                501.0ms +/- 0.2%
    dna:                 501.0ms +/- 0.2%

  string:               3085.4ms +/- 10.3%
    base64:              914.6ms +/- 3.4%
    fasta:               676.0ms +/- 35.4%
    tagcloud:            441.4ms +/- 0.6%
    unpack-code:         846.8ms +/- 25.4%
    validate-input:      206.6ms +/- 1.1%

SAFARI 3.1
========================
RESULTS
(means and 95% confidence intervals)
-----------------------------------------
Total:                 3368.8ms +/- 1.0%
-----------------------------------------

  3d:                   414.8ms +/- 1.9%
    cube:               132.2ms +/- 2.4%
    morph:              144.6ms +/- 4.1%
    raytrace:           138.0ms +/- 0.6%

  access:               520.4ms +/- 4.1%
    binary-trees:        78.6ms +/- 11.3%
    fannkuch:           231.4ms +/- 2.0%
    nbody:              149.2ms +/- 8.1%
    nsieve:              61.2ms +/- 3.9%

  bitops:               449.6ms +/- 2.4%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:   69.8ms +/- 9.6%
    bits-in-byte:        99.2ms +/- 4.6%
    bitwise-and:        167.2ms +/- 2.3%
    nsieve-bits:        113.4ms +/- 6.7%

  controlflow:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%
    recursive:           91.2ms +/- 4.7%

  crypto:               247.2ms +/- 2.3%
    aes:                 81.2ms +/- 2.5%
    md5:                 83.8ms +/- 4.6%
    sha1:                82.2ms +/- 2.0%

  date:                 306.4ms +/- 0.5%
    format-tofte:       146.6ms +/- 1.4%
    format-xparb:       159.8ms +/- 1.0%

  math:                 454.8ms +/- 1.3%
    cordic:             174.4ms +/- 1.6%
    partial-sums:       193.8ms +/- 1.2%
    spectral-norm:       86.6ms +/- 4.4%

  regexp:               209.6ms +/- 0.7%
    dna:                209.6ms +/- 0.7%

  string:               674.8ms +/- 2.2%
    base64:             103.8ms +/- 9.0%
    fasta:              177.0ms +/- 1.0%
    tagcloud:           136.0ms +/- 4.6%
    unpack-code:        136.0ms +/- 1.7%
    validate-input:     122.0ms +/- 2.6%

Comparing with Firefox, the overall result of this test was that it’s 4.56 times faster.

However, if we look test by test, there are areas where I feel embarrassed for Firefox.

Bitwise Operations
For example, Bit-Operation tests in Safari 3.1 are 7.7 times faster in Safari, being the case of the bitwise-AND (&) operator the worst of them, Safari performed bitwise-and’s 16 times faster than Firefox

OUCH!!

String Operations
So you’d be curious now about String operations, which is probably a lot of what goes on with Javascript, and Ajax, parsing those XML results and what not, maybe the bitwise & won’t hurt us that much given that not many programmers today are smart enough to use them for web programming.

When it comes to String operations, Safari 3.1 was 4.5 times faster than Firefox 2.

Kudos to the Safari Team, I thought there was no point in having Safari until I did this benchmark. I guess they don’t want to let go of Web Browser users, maybe they make millions every month with ad-clicks on Google generated with the search field they have at the top of the browser which is set by default to do Google search.

Once again the saying proves it self

“Competition is good”

Let’s hope this will make the Firefox team think more on Javascript improvements with the upcoming Firefox 3. Once it’s release ready, it’ll be worth it running this benchmark again and see where it stands.

Update (March 20th, 2008)

I’ve made tests on Firefox 3 beta 4, You can see the results here. Tests have been made again on the same Macbook Pro. The improvements of Firefox 3 are notable, however, on the mac, Safari still wins.

                          

I personally say it should be legal. High Profile prostitues making $5000 a night could be taxed and the money could be put to use on sex education, hospitals, schools, and what not.

Plus, being illegal isn’t even stopping governors and people of all walks of life from doing it.

If anything, mass-marketed prostitution, well regulated and what not, would be an awesome service to all those geek teenagers that can’t get laid, they’d just go and get their fix, instead of going crazy, taking stupid drugs, and doing mass shootings in their university… that’s why you don’t hear those kind of news in latin american countries, people get laid all the time, no need to go to the shrink, just have sex, best therapy in the world.

Maybe you’d regulate it by having a license to use a prostitute, you’d only be able to go after passing a medical exam, and being a certain age. You could only go to the prostitute after being tested every month or so. Prostitutes could follow a set of rules, like using condoms, and checking their customer’s licenses and latest exams. There would be so much money around this industry if it was legal. Girls could even go to school to learn everything related to it, from history, to managing their business, or managing people. No more pimps or danger around the whole thing. As they say, it’s the oldest profession known to man, and pretty much every woman gets laid for money in a way or another.

Besides… pornography is legal and its technically the same thing but on camera.

                          

If you managed to get out of Venezuela recently, I hope this helps you get over the home sickness and feel lucky you’re out of that madness.

To all those that think Chavez government is awesome and a cool socialist, I recommend you go and spend 6 months in Caracas, and then we talk. For some reason people from Europe and some cab drivers in New York seem to think Chavez is awesome, fuck that.

And to say that this case is Chavez’s fault is probably crap, since murders on convenience stores happen all over the world, the problem with Venezuela, is that this situation is repeated way too many times a day since we don’t have a few hundred guys like that, we probably have tens of thousands of sons of bitches like those two bastards.

(If someone knows when this took place, please leave a comment, so I can update this post)

                          

Weeks ago I heard that when Iraq announced that they’d be selling their oil in a currency different than the dollar, say, Euros, that was the trigger for the Bush administration to link 911 with them and conquer Iraq. Its evident the power of the US comes from having the green ones all over the place, but in 2007 we’ve seen how things are turning towards the euro, and there’s a lot of bad mouthing on the dollar.

