Month: April 2006

Why does Microsoft Passport suck? | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com: Ed Bott is out with a post this morning on why Microsoft Passport sucks and in my opinion he’s pretty much spot on and does a much better job expressing his own frustration with the technology than I did yesterday when I came across the dreaded Passport logon at an MSN Spaces blog. Although my issue was most likely a bug associated with Firefox, MSN Spaces, or Passport itself, it’s still frustrating. Passport logon is blocked by my employer (although I don’t know why, I’d suspect it has to do with regulatory issues in trying to control email at a investment company) which makes me hate it more but I also have been sufficiently annoyed by it over the past few years that I hate it even at home.

Do you know what I like about Flickr? I can log on to Flickr and never log off again. I can permanently log in. Yeah, yeah, I know *the dangers!* someone could *gasp* wrest control of my flickrstream and post God only knows what kind of photos, the travesty! But I like that logging into Flickr is (by option) a once only deal and you’re good to go. I’ve logged into Passport on the other hand dozens of times even back when I used it and yet contstantly I’m prompted to re log on and re log on and re log on. And for what? To do dumb things that don’t need security like leaving a comment on an MSN Spaces blog.

If I’m going to log on to my American Express account, yeah, I’m going to want that to be kind of secure. American Express though relies on their own user ID and password combo and not bothersome Passport. But 98% of what I do online needs very little security if any at all and where Passport tries to force itself on you in those situations it’s just plain annoying.

Ed’s right, Passport sucks and Microsoft should kill it.

TiVo damages estimated at $87 million Right now on Digg’s front page is a Yahoo! News Story on the TiVo vs. Echostar trial going on regarding TiVo’s DVR patents. The case is big in large part because TiVo is small and still unprofitable. Some have suggested that the very fate of TiVo as a business rests on the outcome of this trial.

TiVo has increasingly faced stiff competition from cheapo cable and satellite freebie type DVRs and some have questioned their long term ability to stay in business in an increasingly competitive landscape. At the same time TiVo was the original innovator of the DVR and has become so publicly indentifiable with DVR technology that their very brand name has slipped in the lexicon of language for DVR functionality. People don’t say did you DVR that last night. They say did you TiVo that last night — even when not using TiVo.

TiVo is arguing that at issue here is that when they showed Echostar (owner of the DISH satellite network) a prototype TiVo way back when, rather than work out a deal with TiVo Echostar just kept the prototype and copied it. DirecTV worked out a deal with TiVo at the time and has been reported to be paying TiVo $1 per month for DirecTV TiVo units.

The Yahoo News article is a decent overview of the trial situation as it stands today, but if you want the real in depth coverage forgo Yahoo! News and instead go directly to the Marshall News Messenger. The who? you say. Right. The Marshall News Messenger. While I don’t know of a blogger covering the trial live, the Marshall News Messenger is the next best thing. An East Texas local newspaper covering an East Texas trial with certainly national and broad tech interest.

Over at the Marshall News Messenger you will be able to find that it’s a five-man, five-woman jury, that a Dallas consultant Keith Ugone is earning $425 an hour to work as an expert witness for TiVo on the case, and that Stuart West (TiVo’s VP for finance) was laid off years ago when TiVo couldn’t get initial financing but rehired once they locked in a patent for DVR technology. More coverage of the trial from the Marshall News Messenger is available here and here.

It’s pretty cool to see such indepth reporting from a small local paper and nice work by Marshall News Messenger reporters Sandra Cason and Bridgette Outten.

More on the Marshall News Messenger: “The Marshall News Messenger was founded in 1877 and has, almost from the beginning, earned a reputation as being one of the finest small newspapers in Texas and as the starting point for several journalists of renown, including Bill Moyers. The News Messenger is consistently one of the most honored newspapers in its class in Texas’ APME contest and is also well-represented in other journalism awards.

The News Messenger, with a circulation of more than 8,000 on Sunday, is the paper of record for Harrison County, Texas and the county seat of Marshall, home of the nationally famous Wonderland of Lights. The county is situated in far northeastern Texas, sharing a border with Louisiana.”

I’ve been playing around with Riya a bit the past week or so. And it’s a lot of fun. It doesn’t have the social stick like superglue thing that Flickr has, but the facial recognition stuff is interesting to use and watch as it goes through your photos.

The value of Riya for finding photos of your friends and stuff will only get better as more and more of your friends get on the site and upload their photos of themselves and you to the service.

The service is free which is nice and there is no bandwidth restrictions or storage restrictions making it an ideal place even for someone who is not interested in the technology so much but just wants a place to backup their large digital photo collection online. It’s surprising to me that they will let you upload and store 4,000 photos there for free when Flickr or the other photo sharing site charge for big use — but I guess that makes it the best deal in town for photo storage. They probably are willing to subsidize this portion of the deal for now in order to build a bigger critical mass on the site.

It’s up to you whether or not you want to make your photos public or private and if you mark them private then only you or your approved and designated contacts can see them.

