Oh, what do you know.

I just got an email from Microsoft that says that they are postponing their removal of Hotmail access via Outlook Express after “customer feedback”. It seems they lost too many paying customers, just like me.

Windows Live Mail sucks beyond belief. It’s slow, eats lots of RAM, and most importantly, it’s buggy as hell. Outlook Express is a mature application — at least for what it was originally designed to do.

When it comes to camcorders, Samsung is one of these companies that really piss me off. Just like Sanyo and Aiptek. You see, these are camcorder companies that don’t follow video standards. They just go their own ways to use their own versions of the well understood formats creating a mess. This is because they are not really into the video industry, they don’t care about it. They just want to make a product to sell. They care not about details.

Samsung recently released a full 1080/30p HD camcorder, which records in AVC. But instead of using the actual official AVCHD format, it’s using the MP4 container instead, stereo audio instead of 5.1 surround, and its own internal AVC format. The MP4 container is simply not optimized for editing. If people are cursing 10 times for AVCHD’s .mts not being easy to edit, think that we should be cursing 50 times for Samsung’s MP4.

I did a few tests too, in “draft (auto)” quality, which is the lowest preview quality on Vegas Pro that speeds up the video preview. Here are my findings on my P4 3Ghz DELL PC:

Samsung AVCHD-bastardation 1920×1080/30p: 1 frame per second
Canon & JVC AVCHD 1920×1080/60i: 5 frames per second
HDV 1440×1080/60i: 30 frames (full speed)

I don’t dispute the fact that faster PCs will be able to edit AVCHD faster. But no matter how to put it, Samsung’s MP4 is still 4 times slower than AVCHD. And AVCHD is about 6 times slower than HDV. And HDV is about 10 times slower than plain DV.

So buy cameras wisely if you want to edit, depending on your PC’s speed. But even on the fastest machine available today I don’t think that Samsung’s stream will edit full speed. Maybe in 3 years time or so.

Currently, there are three main camps regarding the future of Gnome 3.0:
- Continue evolutionary small releases
- Break compatibility and try to make it a modern desktop
- Go to a completely different direction than the PC desktop

On a previous blog post of mine I noted that I preferred either seismic additions (e.g. artificial intelligence), or just evolutionary releases that don’t break ABI and API compatibility with apps. Here’s another way that Gnome should go in my opinion:

Remove GTK+ and X11 requirement. Write both a brand new API using the Java language (by using Classpath, not J2SE), and a brand new, modern, windowing system that doesn’t have an ’80s architecture. In other words, pull a Google Android trick (and Apple Mac OS X too, in a way). You can still run older applications via a rootless or windowed X server, the way Mac OS X does it. And you only support modern ATi, nVidia and Intel (and maybe VIA) graphics cards after having few of your devs signing NDAs to get the 3D specs. Maybe you even rewrite the sound part too (adding support initially for only the 3 most common sound chipsets). In other words, you take over the “user visible” part of the operating system and you integrate with the rest of the system properly rather than legacy layers upon layers.

To truly liberate your platform and enable new powerful and modern applications to be written, that’s what it has to be done. Not beating the old dog. And yes, this is a 5+ year plan. Not something that gets done in a blink of an eye.

Red Hat has the most developers working on X.org, GTK+, Classpath, and Gnome, so they have to be the ones to be either convinced or initiate such a thing. Problem is, Red Hat doesn’t care about the home desktop anymore, they only care about getting corporate. Novell trying to go with Mono, would fail because it wouldn’t get enough tract from the community.

So this will never happen. It was a good 10 minutes of dreaming while writing about it.

The one and only Linux Hater, ladies and gentlemen.

Maybe I am old. Maybe I just don’t get it. But I really don’t need “location based” apps and “social networking” apps on my phones. And I definitely don’t need “social networking location based” apps either.

I am talking about the apps currently available or soon-to-be-available on Google’s Android and iPhone’s Installer.app. Take a look (.pdf) at Android’s top-50 third party apps. I personally need zero of them. And while my iPhone is jailbroken, out of the 150+ binary apps currently available for it, I have only installed Terminal.app just in case in the future something shitty happens and I need to fix it manually. In other words, I see nothing that changes the way I do things in my life with these apps. Maybe because I don’t want to change my life. But I definitely need features that I take for granted on the desktop.

What I need is the kind of functionality that can’t be brought by third parties but require strong integration with the system and the hardware. I am not interested for example in a non-integrated random third party IM application, because that lack of integration would be more glaring in the mobile environment than an equivalent third party IM app on a desktop OS. Namely, on my phones I always need these:
* Multi-IM (ICQ/AIM/Jabber/Y!/MSN/GTalk) with full A/V support.
* VoIP SIP with A/V support (not Skype, preferably GizmoProject).
* A2DP/AVRCP/PAN/LAP/Obex Bluetooth support.
* Video recording and more still camera settings.
* Cut/Copy/Paste support and Text Select support.
* Adobe’s Flash Lite 3.0 browser plugin with video support.
* File manager/picker that system apps support automatically, e.g. Mail.
* T6 support like this one.
* UPnP server/client support and internet radio integration.
* Sound recorder (this can be done by third parties without integration repercussions).