Chavez’s is a good buddy of Iran’s President, both of them are outspoken critics of the Bush Administration, and not long ago Iran and Venezuela went to the OPEC (OPEP en espanol) and proposed selling oil in a “Currency Basket”, because they said they were at loose taking the worthless greens. (I’m not sure if they went and said this after US Intelligence discarded the whole weapons of mass destruction in Iran, which is also how they got in Iraq, and they found nothing… some say a war against Iran is just a matter of when, that its already been decided.)

What does Oil, Iran, Dollars, Euros and the US have to do with the referendum?

Everything!, if you take a look at Hugo Chavez behavior prior the referendum on the international media, this guy has been as loud mouthed as he’s ever been, he went to a summit and started calling names, got yelled by the king (to his luck, the bastard, who knows if he paid the king to do so…[now you must be thinking I have a very dirty mind]), then he cuts relationships with spain, then he gets in the way between Colombia’s government and the Guerilla, and insults president Uribe.

Now add this other big detail to the equation, he opens the “Bank of the South” in Caracas, with like 7 billion dollars, hmmmmmmmm….

Then he proposes the craziest constitution changes, he does this illegally raising brows all over the world, and pretty much looking like a dictator by asking for unlimited re-election and other non-democratic laws.

So he does what he wants at this point, get the world to look at him on election day, he will of course loose, but since everyone thinks he’s a dictator, everyone expects him to fix the elections and become the evil one, instead he makes the results to be just a little above 50% against him (to not look like such a loose), but instead the unthinkable happens, he does loose and he accepts his defeat as a “true democrat”, therefore, nothing really changes, he’s still in absolute power, he’s still making oil money at $100/barrel, and he gains 2 things:

– Calm and “hope” by the opposition, the “tense” environment goes away, and a lot of people will wait till 2013 with a smile, not knowing the worst is yet to come.
– He can join Iran and say he will sell Oil in Euros instead of dollars sometime during 2008 or 2009 and the US can’t do jack to invade Venezuela since this guy is a “democrat” that accepted his defeat in the elections.

However, there’s one thing that I don’t yet understand, why the hell is he messing around with Colombia? What does he gain from Conflict with Colombia, does he want trouble with the US to then announce he won’t be selling oil to the US? is he ready to depend on his southern friends as oil customers? can Venezuela break off the US-oil-dollar tittie? I’d like to hear your opinions.

For the Chavistas, I will not accept any insulting comments, let’s keep the debate at a high level, with education, no cursing allowed.

It’d be awesome if you can add or modify this conspiracy theory, and if you think I’m absolutely wrong, please explain why in an intelligent and elegant manner.

                          

“In Atlantic v. Howell, a case against a pro se litigant in Arizona, the RIAA has filed a supplemental brief in support of its motion for summary judgment. The Court has given Mr. Howell until January 11th to respond, and has scheduled a hearing for January 24th at 2:00 P.M.

The RIAA’s brief makes the novel contention, contradicting its lawyers’ arguments at the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster, that making personal copies of songs from one’s CD onto one’s computer is an infringement.”

What the fuck? Sounds like sinking ship, people contradicting each other, trying to stay afloat.

The worst part is that they still make so many millions out of CD sales, and the paid online media (AmazonMp3, iTunes, eMusic, CDBaby and many others) is starting to pick up.

RIAA should embrace technological change and make the best out of it, not bash on their customers. Who plays a CD nowadays? Most youngsters want music and they want it now, and if they get it off a CD they will rip it and put it on their iPod, do you need a team of stanford masters to understand the reality of it?

My good teacher once told me:

“When it rains you see different type’s of people. Some wait until it stops raining, some run out before it rains even harder, some sell umbrellas”

Get with the program people, millions of people won’t be paying for music anytime soon, the same as people don’t pay for TV. If that model worked for TV, why can’t it work for the music industry?

                          

Hugo, te quedan 4 anos de mandato, si quieres hacer historia tienes 4 anos para reinvindicarte con el pueblo. Es hora de dejar de jugar al soldado revolucionario y darte cuenta que tienes una nacion que puede competir con el mundo de manera positiva, no insultando y esparciendo ideales que siempre han terminado en fracasos rotundos, la gente se te esta yendo del pais por miedo a sus vidas, empieza ahora a arreglar las cosas y retirate
como el mejor presidente.

Tienes el poder de legislar como ningun presidente, y debes empezar por arreglar el problema numero 1, la inseguridad, y te voy a decir algunas cosas que puedes hacer para lograrlo:

1) Asi como te has pasado la iglesia por el forro, pasatela como es debido y legaliza el aborto. El aborto legal elimina indices de natalidad no deseados, por ende, elimina ninos en la calle que seran gran parte de los delincuentes de la proxima decada. Ademas, el futuro de millones de jovenes no sera trochado en el caso que no abandonen a sus chamitos, podran seguir viviendo vidas normales y sera un ahorro y un beneficio grande en el futuro de la sociedad dado que el futuro de muchos jovenes no sera trochado por responsabilidades de tal embergadura a tan temprana edad. Cuantos avances tecnologicos o logros sociales hemos dejado de tener pq el proximo Einstein ha tenido que abandonar sus suenos por tener que criar un chamito y pierde el rumbo de sus suenos. Esto no lo invento yo, esto es una idea tomada del famoso libro Freakonomics

2) Debes acomodar el sistema penitenciario, debes construir mas carceles, y quienes mejores que el monton de precios ociosos actuales para construirlas. El dinero ahorrado en mano de obra puede ser utilizado para crear fondos en torno al sistema, para ayudar a familiares de los presos, o para cualquier otro fondo social relacionado con la restitucion de estos individuos a la sociedad, que ahora no tendrian tiempo de estar cojiendose ni drogandose, llegarian mamaos a dormir. De haber hombres suficientes, ponlos a construir vias de trenes, tapar huecos en todas las carreteras, y recuperar espacios perdidos por basura y falta de mantenimiento.

