• One would be the "emergency", or the "E911" service. This would let emergency services find you during times of a crisis. This was also the part of the feature that the user could not turn off.
• The second would be the user-selectable part. The tech-utopian pretty picture painted by many brochures went something like this - "You're walking past a store in the mall with your cellphone's location service turned on. Suddenly, your cellphone beeps and you check to see that the store has sent you a coupon."
  
  Sounds pretty benign, doesn't it? (That was rhetoric, I'll bust that bubble in a bit). However utilitarian this location service was painted out to be, I've been through several malls in the last several years with my cellphone's location service turned on and have had no coupons been sent to me; or had anyone mention them having experienced anything like this.

So...did the service fail to catch on with vendors and stores in the mall? I wonder. As my overstuffed mailbox often indicates, local (and global) businesses have not really eased up on the discount coupons and the unsolicited advertising. Walking through the mall still gets you the food freebies, and signing up via email at stores does indeed get you a 10% off coupon every once in a while.  Add to this the "fact" that most stores are almost perenially in a state of having a sale of some sort, and one would wonder why all this discount coupon brouhaha would stay away from the big cellphone wave that's all over the world right now.

It seems like the most obvious way to sell. Kids have cellphones. They're glued to cellphones all the time. Cellphone vendors cater to kids with products and services. Kids gather in malls. Ditto young adults. Ditto their parents and friends. Ergo, if there was a technology to beam ads straight to these cellphones, why would it not have immense commercial benefits? I mean, having my cellphone buzz with a discount coupon from a store I was about to walk past would probably be a lot better than one of those signboard-wearing people thrusting a flyer in my face when I least expected it.

All in all, I don't see why the advertised function of the location service on most cellphones is still glaringly absent from our over-cellphoned society. If the service failed, don't have it on new phones. If it didn't fail, use it. Its current state of stagnation is eyebrow-raising interesting, at best.

Unless, and here comes the conspiracy theory...its in place because it offers other benefits that the cellphone companies do not like to talk about. Perhaps for their demographics. Perhaps for local, federal and global law enforcement.

It gets better. While most cellphones allow individual (non-commercial) application / software authors to create a plethora of applications for their onboard operating systems, this location feature is strangely locked away from prying eyes. Meaning, I, if I were an application developer for mobile phones, could develop an application for a cellphone that could access the Internet and get directions from an online mapping service, but I couldn't use the onboard location data that the cellphone already claims to have, in order to provide the cellphone's current location to my mapping application.

Alright, yes - doing this would mean that the current surge in portable GPS navigation devices would suffer a significant hit. If so, turn the location feature off from cellphone completely. Make it go away from cellphone chips. Most don't know what it does, and at this rate, most don't care. What they don't know can't hurt them, and in this case, they won't know what they lost because they never knew they had it in the first place.

So...with enough reasons to have it NOT be in cellphones, one still wonders - why is it still IN there?

• Blog sites are literally available by the bucketload on the Internet today. Most are free and/or offer a reasonably robust set of features for their freeloader members.
• Almost everyone and their pet (ahem) has a blog. Ergo, blogging has gone from being the world of the word-ily wise to the open space that teems with almost everyone who has access to the Internet. Thus, "its on my blog" doesn't really evoke as much of a eyebrow-raise as it did about a year or six months ago.
• All these blog services do and offer almost everything but the kitchen sink. Podcast-ability, audio and video podcast features, audio podcast recording from phones, photo display, comments, this, that and then some. And everyone's got everything 'cause those who don't get slammed by users in about ten minutes. Its quite the wrestling arena out there.
• Customizability is what's getting everyone's goat now, or so it seems. WordPress "lets me do this", and TypePad "lets me do that" is all the buzz now.
• RSS is everywhere. If you're not mashing up, you're not breathing right.

So...why isn't MSN Spaces good enough to join the blogger brat pack leading the crowd? Well, for starters, the ubiquitous - "Because its made by Microsoft".

