(Credit:
The New York Times Company)

Over the weekend I updated my
iPod touch to the 2.0 software, and I consider that $10 well-spent. Now I can access all the same great apps as iPhone 3G owners. Thankfully, many of them are free; I’ve rounded up five I really like. (Note that all links require iTunes.)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

OpenX, one the industry’s largest ad networks and the dominant open-source ad server company, just got a little bigger. OpenX announced that Jonathan Miller, former CEO of AOL, has joined the company as its chairman. Writes Scott Switzer of the announcement:

Jon has much experience working with major advertisers, as well as large and small publishers. He understands how difficult it is to provide software, service, and media to medium to small publishers, which is the core user base of OpenX. He can help us grow from a small company to a larger one. He understands our need to continue to focus on making OpenX simple, scalable, and extendable.

This is huge news for the OpenX team. OpenX continues to prove itself to be one of the top open-source companies to watch.

At the time, rumors emerged of a “blacklist” that was circulating as a precursor to some sort of punishment in compliance with new regulations that require video providers to be state-run (but were modified to grandfather in already existing sites if they were vigilant about SARFT’s rules).

On Monday, I’ll be able to talk first-hand about what’s on- or off-line from Beijing. For now, Osaka is my new favorite city in Japan.

As for YouTube, it’s been much reported that YouTube is inaccessible in China since the beginning of the current situation out west. (I have been in Japan the whole time, so haven’t experienced this myself.) But this is not the first time YouTube has been blocked. The most recent example I know of was during last year’s 17th National Party Congress when the site was blocked and then unblocked at a time suspiciously near that important political event.

That story got more complicated after a mixture of denials and partial acknowledgments of SARFT action and a 24-hour shut-down of Tudou that the website said was for a server upgrade, a reason few commentators believed at the time. But the site did come back online on schedule.

Beating the AP with a bit of detailed information, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that Tudou will be one of 32 sites to be punished, while 25 others will be shut down all together. So, after all, unless the penalty is massive, Tudou will live on to fight (and probably keep on with free illegal TV and movies) another day.

An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn’t make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in addition to their advertised concern about obscene material, but it’s important to note how Tudou’s travails began.

As I reported earlier, rumors that Tudou had been ordered to shut down started circulating in the first week of March, with a failure to catch some pornographic material on the site as the justification.

In every case, it took them just seconds to figure out where to go in Ubuntu to accomplish the task. Neither one complained about using OpenOffice (I didn’t tell them it wasn’t
Microsoft Office, and they didn’t seem to notice a difference), nor about using
Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. They had work to do and the operating system and applications didn’t get in their way at all.

After ripping out a few emails, browsing the web, writing some letters, etc. on Ubuntu Linux, I’m confident in saying that Ubuntu is smart enough for the myriad of average people like you, my grandma, and I.

You need to sell something on eBay. Please find the browser, upload pictures of the item for sale, and post it.

Last week Lenovo lent me one of its X61 ThinkPad laptops so that I could give Ubuntu Linux a try. Having had a bad experience with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop a few years ago, I had sworn off desktop Linux and determined not to return.

Given that 95 percent of the world still wastes away in Windows land, this is a good situation for Ubuntu. The learning curve required to switch from Windows to Linux is all of 10 seconds long. My grandma did it. The lady who cuts my hair did it. Neither one of them is an expert with computers.

I tried to change the appearance of the desktop (System:Preferences:Appearance:Visual Effects), but got the error show directly above (left). To be fair, I get random error messages occasionally on Windows or Mac OS X, so the fact that Ubuntu throws them up, too, isn’t a deal breaker. The difficulty, however, is that there’s precious little assistance available if things go wrong, as most people are Windows drones or Mac OS X people. Yes, there’s always Google (i.e., others out on the ‘Net), but I was directed to go to the command line so often via this route that I just can’t see most people being able to resolve their issues in this way.

With that said, my Ubuntu experience wasn’t flawless. As noted, most of these problems stemmed from running it on excellent, but unsupported hardware (Lenovo’s X61 ThinkPad). Whenever I’d put the computer to sleep it would wake to a dim screen that I’d have to CTRL-ALT-F1 / CTRL-ALT-F7 to fix (and I only learned about this workaround through the generous assistance of someone in the comments section of my first post on Ubuntu).

This isn’t to say that my week with Ubuntu Linux was uneventful. I had a few struggles, which I’ll detail below. These struggles, however, were almost entirely due to running Ubuntu on unsupported hardware, and not any fault of Ubuntu (or Linux) itself.

But for most people, this will be a Very Good Thing, given that it will mean a significantly lower learning curve.