3) Teniendo un sistema penitenciario luego debes limpiar el sistema judicial, hay muchos jovenes graduandose en nuestras universidades que aun no han sido tocados por la corrupcion y que les duele el pais, y que pueden trabajar para hacer nuestro sistema judicial digo, es hora de hacer un arduo chequeo y empezar a rasparse jueces corruptos, a restructurar ese sistema judicial, cosa que el trabajo de la policia no sea en vano.

4) Un sistema policial etico, con policias de mayores estandares, no cualquier malandro debe cargar una pistola, ser policia tiene que ser una carrera digna, la cual cause la admiracion de muchos, subir el sueldo minimo de los policias a un minimo de 2000 dolares, y utilizar presupuesto para limpiar las calles, no mas impunidad.

5) Apoya al sector privado para generar empleos, apoya un proyecto de libre comercio en latinoamerica para que podamos competir como region,
empieza a gobernar este pais como si fuera una empresa, con diligencia y buscando maximizar ganancias y el bienestar de todos sus miembros.
Permitele a los venezolanos hacer negocios en el exterior para que pueda entrar dinero y podamos exportar mas que petroleo.

Continua tu planes sociales en cuanto al sector salud, y en vez de tratar de inculcar valores comunistas en las escuelas utiliza tu poder para inculcar la excelencia, no a la mediocridad en ningun nivel, tener ciudadanos con mentalidad de prosperidad y que piensen para ser grandes lideres en todas las areas.

Creo que se me acabaron los 5 minutos, pero ahi te dejo algunas cosas que te podrian poner en alto si aprovechas todo el poder que ya tienes.
Arregla primero los problemas de tu casa antes de ir a ayudar a los vecinos.

(si me dieran otro minuto mas, le tiraria esto otro en la mesa)

Entre otras ideas, puedo sugerir una verdadera apertura petrolera pero para que los venezolanos seamos parte activa de la industria petrolera (exploracion, extraccion, transporte, procesamiento, investigacion), imaginen la cantidad de millonarios que habrian y como subiria el estandard de vida de todos los venezolanos si todos pudieramos trabajar mas directamente con el petroleo.

Que facil es sonar…

                          

Sera que finalmente se arma la de San Quintin? Le tiraran un madrugonazo? Sera que finalmente se arrechan los Venezolanos y sacan al loco (loco pila que tiene mas billete que bill gates) ?

                          

A few things about effing Hugo Chavez and why the US should take this guy as a threat worse than Al-Qaeda:
– Openly hates and resents the US and has insulted the Bush administration in every way possible
– Recently Spent over USD $3 billion in weapons
– Friends of Fidel Castro, Iran, China
– Helps the FARC infiltrate back to Colombia with Air Support (might be planning a war against Colombia to destabilize the region)
– Allows Al-Qaeda terrorist cells to operate freely in the country
– Legislates at his own will in over 50 matters (by decree)
– Recently trying to change the constitution to have infinite re-election
– Nationalized Oil, Electricity, and Telecommunications industries.
– Controls the media (shutdown RCTV), and is about to launch another TV Channel by the government
– Has a direct air traffic bridge from Caracas-Teheran with IranAir, flying known islamic terrorists and printing venezuelan IDs for them, which later allow them to obtain American Visas and enter the US legally
– Has lobbyists in Washington which he controls by offering profits from the Venezuelan oil industry
– Antisemitic
– 1 venezuelan is murdered every 30 minutes (crime related and violence related deaths, there is no security in Venezuela)

and the list goes on and on…

Embed this video on your blog or send this article to all your friends, the truth about this danger to the western hemisphere should be known. My country has no future unless this regime disapears completely, freedom for Venezuela.

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5911805686509043935&hl=en" flashvars=""> &;t;/embed>

                          

“Bolstered by windfall oil profits, Chavez’s government is now offering more direct state funding to Latin America and the Caribbean than the United States. A tally by the Associated Press shows Venezuela has pledged more than $8.8 billion in aid, financing and energy funding so far this year.

While the most recent figures available from Washington show $3 billion in U.S. grants and loans reached the region in 2005, it isn’t known how much of the Venezuelan money has actually been delivered. And Chavez’s spending abroad doesn’t come close to the overall volume of U.S. private investment and trade in Latin America.”

So in short, Venezuela has done DIRECT funding worth 3 times as much as that of the United States, the richest and most powerful nation on earth.

I guess this sounds good, but WHY THE HELL IS THERE SO MUCH POVERTY, INSECURITY, AND HIGH UNEMPLOYEMENT RATES IN VENEZUELA TODAY?

My mind cannot grasp this, its like a 4th dimensional something my brain can’t even conceive.

Another question I leave to the readers is… what’s going to be the cost of all this help for all those countries, there’s nothing free in life, is this beginning of a new Soviet Union but in South America?

Via Chron.com

                          

Plaza Venezuela Subway Station, Caracas, Venezuela – Any weekday starting at 6:30am

And I don’t think its due to bad subway planning (of course it could be better), but Caracas subway is way more frequent than NY subway, wait times are really short specially at rush hour.

No subway station in New York is that full at 6-7am, at least I haven’t seen one. It seems New Yorkers sleep a little more late, try to get on the subway on Bedford Av towards Manhattan at 9am… is everyone late for work? does everybody start work at 9:30 or 10am? I only see the immigrants (probably illegal) going to work early in the morning here in New York.

Photo courtesy of zethanx

                          

Tonight, July 31st of 2007 I had the privilege of attending a talk by the man himself, the creator of the C++ language, Bjarne Stroustrup.

He was sharing with us how things are going for the next version of C++0x – The 0x stands for a possible year of this decade where it will be released.

