A few days back TechCrunch had a story about Microsoft putting out a promo video for SongSmith that included a poorly disguised Apple MacBook covered up with stickers:

If you check out the IBM LotusLive site, which I mentioned earlier, it’s also got a stock image of a woman working on an Apple MacBook, but the Apple logo has just been erased:

Not exactly in the same vein, but still one that I found amusing was the (perhaps inadvertent) Mac vs. PC ad in the Facebook Developer Forum back in December:

So why does this happen?  Well, my theory is that it’s usually because people in marketing and creative arts departments typically use Macs, especially since they’re often used for video editing, so they’re just there. No reason to run out and buy a $600 prop, right?

If you have another example I should add to the list, ping me in the comments.

In an article featured in the New York Times:

[Researchers] found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text-editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.

Although I can personally attest to being more productive with two (or more) monitors, the study was sponsored by NEC, a major manufacturer of LCD computer monitors.  So make of it what you will, I suppose.

Nonetheless, that’s all the reason I need to go out and buy myself another 22” LCD monitor.

Looking at the phone, it’s easy to see why people like what they see:

• Large, vivid multi-touch touchscreen
• Email, web, contacts, etc.
• Slide-out keyboard
• Built-in WiFi
• Wireless charger (called a Touchstone)
• Integration of 3rd party apps (through a store maintained by Palm)

It’s too early to tell if this will be the ticket to Palm’s future, and keep them from hitting the technology dustbin, but the phone does look nice.  Only after the phone hits the market — sometime after the first half of 2009 — will consumers have a chance to shell out over $200 for the Palm Pre and decide if it’s a winner over the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm… Oh, and the HTC G1 Android-powered phone, too.

Additional coverage of the Palm Pre:

• Hands on video with the Pre [ArsTechnica]
• Hands on photos of the Pre [TechCrunch]
• Photos of the Pre at CES [CNET News]

VIZIO, America’s TV and Consumer Electronics Company, announced today the unveiling of its "Connected HDTV" Platform, which enhances the HDTV viewing experience by bringing personalized entertainment, information and social networking content into the viewer’s living room. With unprecedented choice and control of web-based and local content from a wide range of popular content providers and services, including on-demand movies and music, news, weather, sports, gaming and social networking services, this platform will be integrated as a key feature into VIZIO televisions shipping to retailers nationwide this Fall 2009 in time for the busy holiday season.

So I guess even if my next television is a Vizio (which I have been very happy with for the last two years), I’ll still get all the same benefits of having Internet connectivity.  It’s good to see all of the major television manufacturers moving towards the same trend.  Is it just a matter of time, though, before we see things like a television with a built in gaming platform as well?

One thing that’s not clear from all the press releases is the details around what browser (if any) will be built into the televisions, and how well they’ll support RIA (rich Internet applications).  I’m sure details will be forthcoming for developers, though.

According to the official press release:

Sony’s new XBR9 and Z-series models feature an Ethernet connection, allowing the sets to directly access Sony BRAVIA Internet Video content using an existing broadband connection. The service offers one of the largest selections of free and premium movies, TV shows, sports, music and more from an array of partners like Amazon Video on Demand, YouTube(R), Yahoo!(R), Slacker, and others.

If Sony’s TVs weren’t so expensive, this might be interesting for me.  I’m going to stick with my “low end” Vizio LCD TV for now.  It may not have any direct connections to the Internet, but the picture quality is good, and I can always surf the web with my Nintendo Wii or watch streaming Netflix movies with my Xbox 360.  But it’s good to see that manufacturers are starting to build these kinds of capabilities directly into newer TVs.  Something for me to look forward to in maybe 4-5 years, I suppose.

Best Buy also sells refurbished 3G models for people that want to upgrade.

Personally, I’m still sticking with my iTouch until the iPhone gets a full keyboard.  I just can’t type worth a dime on the touch screen.

[c/o Reuters]

Even as usage of the IPv4 space has grown, we’ve been able to keep from hitting 100% usage mainly by using NAT (network address translation) to place entire networks behind a single routable, public IP address.  NAT has its limitations, though, since it becomes much more complex and in some cases impossible to allow hosts behind NAT to host network services.  But despite the use of NAT, the IPv4 address space will run out soon.  Current estimates are that we’ll run out of IPv4 addresses in February 2011, a mere two years away.

So why does it matter and what can we do?

If we run out of routable IPv4 addresses, at a very high level it just won’t be possible to add new hosts to the publicly routable (accessible) Internet as we know it today without upgrading to IPv6.  Some companies could decide to conserve more of their IPs by using NAT, but most will probably adopt IPv6 addresses.

IPv6, finalized in December 1998 (yes, that’s 10 years ago just last month), was developed to be the solution to prevent the possibility of the exhaustion of all routable IPv4 addresses.  Despite having been around for so long, it is still is only used on less than 1% of the total publicly accessible Internet.  Because of IPv4’s structure (32-bit addresses with limitations for special non-routable addresses) there are less than 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses.  By comparison, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, allowing for 3.4*10^38 (that would be 34 with thirty-seven zeros after it), making address exhaustion an extremely unlikely situation for IPv6.