This ease continued when I installed Skype. Going “off-piste” was what drove me away from desktop Linux several years ago, but this time it was as easy as installing an application on Windows or Mac OS X. Double-click on the installation file and…done (See above right).

commentary

In fact, what I found perhaps most impressive was how easily Ubuntu recognized my camera and imported the pictures. I’m used to this simplicity with Mac OS X, but I was shocked (really) to see the system walk us through the importation and management of images. For a desktop to appeal to the mainstream, it simply must be able to do this. I also had video on my camera (a Canon PowerShot SD1000) and Ubuntu imported and played it with ease.

To test how hard it is for an average user to find their way around Ubuntu, I had my grandmother (top right) and the lady who cuts my hair (above left) give it a try. I set them down in front of it and asked them to perform certain functions:

I’m good at self-support, so I immediately went to Google to find the answer to the brightness problem. Two hours later, I was in my own little corner of Linux Hell. I was told to add lines to certain files (/usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-lenovo.fdi) on my hard drive. I tried from the command line, and then by browsing my file system. Despite having root access on the machine, it kept telling me I had insufficient permissions to make the change.

My first (but not last) error message

But first, the good. If you’re familiar with Windows, running Ubuntu Linux is a breeze. In fact, my biggest complaint with Ubuntu is that it feels too much like Windows. I use a
Mac precisely to get away from the utilitarian ugliness of Windows. Finding it in Linux didn’t endear Ubuntu to me.

Ultimately, I gave up.

To this I responded, “Grandma, that’s exactly the point. You shouldn’t have to be ’smart’ to use a computer. The computer should be smart enough to let anyone use it and benefit from it.”

In fact, as I was testing my grandma’s ability to use Ubuntu she kept saying,

Installing Skype

You need to write a letter to a friend. Will you start the application that manages this and start working on the letter?

Hairdressers run Ubuntu, too

Grandma hacks Ubuntu

All in all, however, I am very impressed with Ubuntu. It still has a ways to go to match Mac OS X in elegance and simplicity, but if I had to choose between Windows and Linux today, there wouldn’t be a contest. It would be Linux every time.

Matt, you’re just trying to get me to look dumb. I’m not smart enough to use computers.

In this and other ways, Ubuntu demonstrated that it is clearly ready for mainstream desktop adoption. I would have no qualms about recommending Ubuntu to grandmas and other normal people everywhere, people with no love of the command line.

The main issue regarding the delay of BBD has to do with operationalizing the on-demand model in a cost-effective way. This translates to a realization that the existing release of BBD, now in use by some 150 customers, can’t be scaled up to handle thousands of customers in a cost-effective manner. This is a major operational problem to be sure: SAP can ill afford to ramp up to a massive deployment of BBD if it’s not cost-effective to do so. Klaey mentioned that these operational issues seem to have been dealt with in the next release, which is slated to come on line in the “next few months.”

Over on the Enterprise Anti-matter blog Josh Greenbaum finally finds out why SAP BBD is so late and potentially DOA–a fundamental design flaw in the system, along with what seems to be a misunderstanding of building large-scale applications.

The cinematic focuses on one character only, so just be prepared for that. While I was initially disappointed that we didn’t get our montage, I have to say that the intro is growing on me having watched it five times at the time of this writing. Hmm, maybe I’ll start using the high-res version for monitor testing.

(Credit:
Blizzard Entertainment)

Even if you’re not a fan of WoW, you owe it to yourself to check out the intro as it’s incredibly cinematic and has more story and character in its 3 minutes than many movies have in 90.

The CG intro for The Burning Crusade appeared about a month before the game’s release. Blizzard has commented already that it expects Wrath to be released sometime in the fourth quarter. The fact that it’s debuted the intro for the game is evidence that things are at least going well in the beta, and we could see a release as early as October.

Also, the CG quality is really second to none, but that’s usually the case with Blizzard CG intros. Fans of the previous WoW intros may be a little disappointed though. There is no montage of character classes showing off their badass-ness.

Blizzard Entertainment on Thursday released the CG intro for its next game, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. This is the second expansion for WoW. The first, The Burning Crusade was released in January 2007 and sold 2.4 million copies in 24 hours to become the fastest-selling PC game in history.

Ryan told me that “SaaS is the business version of cloud computing,” meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples.

The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?

Cloud versus SaaS in the enterprise

More mature enterprise applications will all move to the cloud eventually, but the process will take time. Developers will get better about developing around the limitations of cloud computing.

I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.

Over the last 10 years, IT has moved further and further outside the firewall. Starting with ASP (application service providers) and moving to multitenant SaaS (software as a service) on-demand applications, and now into cloud-computing environments, the status of on-premise IT has shifted from being a necessity to an option.

Immediacy
Ubiquitous access on any platform
API–if you can access data on the human level, you need to be able to access it via API
The ability to collaborate on data

Disaster recovery, compliance, and enterprisey features are where the growth is in the near term. You have to have an SLA and support for true enterprise-class applications. Amazon will probably do this over time, but right now, you have no real option. Rowell pointed out that for Amazon to offer these services would add significantly overhead and likely cause the price point to rise significantly.