Secondly, over the last few months, an interesting set of features has crept into the proverbial mix. A few that caught my eye were:

• The URLs have gone from http://spaces.msn.com/members/<blogmembername> to just http://spaces.msn.com/<blogmembername> and the photo gallery is easily accessible at http://spaces.msn.com/<blogmembername>/photos
• There's a little "Add comment" link atop pictures. Its not very prominent, though.
• Blog-by-email has gotten better; but it isn't as easy as, say, TextAmerica and/or Flickr.
• The RSS feed is, as a friendly wired wonder succinctly summarized it, "all f@#ked up". I agree. What's with "&nbsp" elements in the HTML, anyway? And "<DIV>" tags? Really, Microsoft, c'mon...
• A lot more color Themes than before. However, entirely custom color themes still seem to be fleeting visions of the future.
• The content justification is still to the left. I wonder why they can't just center-justify everything like everyone else and let users get creative with their screen space allotment.

Some good, some bad. All in all, I'd sorta agree that the package deal doesn't really look and feel as appealing as the rest of the big guns in the blogosphere. However, I'm sticking to this. My experience with Microsoft's other offering tells me so.

• Works great. Supports most cellphone / SMS carriers.
• You cannot send pictures to multiple Flickr albums at once and hope that thing will work. Here's more:
  
  Lets say you had three Flickr "accounts", each with its own upload-by-email functionality set up. If you were to email the same picture from your cameraphone to all three email addresses for the three corresponding Flickr accounts, you will NOT see the picture posted to each of the accounts. Instead, you'll see the picture posted THRICE to the first email address. Translated...weird!!
  

Anyway, when sent singularly, i.e. one picture to one email address per SMS / email "envelope", things work fine. Based on your settings, Flickr will allow users to view and download the full-size version as well.

After I had things working with Flickr, I opted for the most obvious test. Sending the same picture via the same SMS message to both Flickr and TextAmerica to see which one "looks better", posts faster, etc. Here are the results:

• Posting times are the same. Pictures post immediately and are available on your public page immediately after posting unless you have specific configurations that disallow this.
• Photo resolutions are not the same. The TextAmerica image seemed pixelated and blurry as compared to the one on Flickr.

After some additional analysis, my inference is that TextAmerica does a 40% compression on incoming images.

My caveats:

• I'm no photo / picture expert. Just a newbie masquerading as an amateur wannabe.
• Both my Flickr and TextAmerica accounts are the "free" sort
• I have only skimmed through the terms of service (now no longer available off the new TextAmerica front page) for both sites, and didn't immediately spot any references to "downgraded images" for either "free" users or "paid" users.

So, my layman summary is: Flickr's better. It offers the same upload-by-email functionality, the "tagging" functionality and the image download functionality. It offers comments (not to "everyone" like TextAmerica, though), and it offers EXIF data display - something that TextAmerica does not.

One could theoretically argue that cameraphones don't really require EXIF data dumps. And you would be partially correct. They certainly don't "require" them. However, it doesn't hurt to see 'em anyway, if your cameraphone does have an EXIF data blob associated with every image it takes. For example, I just discovered that my cameraphone shoots at a certain interesting exposure value everytime and that the make of the "camera" visible in the EXIF dump doesn't match the vendor name on the cellphone.

Back to the paparazzi-ing...

• Moblogging, i.e. posting pictures from your cellphone and adding some text garnish around it, thereby sorta making it a "blog post"
• Audio blogging, i.e. posting sound files recorded either via an online service, a phone and/or a microphone. This one's dangerously close to being a "podcast", but then again, not eveyone cares for the moniker
• Not blogging at all. Its so last year.

I've seen a significant trend that says:

• People are making their blog posts shorter and "skinnier". Waxing eloquent in a blog post isn't de rigeur anymore. Unless, of course, thou are of the legalese clan and are discussing errata inflammatoria.
• Blog posts are now getting to be a component of a better fleshed-out Web presence. Instead of websites being "blogs only", websites are growing into more than just reams of verbose opinions interspersed with comments
• The Great Blog Rush did good things for the spirit of the online community, and kindled other "community" websites like MySpace, etc. Those came with their obvious dark sides, but everyone's smarter now. Or so one hopes.
• Blogs brought comments and opinions. While blogs may seem to be dwindling in their nature and "ferocity" of late, I think the Internet as a whole as benefitted immensely from the blog aftereffects of "comments and opinions". There are more of "them" paying attention to more of "us" now, and are changing things for the better. Its putting the 'e' back into the online democracy, so to speak.
  