One of the interesting things that happened to me at this meeting was to finally have the honor of meeting Sebastian Delmont, and oh, those 3 geeky Red Hat guys, wonder if they were actually part of Red Hat or just hardcore fans, good thing I was wearing my Ubuntu shirt to represent for the Ubunteros.

As for C++0x, I guess my thoughts aren’t that deep, I honestly don’t care much about C++ at this point in my life, and it seems it’s an old language striving hard to keep the pace with newer features found in new languages. It seems its very hard to reach consensus on the C++ board, and its very hard to accept new features given the language is already too big, its also funny to see that everything that gets hughe (millions of people use it), will always have problems in terms of adapting to new conditions or injecting innovation to itself. Bjarne created the language around 25 years ago, and there are features that only now he’s finally been able to get accepted for this version. C++ however, we must admit is a language that’s heavily used, (but I think by end users, not the software engineering community), on software like Photoshop, Google search engine, and the Mars rovers (these were the examples Bjarnes kept bringing again and again, I would also be proud of course).

For me, I’ll stick to Python, Nasa’s been using it too for quite a while, the same with Google and many other applications, hey, YouTube’s backend runs in python.

                          

They had promised a demo for July 5th. This is what they said on their site:

Steorn announcement: Kinetica Demonstration

Further to Steorn’s announcement yesterday (5th July) regarding the technical difficulties experienced during the installation of its “Orbo” technology at the Kinentica Museum in London, Steorn has decided to postpone the demonstration until further notice.

Sean McCarthy CEO stated that “technical problems arose during the installation of the demonstration unit in the display case on Wednesday evening. These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures and as a result we have to postpone the public demonstration until a future date.”

He continued that “we apologise for the inconvenience caused to all the people who had made arrangements to visit the demonstration or were planning on viewing the demonstration online.”

Over the next few weeks the company will explore alternative dates for the public demonstration.

I guess I like the thought of free energy so much, I’m going to think they actually had those technical problems…
what do you think? are they Bluffing?

Or do you think the big cartels of Energ, gave Steorn senior executives a black mail Live Video feed of their dearest family members being held at gun point so they wouldn’t do the demo and look like loosers?

                          

- Les gusta experimentar en cuanto a diseno en su decoracion
- La comida es excelente, sobre todo la mantequilla
- Nunca habia visto tantos gringos fuera de USA juntos, a veces dudo que estoy en Paris porque escucho puro acento americano a mi alrededor
- La ciudad es hermosa pero esta bandalizada con mucho graffiti por todas partes
- El metro es demasiado arrecho, tambien los buses, el transporte publico es excelente.
- El metro es caro, pero se nota que mucha gente no paga (mas que todo en las afueras)
- Es una ciudad llena de jovenes (muchos gringuitos y canadienses en edades entre 15-21 por las calles, quizas en campamentos o programas de intercambio) que hacen lo que le da la gana
- En frente de la torre Eiffel hay un jardin donde muchos jovenes van (inclusive un lunes por la noche) a tomar vino y champana al aire libre, nadie dice nada si tomas en la calle, la juventud es muy libre
- Cuando camine por mi primera avenida me acorde mucho de partes de Caracas que tienen arquitectura europea. Caracas debio ser hermosa en los 60,70, seria bueno recuperar nuestra arquitectura y remodelar los edificios viejos.
- Caracas tiene Sabor a muchas Ciudades, a veces New York me recuerda a Caracas, y ciertamente Paris me recuerda a Caracas
- Los tickets del metro son iguales que los de caracas
- Tambien hay que meter el puto ticket para salir del metro, pero mucha gente sale, y hay aveces puertas abiertas. Si te agarran sin ticket, supuestamente son mas de 30 euros de multa.
- Estan invadidos de africanos y arabes
- No hay tantos asiaticos como en New York, pero hay
- Tambien hay gente de la india por aca
- Hay muchos franceses ostinados pero otros son amigables, como en todos lados. Al parecer no les gusta el ingles mucho, arrugan la cara
- Aun no entiendo como funciona la cuestion en los “Brasseries” para que te atiendan si te sientas afuera, vere hoy otra vez
- Es una ciudad en la que se disfruta caminar
- La avenida que esta pegada al rio Siena, en su parte sur, muy cerca de Notre-Dame, me recordo mucho a la avenida que esta pegada al banco sur del rio Guaire en las mercedes… solo que el Rio Siena es navegable y no esta lleno exclusivamente de mierda. Pero veo la similitud de esa avenida de las mercedes… la que esta del otro lado de la autopista Fco Fajardo antes de llegar al CCCT.

Nuevos pensamientos sobre la ciudad:
– Los telefonos celulares funcionan en el metro, inclusive en las estaciones mas profundas, y estando en movimiento dentro de un vagon.
– Hay muchos fumadores, y aun permiten fumar dentro de restaurantes y cafes. Ya habia olvidado lo desagradable que es comer dentro de un restaurant con olor a cigarro.
- Ahorran energia, aqui en el estudio donde me estoy quedando existen muchas luces que se apagan solas, supongo que utilizan timers con sensores de movimiento. Tambien tienen muchos carros “Smart” que deben ser bien economicos en cuanto a gasolina. Otro ejemplo son escaleras mecanicas que disminuyen su velocidad considerablemente cuando no hay nadie montado encima, pero luego aceleran cuando te montas.
- Es raro ver mujeres gordas. Creo que se debe a que la comida no es procesada, ademas de la cultura de que las mujeres se cuidan, se arreglan, etc. es Paris.
- Que aun ni estando en Paris las mujeres son mas lindas que en Venezuela. En Venezuela las mujeres se cuidan como en paris pero su belleza es natural. Hoy vi una mujer preciosa en Sacre Cour, y cuando le hablo al marido, era Venezolana :) I rest my case.

