I don’t disagree with the judge ruling that Apple might have violated the anti-monopoly provisions of the antitrust laws for its agreements with AT&T. However, when the judge says that Apple has violated federal and California criminal computer fraud and abuse statutes by releasing version 1.1.1 of its iPhone operating software when Apple knew that doing so would damage or destroy some iPhones that had been ‘unlocked’ to enable use of a carrier other than AT&T, this is not fair.

I own an unlocked iPhone. And while I would be pissed if my phone was to get bricked if I was to upgrade the firmware, the truth is, I have an unsupported phone. I would deserve the pain associated with that upgrade. The risk should be mine, not Apple’s.

And the bigger problem is, it’s difficult to be 100% backwards compatible in a 1.x release of any product. After the original release, it will take 1-2 more years to stabilize a big project in a way that nothing else is going to get broken again. The judge must understand this. That’s how software works. Apple should only get fined if they broke the compatibility on purpose, in order to take revenge on the unlockers. But how do you even prove that in a court of law without the engineers coming forward?

California is the second state after Massachusetts that allows marriages between same-sex people. It’s a step forward towards a free-er society. However, some old stylers want to put this law away with “proposition 8“.

I have one thing to say to these people: prejudice.

You see, sure, there are the religious nutjob asshats who don’t want to allow gay marriage because they believe that God will send fire to burn them all if they allow the law to pass. Fair enough. We can’t mess with God’s will, now, can we?

However, California, which consists of many artists and techies, is NOT as overly religious as the Bible Belt states are. So why are there people in this state that are against gay people? And the reason for that, is prejudice.

The media, 99% of the times, has portrayed gay people negatively. When there is a gay plot in a movie or show, the gay person is usually the “easy” one, living an “unholy” life. People believe that all gay people are sluts. That’s the real crux of the issue. Not God. Not personal opinions on marriage. Not even that gay people “chose” to be gay. Sure, there are a lot of people who still put God, marriage opinions and choice as their reasons for hating gay people, but I truly believe that the main reason behind these excuses is that they think that gay people are slutty people, unworthy of marriage. That’s the information the average Joe has been fed by the media.

They don’t even think for one moment that right next door from that “slutty” gay club around the corner, there is a “straight” slutty club, where their 18 year old daughter goes anal in the restrooms with that 35 year old married man she just met. But they only see other people’s sluttiness and not the one inside their own home. What was that? Your daughter doesn’t do that kind of thing? Well, either you don’t know your daughter well, or your daughter is ugly as hell. Either way, if not all daughters are the same, then all gay people are not the same either.

We have many gay friends here in the Bay Area, but at least two of these gay friends have been together with their partners for years. Honestly people, when you see these two couples being together for 15-20 years each, how can you have the nerve to disallow these people from getting married? They deserve it much more than most of us, straight people.

I don’t understand why people spend so much energy and money on weddings and wedding photographers. I really don’t. The “basic” package for some pictures/video of a wedding is $600, and it can go as high as $10,000. And I ask you: why?

Why not hire a professional photographer for less than an hour, either before or during the ceremony, and pay like, $150, and be done with it? Then, you can use friends and family to snap more pictures or shoot video. This is how it was done in my wedding, and how it was pretty much done at my brother in law’s wedding. And it’s the logical thing to do.

I mean, on my wedding, we got some pictures and some video (my father in law shot parts of it). I’ve only watched the video once, and I look at the pictures quickly only when I happen to clean up the shelves (something that doesn’t happen very often). So why spend crazy money on that kind of thing? Vimeo is full of such over the top expensive wedding videos, that I personally don’t see the point of.

I mean, look at this video. If that’s not overkill, I don’t know what is. Mind you, I find the video really well done, and very artistic. But I wouldn’t pay for it. If the director wanted to use me as a model for such a video idea I would volunteer, but I wouldn’t pay to create a short film just because I am getting married.

I guess I really don’t believe in weddings. Marriage itself is not a bad thing (although it’s not necessary, it is useful in many ways), but the weddings in general, and all the culture that surrounds them are useless shit.

And please, don’t give me the excuse of “you shoot nice videos/pics so you can remember your wedding better”.

I don’t have Alzheimer’s, I remember my wedding. And even if I wasn’t, what the big deal is? I don’t love my husband more or less because of it.

A new online HD service is around, MotionBox. I tried it earlier today, and it’s really nice to see more services trying to make HD video more approachable to normal people rather than film geeks. Uploading videos was effortless and fast. You can attach your videos to collections, like Groups and playlists. They offer two kinds of accounts, Basic and Premium. The Basic account allows for a limited number of videos, while the Premium account does not even have a limit into the amount you upload!