An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it’s cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

According to Ryan, “we’re still talking about stuff at the hardware level–its much more about data and integration of applications. The underlying infrastructure shouldn’t matter, as long as there is a programmatic and human way to get to the data.”

This isn’t just about being cheaper and faster. It’s about the way people interact with technology. User expectations are dramatically different for cloud services:

According to Ryan, the multitude of big vendor announcements of cloud services haven’t filled the enterprise gaps. In the last six months, vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems have announced private or on-premise clouds, but you can’t actually buy cloud services from any of them.

So how does this change over time?

For the period that ended March 31, the telecommunications giant reported net income of $3.5 billion, or 57 cents per share, on revenue of $30.7 billion. Net income was up 22 percent from the year-ago quarter, while revenue rose 6 percent.

In its statement Tuesday morning, AT&T did not offer any updates on its sales of Apple’s
iPhone, for which it is the exclusive carrier in the U.S. The company also declined to give hard data in its conference call with analysts. “The iPhone again continues to be very popular with customers, and customer feedback on the device is very good,” CFO Rick Lindner said, according to a Barron’s report. “Through the first quarter, it was pretty stable” in terms of sales, Lindner said.

The company’s wireline operations, by contrast, decline 2 percent in both earnings (to $2.8 billion) and revenue ($17.6 billion).

Income for AT&T’s wireless segment nearly doubled, leaping 95 percent from a year earlier to $2.9 billion. Revenue for the wireless business was $11.8 billion, up 18 percent. The company also reported gains in broadband and Internet Protocol-based services.

At midday Tuesday, AT&T’s shares were up less than 1 percent to $37.91.

On Friday, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailed AT&T’s plan to lay off about 1.5 percent of its workforce, with an ensuing pretax charge of $374 million for the first quarter.

This will be a really fun product to play with when it comes out in the second-quarter. A private beta is scheduled for April.

The product does text-to-speech conversion so you don’t need human actors, but it will also lip-synch recorded speech if you want the voices to sound real.

In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal’s Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the “render” button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good–certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and kept things engaging.

(Click the image for demo videos.)

The Web-based version of Xtranormal will have some limitations in regards to the number of characters it will support (two, I think), their actions, and the fact that you have to “render” each animation before you can see it. A downloadable version will allow more characters, more interaction between them, and it allows for a real-time preview of your show.

Also coming: A tool to make character models from real photos (see also, BigStage, from CES). How about Xtranormal porn? “It’s only a matter of time,” Nightingale said.

See also: SceneCaster, which could end up making sets for Xtranormal characters.

The following product is available:

On Sale Now: $798.00
View the latest prices for Sony BDV-IS1000

But even with the generous feature sets, the high prices of these systems will make them a hard sell with consumers. For $2,000, we think most home theater enthusiasts would be better off with an Onkyo TX-SR606 ($400), a PS3 ($400) and the Mirage Nanosat Home Theater System ($600)–a setup that’s $600 cheaper than the BDV-IT1000ES. The BDV-IS1000 is somewhat more attractive at $1,000, but we have serious doubts that the speakers will have “no problem delivering the full power of traditional home theater products” like Sony claims. Still, these systems do offer unique styling and the ease of an “all-in-one system”, and we’re happy to see that they have a decent feature set to go along with their slick looks.

Sony BDV-IT1000ES

Sony BDV-IS1000

5.1-speaker system, with five tiny speakers
Currently Profile 1.1, will be Profile 2.0 with a firmware update (coming this fall)
Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio
Compatible with Sony’s S-AIR technology
Two HDMI inputs
XMB graphical user interface
Available in October, with a list price of $1,000

Key features of the Sony BDV-IT1000ES:

We’re impressed that Sony is including full-featured Blu-ray players with these systems. Both systems have onboard decoding for both high resolution soundtracks formats–Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio–and are upgradeable to Blu-ray Profile 2.0 with a firmware update coming later this fall. Two HDMI inputs are also a big step-up over the other HTIB systems from Panasonic and Samsung, as both of those lacked HDMI connectivity and had few options for connecting external gear. And with a Blu-ray player already packed in, two HDMI inputs will be enough to handle most home theater setups.

Standalone Blu-ray players may still be expensive, but you know Blu-ray can’t be too far from being a “commodity” feature when it starts getting bundled in with home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) systems. While we’ve already seen HTIBs with Blu-ray from Panasonic and Samsung, these are the first systems from Sony, and also the first that we’ve seen with Blu-ray players that are upgradeable to Blu-ray Profile 2.0. Here’s the summary of the information Sony has released so far:

5.1-speaker system, with slim tallboy speakers
Available in October, with a list price of $2,000