Nearly 2000 Movies Taken Off Netflix

Checking the news this morning revealed that Warner is removing 1794 movies from Netflix’s streaming service. It reminded me of an argument I had a few years ago with my brother-in-law about Netflix having a future via streaming. My position was that the studios would eventually shut them down by starting their own pay services.

Sure enough it has begun despite Disney’s earlier exclusive deal with Netflix. A month ago (or was it two) I was notified that Warner had started a streaming service of its own, Warner Instant Archive for $9.99 a month. I occasionally purchase made to order DVDs from them so it was not a surprise to get an email from them. The collection is all older movies – for the moment. I expect that to change over time.

BTW, a lot of content is shown as available in 1080p HD. I can’t say it is tempting enough to merit $10 a month, which works out to $120 a year. Other services such as Hulu Plus and Crunchyroll are available at cheaper rates while Sony has a free service, Crackle. Maybe the service will fall in line with them eventually, but it is hard to tell.

Roku and PC are what’s supported at the moment via Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which was a surprise since Flash dominates the streaming industry. This is another nail in the coffin for Adobe’s fading standard as the Web transitions slowly due to Apple’s refusal to support Flash in iPads and iPhones.

Rumors have been floated that HBO might start an online only subscription service for their shows, so this is not an isolated incident. We’ll be seeing more fragmentation in services as time goes by since studio executives blame streaming for loss of revenues from DVD and Blu-rays. They want profits to go back up or go entirely to them. Hulu may not survive if it is finally sold off since the content won’t be included thanks to this kind of reasoning.

I wonder which studio will be next to launch their own service?

Moving from Radeon to GeForce Again

Getting a better monitor seemed like a great idea at the time, but performance issues in games became noticeable on my aging system once 1920 x 1080 became the default resolution. The Gigabyte Radeon 7750OC is a great budget videocard that handled 1680 x 1050 well ever since my Palit Radeon 4850 died. It was the only card at that time which would fit in my case while having any kind of decent gaming performance.

A visit to Newegg.com to check out the newly released AMD Radeon 7790 based cards produced a possible replacement from Gigabyte again for $150.00. For some reason, I decided to see if any Nvidia based cards had come out in smaller size. Somehow I’d missed the introduction of the Nvidia 650 TI family of GPUs last fall.

Being one to save $20 I ended up ordering Gigabyte’s GeForce 650 TI in the 1 GB factory overclocked edition. The videocard is very small with amazing performance for its size. Luckily for me I got a good one straight out of the box.

Some initial observations follow since I won’t actually benchmark the performance.

What’s Going On

While I’ve been ill, that doesn’t mean things stop happening. Life is like that, it moves on whether or not you think it should. Look around you at the small changes and events occurring without cease. They add up to a lot of things happening if you just open your eyes to them.

Oh and if your were expecting some Marvin Gaye, here he is and you don’t have to read any further:

Fantastic song from a tormented soul.

Now for what’s going on in my life.

More Thoughts on the Nook HD

Since I’ll never get around to writing a full blown review, I’m going to type some more of my impressions of Barnes and Noble’s 7” Android based tablet. Video playback, book reading, and the child friendly nature of the Nook HD will be covered.

The screen is even more phenomenal than I first thought. One of the knocks on color LCD tablets is that you can’t read them in bright sunlight, unlike the E-ink based readers. To my shock, this is not true with the Nook HD. All you have to do is up the brightness to maximum and it will do just fine. I tested this by reading while being in very bright sunlight surrounded by white snow – and wearing sunglasses which make LCD reading very hard.

Now I no longer covet having a simple Kindle or Nook for bright days. This is huge because I primarily use my other tablet for reading. It being so lightweight makes reading on it a joy.

Video playback has been an interesting odyssey. Things look fantastic on the display with the difference between high and low definition sources being very noticeable. Streaming has been an interesting experience due to the closed environment of B&N.

Nook HD 7" Tablet First Impressions

The big gift I received this year was a white Barnes and Noble Nook HD from my sister and her husband. Dad got a gray one so it has been an opportunity to observe a tablet rookie deal with the device. What follows will be a short series of comments and I'll go more into the Nook HD at a later date.

The first thing that struck me was how light and compact it is. Compared to my iView CyPad 760TPC, it is thinner and a touch lighter. The difference in dimensions worked out so that my modified Kindle Fire case by Poetic can hold it, but I recommend getting a case designed for it.