Where I could see Riya really taking off is with families. Because it’s free it would appeal to everyone in the family even those that are not as into photosharing as you are. And because your brother/sister/mother/cousin/bestfriend/dog/cat/petsnake/petrock, etc. is too lazy to tag things, the photo recognition stuff will capture a lot of this metadata for you.

You have to train Riya which is easy enough to do and it gets smarter and smarter over time. Although in Tara’s example above Riya didn’t catch Bill Clinton’s photo, this could be because Bill is trying to keep a low profile these days. Or maybe Riya is part of some secret Republican conspiracy out there (kidding, kidding of course).

The uploader for the site is especially robust. I’ve never been all that happy with Flickr’s bulk uploader. It’s much better today, but over the years I’ve had tons of problems getting it to do batch uploading jobs for me. Riya’s uploader on the other hand is rock solid. The very first time I used it I was able to upload over 4,000 high res photos to the site without a single interuption in service. Very impressive. It took about 40 hours of course and did a lot of this work while I was away from the computer, but still impressive the stability built into the uploader.

Riya still has hiccups and bugs here and there but that is expected for beta software. These of course should work themselves out over time. The biggest thing the site needs now is you and all your friends to use it. Like any social networking software the power of these sites are the number of users. It’s not as much fun to go there and do a tag search for Thomas Hawk and only see the 4 photos you uploaded yourself. But as more and more people start uploading their shots there and tagging them this has the potential to get pretty big.

To get a sense of how it works though for someone with more friends on the site you can check out a search for Tara Hunt’s name. Tara of course works for Riya and has all her friends on the site, but if you and all your friends were on the site it would be just as easy for you to find all these photos of yourself. The power of the site for this purpose over Flickr is that the photo recognition feature takes a lot of the work out of it for those too lazy to tag.

Riya also plans on working to allow you to export your tagged photos to both Flickr and your own computer hard drive which is very cool and will represent a great filter of sorts to run your photos through as you take them for Vista when it’s released and photo tagging becomes much more significant for Microsoft.

Privacy of course has been and will continue to be a big concern for Riya. But I should stress that it’s super easy to make all of your photos private if this is a concern of yours, or just certain albums private, or whatever.

By Davis Freeberg

Davis Freeberg is both a customer and shareholder of Netflix. This post should not be construed as financial advice

In a new development to Netflix’s heated rivalry with Blockbuster Video, Netflix sued Blockbuster earlier today for infringing upon two patents that Netflix currently holds. In June 2003, Netflix was granted a patent relating to it’s use of queues to manage subscriber’s movie choices. The abstract of the patent is pretty technical but describes it’s in greater detail.

“According to a computer-implemented approach for renting items to customers, customers specify what items to rent using item selection criteria separate from deciding when to receive the specified items. According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider provides the items indicated by the item selection criteria to customer over a delivery channel. The provider may be either centralized or distributed depending upon the requirements of a particular application. A “Max Out” approach allows up to a specified number of items to be rented simultaneously to customers. A “Max Turns” approach allows up to a specified number of item exchanges to occur during a specified period of time. The “Max Out” and “Max Turns” approaches may be used together or separately with a variety of subscription methodologies.”

Without a queue it would be pretty hard to run an online rental service. Right now I have 480 movies that I really want to see in my queue and I would hate to have to dig through all 55,000 dvds everytime I sent something in. If this patent holds up for Netflix, it’s going to create a pretty interesting dilemna for Blockbuster.

Netflix is also claiming that Blockbuster is infringing upon a second patent issued to the company just this morning. According to the lawsuit, this patent “covers a method for subscription-based online rental that allows subscribers to keep the DVDs they rent for as long as they wish without incurring any late fees, to obtain new DVDs without incurring additional charges and to prioritize and reprioritize their own personal dynamic queue — of DVDs to be rented”

Interestingly enough, Netflix’s patent relating to their use of mailers to get DVDs back and forth wasn’t included in this lawsuit.

Netflix’s lawsuit against Blockbuster comes at a difficult time for the video store. After having a terrible year in 2005, Blockbuster was hoping to move forward in 2006. A patent lawsuit could end up being costly and time consuming and will undoubtly be a big distraction for the company. It also casts doubt for any other competitors who have been considering entering this market. In many ways the longer that it takes Netflix to resolve this issue, the better it may work as a deterent for future competitors. I think it’s interesting to note that unlike TiVo who filed their case in Marshall Texas, a known patent fast track court system, Netflix has opted to file their complaint in San Francisco instead.

While on the surface, Netflix’s case appears pretty straight forward, patent law is notoriously complex and it is worth noting that not everyone agrees with the merits of this lawsuit. In an interview earlier today, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter expressed his thoughts;

“Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who also is an attorney, said it was unclear whether Netflix’s challenge to Blockbuster’s online service would be upheld by the federal court.

“It’s my opinion that it won’t be,” Pachter said. “Blockbuster detrimentally relied on their silence as consent. If in fact (Netflix) feels so damaged they should have sought injunctive relief before Blockbuster rolled out its service.”

