Author: Serkadis

If you’re cooking for a smaller gathering this Thanksgiving, Trader Joe’s pre-stuffed turkey breasts are just perfect.  They can easily feed 6 people and make a gorgeous, impressive presentation with cranberry-jeweled stuffing in the center.

Grab this turkey, add aside of vegetables, and dinner is done!  If you go this route, we demand that you sear the outside first.  Do not just toss it in the oven like the package instructions say, or you’ll end up with a dried-out hunk of meat.  Repeat: Do not just follow the package instructions!  I tried this the first time.  I was on autopilot just following instructions, and before I knew it, I had a seriously dried-out turkey.  The only way to salvage it was to dice it up and make soup with it.

As I stood there scratching my head, wondering what went wrong, I realized I had forgotten my cardinal rule of roasting when there’s no bone or skin to protect meat: sear first!  Searing the outside forms a protective layer that locks juices in and keeps meat from drying out.  It also gives the outside a mouthwatering golden color that you can’t get from simply baking.  So please, I beg you to take a few extra minutes to sear the outside before baking.

Look for pre-stuffed turkey breast in the raw meat section of the store.  It’s a great dinner option for an intimate gathering.

As you hopefully know, back in 1999, the RIAA had a Congressional staffer named Mitch Glazier slip four words into a totally unrelated bill on satellite retransmission of broadcast TV, literally in the middle of the night, that effectively changed the way copyrights worked on songs by major label artists. It effectively took much of the control out of the hands of the artists and handed it right to the labels. Remember that the next time the record labels claim they’re representing the best interests of artists. The use of four simple words, buried deep within the bill, which no one other than the RIAA knew about (seriously, those who voted on it later said they had no idea), turned songs recorded by artists signed to record deals to works made for hire. That meant that those artists could not reclaim the copyrights to their songs later on via a “termination” right, as any other content creator could. Glazier, the staffer who slipped this into the bill, ended up going to work for the RIAA just three months after putting this text into the bill. He was apparently hired with a $500,000 salary. Not a bad payoff for changing a key component of copyright law in the middle of the night when no one’s looking.

Luckily, soon after this passed a few people did notice, leading to a big uproar from artists, and an eventual backtracking from Congress, who never did believe the RIAA’s line that this “change” just “clarified existing law” rather than changed it entirely.

But, it’s important to remember all of this when discussing termination rights for music. Back in October, we had discussed how the songs of many top musicians were quickly approaching those termination rights, and some of the major record labels stood to lose the copyrights on some of their biggest hit albums. Wired recently ran a similar article about this “ticking time bomb,” and I wasn’t going to post it, because I wasn’t sure it added much new, until reader Mesanna pointed out one little factoid down at the bottom:

The second option is to re-record sound recordings in order to create new sound recording copyrights, which would reset the countdown clock at 35 years for copyright grant termination. Eveline characterized the labels’ conversations with creators going something like, “Okay, you have the old mono masters if you want — but these digital remasters are ours.”

Labels already file new copyrights for remasters. For example, Sony Music filed a new copyright for the remastered version of Ben Folds Five’s Whatever and Ever Amen album, and when Omega Record Group remastered a 1991 Christmas recording, the basis of its new copyright claim was “New Matter: sound recording remixed and remastered to fully utilize the sonic potential of the compact disc medium.”

Now, of course that sounds ridiculous, to hear that record labels can get a new copyright on just remastering a work… but, that sounds an awful lot like the argument made by Bluebeat.com, concerning its “psycho-acoustic simulation” re-recordings of famous songs, that enabled it to claim a new copyright. Now, the record labels are crying foul about this, and the vast majority of copyright law experts say that Bluebeat’s claim has no chance at all. But, if that’s the case, then the record labels own attempts to get new copyrights on remastered albums to avoid the termination rights might also be in jeopardy. It seems like any argument that is made against Bluebeat can soon be used against the labels as well if they really do try to claim copyright on remastered albums.

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As mentioned in yesterday’s theme review post, RIM recently released BlackBerry Theme Studio, an application which allows anyone to create new BlackBerry themes. While we’ll always appreciate the work of the professional designers who create vibrant premium themes, we also know that many people have an idea for the perfect theme in their heads. I know I do. There have been a few themes that have come close to that, but none have been the perfect Joe Theme. If you’ve been longing for your own perfect theme, and you have some time on your hands, you can now give it a try.