  Alright, that was a gross overstatement. I'll whittle it down to this. Consumer-driven change is always a good thing, and the pervasive "viewer comments" on almost everything today have made a lot of corporate stonewalls (grudgingly) admit to the presence of the customer in a lot more active manner than before, and then act on the end-user's input.
  
• Pictures, pictures, pctures. And in a time that has the average Internet user's Web-page-loyalty grown even shorter than it was before, I think both the poster and the reader prefer the "a picture speaks a thousand words" bit so that one is spared the effort of typing, and the other is spared the effort of reading. Its seems like a good synergy, and I'm sure that camera vendors love it, too.

Ergo, cameras with beefier specs in smaller form factors. Ditto computers and cameraphones. "Blog services", like this one - MSN Spaces - pushing better features into the mix in order to wade out a marketplace awash with a gazillion others like it.

And the final "ergo" - the user. The user today is becoming smarter, both from a sense of global information awareness to being informed about specifics about specifics. A lot have complained that Google's done away with the need for people to have textbooks. While I don't hold Google in the highest regard (have you checked out Ask.Com yet?!), I don't necessarily agree with search engines making teachers obsolete. Think of it this way - if anything is free and functional and fast, one usually ends up using it. Faced with a free and fast way to find stuff, one could only be driven to find more stuff quick. And that can only make one better informed than before. Couple that with RSS and the sort, and you're faced with a user who's well-educated in the means to be well-educated. And that's one of the few good man-made recursive cycles in nature.

Yes, that has its obvious shortcomings and dark sides. What doesn't?

• Better color schemes
  
  
• Turn-by-turn text is optional
  
  
• Maps print better
  
  
• "Send to phone" is still around
  
  
• Traffic overlays! That's one and a half stars right there!
  
  
• A "simple API" for quick-and-easy developer stuff
  
  
• An advanced API on offer as well. Getting under the sheets with a live traffic map was never so easy!
  
  
• A growing gallery of "cool stuff" that one can do by leveraging their map API. This weekend's going to have me put one of these to use!
  
  
• More API goodness: They've got "stitch together your own map image" APIs, "geocoding" APIs and "traffic" APIs. From where I stand, they've covered pretty much everything of interest in the usable map space.
  
  Yes, it does leave out stuff about elevations and other cartographic wonders. I don't climb mountains, and ergo, don't care enough to figure out if "it can be done with what's on offer". I see AJAX is in the mix, so I can theorize that the possibilities are endless.
  
  
• Alright, enough supergeekspeak and back to the "average user" stuff:
  
  
• Insert stuff!!
  
  This totally ROCKS! Say you're mapping directions from point A to point B. Then you decide to "go via" or "stop at". Yahoo! Maps now lets you add insert this map point into your route
  
  
• Search and insert!
  
  Say you're plotting a route, and then you want to search for Chinese restaurants along the way. Yahoo! Maps does this in style, and lets you insert the map points accordingly.
  
  Restaurants are added to your route along with their rating and their phone number so that the printout has all the information you'd need.
  
  Simply superb!
  
  
• Addresses find their names
  
  Lets say you enter an address. If the Yahoo! Map database already has it on file as "something" - some business name, etc. - it'll indicate this on the pop-up.
  
  So, 123 A Street may be the address you know, but the discreet Yahoo! Map pop-up will also include "ABC Inc" if that's the name of the business it has associated with it. Very cool to verify addresses and directions.
  
  

So, what's with the "four stars" and not a full five - assuming its a scale of five?

It is a scale of five. And the only thing missing is the satellite overlay feature. I don't really care too much about it since it makes for bad prints, but its good to have - just 'cause a bird's eye view of the destination often makes finding it easier and parking simpler.

Yahooooo!!

• Pictures are taken during vacation(s), Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, birthdays, weddings and other parties - at the very least.
• Prints are always desired, usually in multiples.
• Even if everyone on the distribution list has a computer and uses it all the time, prints are still desired for those remote relatives who do not / cannot use the computer.
• "Its cheaper" to pay for a printer, glossy paper and cartridges every once in a while as compared to paying for individual prints
• Even if everyone does everything almost paper-less today, "its good" to have a printer at home - especially if its one of those new ones with a screen that takes memory cards and does a lot of other things like faxing, scanning, copying, etc. - nevermind the fact that most people who can afford the toys that would make use of such a printer would have to have jobs that would keep them in an office environment for most of the day, which would have all these facilities available for free.
• We don't write anymore. We print cursive in navy blue ink so that it looks like its handwriting and expect the receiving party to actually believe it to be so.

