The Joost staff posted a public blog post discussing the bandwidth requirements when using the app. Apparently you need about 300 MBs down and 100 MBs up, per hour. Now, I don’t know if these guys are using h.264 instead of plain MPEG-4 but in any way, there is no chance in hell that my internet provider, Comcast, will allow its subscribers to use Joost after it’s released. Not only Joost will suck out all the available internet bandwidth if it becomes as popular as their other product is (skype), but it is posing a threat on Comcast’s TV business. It is well within Comcast’s powers to filter them out (with or without a net neutrality law), which will be a big blow to Joost’s plans. Comcast is one of the most important US ISPs that the Joost folks need to make deals with. Personally, I see a rocky road ahead for Joost. I am not convinced at all about their business model, even if the idea is promising. But I guess, every innovator’s business die easily. It’s the second implementor who succeeds, because he learns from the mistakes of the first one.

* My friend Nathan Baesel made a great appearance on “Without a Trace” tonight on TV (too bad his character dies at the end). He had quite some screen time as he was the center character of the episode.

* The reason I can’t watch any of the Stargate series is because almost each time they go to a new world, everything looks either like China, or medieval Europe or Nazi Germany. Their clothes, their houses, even the background music. It just shows how cheap the Stargate series are and how they borrow clothes from Hollywood’s “rent one, get one free” storage rooms. Where the heck is imagination?

* It bothers me how non-technological the “Battlestar Galactica” show is. Except the actual (annoyingly dark to hide the cheapness) starships and fighters, the rest of their technology does not seem to exceed ours. The whole space thing seems forced. The Cylons seem to have technology, but the humans look like rats in a can.

* My JBQ opened my iPod Mini today and put a new battery in there for me. At last, full battery life again.

* I am starting my low-calorie diet again. I will target 800 calories instead of 700 this time though, so I don’t have to cut down on milk, fruits and orange juice. When I stopped my low-cal diet the last time, I couldn’t stop drinking milk 5 times a day, for a month!

* Tadaaa! Google is working on artificial intelligence. I expect nothing less from a company which looks at the future.

* “Police called to a Long Island man’s house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.”

I am not afraid of death itself, but I am afraid of dying alone. I mean, the poor man had no one visiting him for more than a year. It is a terrible thing.

I met Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, a few years ago at a Sun-sponsored press party (their skewers were delicious). He talked about open standards that evening and sure enough a few months later he blogged about open standards being more important than open code. Many GPL junkies attacked him for that beliefs, but over and over again I, the consumer, I pay the price of products not following standards rather than ever needing the source code of any driver or firmware.

You see, last week we were sent at OSNews a 17″ Dell PAL/NTSC HDTV for a review. We decided to send it to Thom in the Netherlands to write the review, as all of us here had big TVs already. Thom received the TV earlier today only to find out that his PAL system was not supported by the TV. Sure, when you plugin a DVD player or a game console, it works fine in PAL. But region-specific RF cable/over-the-air PAL does not work (it works without sound and in B&W only). Thom believes that if he could flash the monitor’s firmware to the european version of the TV he would be able to access the PAL menu (currently disabled) in the TV. But my JBQ believes that it’s much more than a software issue. To support all kinds of North African and European versions of PAL you need more chips inside the monitor.

In my opinion, the problem is not with the monitor. Dell did what any company would have done to save that extra $2 by not including non-essential hardware in it. If all countries instead had followed the same PAL system (or NTSC, or SECAM) there would not have been such problems in the first place. Sure, some countries had to modify their PAL version in order to get compatibility with their older, B&W PAL signal from the ’60s (so people would not had to buy new TVs), but man, sometimes someone has to take a hard decisions sometimes in order to ensure future compatibility with other countries, a measure that would eventually create cheaper products.

In the beginning, it was the FSF, fighting for Free/Open software. Then, others would fight for Free data. Now, some others are asking for Free/Open hardware.

I like free and Free. It is in the best interest of my wallet and my personal freedom as a citizen. But would an economical system where everything is “Free” work in real life? Or is it like communism: great on paper, but impractical, because humans are greedy by nature? Will our civilization mature just enough to produce sheep-humans that could make such a system work, or the human nature of greed can not change because it’s in our genes? What do you think? I am personally perplexed. I like a sort of utopia, but I am not sure it’s achievable. Maybe the current system (some companies being Open and others being Proprietary) is the best system, so citizens can actually choose.

When my mother arrived to France for my wedding in 2001 she made sure she brought with her a number of Greek delicacies. Including a skinned dead rooster from my grand mother’s flock. While she heard it from me, we cooked and ate it next day as “soup avgolemono”. It was delicious.

* I watched all 13+1 episodes of “The Lone Gunmen” this week (God bless America for not allowing me to work and leaving me with too much time on my hands). The show had its moments but it was overall a mediocre production, under-budgeted. Langly is loveable as a goofy hacker and Byers brings me memories of someone I knew who would not only carry the same ideas but he looked like him too. I wrote a review of the show at IMDb.

* Last night’s “Lost” episode was one of the best ever produced for the show. Extremely well-done and provoking. However, “Lost” dipped into just 12.4 million viewers last night, its worst ratings ever (let the fans live in their dreamland but the point is “Lost” is losing some of its appeal). ABC made the same mistake with Lost as it did last year with “Invasion”: slow-going storyline at the beginning of the season, and then a long hiatus. It seems that not even “Lost” is immune to this stupid strategy.

* My actor friend Nathan Baesel guest stars on this Sunday’s “Without a Trace” episode called “Desert Springs”. If you live in USA (and you don’t watch “Battlestar Galactica” at that same time), watch his show!

* Madonna’s “Confessions on the dance floor” live DVD is visibly worse quality than ABC’s broadcast in 720p a few months back. A trained eye can see the encoding differences. But I guess, for most people DVD is good enough.

“Putting RFID chips into people’s arms is, it turns out, not a booming business.”

I would never agree to be implanted with a chip. If more tech jobs require it, I’d go work at MacDonalds. And when MacDonalds requires it too, I will move back to the Greek mountains and plant veggies in the summer and hunt rabbits in the winter in order to live. And if the state requires it for all citizens, I will take my riffle and become a guerrilla fighter until my last breath.

I wasn’t born a Souliot for no reason.

I am not a big fan of photography. I find it too static and (usually) somewhat boring. Which is why I prefer video with audio. However, I absolutely love HDR photography. It just wows me. You can take a not-so-great picture and with HDR bring a whole new way of looking at it. Some nice HDR pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

My JBQ (whose main hobby is photography) despises HDR pictures. He finds them unnatural and according to him, they look like they came out from 3D Studio Max or something. While what he says is correct, it is exactly what draws me towards them. I guess it is because of the same reason why I can’t sit tight and watch medical or social drama TV shows. I need to overstimulate my senses with action and otherworldly sets.

“SCO’s lawyers apparently believe that “Pamela Jones” does not exist and that Groklaw is penned by a team of IBM lawyers.”

While SCO is not to be taken seriously, there is a good chance that what they claim is true. And if it’s true, I feel sorry for the thousands of Linux fans who were tricked by the supposedly innocent IBM. Thankfully, at OSNews very rarely we linked to Groklaw’s (ultra-biased) articles. But other sites, like Newsforge and Slashdot, were linking to Groklaw continuously.

“The world’s first commercially viable quantum computer was unveiled and demonstrated today in Silicon Valley…”

Damn it. I just realized that I had an invite from the Computer History Museum to attend and report on this historic event showcasing the first Quantum computer, but I was not reading their emails through for the last few weeks. That will teach me to read their announcements in full in the future.