The only third party app I am interested in seeing, and use only a few times a year, is possibly Skype. Nothing else. Ok, and a few games. But the BULK of what I need, they HAVE to be fully integrated with the system so they don’t behave like poor cousins, and therefore, it has to be Apple’s (or Google’s) job to implement and not the developer’s community.

The only phones that do a lot of what I need are Nokia’s Symbian S60 v3.1 phones and some of the newer Windows Mobile ones. Problem is, I am not willing to go back to a non-touchscreen phone environment (and the new touchscreen Nokia phones don’t inspire me at all), while Windows Mobile’s interface is The Suck.

So I am on “the waiting”.

There’s this new popular blog, the “Linux hater“. I have to say that I agree with most of what the guy writes. He ain’t no fool, in fact, the guy is a developer and had enough experience with the platform to criticize it in this fashion (it is obvious that he is knowledgeable when it comes to Linux-related happenings going back to 10 years and he is/was at least a power Linux user if not a developer). Neither I believe that he works for MS as some people accused him. I truly believe that he just writes his opinion, an opinion that most of the time is not far from the truth.

Reading him a bit more reveals EXACTLY how most developers feel and behave and think about consumers in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere). Reading this is not too different than hearing our (engineer) friends talk at barbecue parties:

“Take a software product from some commercial company. If you ever get a chance to get through the marketing folks and talk to their devs, chances are that they know exactly all the ways concerning how their products suck. They’ll have a huge list of reasons of why they can’t implement some feature that you, non-paying, ass-hat, non-customer, wants. And then they’ll tell you what they should, “Show me the money, or bugger off. We’re working here.” And then they’ll talk shit behind your back about how you have no idea what it takes to ship reliable working complex software.”

His blurb about GNOME was 100% on the mark. Most of his other ones find me in agreement as well as to what’s wrong with Linux as a user-friendly desktop platform. His LSB post was on the mark too. The guy ain’t a troll, don’t try to downplay him. The guy tells it like it fucking is. That’s the kind of people I like.

Havoc and Jono made some good blog posts about the future of Gnome. The problem is two fold: the older Gnome 2.x “celebrity” devs are not involved in coding anymore, and the newer ones can’t get past the celebrities. Havoc also correctly speaks of the fact that breaking compatibility with Gnome 2.x is not what most users would want.

If the community needs revolution instead of evolution stop looking at the pretty graphics and how to improve this or that. A revolution requires radical thinking. For example, artificial intelligence. If you don’t have the guts or knowledge to bring such big changes (that can take years to complete), then don’t. Simply improve what we already have little by little and don’t do changes that would upset users rather than completely change the way they work.

“Only 5 percent of consumer electronics products returned to retailers are malfunctioning–yet many people who return working products think they are broken, a new study indicates,” says PCWorld.

This just shows how important usability is and how bad the industry is providing good usability on their products. Usually, that’s because the engineers and designers who design these products never use them in their personal life and therefore they never use the devices properly. Every time I happen to review a bad product the first thing that comes to mind is “I don’t understand. Don’t these people actually use their products?“.

It’s just sad that companies don’t realize that the money they must spend on usability is a good investment as the fewer returned devices would mean more money for them. I am going to bet that the iPhone is among the lowest returned devices, because it rocks when it comes to usability and user expectations.

Here’s how to export from CyberLink PowerDirector 7 for Vimeo’s 720p HD service. The produced files are also compatible with the PS3 and XBoX360.

It’s ridiculous how much CPU speed you need to edit full 1080p AVCHD clips with Vegas. I got my hands on a 1920×1080/60i 14mbps AVCHD clip today and it plays back on the Vegas Pro timeline at ~2 fps on my P4 3Ghz (in “preview/auto” quality). Vegas only supports basic DirectDraw functions, so a faster GPU won’t help either.

Now think that the fastest affordable PC on the market is a Quad-Core Intel at 3Ghz, which is about 5 to 6 times faster than my PC (including bus/RAM speed). Now, multiply that: 6*2fps=12 fps. This means that even the fastest PC on the market today won’t give me full preview speed while editing AVCHD. I would need double that speed. And that’s before adding any plugins or transitions that slow-down preview even more.

Someone might suggest the way Apple does things: all imported footage gets re-encoded to AIC or ProRes codec before editing which are faster to edit/playback. You will have to wait for the transcoding to take place of course, and that will take quite some time for ProRes (it’s faster with AIC, but AIC is not lossless so I can’t recommend it).

So in essense, you have the choice: do you want to wait while importing in the beginning, or wanna wait while editing? In both cases, there’s gonna be stalling. This means only one thing: I will have to wait for a few more years before I decide to get an AVCHD camera and a new PC. For now, the HV20 with its faster-edited M2T format will suffice.

Update: Some people are telling me that AVCHD editing is plenty smooth on newer computers. Good to hear.