Ergo, its essential to have a working printer at home at all times. One that does a great job of color prints and "regular" prints on regular A4 paper. One that should ideally also fax, scan and copy.

I'm bored with the introduction already. In summary, here's my attempt at trying to create a complete and correct list of requirements for a new printer:

• Form factor: reasonably small.
  
  
• Features: The "must have" list
  
  
• Must accept A4 size paper
• Must accept standard photo-sized paper (4" x 6", 5" x 7", 8" x 10")
• Must have discrete ink tanks for all its colors
  
  
• Features: The "nice to have" list
  
  
• PictBridge printing
  
  Printers that support this feature have a little USB port on the front. Cameras and cameraphones that support PictBridge printing can use their respective USB connectors to hook straight into the printer and print images.
  
  Functionality points: 4 out of 5. This is certainly a cool thing to have.
  Reasaonability points: 1 out of 5. Lesser than 5% of the people I know would actually keep using this feature. Most would download to their computer and issue a print command from there as usual.
  
  
• Memory card support
  
  Printers that accept memory cards are getting to be en vogue now. I think its a nice feature, but it necessitates the presence of an LCD screen on the printer, which, naturally, would drive up the price by an easy $50 to $100.
  
  While printers / printer software are doing a better job of reading and translating the associated EXIF data in digital images to make for better prints, I would still think that most photographers - whatever their expertise level is - would be more comfortable downloading their pictures onto the computer first and then printing it out.
  
  Especially so when one is making a print, because usually one wants prints to "look just right".
  
  On the flip side, printers supporting memory cards may be a great idea for SOHO environments where one just wants to "get a print" quickly - editing and looks be darned.
  
  Functionality points: 3 out of 5. In theory, this is no different than PictBridge-friendliness. Instead of a peripheral, memory-card-reading printers allow the user to plug in the memory card directly. However:
  
  # Memory cards are like floppy disks. People tend to throw a lot of "stuff" on them. Thus, if a printer supports memory cards, I'd like for it to be able to recognize more than just the vanilla JPEG and GIF formats. I would like it to recognize and print out Word / PowerPoint documents, text files, etc. If the claim is "printing without a computer", why stop at images?
  
  As of last read, I wasn't aware of printers supporting this "print most / non-image files" functionality. I'd love to be wrong. Please drop me a line if you believe so.
  
  # Not all memory cards have write-protection switches. I would be touchy about the potential consequences of having a printer ASIC touch the only copy of a spectacular image (no copies) and finding out later that it was "somehow" corrupted.
  
  # Memory cards are small. While that's great for the cameras that are supposed to hold them at most times, its also makes things a lot easier in the "Oh, I forgot my memory card in your printer!" department. Having a memory card stuck in someone else's printer is not a pretty thought. The knowledge that "they" could now see everything else on that card till I picked it up is even more interesting. The thought that my camera would be limited to its meagre onboard memory store till the time I get that memory card back into it is absolultey horrifying.
  
  
  
  Reasaonability points: 3 out of 5. All said and done, this is still a good feature - both for the consumer and for the manufacturer. It lets the consumer do quick prints without starting the computer and/or falling prey to OS hiccups. It gives the manufacturer a reason to put in fancy LCD screens on the printer and raise the prices. Everyone "wins"...apparently.
  
  
• "All in one"
  
  Using a fax is getting to be a lost art, but I'll admit - having one around isn't such a bad idea. Ditto for a copier.
  
  However, given that most Kinko's outlets are open 24 hours and the cost of a copy / fax isn't prohibitive - are these features something that the "average home user" should pay for in a new printer!
  
  Functionality points: 4 out of 5. Having a computer-less solution for faxing, copying, printing and scanning (alright, maybe one can't really "scan" without a computer) is awesome.
  
  Reasaonability points: 3 out of 5. Lesser than 5% of the people I know would actually keep using the extended feature set. I imagine printing and scanning to be used and the rest to be, well, just "available".
  
  And things can get really bad if you actually hook up the fax line and start receiving spam faxes. Those can kill your paper store in a hurry - both the white and the green variety.
  