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What’s it like to perform a processor upgrade on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers? In this video, Al Enger from Cray, Inc. walks through the upgrade process of the Kraken supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which holds the number three spot in the new Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Enger is upgrading Kraken’s quad-core AMD Opteron chips to Opterons with six cores. This video runs about 4 minutes.

For more coverage of information about supercomputing, check out our High Performance Computing Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

Today, policy and business leaders are reaching a consensus that industry must address rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly in the data center. Leading enterprises are now turning to the practical challenge of determining how, how much, and at what cost to reduce emissions. In a recent white paper from IDC many companies are learning that their data center offers a means to both abate GHG and reduce costs with the right incremental capital investments.

The process of improving information technology and data center efficiency not only reduces GHG emissions but also reduces cost for the enterprise. This means that the savings or business value derived from improvements far outstrips the incremental capital costs of “greening” the datacenter. Green IT means business improvement. Firms that rank highest among the “Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World,” such as Amazon, Toyota, and Nike, have realized that focusing on limiting energy calories in the datacenter and elsewhere pays profitability dividends on the financial side. IDC research indicates that companies reducing their metric tons of carbon per datacenter workload by a factor of 55% also incurred 35% less cost per user session on a server.

Mozilla seems to have hit a sweet spot with Personas, the theme engine add-on for Firefox and Thunderbird. While the browser had customization options before and themes support from the early stages, most people weren’t using them, either because they found it complicated or found the selection of themes was rather lacking. In just several months though, 10 million people have customized their browsers with Personas and the number of available designs is staggering.

“Since Personas was launched earlier this year, over 10 million people around the globe have chosen to personalize their Firefox by downloading Personas. Nearly 35,000 designs were contributed from artists at all levels of experience from all parts of the world (over 1,000 designs / week). Nearly 40 affinity brands, including Harry Potter, Bob Marley, Lady Gaga, and Greenpeace have added their content to the gallery. Localization community has diligently translated the add-on into over 25 languages; Personas website will be localized by the end of the year,” Mozilla’s Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez listed some of the team’s achievements.

The Mozilla Labs team just released the latest version of the popular add-on, Personas 1.4 which brought several updates and enhancements mostly related to the user experience. With so many designs it’s g… (read more)

Sprint have begun sending out their first ‘over the air’ update for their HTC Hero handset. Before Hero owners get too excited, the update is just a maintenance and not the highly anticipated Android 2.0 Eclair update.

Weighing in at 3748377 bytes, the OTA update is reported to fix a number of SMS related issues which impacted battery usage, along with a fix to enable the device to function properly with DST.

If you’re a Sprint HTC Hero owner and haven’t yet received the update, then you can initiate the OTA transfer by going to Settings -> About -> System Updates -> then hit Firmware Update, and follow the prompts.

If you’ve noticed any other fixes, or changes after installing the update, then please let us know in the HTC Hero forum!

If you’re looking for more info on the new Verizon Android phones, then be sure to check out Droid Forums & Droid Eris Forums

Sprint Release HTC Hero OTA Update 1.56.651.2

At the Interop conference yesterday I heard a familiar refrain: "IT is the problem." The epithet was issued by a cloud computing guru, but you could replace "cloud computing" with nearly any emerging technology and hear the same thing. Enterprise IT just doesn’t adopt new technologies as fast as many consultants and analysts would wish.

In this case, the argument was doubly specious because the cloud consultant: 1) accused IT managers of trying to subvert the business to keep their jobs (impugning motives is rarely a winning argument); and 2) accused IT managers of dragging their feet due to irrational security fears. Now, I have seen some poor decisions made in the name of security, but a careful assessment of enterprise data safety and business continuity in the face of still-emerging cloud models seems pretty sensible. Ironically, a customer panel preceding the consultants’ session included an anecdote where a cloud customer lost service for two hours because another customer mis-behaved in what was supposed to be a nicely-walled environment.