The next thing I noticed was the quality of the display. At 1440 x 900 it has impressive room to render web pages and equals laptops in resoulution. This is actually better than 720p and HD streamed content is amazing on the screen. Even more impressive is the sensitivity of the touch screen -- it is actually easy to pick out the tiny links on a web page.

Sound is much better than I expected. The stereo speakers on the back have good range and are clear even with case covering them. A variety of anime, movies, and YouTube videos have been thrown at it without too many problems.

App selection is tiny in B&N's store and the Nook HD is locked to it exclusively. One of the prominent bundled apps for Hulu Plus has a serious issue of perpetually looping commercials on the first or second commercial break making it useless. Another app notorious for that is Crackle's, but it runs just fine on the Nook HD. Weird.

While I haven't personally run any games on mine, the step nephew and niece have on theirs with total fluidity.

The builtin ebook reader software is excellent and I like it better than the Kindle due to font handling and the fantastic display. Reading is a joy on the device.

It should be noted that the Nook HD is software tailored to be a dedicated book reader with a secondary purpose of displaying movies. It is not aimed at being a general pupose tablet, though that could be changed in the future if B&N so wished. The hardware is certainly capable of it.

My Nook HD is the 8gb model, but can be expanded out to an additional 64gb via a microSD card. The charger and data cord is proprietary, so taking care of it is a must. It does charge amazingly fast from a wall outlet.

The only browsers for the tablet are the modified Ice Cream Sandwich Android browser and Dolphin. The latter can play YouTube videos without issue, which is good because the app is not available for the Nook.

So far I love how responsive the Nook HD is and the display. I do not like the limitations on apps because you can't even side load them! I'll  play wth some workarounds next week and report on how that all goes.

Windows 8 First Impressions

Oy, where did everything go? The Start screen is a pain in the rear. Getting to settings for hardware and software takes even more digging than in Vista and Windows 7. This was a particular pain since I had to hack drivers for my audio card to work properly. That little endeavor was painful, but ultimately successful in granting me full optical out.

I don’t like that I was forced into 32 bit Win8 due to the downloadable cheap upgrade locking you into whatever was on the system before. Be warned you will need the much more expensive disc version to move to 64 bit. Me, I’m cheap or I would never have upgraded.

Flash player is being temperamental in Firefox 17, yet works just dandy in Internet Explorer 10.

I do not like how difficult it is to get to programs now. Everything is aimed at the Start page, which is a garish mess. I feel like I’ve been thrown back to Windows 3.1 it is such a step backwards. This interface will not be put on my main PC unless I’m forced to by Microsoft.

If I hadn’t gotten an Android based tablet earlier this year, I’d have no clue where things were hidden. The interface is completely smartphone and tablet centric, which is pretty useless when using a mouse.

At least Win8 is running fast on the old hardware which has an AMD Opteron 180 Dual Core 2.4 ghz processor with 2 gigs of RAM.

Sockets to Stay?

Intel has finally reacted to the brouhaha that began when some OEMs spoke off the record about plans to move to soldered on motherboards. The official word is that they plan to keep offering socketed CPUs, but they don’t exactly deny there is a change coming.

Amidst all this I hadn’t seen that AMD had taken advantage of the rumors for a little PR, which isn’t a surprise. They need something to help them get out of the hole they are in.

Is it my imagination or are things in the PC sector getting as unstable as everything else in the world right now?

An End to Upgrading CPUs?

It is ironic that I would be reading about the end of upgrading CPUs in home PCs a week after doing just that. Over at Ars Technica, there is an article about how Intel is planning to move to soldered on the motherboard processors and probably abandoning sockets.

To those few remaining hobbyist builders who do buy a low end CPU to be upgraded later this is something of concern. Unfortunately for them, this is no longer the norm in home building PCs. Instead we see most people swapping out the entire guts of a system when they upgrade, so this isn’t a big deal to them.

For me, I have always operated on the cheap side of computing and have upgraded processors on most rigs I have had. The three PCs in the house all have had more powerful CPUs dropped in that have extended their lives out considerably. The real world performance gains have been nothing to sneeze at either.

So I’m a little sad to see this kind of change to the industry being talked about. It is far from the first computer component category to implode with dedicated sound cards and video cards becoming niche products made only by a few manufacturers. With most PC users content with the onboard gear, only gamers have kept those two items afloat.