Most network software, operating systems and networking equipment manufactured today supports IPv6 already, but there IPv6 still hasn’t gained the adoption it needs.  There are lots of theories on why – ranging from a lack of support from ISPs, investment in older equipment that only supports IPv4, to things like the complexity of an IPv6 address (example: an IPv4 address looks like this: 10.4.33.7, whereas an IPv6 address would be something like this: 2008:ab7:653::9d3d:370:7661 – imagine trying to read that over the phone to your IT Helpdesk administrator!).  Personally I believe it’s been mainly an issue of complexity – the IPv6 addressing scheme requires a lot of knew expertise plus a lot of work to switch over, and since there’s no performance or financial reasons motivating a switch to IPv6, network administrators don’t want to invest the time in getting up to speed and making all the necessary changes.

Whatever the case, though, it’s something that anyone developing software should be aware of right now: your software needs to support IPv6, or else you’ll feel a big pinch in 2011.  Already the US government is requiring all new software support IPv6, and many government agencies have converted in part or whole already (the deadline was 2008).

[IPv4 usage details c/o ArsTechnica]

The price of home computers has dropped significantly.  It’s now cheaper than ever to buy a home PC, and with most of the best applications on the web being free or advertisement driven, the only recurring cost is the monthly fee for an Internet connection (unless you’re using a free municipally-operated WiFi service or public hotspot).  It seems like market forces are attempting to drop it even lower, and Microsoft is looking at how to make that happen.

I’ve read lots of opinion articles and speculation before that Microsoft should consider making a "free" version of Windows that is entirely ad-driven, as a way to sway people from switching to alternate operating systems like Linux, or even beat Google to the punch assuming they ever enter the OS market.  The suggestion was that even businesses would consider switching to Vista if they knew that it was free.

Here’s one final rambling note: it seems a bit ironic how AdWare and SpyWare aren’t well tolerated practices for desktop applications, but it’s okay for sites like Facebook to have targeted ads.

The second one died, of course, about another 6 months from the first.  I’d left it dead on the floor for a number of months, swearing I would call Microsoft tomorrow, ultimately never getting around to it.  I finally decided I would just get another, newer Xbox 360, just so I could have two, get a newer 60gb drive, and be sure that I wasn’t going to get a warranty repair unit with the same internal architecture as the first two.  The newer Xbox 360s have some substantial internal changes that supposedly make them less susceptible to the RRoD.

So, then it was just a matter of getting my saved game data from one drive to the other…

Initially, I just used the original 20gb drive on the newer 360, but the new dashboard feature of copying a game to the 360 hard drive for faster load times meant that I was going to need more space, and fast.

I’d bought an XSATA kit from Datel about a year ago after my Forza 2 profile got corrupted.  I thought maybe there was some way to recover the saved data (which I had spent about 15 hours on), but ultimately it proved to be a futile attempt. 

I figured I could make some use of it now, though, and use it to copy the saved games on my 20gb hard drive to the new 60gb unit.  The first problem I ran into, though: the original Xplorer 360 program that came with the Datel kit only recognized the original 20gb Xbox 360 hard drives, and not the newer 60gb and 120gb drives.  That is to say: it recognized the 60gb drive, but it didn’t display any of the contents of Partition 3, where all of the saved game data is supposed to be stored.  So I was able to back up the original drive, but not able to restore any of the data to the 60gb drive.

It took a little searching, but I finally found a more recent release of Xplorer 360 (right on the place I should’ve been looking in the first place) on Datel’s website.  Datel renamed the program, from Xplorer 360 to Xport 360, which made it a bit harder to find.  The current version of Xport is 1.12, and was released on October 27th, 2008.  So, without further ado, here are the steps for transferring your saved games from a 20gb drive to a 60gb drive:

1.) Connect the 20gb drive to the XSATA (or if you’re using the Datel Xport, connect the drive to the Xport unit), connect the USB connection to your PC (and install the drivers if necessary) and back up the original 20gb drive with Xport 360.  This will create a full 20gb .bin image on your local hard drive, so be sure you have enough space before proceeding.

2.) If you want to move only selected content and saved games from the original drive, open the image you created with Xport and expand Partition 3.  Under the folder "Content", you’ll find a list of sub-folders.  Each of the sub-folders is a profile.  The one with all zeros is the downloaded content directory.  In my case, I wanted only the saved games from a few select profiles, so I copied over the ones that I cared about.

3.) Connect the newer 60gb drive to the XSATA unit and load Xport 360 again.  Drag and drop the original profiles that you expanded on your local hard drive back onto the 60gb drive under Partition 3, and place them in the same Content folder.

4.) Re-connect the 60gb drive to your Xbox 360, boot up and make sure that everything copied correctly.

I kept the 20gb backup image (and compressed it) just in case I need to recover a saved game in the future, or in case there was something else I wanted to pull from the old drive.  This method is also good in general if you want to periodically back up your Xbox hard drive (in case of catastrophic Xbox 360 drive failure).

Note: I don’t recommend buying into the story that you can re-use other people’s saved games to gain achievement points.  Microsoft caught on to that scheme really early on, and started banning people from Xbox Live who were caught doing it.  And besides, that’s flat out cheating.  What good are achievement points if you didn’t really earn them by playing through the game?

The feds claim that Siddiqui embezzled more than $65 million from Fry’s under this scheme, and has paid more than $120 million to three Las Vegas casinos since 2005.

Like everyone else in the Silicon Valley, I shop at Fry’s pretty often – sometimes as much as three or four times a month.  This story leaves me wondering: is that why the prices for routers and flash drives at Fry’s are so high compared to everywhere else?  It sure would explain a lot!

[c/o SF Chronicle]