The other arena where IT sometimes plays villain is among Enterprise 2.0 evangelists. Thankfully, this appears to be changing. In my experience, IT teams frequently have significant experience with — and substantial enthusiasm for — social computing. For every case where IT is holding up internal social computing initiatives, I can point you to several cases where IT is trying to push the business side to adopt these technologies more effectively. When IT fails here, it is often because they assume, incorrectly, that their non-tech peers will adopt social tools along familiar patterns (which almost by definition they won’t).

Remember that IT teams are frequently more interested in emerging technologies than you know. But they are also held accountable for some old-school requirements….little stuff like: security, reliability, performance, continuity, cost-effectiveness, regulatory compliance, and the like. If you want your IT group to be more creative, then you also need to give them the freedom to experiment, too.

The US isn’t the only country to have its two largest wireless carriers in the middle of a legal spat as Canada’s TELUS has filed suit against Rogers Wireless. The reason for the lawsuit has to do with Rogers’ claim to “Canada’s most reliable network”, one that is “two times faster than any other.” According to TELUS, such claims became invalid as of November 5th when its very own 21Mbps HSPA network was launched. Looking to resolve the matter out of court, the Burnaby, BC-based company asked Rogers to immediately cease all reliability and speed claims. Rogers did not and one week later the lawsuit was born.

As it stands today, Rogers is refusing to back down from its claims citing independent studies dating back to 2007 which consistently show its networks superior performance. The problem with the position taken by Rogers is it puts TELUS at an unfair disadvantage as its new network has yet to undergo such third-party testing. On the other hand, the Rogers network does include an EDGE network, something TELUS does not have, which one could argue creates a fail-safe of sorts thus lending credence Rogers’ claimed reliability. As for what it hopes to achieve with the lawsuit, TELUS is asking that Rogers admit it disregarded the standards set forth in the Competition Act, stop all ads claiming its network to be the fastest and most reliable and, as always, pay for damages incurred.

Bell, who shares its network with TELUS, is not involved in the lawsuit.

Thanks, Tom!

Read

I usually find Larry Magid’s columns pretty reasonable, so I’m a bit surprised to see him calling for a special “news tax” to fund failing newspapers. Most of the column is a decent enough explanation of how the newspapers are losing subscribers and are having trouble making as much money as they used to. He even notes (as so few in this debate do) that subscriber revenue to newspapers has never really been about funding the news operations, and has always been a very small piece of the revenue puzzle. And he suggests, as we have many times, that it’s quite unlikely that a paywall solution will work.

But, right towards the end, he writes the following:

Maybe we need to find another model? I realize there would be a lot of objections to using tax money to finance journalism, but I wonder if we should take a look at the British model that finances the BBC’s TV, radio and online programming with a $237 tax on whatever device you use to watch TV, be it a computer, personal video recorder, mobile phone or TV set. In Britain, according to the British government’s TV licensing Web site, “watching TV without a valid license is a criminal offence.”

I’m quite sure that criminalizing unlicensed Web surfing or TV viewing would be even more unpopular with Americans than mandatory health insurance. But unless media companies can find another way to stay in business, we may very well see some serious proposals along these lines.

Magid is, certainly, not the first person to call for government funding of newspapers, but he does little to actually explore the idea — such as looking at the recent report talking about how as more government money goes to funding newspaper activities, the coverage of gov’t corruption drops. On top of that, there are serious practical issues here. The BBC setup, involves funding a single national operation, not many different newspapers (which is what the rest of Magid’s piece is about). It seems odd that he would effectively be suggesting that we wipe out local newspapers in favor of a gov’t funded national news organization.

And, of course, there are all sorts of questions about whether or not this is even needed. Certainly, many newspapers are struggling, though in many cases it’s not due to trouble funding operations, but due to the massive debt loads they took on a few years back when management stupidly thought that they were invincible to market changes. At the same time, we’re seeing new and innovative startups hiring journalists and doing good work. Shouldn’t we let the system work itself out before we suddenly decide to have the government intervene?

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AOL is already looking ahead of the upcoming split from Time Warner and is making plans to spin-off some non-essential proprieties to allow it to focus more on its new direction, moving away from services and more towards content. The rumor now is that it’s looking to shed its ICQ instant messaging service and has put a price tag of about $300 million on the property.

According to sources close to the matter, cited by BoomTown, AOL has put investment bankers Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co. to work on preparing the IM unit for sale and managing the perspective talks. It looks like AOL didn’t have any immediate plans to sell ICQ, but interest from a couple of companies outside of the US, which probably sensed an opportunity, determined it to put things in motion.