  
• Dye-sublimation
  
  Excellent technology. Makes brilliant prints. Should be left to the pros who need to consistently churn out that kind of quality.
  
  The "average" home user, however educated he / she is thanks to Google and/or technology infomercials (thanks to blogs and the sort - I think most of everything out there is now an infomercial..of sorts. Product plugs catch you complete unaware at most times!), is faced with a selection of 25-year-long prints and 100-year-long prints and water-and-fade-resistant prints if he / she uses any of the current set of "regular" inkjets. Canon's Chroma inks and Epson's DuraBrite inks boast print longevity that would far outlast interest levels, for the next few generations.
  
  And if you / they still haven't gone digital and/or made copies by then - you already know that it isn't the printer's or the ink's fault.

I've waxed on long and hard. Here's what I think:

1. If you just want to print on paper and on photo-paper, get an inkjet that does just that. If you already have a scanner, don't even look at the all-in-one aisle.
   
   
2. If you are serious about your photo prints, get a printer with dye-sublimation. They're expensive, but then again - nobody said photography was cheap.
   
   
3. If you're the "occassional" photo-printer, refer to #1

So...what got me started about this in the first place? Yeah - my existing printer gave up! Does the fact that I can spin verbose gossamer about the aforementioned "requirements" make my search for a new one any easier?


Not in the least bit. Just like you are right now - I'm reading reviews, polling friends and lurking in store aisles (and online, of course) for good deals, buzzwords to look for, intelligent questions to ask and the corresponding correct answers to expect.


The Black Friday deals should help, too.

Yeah, its been a while. Yes, I've sounded like a Microsoft guy. No apologies. Bouquets and brickbats when they're due.
 
 
So, here's me playing from the other side of the proverbial table. Not that I agree to actually havin taken sides in the past, of course...

Presumably in order to keep up with the slew of online and desktop applications geared towards letting the "average user" keep up with their growing repositories of digital pictures and the sort, Microsoft has just released a beta version of their photo-gallery product / service.

Not really the first ones off the block at the race

Yahoo! has had Yahoo! Photos for ages and then some now. In fact, they recently purchased Flickr to beef up their photo-storage-and-sharing portfolio. Some say they messed it up a bit since Flickr usage now enforces valid Yahoo! authentication. But, the way I figure it - if you don't have a Yahoo! username, you were either born less than five years ago (and if you can actually read this, you oughta get your IQ checked...'cause you're probably a prodigy!) or you were born over ninety years ago (and if you are reading this - you rock!). Other than those possibilities, you were probably living on a beautiful island for reasons best known to you, and I would heartily recommend re-evaluating your desire to resume the "normal life".

Alrighty then. 'nuff said already. So, Yahoo!'s got the big guns when it comes to photo-sharing and storage. There's ImageBucket, ImageDump, PhotoBucket and then some. Essentially, ever since some hotshot at Yahoo! said "storage doesn't matter", everyone's gone nuts about handing out free storage for pictures.

This has been going on for ages now. What's with Microsoft's late entry? I know there used to be something called Microsoft Communities or the sort before that used to be considered as a medium to share pictures, and there's this - MSN Spaces - with the well-developed-but-limited-storage photo display capabilities.

Microsoft's late to the game. To add insult to its own injury, its released a beta version of a product that's far from "lightweight" when it comes to system requirements. In addition, I don't see why the Microsoft behemoth has to actually do a beta release anymore. Just an internal release would probably get them enough end-user QA comments for them to roll out version 1.0 to the public right out of the gate. They employ the equivalent of a couple of US states anyway - and that's just in the US.

What part of the "Microsoft makes bloatware" accusation had they not heard?

Time flies. Operating systems develop. Features grow. Users whine louder. Hackers try harder. That's how it goes. However, Microsoft's traditionally attracted a consistent rant - that their applications are <add your own choice adjective / expletive here> huge! And they keep getting bigger.

Since I'm no expert on OS engineering or deployment, I've stayed away from commenting on the question - "Does the new version of Windows really have to take up so-many gigabytes?!!". However, I do know that there are freeware image gallery creators and image organization applications for the average user that run less than 10 MB. Given that, I find the following specs a tad overboard:

<quote>

System Requirements

Minimum

• Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Microsoft Windows XP Professional with SP2. (Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition not supported.)
• 1.0 gigahertz (GHz) processor.
• 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM.
• 200 MB of available hard disk space.
• Super VGA (800 x 600) resolution monitor.