Its more impressive feature is its online video editor. You upload your clips, you go to the “remix” area, and then you cut the way you want it to. There is no ability to add an additional audio track though, or other niceties, it’s just a straight forward “cut and glue” editor. MotionBox told me that the videos used in the editor are the original clips and not any re-encoded versions.

MotionBox is undoubtedly going to be compared to Vimeo, the darling of the filmmaking community. The first difference is that MotionBox is more about families rather than filmmakers. So I don’t think that the two sites compete directly. The second difference is that Vimeo already has a vibrant community, while MotionBox has limited ways of creating such communities. Additionally, MotionBox only required ~30 seconds to re-encode to 720p my 17-second Golden Gate Bridge video, while it took Vimeo about 2 minutes. MotionBox also supports AVCHD uploading via Adobe AIR, while Vimeo doesn’t. Finally, the embedded videos on web pages serve the HD version, while Vimeo limits embeds to SD.

Quality is better than Vimeo’s. Their SD re-encodings are clearly better, and their HD versions edge out Vimeo again albeit the difference is not as glaring as in the SD re-encodings. Additionally, MotionBox re-encodes HD video at 30fps, while Vimeo had to go back to 24p as maximum, because many users could not play it back smoothly on their computers. And this is true for MotionBox too. While it’s an answer to the prayers of Vimeo users who don’t want the 24p limitation, it does require a faster PC decoding these files.

A few things need to be fixed though. For example, Motionbox allows you to download an MP4 h.264/AAC re-encoded file in the native resolution of the uploaded video, but the bitrate used is weird. For example, I got a 4.5 mbps for a 720p video re-encoding, and a 5.5 mbps re-encoding for a wide-VGA video. In the case of the VGA video, this is waste of bandwidth (it shouldn’t have been more than 1.5mbps). Plus, the video is encoded in some really high-level h.264, that even the VGA video doesn’t playback smoothly on my Quicktime! I believe that Motionbox should export a maximum of 720/25p video (just because AppleTV doesn’t do more), at low-complexity Baseline h.264, with a bitrate that’s variable depending on the resolution, so it’s compatible with the XBoX360, PS3 and AppleTV, in addition to Quicktime PC/Mac viewing. Their iPod export seems to be better in terms of bitrate/complexity. The original file is also download-able, if you have a free account with the service.

Another thing that irks me very badly at MotionBox is the fact that videos are downloading when you hit a page, even if you haven’t requested a play. This is really bad for Comcast users who use online video too much (like myself). The last thing I want is having Comcast closing down my internet account (don’t forget that from Oct 1st, Comcast is not unlimited).

Security needs tightening as well. The service did not request my current password to either change my password, or my email address.

I think that MotionBox can become a hit with families. It offers a way to burn and order DVDs, to “cut and glue” online, and share it with friends and family in a variety of ways. I think it has a nice future as a “family video sharing” service. To win some of Vimeo’s filmmaking crowd though, it needs to be more “hip”.

People most of the times don’t know what they want. We see it in software all the time: we can have clients that ask this and that and some more of that, and all they really need is something else. This little comic here shows the situation 100% correctly.

Same thing is true with politics, and entertainment. I read a lot of crap today about how many people disliked the “Disturbia” music video of Rihanna. They found it “disturbing, and Rihanna was scary”, most people wrote. Well, duh! The song is called “Disturbia”, and you wanted to see SnowWhite petting puppies instead? No. That’s what you thought you wanted to see. If that video indeed disturbed you then the director did an AMAZING job. Hats off to him.

Same thing goes with some films. Some people attack certain actors (not just characters) because of their role as the film’s villain. They just start disliking the actor himself because of the role. Which means one thing and one thing only: that this is a kick ass actor. Examples include but not limited to: James Callis on Battlestar Galactica, and Giovanni Ribisi on “Flight of the Phoenix”.

* My Pegasos/Morphos machine is now donated to the Computer History Museum. I am very happy that this machine found a good home.

