I finished today watching the last episode of “The X-Files” and so I have some more thoughts on the series. I had seen most of these “mytharc” episodes in the past, but that was years ago, so I needed to refresh my memory.

Basically, seasons 7-8 were a bit weak and season 9 sucked. No wonder it was canceled with fewer than 6-7 million viewers per week, down 5 millions compared to previous seasons.

The creators were correct to create a new mytharc on Season 8, the super soldiers, to better suit the new character, Agent Doggett. There were problems though: the story was too unbelievable (the way these creatures were born and ‘fix’ themselves), laughable storylines (why did the super soldiers didn’t kill or take the baby when it was born? Mulder died and then resurrected, come oooon!), we had no in-depth insights of the global situation or who was really in charge anymore, and even worse, it was too much about Scully’s baby (”my baby, my baby…” - enough already). From all the abductee-created babies in the globe, it was Scully’s the one that would save or codemn the world. Hogwash, it became too much of a soap opera complicating an already weak storyline at the end. The quality of the show just wasn’t the same anymore. The creators should not put the blame to the FOX Network, but to themselves alone.

To make matters worse, in the producer and writer’s interview at the end of the DVDs it was said that if there was season 10, there would be no alien mytharc anymore and the series would become more detective-like, trying to explain more about Doggett’s child death a few years back. In other words, X-Files would have lost its most important element. Thank God it got cancelled.

However, I still maintain the opinion that two movies could be created to give a happy ending to the X-Files, because the current ending is way too depressing (although definitely realistic and pragmatic). An idea could be that Mulder and others would make a special agreement with the rebel aliens to try to eliminate once and for all the super soldiers and the alien plans to colonize Earth. Eventually, they would “sour the milk” for the black oil-infected aliens to want to colonize earth and would make them leave. For the time being. I think that this could be a plausible scenario, because the creators never explored the rebel aliens properly and the actual war between the several alien races — it always felt like a distant happening. If the creators pick a non-alien movie scenario, the movies would be doomed in the box office. Nobody cares about the ‘monster of the week’.

On other news, we watched Madonna’s “Confessions tour” tonight on NBC. Very nice show, although 2-3 songs from the concert were not included in the broadcast. Additionally, NBC censored half of her “Live to tell” performance from fear from some Christian groups. One of the NBC affiliates in Tennessee did not broadcast the concert at all as they found it inappropriate…

JBQ had a great lunch at Google’s campus today. Some of our Google/Apple/other friends are coming over for ThanksGiving dinner tonight. I am torned between mash potatoes and rice to accompany the turkey and the Greek salad.

“The X-Files” were for the ’90s what “Lost” is for the present days: a cult phenomenon. My beloved JBQ bought for me yesterday the X-Files mythology DVDs, 60-something episodes that only deal with the “alien mytharc”, rather than the “monster of the week” kind of episodes. Very interesting to watch, even if acting was really bad in the first few episodes (it got better afterwards).

It’s also interesting to see that the IMDb X-Files forums are filling up a full page in less than a day, while other, brand new TV shows might need 4-6 days to do the same! In other words, it is still a successful show and the reruns are possibly still bring lots of money in.

Many are anticipating the release of two more X-Files movies, to complete a trilogy. But I don’t believe that this will go anywhere. Duchovny is in a legal spat with the producers over money owed to him while some of the producers who tried to put the thing together don’t have a script or even an idea as to where they want to go in the remaining two movies (Anderson says that it won’t be an alien-related story, Duchovny said it would be — go figure).

And the real force behind the X-Files, Chris Carter, is nowhere to be seen. It’s like he has disappeared from the face of the Earth. He hasn’t produced or written anything since X-Files got canceled in 2002. A pretty tragic end with a weak resolution (in its alien mytharc) for such a popular show that shaped the ’90s. According to the mytharc, we are still up for alien colonization and hegemony by December 2012 (the end of the Mayan Calendar). The remaining two movies could give a happy ending to all that, but I don’t see it happening because the people involved can’t get their act together and grow beyond monetary differences.

I decided to give a second look at MetroFi’s free WiFi service which currently exists for 6 cities in the US. One of these cities, is the city I am living in, Foster City in the Bay Area.

I had my QTek 9100 smartphone with me when I passed by a tower with a MetroFi box on it and so I used my phone’s built-in wifi capability to connect. Some points:

* The boxes supposedly can offer service up to 300ft in plain sight, but I found that in reality they don’t do more than 230ft. The map they show supposedly fills up the whole city, but this is not true. Only if you are within 250ft in plain sight or about 70ft without plain sight you will get a signal. My appartment for example does not have a signal at all, because it is facing in the other direction, even if it’s about 70ft away from one of these boxes.
* After I moved below a MetroFi tower, I got a good signal. The one I stopped at, was also a bus stop. People were awaiting for a bus. And given the fact that the SkyPilot boxes MetroFi uses (check their PDFs) are very strong, radiation-wise, it is a tricky situation. Trust me, you don’t want to be too close to these boxes and surf all day, or you might end up lose your hair… These Skypilot boxes are many times stronger than the home-based Wifi routers (which also radiate quite a bit).
* In the initial connection you have to give away your email address, sex, age, income and other information. You have to manually opt out off their mailing list. As Americans say, “there is no such thing as free lunch”.
* But you know, I was ok with all the above. Until I saw that their system does not recognize mobile devices automatically, and so I was served FRAMES with an ad on the top of the browser, and the requested web page underneath. This left me on my PocketPC/cellphone with only half the screen available to browse the internet. Ads don’t always appear, it’s a 50-50 chance you will be served an ad or not. One curious thing is that Slashdot’s mobile page never gets any ads, but osnews.com’s does. Look, let’s make one thing clear: I don’t mind these ads. They are really not intrusive when used on a laptop. But they are not mobile-friendly on smartphones and PDAs.
* Regarding downloading speed, it’s ok if you are not getting served ads. For some reason, when you are about to get served an ad, downloading of your web page is much slower. No, that’s not because of the additional bytes (we are not talking about big graphical ads here, just merely a Yahoo! search box), but it seems that MetroFi’s end is not fully optimized to speedily load from their ad server an ad. So basically, what they need to optimize is not their net connection, but their ad server.

* Conclusion: MetroFi is an acceptable solution if you are using a laptop and you have good signal where you are standing. If you are using a cellular or PDA device, the experience degrades to the floor, because half of your screen real estate goes away and makes browsing essentially useless and unpractical. MetroFi must autodetect the 10 most-used mobile browser user agents (e.g. Pocket IE, Blazer, Netfront, Opera Mobile (tricky autodetection, but this code can do it), Opera Mini, Openwave UP.Browser, Symbian WebKit, Nokia browser, WebPro, Obigo) and give a full screen ad to these browsers, and then a “press here to go to the requested page” link/button. This way, they can make their service more compatible with mobile browsers (no frames, you see), and it won’t take away all the real screen estate while browsing.

I wonder why the US (and especially UK’s) government doesn’t modify its Fair Use laws to be more clear and more current, so we don’t have all these lawsuits from RIAA and MPAA against services, companies and people.

I hate it when MPAA does not allow people to rip their own DVDs. Why the hell would I want to buy the SAME movie 3 times in order to play it back on my DVD player, my PMP and my PSP?

And why is Universal suing MySpace for including some music video clips on their web pages? I mean, look back, in 1980. When the first video clip was created for MTV, it was created for exactly that: promotional reasons. They would beg you to playback their video clips! Back then video clips –while copyrighted– were not used as a way to own a song. It was used as promotion of the actual song. Today, RIAA is shooting their own foot by not allowing sites carry these videos on their pages.

And what’s the deal with RIAA asking $750 for each song pirated when the actual song’s value is below a dollar?

But most of all, I hate region-locking. God, I hate this so much.

“The Dutch government, facing re-election next week, said Friday it plans to draw up legislation “as soon as possible” banning the head-to-toe garment known as burqas and other clothing that covers the entire face in public places.”

I have blogged about this in the past (and Thom did too), and my opinion is that religious clothes must only be banned when they get in the way of performing an action that requires otherwise. For example, girls should not wear long dresses when they are on a gym class and Muslim women should not wear burqas when they are teaching children (eye contact is important) or when working in something as dangerous as chemistry can be. But for all other “normal” uses of religious clothing, when it doesn’t get in the way, people should be free to wear whatever they like. If I want to go shop groceries wearing a burqa, I should be able to do so.

Dutch were always innovative regarding their laws. They usually have laws that other countries get/modify years later. And I believe that this is such a case. This IS a law that is in accordance with the Dutch being ahead of the game. How so, you ask? How is it possible for the always open minded Dutch to create such a restrictive law and still call them “first in the game?” The answer is simple: other countries will follow with similar laws. I see UK being No2, being the king of spying to its citizens. But make no mistake. This law has NOTHING to do with religious bigotry. This law has everything to do with surveillance.

“From a security standpoint, people should always be recognizable and from the standpoint of integration, we think people should be able to communicate with one another,” Minister Rita Verdonk said.

The western world is becoming totalitarian (or “policed”). It will be a mix of totalitarianism and some twisted form of democracy. In the next 100 years people will be less free to do many things that today we take for granted (e.g. smoking on a live TV show was the norm in the ’60s!). It was always like that, but it will become more apparent as the time goes by. Demo-totalitarianism (as I call this bastardized version of democracy) is the only efficient way to survey and keep order in a planet of over 7 billion people. It’s inevitable. Forget democracy the way our forefathers envisioned it. It just doesn’t scale as well.

So, don’t take this Dutch law as “religious bigotry”. Take it as a sign of the things to come. At a western country near you.

Thom blogged about Microsoft going into the offensive regarding IP and software patents against Linux and require tax money for using their technologies. I also believe that MS has legal ground to sue distros who ship with FAT32, SMB, Exchange, (winforms) Mono and what not.