Recommended

• Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Microsoft Windows XP Professional with SP2. (Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition not supported.)
• 2.4 GHz processor.
• 512 MB of RAM.
• 200 MB of available hard disk space.
• Windows Presentation Foundation™–capable 3D Video Card.
•  Broadband internet connection.

</quote>

Lemme get this straight - a 1 GHz processor is the bare minimum for this? It ain't no PhotoShop, y'know..

The recommended specs had me amused as well. What could've led them to recommend a "2.4 GHz" processor as compared to just a "2 Ghz" or a "3 Ghz" processor? It isn't "2.5". Its "2.4". I'm curious - did someone at Microsoft actually figure out that a 2.5 GHz processor was overkill, as compared to a 2.4 Ghz processor - for this application?

Creative talent?!!

They named this "Max". "Max". What does "Max" remind you of? Or, better still - how does "Max" allude to photography, imaging or any sort of media - in any way?

For a company worth a few bazillion, "Max" seems a tad dry, doesn't it? Did they open-source the creative nomenclature process and get screwed over by a crowd of Microsoft-bashers posing as helpful elves?

Way to go..this disclaimer really makes me feel comfortable about using the product

On the right hand side of the download page, they've got a write-up that starts pretty well. It addresses the obvious user concern about using a "beta" software application. It goes...

<quote>

Because this is beta software*, you might be wondering if it will destroy your computer, erase your data, or cause unnecessary stress. It won't, and here's why:

</quote>

Excellent start. This is exactly the sort of user-friendly text that puts the new user's mind at ease.

However, the skeptical reader (like yours truly) spots the asterisk above "software" and looks for fine print. And here's what I found:

<quote>

*Note: This is a Preview release. Therefore, do not install this on machines you depend on.

</quote>

That is open to so much anti-Microsoft humor, I'm not even going to start!

C'mon, Bill! Just 'cause Ballmer threw a chair around on stage to punctuate his feelings about Google shouldn't let you turn a blind eye to the fact that users love Picasa. An ominous disclaimer attached to a beta application that almost requires the heaven and the horizon to work right doesn't really sound like the best way to win back customer loyalty.

• If you were to eat alone, the average buffet spread could be a tad more expensive than if you were to stick to the tried-and-true off a familiar menu, or sampled something new
• If you were to eat as part of a crowd, you would probably pay a lot less for an a-la-carte meal off the menu than if you were to have an equally satisfying buffet experience
• At a buffet, you essentially try to "sample everything" and then, ideally, come back for seconds when you find you like something. In practice, this never happens because you're too full for seconds by the time you're done sampling everything that looks interesting
• Since everyone eats less, and since a few weeks worth of monitoring could easily establish the "popular" items and the "unpopular" items, the buffet owners would know what to spend on and what to not spend on
• The buffet owners could still keep having the "unpopular" items  out there so that the spread looks bigger, knowing fully well that people will sample it, quench their appetite a tad more by doing so, and not return for seconds
• Its a buffet, and microwaves / heating elements have been around for decades. Could anyone conclusively prove, at first look or rudimentary examination, that the food on offer isn't a carryover from yesterday?

Seriously, think about it. Do you believe you really get "value for money" at a Vegas  buffet? The desserts look fabulous and the drinks are interesting, and often free. However, for the amount you put away versus the amount you're charged - who wins?

The segue into Vegas was intentional, because Vegas is probably among the few places on the planet that attracts gazillions of wannabe gazillionaire who "know" that they can "beat the system" with anything from a silent prayer to a favorite shirt to a complicated-yet-apparently-undetectable gizmo hidden on their person.

And as we all know, 99% of these hopefuls are welcomed by the casino 'cause its the dealer who has the last, albeit silent, laugh. The potential 1% who actually do "make it", probably account for losses lesser than what it takes for the casino to change its linen on a regular basis.

So, do I go to Vegas? Yeah. Do I like it? Absolutely. Have I lost money there? Of course! Would I go again? Sure! Why? Because, dollar-for-dollar, I believe Vegas offers a lot more "entertainment value" than any other place (commonly known) that would entertain you in a similar fashion. How was my opinion about Vegas relevant? Because that's usually the next question that a theory like this elicits...