ICQ has about 50 million unique monthly users and is the most popular IM services in several countries, though mostly in smaller markets. In the US, it is virtually unheard of, while the company’s other IM service, AIM, is among the top three services along with Microsoft Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. The ICQ unit is profitable, although not exactly a big revenue earner, enough to raise the attention of several players with interest in the countries where the service is more popular.

AOL is about to become an independent company and… (read more)

HedoneDesign have prepared a new theme designed for OS 5, called GreenTech, which was made using the latest BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0. GreenTech features an easy-on-the-eyes green color, with large time, battery and signal icons.

Because it was developed using the Theme Studio 5.0, this theme is compatible with all the latest devices including Storm2, Storm, Tour Bold 9700, 8900 and 9000. On the other hand, popular but older devices like the 8330 aren’t compatible.

GreenTech is available for $3.99 until November 23rd (regularly $7.99).

© BlackBerry Cool for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss is well known for starring in such movies…

Less known are his passion and advocacy for the importance of passing on to each new generation of Americans an understanding, appreciation and love of their nation’s core values and founding ideals.

The American system requires the involvement of intelligent people in citizenship and governance, Dreyfuss said…

»Read the entire article in newsleader.com.

Google Image Swirl [googlelabs.com] is an experimental feature in Google Labs which is based on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a visual, exploratory interface.

For example, for an “apple” query, images of the fruit appears next to many products or logos of Macintosh. Users can then click on any thumbnail and a cluster of images will “swirl” into view. Other examples include keywords like car or Eiffel tower.

Via The Official Google Blog and Thnkx Andrew!

See also Google Wonder Wheel, Google Similar Images, Google Fusion, Google Timeline and Google Query Visualization Graphs.

In a recent Times article ‘The future was never going to be the C5‘ actor-comedian Ben Millar offers a familiar criticism of foresight work. Inter alia he says: “For all our achievements in art, science, and technology, the human race has always been spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Literature is littered with shockingly wide-of-the-mark utopias, dystopias, shiny suits, flying saucers and whole meals contained in a single pill. As a child of the Seventies, I was taught that as an adult in a world run by machines my main challenge would be how to spend my endless hours of leisure time…”

Yes, Ben. I’m sure you know this has all been said before ad nauseam. But more importantly, 40 years on many lessons have been learned, and it wouldn’t run foul of quality journalism standards to reflect this.

First, let’s be clear: nobody can predict the future. Anyone who says they can is a charlatan. Also, yes, unconscionably dreadful and irresponsible predictions have been made and are continually being made. But there are three problems with the ‘no-flying-car-so-there-we-can’t-predict-the-future’ argument:

(1) The kinds of predictions Millar cites are a product of a particular moment in Western thought and therefore foresight. The 1960s and early 70s were a time of Post-War American emergence, unleashing for a while a techno-futurist predictive rapture, most of which has indeed proved to be rubbish. There are still people, very famous talking-head futurists, promoting techno-rapture for the 21st century (caveat emptor) but as a whole the foresight field has moved on to become much more circumspect about what can be predicted.

Balancing techno-fantasy

Foresight practitioners are these days more likely to balance technology wowee with economic, social, and environmental friction; see systemic (often indirect or counter-intuitive) effects where once only simple cause-and-effect was seen; and create scenarios of key alternative outcomes rather than predict one.

(2) The second thing that is missed in gleefully deriding foresight work, is how many people and institutions get it right, or right enough.  It’s axiomatic that in order to be successful a person or organization must have correctly assessed both key changes and rate of change in their operating environment. To take a famous case, as quoted in Future Savvy, while Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1972 erroneously forecast super-sonic passenger air travel, Herb Kelleher, founder of SouthWest Airlines, foresaw the low-cost air travel industry. Bingo. Billionaire. Similarly, behind every success one can find future thinking that, while sometimes latent, was present and correct.

(3) The purpose of foresight work is misunderstood. We cannot predict the future and it’s pointless to try. We can only assess signals of change, trends, and potential for surprises and reversals, including challenging our all-too-easily calcified mental models, and take this into a process of understanding alternative outcomes and pre-considering best strategic actions. In other words, actively stimulating the investigation and analysis of future conditions in order to create the basis of better decision-making today.