Combine this with the talk of AMD being in serious trouble and we have a recipe for returning to the bad old days of computing where PCs cost two to four grand to buy. Maybe ARM can start making inroads as an architecture against x86, but…

Improving HD Streaming

Ever start writing something and go completely blank due to interruptions? This is one of those posts. I know I had something else in mind… Oh well. So I’ll write a little bit about some tech upgrades while the brain cells attempt to fire. It isn’t even a cold morning.

A visit from my sister and her husband last month revealed that the intermittent streaming problems with the cobbled together media center PC had become an issue. Trying to properly stream the Notre Dame game in high definition became an exercise in pulling teeth. After that, continued issues with other sites, especially Crunchyroll, forced me to do some exploring and tinkering.

While the current WiFi is only 802.11g in the house, it should be sufficient for 720p rates. However, research revealed issues with even the most recent standards. Stuttering and complete stops are common complaints across the Web. Some people advocate using power line networking modules, but this rickety old farm house would be a poor place to attempt that.

More Russian Referral Spam

The latest round of spam showing up as blogger hits come from fr.netlog . com and appears to be actually a link from t . co instead. So far I have gotten sixteen “referrals” from there this week. While they show up on the Blogger dashboard’s stats, Google Analytics does not list the hits. Why Google does not filter them out for Blogger’s built in stats puzzles me.

So anyone getting hits from there, please do not clink on the links to investigate, that is what they want you to do. I would not be surprised if this is being done by the same people responsible for the aptratings spam.

UPDATED October 1, 2012

Yet another round of referral spam from Russia has been hitting my blog heavily. In this case adsresultpages . com links to a viagra ad. Out of curiosity, I looked up the website through whois and found out it gets about the same amount of visits I do a day. Not exactly a successful campaign, is it?

Funny thing is that referral spam has been around since at least 2002 when blogs started getting going in earnest and nobody can figure out how it can be profitable.

Technology Can Make You Feel Old

I was reading that the first CD came out thirty years ago today. Three decades ago. I remember hearing my first one circa 1987 since cassette tapes took awhile to be displaced.  In fact, I did not have a CD player until around ten years after the first ones were released.

Now the Compact Disc is on its way out with sales having collapsed. Downloadable digital files have been the bulk of music sales for some time now and supposedly streaming subscriptions are the wave of the future. That I will believe when I see it.

Attempts to replace the CD with another hard medium all failed. SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc), DAT (Digital Audio Tape), and DVD-A (Digital Versatile Disc – Audio) never caught on with only DAT surviving in the studio environment.

China Doesn’t Just Copy Electronics: The J-21

The military aviation world got a surprise a couple of years ago when the Chinese government took the wraps off of the J-20 stealth fighter, but that is nothing compared to what just showed up. Roughly in the F/A-18 Hornet size range and possibly a competitor to the F-35 Lightning II strike fighter, it is clearly derived from stolen data from Lockheed and subcontractors of the F-22A Raptor program. That is a scaled down F-22 if I have ever seen one with a radome more like the F-35. The proportions made a lot of us on the Net think it was a Photoshop at first, but I had a pit in my stomach when I studied the photos and better ones came out.

I knew our defense programs has been thoroughly compromised by the Chinese, but seeing the tangible results has been an unpleasant experience. As far as cyber security goes, our most classified and protected programs are in the hands of a hostile foreign government. It makes you wonder if the federal government is competent at anything at all.

Meanwhile, China continues to push claims on disputed territories with no fear of being countered.  With the continued aggression in the Pacific against neighboring countries, is it any wonder an arms race has begun in the region?

Odd and Ends 8-20-2012

Despite Monday being the toughest day of the week for my health, I felt inspired to head to Winona, MN to get some ammo and maybe a cheapish phone. My eight year old Motorola cordless runs through replacement batteries at a faster clip than it used to, while acting strangely of late. At Amazon, I had wish listed a well reviewed AT&T corded and cordless DECT 6.0 combo, something I had never dreamed existed and perfect for rural life. But the price went up and I was reluctant to pull the trigger.

So it is much to my surprise that I have the AT&T phone charging at the moment in the living room while the corded base keeps watch in my room. It turns out they had a couple in stock at Mills Fleet Farm where I got my cheap Russian .223 ammo! Now I am penniless until my next Social Security check, but I am very relieved to have a working telephone. The extra range of the phone should be very helpful since the Samsung barely worked at the other end of the not very big house.