* I hate software. I really do. When my new PC came in last week, I put back my old 21″ vertical display for web browsing to my older PC. However, because –as I had blog posted last year– nVidia GeForce’s driver didn’t support full acceleration for rotated displays, I had to download the latest one to see if they added such support. Well, they haven’t. But in any way, I had a new driver, so all was good. Until I loaded my Sony Vegas with “Magic Bullet for Editors 2.0″. When the GPU is enabled in Magic Bullet’s dialog, everything is rendering with a strong fucking red tint. I don’t know if Magic Bullet was relying on a bug that nVidia fixed in the meantime, or that nVidia introduced a new bug, but the point of the matter is, all my video projects were now useless. All my shots were red. Apparently, sometime in the last few months this problem was introduced so I went back to a December 2007 nvidia driver and it’s good again. It seems that most of the 17x versions introduce the problem, but the v169 doesn’t. Just so you know, the problem was only with “Magic Bullet for Editors 2.0″, not with the version of “Magic Bullet Movie Looks HD” that used to be supplied freely with Vegas, or with the new “Magic Bullet Suite” version.

Update: Motherfucking video drivers. Now Windows won’t go to sleep. The “stand by” option is now disabled! I never had this before.

* This morning while sleeping, I felt that someone was leaning on the side of my bed (JBQ was already at work btw). I got panicked and tried to move. I couldn’t move, I was paralyzed. Panicked some more. And then I shouted to my self: “MOVE”. And I moved, which woke me up. I looked around and there was no one there. So I fell back asleep. When back asleep, after seeing a normal dream, I felt that I was waking up because I was seeing a shadow on the bed, and it felt so real, but I managed to moved again (and wake up for real). That was the point that I realized that most of these alien abductions (if not all) are just what they seem to be: sleep disorders. You see, there was no chance in hell, that I could “see” a shadow on my bed, because I was sleeping at the time — even if I thought I wasn’t. Yes, it felt like it was real, because I was dreaming of myself sleeping in that bed — which is what I was doing. But when I deterministically ordered myself to move, I actually woke up for reals. Of course, the believers will always say that I wasn’t fully sleeping, and that I was seeing the shadow with “my third eye”. Or some bullshit like that.

* Mac fans disappointed in GTK+ port, says WebMonkey. How could they not be? The Lunix developers tried to “sell” their unpolished crap to Mac users. That shit can never fly in the Mac platform without some strong integration and beautification. So that’s a release that goes straight to /dev/null.

A few weeks ago Vimeo decided that uploaded videos that show computer games in action are to be banned. Many got seriously pissed off about this decision, as Vimeo was offering them a good 720p HD quality to upload their gaming videos. Vimeo argued that these videos are not art, plus, many computer games companies are arguing that they own the copyright of the images, and therefore Vimeo can’t allow such videos.

I am personally siding with Vimeo on this subject. These computer games are indeed copyrighted, along with all the images generated from them. As ludicrous this sounds, it’s how it is. Additionally, I don’t find these videos to be any kind of art — apart from the art of the gameplay ability itself. The gamer only offers the gameplay seen on these videos, and nothing else. On real videos, that you shoot with a camera, the shooter needs to take a lot of things into account, it’s a much more complicated affair than just enabling FRAPS to do the recording for you.

And honestly, I don’t see what this whole fascination of showing off yourself killing monsters is. What kind of self-expression is this?

This 250 GB limit per month on Comcast is going to kill me. I downloaded a bandwidth monitor utility earlier, and I have consumed already 600 MBs of data — just by browsing (ok, and a bit of Vimeo in SD mode).

This means that we (I) consume at home an average of about 10 GBs of data daily. WITHOUT any pirating. Not only that, but I am using the NoScript Firefox addon that doesn’t allow ads/scripts/data to be loaded from external sites. If I didn’t have that we would be looking at around 13-15 GBs of data daily!

At the current rate, at 30 days a month, that’s about 300 GBs. I am off by 50 GBs of data every month! I experimented earlier with turning off images on the web, but it makes usage of most CSS pages impossible. I am fucked. I really need to be less in front of the computer, or upgrade our plan.

“A 22-year-old woman in the United States is publicly auctioning her virginity to pay for her college education, sparking a heated online debate about sex and morality,” says Reuters.

Personally, I support the idea. I am for a world without the need of prostitution of course, but read more carefully the article to see that life is not really Utopian:

- Her mother, a fourth grade teacher, does not agree with her decision.
- The auction will take place at a Nevada brothel where her sister is working to pay off her college debts.

So, what do we have here? A mother, who can’t pay for her kids’ college. A sister, who’s been down that road before and she has to sell herself repeatedly in order to pay the college debts. If anything, “Natalie” does the clever thing by initiating an auction. By doing this one-time thing, she clears herself from future, daily even, prostitution.

But I ask you: why isn’t their family able to pay for their college? Instead of having the mother “disagreeing”, where is her second job to help pay for her kids’ education? Where is the father? In Greece, there is no family that wouldn’t do their best to support financially their kids during university or college. And going further: why do you even have to pay for education? For example, I think Stanford Uni costs about $200,000 a year these days.