For the longest time, I've nursed a similar conspiracy theory about NetFlix. My opinion was that NetFlix was "Too good to be true" and that its owners were the kind who were laughing their way to bank 'cause they were attracting a whole load of people who liked the convenience of the website and the queue, and believed they could get more value out of the system than was intended by watching movies and sending them back really quick - thereby beating the BlockBuster / Hollywood equivalent.

Essentially, another business that was based on letting its users believe that they could beat the system, while, in effect, profiting from 99% of those who didn't. The NetFlix feature set is impressive, and includes various goodies for the membership fee - from never having late fees, requesting movies be sent to you via a website, and postage-paid envelopes to return them. It works for many.

Lets examine the convenience / user / value trade-off one more time:

• NetFlix offers a convenience to people who want to rent movies, new or old, and claim to not have te time to either make a trip down to the local video store and/or have the time to go back to return the rental
• NetFlix offers a website so that these "busy people" can queue up their favorites and "keep 'em coming"
• NetFlix offers various pricing plans so that these "busy people" can opt to have either one, two or five rentals available to them, at any time

So far, so good? Lets dig deeper:

• This "busy people" profile has to have the time to watch the one, two or five videos.
• If they're really as "busy" as they claim, they'll take a while to watch and return those videos, and get the next set
• If they're somewhat as "busy" as they claim, they'll probably return movies quicker, but not quick enough to "max out" the stream of NetFlix videos arriving in their mailbox
• If they're not busy at all, then they could probably get to the local video store. Even if not, they could technically be the 1% who could "max out" the NetFlix model and gain maximum value. So, in effect, you've got to be a "not busy" person to be able to consistently "beat the system".
• In addition, there could be a time at which you don't find what you want to watch on NetFlix. One can only have so many "A-ha! I'd like to see that!", and those would dwindle down over time - thereby meaning that there could be a point when these "beating the system" people would either have to slow down, or cancel their membership.
• They probably wouldn't cancel their membership because they're waiting for the new releases and the global movie community doesn't stop making movies.
• And if they slow down, they're not beating the system anymore.
• Also, if they start renting movies that elicit a "Yeah...whatever" reaction, just to believe that they're extracting the most from NetFlix,  its not exactly apples-to-apples with the local video store comparison, because you rent only what you like and want to see from the local video store.

• Google can do no wrong
• Google is free, and thus not similar to the rest of those money-sucking monsters on the Internet
• It has thus been blessed with a three-figure stock price even when the rest of us are wondering about the economy.

• The average viewer buys VHS instead of DVD
• The average viewer rents movies rather than buying them
• The average viewer streams / purchases movies off the Internet in some non-DVD format
• The average viewer pirates movies off the Internet
• The average viewer prefers reality TV to the movies
• The average viewer has rekindled a love for the great outdoors and lets nature do the entertaining

Now lets weigh those against a scale of reasonable-ness and scratch off the obvious:

• VHS is soon getting to be a forgotten three-letter acronym. I would hesitate to believe people are still buying pre-recorded, legitimate tapes of recent movies
• The great outdoors is great, but it still "out there" for a lot of cube farmers whose only look at the great outdoors is the smog during the commute and/or the brief meeting of foot with sidewalk while running into a store for an errand

The rest are practically possible:

• BlockBuster, NetFlix and the strangely-quiet Hollywood Video are apparently doing reasonably good business, so its a fair assumption to think that people are renting a lot more than before
• An increasing amount of online movie content providers seem to be popping out of the online ether, and its probably a fair assumption to think that they've got an increasing circle of customers to justify their existence to their venture capitalists
• The reality TV behemoth doesn't seem to be waning, in spite of the increasing level of the collective groan that's going up from the average TV audience. And that begs the question - would it ever reach a point when the still-interested audience would realize that there exists an alternative to glorified voyeurism that could be easily achieved by turning off the TV and experiencing an immersive reality that the rest of us refer to as "life"?

And that brings us to: More people pirating movies off the Internet.

Practical? Certainly. It would take about ten minutes for the average technology-hating grandma to figure out the benefits in setting up a free, peer-to-peer download client that lets users download anonymously with a reduced risk of exposure to the authorities and with the glorious advantage of a virtually unlimited movie library without any charges whatsoever.