In fact sometimes the ’strategic conversation’ that results from poor predictions is instructive to managers. As I say to clients: the goal of foresight work is better decisions not better predictions.

Back-street abortionists

The reality is that there is good and bad foresight work. Yes, some futurists are the technical and moral equivalent of back street abortionists. But the good work remains, and quality foresight is a critical advantage to decision-makers. The key thing is to be able to tell good foresight work from bad.

Simplistic trashing of foresight work en bloc ignores the weight of case evidence that people and organizations can improve their management of future uncertainty and/or create a situation where they manage the future better than competitors. Further, it encourages managers to fly blind into changing environments, often resulting in spectacularly poor decisions that deeply and widely punish their dependent stakeholders.

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The web portal Marshall IDX [marshallindex.com] tracks the historical popularity of words used by several thousand media sources, from months to just down to seconds ago. It aims to go beyond counting search queries to bring more transparency and understanding of the impact of news, advertisement, trends, and terms to its users.

The so-called “Marshall Index” is expressed by a number: 1 point represents 1 million individuals that got in touch with a particular term in a 24 hours time window. For example, if one searches for the word ‘Olympics’, the service will calculate an index based on how often the word is mentioned right now in online media. Via the Marshall Index it is also possible to observe words and watch their development in the media over a particular time period, from years down to seconds. By providing charts of the Marshall Index, the tool becomes interesting for many types of comparative studies like investment, medicine, music, movies, politics, and many other fields.

Users can create your own word lists in order to measure and illustrate their relativy popularity, check them against other words or benchmarks, or just explore an understanding of how word popularity fluctuates over time. Examples include the words Facebook or Facebook versus Twitter, or Obama or Obama versus Sarah Palin, while existing lists rank the popularity of movie stars and Head of States.

Marshall IDX is different from seemingly similar and well-known concepts such as Google Trends, as what people search for online, does not necessarily match with what is really popular.

See also Text Trends.

Facebook has just announced that it’s launching a new photo uploader, which should greatly improve stability but also the performance of the tool. The new tool is being released for testing purposes for the time being and is available in Facebook Prototypes, the social network’s testing grounds. The “New Photo Uploader” should be faster and lighter, but the biggest change the users will mostly enjoy is the the fact that they can navigate the site while the photos are being uploaded.

“At Facebook, we’re always looking for ways to make sharing more efficient. Today we’re announcing a significant upgrade to our Photos product: a new and improved photo uploader that’s available for testing as a Facebook Prototype,” Facebook’s Chris Putnam announced.

“Since Photos launched in 2005, the photo-uploading experience on Facebook has relied on the use of a third-party ActiveX control (and its sister Java applet),” he went on explaining the reasoning behind the new tool. “Over the years we have seen a growing number of complaints with this old uploader. In a recent poll, we discovered a significant percentage of users were unable to upload photos due to technical issues. Many more found it functional, but only just.”

It’s actually surprisi… (read more)

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE announce honors
BATON ROUGE – The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE, have named LSU’s Marybeth Lima the 2009 Louisiana Professor of the Year. Lima was selected from more than 300 top professors in the United States…

»Read the entire press release in LSU News.

Microsoft and Yahoo have been engaged in a strange relationship for years now, but it is finally getting close to becoming official. The two Internet giants reached an agreement last summer, in which Yahoo practically handed over its search engine to Microsoft, but they haven’t been able to actually sign it until now. The deal was originally supposed to be finalized on October 27, but the companies said they needed more time. Now though, they’re ready and the deal will be signed by the end of the week, BoomTown reports.

Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft have confirmed this, but if everything goes according to plan, which it didn’t the last time, we should see a definitive agreement this week. The reason for the delays is simple enough, it’s a massive deal and the intricacies of getting the two search engines work together while keeping their separate identities took longer than the people at Microsoft and Yahoo had anticipated.

The two companies announced a huge but not totally unexpected deal in July. In it, Yahoo will hand over the technical side of its search engine to Microsoft and Bing will provide all of the results on any Yahoo property. Yahoo will keep its custom interface and can do what ever it wants with the actual data coming from Bing. The advertising on both search engines will be se… (read more)