Now I’m not an attorney and personally I don’t think that patents covering business models should ever be issued, but if Forgent can sue Microsoft for jpeg patent infringement or if the SCO can sue IBM for linux infringement, then I don’t see how Netflix waiting a year and a half will hurt their case. Considering that their second patent was only issued just this morning, I don’t see how Netflix’s “silence” will factor into this case at all. But like I said, I’m not an attorney.

Ok, so this is a really cool set if you happen to be named Jackson.

My photoblog is where I keep my top rated photos that I take as voted on at Flickr. To see my complete portfolio please visit my Flickr site.

If you click on any photo it will take you to my Flickr page for the photo where you can select all sizes and download a high res version for your pleasure.

Add my Photoblog as a Photoblog.orgs favorite

Artichoke

And My Love is Bigger Than a Cadillac

Flowing In and Filling Up My Hopeless Heart

Cry For Us All Beauty

Mirror

Sutro Tower

Look Up, Part Two

Said the Otter to the Frog

All This Talk of Getting Old

Porsche for a Ride

Lamp

30 Summers

All the Lonely People

Rain in the French Quarter

Destruction

Somebody’s Little Girl

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog April 2006
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog March 2006
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog February 2006
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog January 2006
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog December 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog November 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog October 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog September 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog August 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog July 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog June 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog May 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog April 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog March 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog February 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog January 2005
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog December 2004
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog November 2004
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog October 2004
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog September 2004
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog August 2004
Thomas Hawk’s Digital Photoblog July 2004

http://thomashawk.com/2005/04/remixing-warhol-ron-englis
h-son-of-pop.html”>Remixing Warhol, Ron English, Son of Pop photographed June 2, 2005
Photoblogging Disneyland, 99 Interpretations of the Happiest Place on Earth photographed May 28 and 29, 2005
Citizen Media Party photographed May 13, 2005
A Night on the Town, photographed May 13, 2005
Flowers of the City, photographed April 30, 2005
I Am Robot, Hear Me Roar, photographed March 26, 2005
Reflections on Manhattan, photographed October 15th – 17th, 2004

See my photos at Flickr here.

So tonight I was on Memeorandum checking out some news and I saw this really hot headline from the Windows Live Desktop Mail Beta: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, “And we want to make it easy for our customers to share those pictures. You’ll discover that with Mail Desktop Beta (Windows Live Mail Desktop) sharing pictures is super easy. — The common situation now? (at least for me ) — I take a TON of pictures.”

Ok, great. You got me with that headline. I love photo sharing. All I ever talk about these days are Flickr and Zooomr and well whatever else has to do with photo sharing. So I click the link to read the blog post, and what do I get? Yep, you guessed it, the image above. Not the blog, not the blog post, but some crappy message telling me that I need to figure out some log on thing with Microsoft Passport.

Sorry Charlie. It would have been nice to read the article and blog it, but oh well.

Want a surefire way to sabotage your blog readership? Then be sure and sign up with Spaces dot MSN dot com for all your blogging needs. Sure to turn away even the most interested of your readers. Sheesh. Very, very, very annoying.

Update: Ed Bott thinks that my experience is most likely a bug related to my useage of Firefox combined with this site and not part of a bigger problem overall with accessing MSN Spaces blogs. I’m certainly willing to concede that that this problem that I had could be a bug and not intentional and that the issue might not be as widespread as I thought. Although I could not access this post either at work or home earlier this morning and did get the prompt above (caputured directly from screen print) the link does appear to be working now. You still of course must log in to passport to leave a comment on the blog which I don’t like.

Ed wrote about a similar bug last year with the Passport log on thing.

New York Times. So here I am reading today’s New York Times and what do I come across but the article “Every Click You Make, They’ll be Watching You,” and just about laughed myself right off of my chair. Apparently Claria, yeah, your fine friends from spyware company Gator, are betting that you and I will want to volutarily allow them to track our every move on the internet. The reason why? So that they can serve us up more relevant ads.

This is just about the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life. This could totally be an April Fool’s joke.

From the article: “Claria says that because those ads are so closely aligned to the user’s interests and recent behavior, marketers will be willing to pay more than they might on other sites for the ability to reach PersonalWeb users.” Well, duh, yeah that’s right. But Claria is smoking crack if they think that I’m going to:

1. Allow anyone to track my internet useage voluntarily.

2. Install their crappy software (which is a requirement).

3. Change my homepage to their portal (isn’t that what they kept doing on their own the last time I installed Gator?)

4. Ever trust a spyware company for what benefit? So that I can have more relevant ads?

Welcome to the biggest con job ever on the internet. Again, from the article: “Readers would visit the newspaper’s Web site more often as a result, Mr. VanDeVelde predicted, thereby generating more advertising for Claria and the publisher to share. So far, Claria has signed no such agreements with United States publishers, but it has set up a joint venture with Yahoo Japan to possibly implement the technology there.”

Yeah, Claria has signed “no such agreements” because any newspaper caught doing business with this spyware company would be mocked as much as they are. I’m surprised Yahoo! is having anything to do with them.