Why Tablets are Not the Future of Computing

Just a short post to relay the story of an Apple user who ran into an old man who does not like the company. Why? Because they are killing creativity by pushing iPads. I love his reasoning and even more that he has bona fides that cannot be looked down upon. While I love using my 7” Android based tablet as a glorified book reader, I do not approve of the bigger ones for the same reasons given by the old man.

The other moral to the story is that you can run into the most interesting people if you are willing to have conversations with strangers. So go read the story already!

Insecurity

The more we connect electronically, the more we invite crime it seems. This past week, I have had to change my passwords to LinkedIn and lastFM – the latter I had only tried out briefly in 2009. Both services have suffered cyber break ins with millions of passwords compromised. League of Legend European site had user data stolen along with passwords as well. After logging in on another service on a friend’s laptop, I was so appalled by his meager security and use of shady pirating sites that I changed that service’s password once I got home.

An over reliance on antivirus and firewall software, deleting browser history and cookies, and running malware scanners is no substitute for smart browsing in the first place. While useful tools, they mostly are of use after your system has been compromised. IP filtering via service such as OpenDNS is more proactive, but no substitute for avoiding where you should not be in the first place.

Yet there is no real protection once you sign up somewhere online for something. At that point, you are at the mercy of the security employed by that service. It turns out that a lot of them are not that secure. With so many people willing to hack for money and kicks, the attacks are escalating. That is not even counting what is going on with cyber attacks from government, China in particular.

So you can add cyber dangers to the economic insecurity we are already feeling. Get used to it, it will not be getting any better. No wonder some of the white nights in cyber warfare have bailed out.

Culling the Herd

While I am no longer active on Facebook, I did go back today to remove the remaining hundreds of “friends” I accrued while gaming there in past years. As it stands, I have 67 people left, most of whom I know in reality or through politics. Read what you will into that.

I doubt I will ever be active again there, as I forget it even exists until someone brings it up. Meanwhile, Google + is a bust, which can be of no surprise to most. Over at LinkedIn, I had to change my password due to the massive hack attack that exposed many passwords.

Social media sites, or the Web 2.0 as the wits dubbed it, are losing their luster since they are inherently superficial. But the greatest threat is the lack of security and the fact that hackers are targeting their databases more and more.

Blogging at least allows coherent thoughts to be put up, so I am content to write here where nobody pays attention. I would rather post substance and be ignored than to post twaddle and have “likes” dinging it up!

High and Low Technology

To start with, I do not have enough money to be a true gadget freak or enthusiast. That said, I love clever devices whether they be complicated or simple. So it was an interesting day when my latest box from Amazon arrived this afternoon. Contained within were two devices, one a sophisticated work of silicone and metal, the other harkening to simpler days despite being electrically powered.

Having succeeded in reviving my video card from failing this winter, it was with great disappointment (and financial pain) that I realized the fix was not going to work in the long run. For the past several weeks, the card has been running hotter and hotter with the occasional glitch. Time was clearly running out for the old beast, which had given very good service. Since I have a smallish case, a top of the line replacement was out of the question – and out of reach of my bank account.

After checking around for the best bang for the buck that would actually fit in my case, I settled on a Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD7750 that is factory overclocked. From my studies, it would be more of a horizontal upgrade (according to some benchmarks) with hopes that it would actually perform a bit better. Best of all is the fact that it consumes far less electricity and runs much cooler. Heat is the enemy of electronics and I liked the idea of having the entire PC run cooler.

So far the new video card is doing just that. Throwing my best games at it resulted in maximum temperatures that are twelve degrees Celsius less than what the old one idled at. The massive fan also is dramatically quieter for an added bonus. Fancier video decoding, deinterlacing, and scaling have impressed and eventually I will get a second one for the media center in the living room.

The other item in the box was a rice cooker that doubles as a vegetable steamer. Since I only used it to steam asparagus tonight, I will not go into detail on the little appliance other than to say it is highly reviewed. That and I cannot remember the name of the company that makes it at the moment.

It will be used heavily if things go according to plan, for making rice a regular staple is on my agenda of improving my diet. Steaming veggies is also part of the goal and it did a good job on the first experiment. So while writing more about the high tech item, it is this simple device that I am the most excited about.

I must be getting old.

Odds and Ends 4-10-2012

Since I have not done this in awhile, I will throw some links up to what has caught my attention lately.