But this is not the point of my blog post. Instead, I am trying to fast forward a few years in the future and visualize how the Linux scene would look like if Microsoft has made Novell-like deals with the 4-5 major Linux distros and has sued the smaller distros, or at least kindly required their IP to be removed from their distros. If that’s the case, we are left with the following: The 4-5 big distros ship their commercial versions of their distros with all MS tech in them, but for their free versions all that is removed. The completely free, hobbyist, distros are shipping with all that removed by default.

This begs the question, how useful these distros are then? Can a modern computer user live without being able to access his FAT32 mp3 player, or without having access to his SMB printer? I don’t think so. There will be some radicals who will push themselves to agree to live in this ordeal, but the majority of users will have two options: either buy a commercial Linux, or move to Win/OSX. Given how complicated package management is for normal users (even in Ubuntu), the majority of users will never find the correct libraries to install manually. Just as it happens today for other stuff, like Flash, Java and mp3. I have read countless blogs where newcomers just can’t figure out how to enable mp3 on their computers despite the also countless tutorials.

And here’s the kicker: I don’t think that this whole situation would be bad for Linux. Today, there are so many Linux distros, and much duplicated effort, that it actually hurts the Linux success in the consumer market. If MS will be the catalyst for fewer distros, and push consumers to actually buy distros rather than downloading the featureless free versions, that’s ultimately a good thing. Isn’t that what the Linux whinees always said, that the “Free” is as in freedom and not as in beer? Well, let’s see how they like it when they will have to shed $50 to get a new version of their distro every 6 months.

How more stupid people can get? Camping and getting violent over a gaming console. Why? What’s the point? Why not wait until shop owners have more units to sell? In fact, waiting for next year is likely to get you a console with fewer hardware bugs and problems.

This also reminds me of some kids that were murdered in the ’90s for their “Air Jordan” shoes. People’s stupidity at its max, right there.

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Slate.com says that both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD are dead on arrival just because other technologies will replace the “disc-oriented” market. The author mentions the internet, cable HD DVRs, on-demand HD TV etc.

Well, here’s the thing. I have access to all that. And yet, I still feel compelled to buy the occasional DVD disc, because of the extras, the convenience and the physical aspect of the disc that mean security for my “possession”.

However, the author IS right to say that the Blu-ray and HD-DVD are dead on arrival. But for a different reason.

The reason is, the DVD is still good enough. It has great sound ability, and when it’s encoded the right way (e.g. the “Daredevil” has the best quality I have ever seen encoded on a DVD disc), its progressive NTSC 720×480 resolution (720×576 in PAL) is more than enough. Most people don’t have HDTVs yet, but even when they do get one, the DVD scales just fine on these TVs and it still looks superb.

Let me put it another way: the visual difference between VCR and DVD was way-way bigger than between DVD and HD. And this visual difference was profound and easily seen on the viewer’s existing TV sets, they did not have to buy a new TV to watch DVDs. Also, there were other technologies before that challenged the VCR, namely the laser-disk, VCD (352 x 288 in PAL) and SVCDs (480×576 in PAL). None of these formats killed the VCR, because while they had better quality, they were not *that* much better than it and they couldn’t easily fit a full movie in a single disc. When the DVD came out, it still took 2 years to take off, but the visual difference was big enough to warrant success. Plus, DVD-ROM devices for PCs were almost instantly available and helped its success, something that’s not true for the HD-ROMs. Even if HD software tools become available, encoding a home movie in HD it can take days, while DVD encoding can be done in a few hours.

In other words, I don’t forsee the two competing HD disc standards to become hits overnight. They eventually might yield good sales and profits, but that won’t be soon enough, and they won’t dethrone DVDs just yet, while the internet/cable/dvr market will also battle them from all fronts. And competing with each other only makes things worse for the companies involved.

They screwed up.

Here’s my interview with Mike Hodgkinson, the director of Rob Dickinson’s “Oceans” music video clip which was shot using a Nokia N93. If all goes well, I might be able to get an interview with Rob in a few days too.

UPDATE: Interview with Rob Dickinson is up too.

I am a boring person. I don’t like changes. I like things the way I know them.

I left Greece exactly 10 years ago for UK, but only a few months ago I found out that the government has re-arranged Greece’s peripheries and for some of them it has changed their names. For example, Patra is not part of Peloponnese anymore, Thrace is called “East Macedonia and Thrace” now, while there is no Sterea Ellada, and Dodecanese & Cyclades are souped up now. Why the hell was there a need to change something like this? Cutting down Greek Macedonia in 3 and “elliminating” Thrace is stupid. If they wanted to change something, they should have renamed Sterea Ellada to “Roumeli” (its original name) and be done with it. Why make changes over changes for something that it’s already so well-crafted in my mind since my school years and it made more historical sense? I fail to see how the new changes make it easier to administrate these peripheries. Although it might be better for the Aegean islands now, I don’t think it’s better for the mainland. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.