En las fotos del dia martes, tome algunos detalles interesantes de sus diferentes vagones de metro, por ejemplo, las columnas para que se agarre la gente, se dividen en 3 sub-columnas, asi puedes poner mas manos sin que se solapen. Tambien tienen trenes cuyos vagones no tienen divisiones, hacen un gran vagon. Y lo mas curioso es que algunas lineas son hibridos entre rieles y llantas.

                          

“ESTUVE ESPERANDO LA CUENTA REGRESIVA DEL ULTIMATUM, Y AL LLEGAR LA HORA, NO PASO NADA. ¿ES CIERTO ESTE
MOVIMIENTO, O ES QUE ESTO ES UNA BROMA DE MAL GUSTO DE ALGUN AGENTE DEL CHAVISMO PARA DISTRAERNOS, O UN
ARRANQUE DESESPERADO DE ALGUN OPOSITOR LOCO O ENFERMO?
Entendemos tu preocupación. Con el ultimatum, culminó la FASE 1, y ahora arrancamos la FASE 2. Con el ultimatum queriamos ver si el
enemigo reaccionaba ante nuestra presencia, y así lo hizo, declarando en las noticias que somos una “Organización Terrorista”, y
culpándonos injustamente por los disparos en CONATEL la noche del Domingo 27 de Mayo de 2007. Por otro lado, sabemos de fuentes
cercanas al Teniente Coronel, que éste estuvo tres dias sin dormir. Por otro lado, Mario Silva, el de la Hojilla, y Eva Golinger no han dejado
de hablar de nosotros, y solo les falta decir que somos hijos del demonio, que somos chupasangres y que botamos espuma por la boca.

La Fase 1 fué la etapa de hacer sentir nuestra presencia y darnos propaganda, y por ello decimos que fue efectiva. Mucha gente no ha
comprendido todavía el sentido de nuestro ultimatum, pero hay otros que si y se siguen organizando. Mucha gente erroneamente pensó que
iba a haber un terremoto, o algo parecido, a la hora del vencimiento. De todas maneras, la prueba que tienes de que este movimiento es bien
serio y que vamos “con todos los hierros” como popularmente se dice en Venezuela, es el impacto que tuvo el ultimatum en las esferas del
gobierno. Muy acertado y prudente fué el Tirano cuando dijo que no había que subestimarnos (y que no se equivoque), ya que esas fueron
las palabras que le dijo el propio Dictador Cubano en el viaje que hizo a Cuba el Teniente Coronel la tarde del Lunes 28 de Mayo de 2007.

Luego del ultimatum, se ha dado inicio a la FASE 2.”

                          

Ojala, que fresquito se sentiria si se va el Ayatola.
Yo por aca estare contando los minutos a ver si esto es puro blah blah, o si finalmente se arma el peo que tanto he estado esperando para que salga ese desgraciado.

Corre la voz, pega este video en tu blog, mandaselo a todos tus amigos.

                          

Escribo este post para mostrar que raperos tienen un estilo admirable, en su musica, sus letras, y su forma de vestir, esperemos que mas raperos nuevos como Lupe Fiasco sigan el ejemplo del buen estilo, el “Thug” rapper is dead for me. Let me introduce you el “Classy” rapper.

(La informacion a continuacion es traducida de Wikipedia.org)

Lupe Fiasco

Wasalu Muhammad Jaco (nacido el 17 de Febrero de 1982 en Chicago, Illinois), mejor conocido por su nombre Lupe Fiasco, un rapero americano. Se hizo famoso en 2006 dado el exito de su album debut, Food & Liquor (Comida y Licor), por el cual recibio 3 nominaciones al Grammy.

Lupe empieza a punta de Mix Tapes, auto-glorificandose como un heroe de la cultura Nerd de la clase media, consiguiendo una fuerte base de fanaticos en el internet. Luego firmo con Arista records, pero cuando Arista Records quebro, fue firmado por Atlantic Records.

En 2006 saco su sencillo Hit llamado “Kick, Push”, una cancion de pesada referencia a la cultura patinetera, y se establecio como la antitesis del rapero comun (Effing Thug Gangsta Rapper que era cool en 1995 en la epoca de Dr. Dre y Snoop Dog, pero que ya esta trillado)

Su Album Food & Liquor fue nominado como Mejor Album de Rap en los premios Grammy 2007.

Veanlo por uds. mismos, este es el video de Kick, Push (En Joost hay como 4 videos donde pueden ver mucho mas de Lupe Fiasco, en el canal de Atlantic Records, es totalmente legal ver estos videos por Joost, ya que Viacom firmo un acuerdo de contenido con Joost – Para los que dicen que Joost esta Overrated…)

Vistete como Lupe: El utiliza las marcas Maharishi, FALSE/LMAC, DPMHI, CLOT, Dekoi y Artful Dodger, Le Messie (FALSE/LMAC), Hardy Blechman (MHI), Edison Chen (CLOT), y Damion Grace (Dekoi)

Kanye West

Este señor ya es toda una leyenda del rap, lo menciono porque ver cantar a Lupe Fiasco no hace mas que recordarte a Kanye West.

Kanye West es autor y productor, y tiene bajo su cintura 6 premios Grammys. Nacio el 8 de Junio de 1977 en Atlanta, Georgia, a los 3 años de edad sus padres se divorcian y se va a vivir con su madre a Chicago, Illinois. A diferencia de otros raperos, Kanye viene de la clase media alta, desde joven produjo musica para artistas locales, y entre otros artistas para los que ha producido sencillos, ha producido para Lupe Fiasco. En el video Touch the Sky aparecen juntos, y tambien sale Pamela Anderson.

Kante West es un columnista en la revista Complex, donde escribe sobre moda.

Otros raperos con estilo

Otros raperos quizas no necesitan ser explicados mucho, son famosos y tan solo nombrarlos les recordara su estilo… P. Diddy, Mase, Jamie Foxx, Usher, completen Uds. la lista.

                          

Creo que fue bien, pero no como para verla dos veces.