Possible? Certainly. I imagine its on the rise in a big way. With Windows and an increasing number of open-source creators dabbling in creating small-form-factor "media center" computers, its getting increasingly simple to "drop a box" right next to your TV and be able to stream online content to the same screen you've known, loved and dozed off across from for years.

Another reason to merge the computer with the home theater setup is online music stores. Yahoo! has its new music download service and its existing "customizable radio service" that's had me as a satisfied proponent for years now. There's the usual suspects growing in popularity by the day - iTunes, Rhapsody et al; and then there's all the new kids on the block like Wal-Mart, etc. Everyone's pushing the same thing and people are buying.

I imagine this is a good thing for the entire environmentalist community. More media going straight from the network to portable storage and/or the home theater means lesser DVDs and CDs being used for the same purposes - meaning lesser plastic on the planet, meaning lesser amounts of non-bio-degradable stuff for us to wait centuries for to break down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - do I have a point? Sorta. I recently heard about this new open source "project" called "Hymn" that claims to try and increase awareness of fair-use laws while still offering a free download that lets users break the copy-protection from iTunes' purchases without a loss of quality.

So, is it an entire open-source software project that leverages some loophole in the way Digital Rights Management was rolled out?

Or, is it worse? Did a bunch of learned lawyers turn into a bunch of supergeeks and decide to play from the other side of the table?

Lawyers turning into geeks - that's kinda like open gasoline meeting naked flame, ain't it? Lawyers are usually as essential and as high-priced in the world of turning business wheels as gasoline is to automobiles, and geeks are usually the ones capable of burning through the night with their work to light up the mornings with their spectactular results. Yes, I get the feeling I should stop before the analogy gets too lame.

About Hymn? Well, do with it what you will. There are a few practical reasons to share music between multiple computers at multiple locations within the jurisdiction of the same owner and there are probably a gazillion piracy-related reasons for the same. At the end of the day, its software. What one set of people can make; another set can break. Cops and robbers all over again. Pick your side.

• Do you really think that little wireless router can support everyone everywhere? I've seen several cooler-than-thou wannabe ÜberGeeks do the hum-haw when the differences between diversity /  omni-directional / patch antennae come up in conversation. You could boost the output transmit power on your router all you want, but I guarantee you'll have trouble with a Skype conversation or any other high-bandwidth app when you're close to too many flourescent lights, microwaves, refrigerators, lawn mowers and several other seemingly innocent household items. Ethernet in the walls could let you plug in easily and/or let you plug in a wired router easily if you / your kids wanted to have one of those digerati slumber (LAN) parties.
• Byte for byte, a wired connection is a lot more reliable than wireless given the increasing amount of wireless spectrum traffic in our lives today. BlueTooth headsets are on the same band, microwaves are on the same band, little landline telephone headsets are being made for the same band, and the 5.8 GHz flavor of everything wireless is being sold at a premium for exactly this reason.
• Think of the new-age analogy to having a "secure phone call". There are those of us who prefer to have one corded phone in the house so that you could still use it during a power outage and/or while you're discussing portfolio transactions with your broker. One could technically argue that a laser microphone pointed at your window or a line tap on your phone line would make these steps wasteful, but they do offer some level of security against the "average", not-the-NSA kind of electronic snoop. And yes, a power outage would take out your entire network, irrespective of wired or otherwise. However, bits flying across covered cabling offer a lot more fundamental security than those flying across the air and susceptible to a high-gain antenna fashioned out of ten Pringles' cans and a tutorial from the Internet, pointed at your house from 3 miles away.
• Those same ÜberGeeks have probably never heard of Power-over-Ethernet, a technology that has been around since before the first wireless router hit the consumer market. Its not exactly akin to replacing your existing electrical wiring, but there's enough juice on the average (correctly done) Ethernet network to power a few things. Like wireless signal boosters in areas of house that need them. Like speakers in the bathroom. Yes, the link is in Japanese. If you can't read it, take my word for it.

Why the sudden urge to deflect the blows for the repressed ones who can afford to have customized houses and run Ethernet through their walls?

Probably a rally for the underdog as we near Independence Day; or just me being bored with people scoffing at Ethernet cord whenever they see it.