Locally, the apple orchards that are such a part of the region are under threat thanks to the cold snap this week. The combination of unusually warm temperatures followed by unusually cold ones is lethal to apple buds. Not much can be done but hope there will be Honeycrisp’s this year.

Ah, those wacky Japanese using high tech to better humanity. Oh wait…

At least they are diverting resources from making robot women. Don’t get me started there.

Having watched the dot com bubble of the late nineties, I have been getting the feeling of déjà vu again. It turns out I am not alone in worrying over how the latest Internet startups are over priced. I suspect we are headed for a dot com bubble 2.0.

The media in all its forms is increasingly dishonest as things crank up for the elections this year. Race baiting is one of the more evil ways to stir things up and it is being employed fully as a rallying tactic for the left. Outright fabrications are being spread around to inflame tensions. The ends justifying the means rarely leads to anything good, but people never seem to learn that.

The mainstream media cannot be trusted to be guardians of the truth or public good and I wonder if they ever were worthy of it. Given how partisan they have become, they resemble the state controlled media of totalitarian states more and more. Maybe the idea that yellow journalism died out was an illusion in the first place.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is how humanity lost its willingness to take risks by the end of the 20th Century. We need to go to space, take chances, colonize, and build. Yes, people will die in the endeavor, but there are far worse things than death. One of them is stagnation. So it is sad to see plans from the 1950s aimed at going to Mars and realizing there is little chance that will happen this century.

I am probably not alone in that. An anime adaptation of Space Brothers has started airing in Japan and streaming worldwide at Crunchyroll. It is a rare thing these days to see an anime featuring characters that are all adults and dealing with adult problems. Set in the near future, it is about a pair of brothers hoping to make it to the Moon and beyond as astronauts. Warm and sentimental, it also catches some of the current cultural malaise in Japan. Man, it makes me wish we had real space programs and not the token jokes we have today.

Pulling on the Dragon’s Tail

Anonymous went after the Chinese government in another coordinated attack on a large amount of websites. Given how much cyber warfare is conducted by that government, I would not be surprised to see Anonymous get hacked thoroughly in retaliation. There is a strong nationalist streak that has been inculcated in the populace for the last couple of decades which means there will be plenty of retaliatory attacks from outside the government as well. Break out the popcorn, this could get very interesting.

Tools of the Faith

When it comes to technology, I believe that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are more geeky than a lot of the population at large in the United States. That is a bold claim in the era of iPads, iPods, and Facebook, but I notice we tend to be early adopters of technology and love to incorporate it into church wide usage. Now that I have moved over to an Android platform for my portable assistant needs, I am finding my suspicions are correct.

The last revamp to LDS.org has made it a more useful tool for individual members, whether they be leaders or the average person. While the updated profile information and access to online versions of manuals/teaching tools impressed me, it was not until recently that I began to really appreciate what can be done with them.

Both  iOS and Android devices have free apps that allow you to sync up all your highlights, annotations, and bookmarks from your scriptures, magazines, and manuals with your LDS.org account. This is tremendously handy for me, since I try to keep my electronic and hard copy scriptures in sync. Making sure to highlight or note something in my Holy Bible or Book of Mormon that I did with my tablet is not easy simply because my memory is not that good. But if I synch my tablet to the account, all I have to do is look under “My Study Notebook” and voila, there it is. Then I crack open the books and get my highlighting pencils out to manually sync the paper editions. The ease of that made me very happy.

Search for “Gospel Library” in Google Play, Amazon Kindle, or iTunes app stores for the very well done app from the Church. If you have a lot of space on your tablet or smart phone, I advise downloading all the conference talks available. So far everything back to 1974 has been issued in electronic format for the app. I also suggest exploring all the lesser pamphlets and manuals, for there is a lot of good information there.

But wait, there is more out there!

I highly recommend Stake Central for Android. While some may be content with the lesser Ward Central app, this has your local leadership and stake calendar included. Both are very handy for active families looking to keep up with local events and contacting people for information. It is the same data you can access on your LDS.org membership account, but downloaded for when you have no Web access.

Another useful tool for digging into scripture is “LDS Citation Index”, which allows you to find conference talks, books, and manuals that reference a specific verse of scripture. This is great for preparing lessons and talks when you are on the road or cannot get to a PC. Look for it in Android markets.

There are other apps available, but those are the ones I am using currently. Now to get the stray annotations out of my old Dell Axim…