This blog post will have to go around the same path as some of my older ones: college education in the US is extremely expensive, in sharp contrast with most European countries where entering a university or college is usually free or low-cost. The fault here is not the morality of “Natalie”, but the system she has to abide to. So she simply plays out according to the rules of the capitalistic system. She has no alternative, because the alternative would be not just a night off, but many years of prostitution — like her sister.

Unless her college offers her a free tuition, even if it would be just for PR reasons, “Natalie” does what she must do to survive and have a future. I rank education as that important. If you have a problem with all that, write to your congressman.

Asking if I would ever do what she does, the answer is “no”. But she’s not me, and I fully understand her reasons for doing so.

In spite of what some of you might think, I love my country. A country filled with orange and lemon trees. And yet, I ask you: why the hell orange juice is so bad in Greece?

The only kind of orange juice I could find is the water-down version with a half a kilo of added sugar in it, heavily concentrated. Fruit juice brands like “Amita” rule in Greece (Coca-Cola owns the brand), and yet, they have nothing in common with the quality we can get in UK, France or in USA for the same amount of money. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how a country that has so many fruit trees can’t get their recipes right.

Then again, it might just be a “used to” thing. You see, I am old enough to remember the first time fruit juices were actually available in the shops at my town in Epirus: mid-’80s. Before that time, if you wanted a fruit juice, you needed to pick the fruits from the tree and make it yourself. Given the financial capacity of most people at the time, it might have made business sense for companies like Amita to introduce these cheap, watered-down crap juices. Problem is, 25 years afterwards Greeks are used to these unhealthy juices and either would never consider a more expensive but real orange juice (with pulp in it and all), or they are not even aware of them (e.g. my mother never had a good glass of bottled orange juice).

Now, I am not saying that there aren’t any “real” orange juices out there, but I haven’t found any at the shops I looked at for (ranging from the local shops, to “Lidl”, to “Marinopoulos”). I must also mention the orange juice we had at our hotel in Athens during our 2-day stay there: an even worse, more watered-down, smelly even, version. JBQ noted during our breakfast there: “this is disgusting”.

* Bad, really bad cold. Fever, tendency to throw up, unable to stay awake but also unable to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time, couldn’t breath when lying down, and heart arrhythmia (I was feeling that my heart was stop beating when falling asleep). I caught the bug from JBQ, but I really think I had a worst time than he had… He was driving to work and all, I was unable to even walk as far as the toilet.

* I am thinking of buying the DELL Mini 9 for $480 (fully spec’ed) when my 12″ Powerbook dies. I prefer it over the Acer Aspire One as it also has Bluetooth and a 3G card onboard. I guess the next big thing in these nettops are the 1280×768 resolution at 10″. The res is the main reason I prefer XP over Ubuntu. A large number of GTK+ utils just don’t fit on 600px vertically. And this is something I was shouting at the Gnome devs for years now, and they were coming back to me to say “nobody uses 800×600 anymore”. Well, too bad for you, but the latest trend is 800×480 and 1024×600 res nettops, and some of your badly designed utils don’t fit. So I am going with XP.

* [Spoiler] Ancient Egyptians will be seen on the new season of “Lost”. Man, can’t wait for February.

* Back from Greece. Too long of an overall flight time for my taste (15 hours, 3 flights one of which had a stop).

* To everyone who is looking for a business idea: bubble-bursting touchscreen device for babies. My 8-month niece would usually throw away her normal-looking toys after 15 seconds — she quickly grew bored with them. But when I gave her the iPhone… with the iPhone she was totally surprised. She wouldn’t stop bursting bubbles with the two such iPhone bubble games I had installed in it. Especially with the one of them, where she could use more than one finger on the screen at the time, she wouldn’t stop playing! Now, that’s a toy for smart babies!

* I am thinking of growing some tomatoes on our balcony. I got jealous of the nice tomatoes I had in Greece during my stay from our vegetable garden.

* My mom prepared and cooked some kokoretsi for us. That’s most of the animal internals, well-cleaned, and tangled together. Then, roasted.

* This was the first time that I felt that I didn’t want to leave Greece after being vacating there for a few days. I was happy there.

We can buy organic, free range chickens everywhere in the world. But even these organic free range chickens look just like any other industrialized chicken. Here’s the real organic, free range, corn-fed chicken. From my grand-mother’s hens. Meat that resembles duck, not chicken. More real than the real thing.

Uncooked:

Cooked:

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