Los graficos muy arrechos, la pelea brutal, excelentes slow motions, pero no veo motivo para volverla a ver en el cine de pana. No te deja picado en lo absoluto, es una historia muy sencilla, supongo que es lo que se espera de una pelicula de batalla.

En algunas partes pude hacer analogias de contexto politico, pero nada que ver, cualquier debate o rumor que sale en las noticias que la pelicula tiene tinte politico me parece que son interpretaciones de fanaticos.

Mi veredicto seria el siguiente para cerrar:

Buenos efectos especiales, composicion y fotografia

Buena Pelea

El publico gay se va dar banquete, puro macho papeao y depilado corriendo en interiores, y el rey de los persas es un rolo e negro marico que se saca las cejas.

PS: Una anecdota al mejor estilo Larry David en Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cuando venia de vuelta, entra un pordiosero a pedir real en el metro, se para en frente de mi, y pillo que en un bolsillo del pantalon el carajo tiene un celular, le digo a mi novia, pilla la vaina, tiene un celular, cono e su madre, para verificar que es la parte de arriba del celular se me ocurre sacarme el celular del bolsillo, justo en ese momento, el carajo voltea y me dice “Thank you brother”, y yo no tenia ni un centavo en el bolsillo y le digo “Sorry, I’m just taking out my cellphone”, y en eso el carajo me dice “Another Fucking Pretender”… y yo por dentro “EL CONO DE TU MADRE MALDITO MOJONERO TIENES UN CELULAR TU TAMBIEN”, en eso el tren se mueve, y se le caen los reales en mis pies… jeje, recojo los reales y se los pongo en la mano, y el hijo de puta no me da las gracias, me vuelve a decir “Fucking Pretender”… de vaina empieza a sonar el theme song de Curb Your Enthusiasm.

                          

Cuando Robert Mugabe, jefe radical del movimiento nacionalista, llegó al poder en 1980 en medio del alborozo de la mayoría negra, los habitantes de la entonces Rhodesia (del Sur) no tenían ni idea de lo que les esperaba. En 1987 Mugabe estableció un régimen presidencial y puso en marcha una reforma agraria para redistribuir entre los africanos las tierras que durante largo tiempo habían pertenecido a los europeos, hecho que generó duros enfrentamientos. Fue reelegido en 1990, 1996 y 2002 gracias a elecciones tan “transparentes” como las venezolanas del RRP y del 3D, comandados por jorgitos protegidos por la fuerza de las armas. (Obsérvese que son períodos de 6 años, como los aprobados para Hugo Chávez). Hoy Zimbabwe es un país arruinado por las políticas corruptas e ineficaces del dictador Mugabe.

Tal Cual reprodujo (26-02-07) un oportuno artículo de Michael Wines publicado en The New York Times (“Zimbabwe y la enfermedad prohibida”) en el cual revela que la última medición (de enero 2007) mostró en ese país una tasa inflacionaria de 1.281% anual. Como no ha podido derrotar la inflación con su polìtica de controles, ni con la pena de cárcel para quienes aumenten los precios y los salarios (el mercado negro domina la economía y los apagones interrumpen el servicio eléctrico constantemente), el dictador Mugabe lanzó un decreto (¿”habilitante”?) declarando ilegal la inflación. Cuenta Wines que el gobierno ha advertido un colapso en el servicio eléctrico (“nacionalizado” como hizo su “pana” Chávez) y una crisis en el tratamiento de agua que ha provocado un brote de cólera en la capital, Harare. Todos los servicios públicos se interrumpieron en el este del país porque se agotaron los recursos para reparar sus instalaciones. Los médicos y enfermeras están pidiendo un aumento del 9.000% y llevan cinco semanas en huelga, al igual que los maestros. Hasta los policías y militares amenazan con causar más disturbios si no aumentan su salario. El Banco Central reportó que los precios de la canasta básica subieron 223% en la primera semana de febrero. Buscando reactivar la producción agropecuaria, Mugabe “vende a los productores el litro de gasolina a 350 dólares zimbabuenses y éstos la revenden en el mercado negro por diez veces su valor, dejando las tierras ociosas” (cualquier parecido con los “fundos zamoranos” no es pura coincidencia). Además de “ilegalizar” la inflación, Mugabe culpa de tan grave crisis a “una conspiración de Occidente en su contra” (¿les recuerda algo?). “El gran problema de Zimbabwe -dice un analista de ese país- es que la única cosa que no puedes falsear es la economía. Cuando cae, cae. Y eso puede tener efectos impredecibles” .Los petrodólares hacen la pequeña diferencia “por ahora” en la Zimbabwe de Chávez, tal como reseña Harry Blackmouth en TheNew Yor Times (17-02-07). En Venezuela “una acelerada tasa de inflación está comenzando a afectar el abastecimiento de productos básicos tales como carne, pollo, caraotas, azúcar y leche, aunque por suerte todavía pueden adquirirse en los supermercados de Caracas bebidas espirituosas de marca, excelentes vinos y algunos quesos exquisitos de Francia” ,

Además del decreto habilitante que contempla cárcel y confiscaciones de empresas, algunos ministros están amenazando a los presidentes de las cámaras industriales y comerciales venezolanas con aplicar represalias si siguen diciendo que hay desabastecimiento en sus respectivos sectores, mientras el pueblo sufre la escasez y los ataques criminales del hampa. A Chávez sólo le falta , como a su “pana” Mugabe, declarar ilegales la inflación y la inseguridad personal porque ambos males perjudican “el proceso”, como dijera el desalmado prefecto a una mujer del barrio Los Erasos cuando lloraba desgarradoramente por el asesinato de su hijo.

Para The Economist (12-02-07) el modo de “corregir el desequilibrio fiscal se asemeja a invitar a Chávez a jugar a la ruleta rusa con todas las balas en el cargador”. Y puede que ese juego macabro se haya iniciado con el silbato sonado por las Bolsas asiáticas que ha hecho tambalear al mercado bursátil mundial (preocupado también por la salud de la economía estadounidense) y, como ocurrió en 1997 con la crisis de los tigres asíaticos, se reduzca la demanda y caigan los precios petroleros. Lo avizora Francis Fukuyama en The Washington Post (“El fin de Chávez” 16-02-07): “La irracionalidad de la economía chavista no va a sentirse hasta que los precios del petróleo no bajen”. Aunque puede que con las destructivas disputas internas de las que ha surgido un gobierno “paralelo”, el creciente desencanto popular registrado en las últimas encuestas y el catastrófico pesimismo de Lina Ron en su último artículo en El Nuevo País, los acontecimientos se precipiten. Y es que en Venezuela, como en Zimbabwe, “cuando cae, cae”.

Marta Colomina

                          

Joost (conocido en principio como Project Venice) este jueves pasado (Primero de Marzo de 2007), abrio una nueva ronda de Beta Testers para su segundo release beta. Finalmente tras la gran jaladera de bola desde que abrieron Joost.com yo y algunas personas finalmente logramos entrar a esta segunda ronda de beta testers. Al parecer en el futuro me daran lo que ellos llaman “Tokens” y dare estos tokens como invitaciones al sistema a personas que esten sumamente interesadas en probar el producto y ayudar al equipo de desarrollo con el feedback necesario para llevarlo a un nivel de calidad estable.

En este post no voy a poner Screenshots, primero porque violaria el acuerdo de licencia en el cual me dicen que no debiera mostrar este producto a nadie, y segundo, pq estoy escribiendoles desde Vista, y Joost aun no es compatible con Windows Vista, cuando intentas lanzarlo te da el siguiente error:

<br /> “We are sorry but the application cannot run due to a software conflict.</p> <p>C:\Windows\AppPatch\AcGenral.DLL<br /> C:\Windows\WinSxS\x86_microsoft.windows.common-controle_6595b64144cc1fd_f6.0.6000.16836_none_5d0728″<br />

Supongo que pronto resolveran estos problemas de compatibilidad con Vista. De momento solo pude utilizarlo en Mac OSX Tiger (Intel) y en Windows XP.

Si quieren ver Screenshots, pueden ver el post de Huguito en Esquizopedia.com, hay un monton de screenshots y sus opinioes (pero no hagan click todavia, lean primero esto que se pone bueno), tambien pueden ver a Joost en accion si van a youtube.com y escriben “joost” hay un monton de videos de la interfaz asi que no me moleste en grabar nada por mi mismo.

So, aqui van las opiniones en un bulleted list.

                          

Si puedes pon este video en tu blog, solo copia el codigo a continuacion:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wy_bIsS6AGM"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wy_bIsS6AGM" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

                          

Acabo de ver unos 10 minutos de opinion en Fox news, con 6 panelistas, 3 de derecha, 3 de izquierda.
Ni los de izquierda estaban a favor con lo que paso esta semana en venezuela en cuanto al presidente mandando por decreto.

Algunas de las cosas que me alarmo es lo siguiente:

- Mostraron una entrevista con el mismisimo Bush, y el carajo vino con el discursito
“I only care about the venezuelan people, since this industry nationalization will not let them realize their full potential”

Despues lo veremos diciendo que tiene que liberarlos y la cosa se puede poner fea.

Luego los panelistas uno dice:

“Cuando veo lo que sucede en Venezuela esta semana, me recuerdo a Alemania en 1933,
si eres venezolano, y no eres bruto, ciego, sordo o mudo, GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE”

luego otro panelista, un ingles dice

“Yo mas bien compararia lo que sucede ahorita en venezuela con Cuba en 1959″

Comentaron sobre si debemos dejar de comprarle petroleo a venezuela, o si mas bien Chavez
va a dejar de vendernos, aunque Chavez juega los dos equipos pq tiene 40mil bombas de gasolina Citgo
que venden a 2 centavos mas barato, y conociendo los gringos prefieren cruzar la autopista por ahorrarse
los 2 centavos.

Pero luego otro carajo, un izquierdista… dice
“Yo creo que esto no es cuestion de si le compramos o no el petroleo, si lo boicoteamos o no,
yo pienso que esto podria ser una amenaza militar en un futuro, ya que el carajo es pana de
Kim en korea, y mantiene a cuba a flote ahora que la union sovietica no lo hace, su mensaje
se esparce por latinoamerica, y quizas en un futuro diremos que porque no hicimos nada cuando estabamos
a tiempo, aunque lo que Chavez quiere, es quizas usarnos como Chivo expiatorio”

Despues otros panelistas dijeron que definitivamente se espera un exodo masivo de la “middle class” en Venezuela,
y que es una lastima que pase esto en venezuela pq en Venezuela aman los productos americanos, son un buen
cliente, que por ejemplo la marca de autos en venezuela mas vendida es GM.

Un poco tensa la cosa cuando escuchas de este tema aqui, y no por blogs o noticias venezolanas, y de expertos politicos.

Germany 1933, Cuba 1959, ya no es cuestion de Yo si creo en Venezuela pq soy muy optimista, piensenlo de pana,
ya estan en dictadura por si no se habian dado cuenta, al menos de aqui hasta Julio de 2008 es autocracia declarada
y ya ahorita este mismo mes empiezan a cerrar empresas para hacerlas del gobierno.

Espero poder verlos de nuevo en libertad my friends.

                          

Para lectores en Espanol:

Creo en Dios (o como le quieran llamar), pero no creo en NINGUNA religion, mucho antes de este blasphemy challenge he hecho tal afirmacion, y desde que lei el codigo davinci perdi todo miedo alguno del fulano infierno. Mi creencia consiste mas bien en que nuestras mentes, nuestro cuerpo, nuestros atomos, todos son lo mismo y nos podemos comunicar con el universo… como? por medio de lo que la religion llama “FE”. Para mi, la FE, es poder mental, es el poder de imaginar algo y luego hacerlo realidad, cuando sabes canalizar tus energias de manera positiva, y haces todo lo necesario para que eso que quieres se haga realidad, el universo conspirara para ayudarte… que los catolicos hayan descubierto esto (que es mas viejo que la mania de cagar agachado) y hayan hecho tremendo negocio al vender la religion e inculcarla con miedo es otra cosa. Uds. deciden que creen, creo que pronto hago mi video, o hacemos la version en espanol de este reto.

                          

Al parecer cientificos Canadienses encontraron la cura a muchos tipos de Cancer, con una droga llamada “Dichloroacetate” (DCA), la cual en terminos simples, apaga la inmortalidad de las celulas cancerigenas.

El unico problema, es que seguro te enteraste por mi blog, y no por la television, o el periodico.

Al parecer las empresas farmaceuticas no les conviene que la droga sea barata de crear (ya que no tiene patente), asi que no es negocio para ellos, y no les conviene que se haga publicidad.

Hay todo un debate al respecto en la blogosfera norteamericana.

Busca en google por:
“cancer cure found”, “Dichloroacetate”

Corre la voz, y si conoces alguien sufriendo de este mal, cuentale sobre esta posibilidad de cura.
Al parecer la droga es segura, no altera celulas no cancerigenas, y ha sido probada por mas de 17 anos para desordenes metabolicos.

Viva internet, no mas oscurantismo mediatico.

                          

No se acuerdan la felicidad que tuvimos con la “Medio” apertura de las telecomunicaciones del 2000, que ahora es que finalmente empezamos a sentir los primeros frutos, y que ha creado uno de los mercados mas exitosos de nuestra economia…

Se imaginan lo que va a pasar con esto?

Empezando por mala calidad de servicios, perdidas de miles y miles de empleos porque no habra pluralidad de eleccion de carriers, siguiendo por total falta de privacidad, censura (porque la linea no va a ser tuya, va a ser del gobierno)… y para los internautas…

me temo que no habra ya libertad de expresion, o de informacion en el web…

Veo en unos anos a Chavez y su equipo tecnologico implantando filtros tal cual como se hace en China, y los tendran leyendo en internet lo que ellos quieren que uds. lean.

Y no lo digo yo, lo dijo Chavez en su discurso de toma de posicion, “Agarrense que lo que viene es bueno”

que creen? los amigos seguidores del chavismo, quisiera leer comentarios explicandome beneficios de una nacionalizacion de las telecomunicaciones, si estan de acuerdo con esto o no, si los tomo por sorpresa… por favor, se agradece un lenguaje civico y de altura, quiero una discusion a la altura, no quiero pelear con nadie, quiero debatir.

                          

Analizemos el potencial de este aparato con nombrar solo algunas de sus caracteristicas, y obviando toda la innovacion de la pantalla multitouch, y de que va a tener hasta 8gb de almacenamiento.

Corre MacOS X
Creo que no hace falta decir mas la cantidad de innovacion que un fully powered os va a traer al mundo de la telefonia movil, sin embargo vamos a darle una idea, sigue leyendo…

WiFI, Bluetooth
Con conectividad WiFI, finalmente hemos llegado al momento de que podemos utilizar nuestro telefono celular para hacer llamadas gratis a cualquier parte del mundo gratis…. piensa ahora que tienes MacOSX en el telefono y tienes WiFI

2+2=4
OS + WiFI = Skype

Lo primero que voy a hacer es intentar meterle skype al telefono, y llamar a cualquier parte del mundo, ya sea con otras personas teniendo skype en su computadora o iPhone, o a cualquier telefono normal con mi cuenta de Skype Out por solo centavos por minuto. :) No mas llamadas internacionales.

Safari
El telefono va a tener finalmente un navegador web con todo el poder de un navegador de escritorio, ademas va a funcionar con una conexion EDGE, o con WiFI como mencionamos, dando total velocidad.

Mencione que ahora si vamos a poder tener verdadero correo electronico, con un teclado virtual multitoque (qwerty), ademas de una camara de 2Mpx (que es lo que menos me emociona)

Esto abre un nuevo mundo a los desarrolladores web. Ahora si tendra mayor sentido desarrollar los widgets que la verdad que no utilizamos mucho en el escritorio, pero que si pueden tener mucho sentido a la hora de estar en la calle con el telefono.

Veremos ahora una nueva revolucion del web yendo finalmente al telefono, todo lo que fue wap, o algunos intentos de web movil, no fueron mas que un chiste comparado con la revolucion que navegadores con full poder traeran. Si eres un desarrollador web, ve pensando como te convertiras en el proximo Yahoo de los telefonos, como vas a hacer para posicionarte antes que el resto, tienes hasta Junio para terminar tus primeros servicios, a echarle coco.

Y bueno, mencionemos ahora otras funcionalidades como…
Tener tu musica, tocar video, ver fotos, y todo esto unido a la interfaz de multitoque, un “acelerometro” que le permite saber al telefono si esta siendo visto de forma horizontal o vertical, un sensor de proximidad que detecta si esta cerca de la cara, no mas escuchar el ring del telefono en la oreja ademas de ahorrar bateria porque la pantalla se apaga cuando lo tienes en la cara.

Vuelvo mas tarde a retocar este articulo, el bendito telefono me parece el producto perfecto y fueron unos genios en anunciarlo ahorita para crear el deseo y permitirnos ahorrar el dinero.

Como se sentiran en Nokia, Sony-Erriccson o Motorola? Tanto tiempo haciendo telefonos y no pudieron sacar un producto tan poderoso como este. Me pregunto cuantos empleados en estas empresas vinieron a sus jefes con ideas de interfaces multitouch y los rebotaron, deben estar con una botella en un bar :)

Redefinieron el telefono.