Even though standalones are struggling, ABI says that hasn’t stopped Blu-ray from marching forward, thanks to strong sales of the Sony PlayStation 3. And despite some early doubts that
PS3 owners wouldn’t watch Blu-ray movies, ABI says the company, “didn’t see any significant evidence” of that behavior in the survey. That’s consistent with an earlier report from the Entertainment Merchants Association, which claimed that 87 percent of PS3 owners do watch Blu-ray movies.

If you’ve been following CNET’s Blu-ray coverage, it shouldn’t be shocking that standalones are struggling. The PS3 holds the top spot on our best Blu-ray players list, and every time we review a new Blu-ray player we use the PS3 as our reference. It’s the best Blu-ray player we’ve tested so far, plus you get a high-def gaming console and a well-featured media streamer for $400. Yes, there are a few reasons why you may not want to use a PS3 as your Blu-ray player, but for the vast majority of people the PS3 is just a better value. And with standalone players at current price levels, it seems like consumers agree with us.

When the PS3 offers so much more and only costs $400, can you blame them?

Source: ABI Research via Video Business

I’ll update with links to the Facebook application when the WeFi folks get back to me. In the meantime check out the service in action here.

Related:
Two ways to geolocate your dog

The Windows Mobile application is similar to the desktop version–letting users discover and log Wi-Fi spots, as well as add them to a central database which can searched and referenced. Think of it a little bit like Wi-fi Hotspotr (review), but integrated at a system level.

What’s interesting here is the new Facebook application, which like Whereboutz (review), will let users track Facebook friends if they’re using WeFi. This all happens in real-time, meaning if a friend is at the local coffee shop and they decide to check their e-mail using a Windows Mobile smart phone, WeFi users will see them pop up on a map. Users can even get these status alerts to show up in the Facebook news feed.

Today the company, which offers up a pretty svelte little replacement for Windows’ clunky Wi-Fi manager, is launching two new items: a mobile application for Windows Mobile users (which could soon be SideKick users too), along with a Facebook application to help users track people using the service. Oddly enough, in all its news release bravado the company failed to offer up a link to said Facebook application, and it’s not in the directory–so I can’t get my hands on it.

WeFi has had a similar program going through Twitter, letting members automatically note where they are grabbing Wifi via a WeFi-marked access point. To some this might be a little more information than they’re comfortable sharing. I’m hoping that WeFi has setup the application to limit who can see the information using Facebook’s default privacy settings, or at least let users pick out who gets to see what off a short list.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Check out local Wi-Fi hot spots or add your own. Wefi's desktop, mobile, and Facebook application let you find hot spots, and show others where you are in real-time.

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EPISODE 13

TODAY’S LINKS: Opera Stories Don talked about.

Traffic Sources for The Open Road - All Time

(Credit:
Matt Asay)

Last week I had two stories Dugg and two stories Slashdotted. The difference in traffic is striking. Digg delivered three times the amount of traffic as Slashdot did. Granted, my stories hit Slashdot in an off-peak time, but it got me thinking: Is Digg the future of web traffic? The tyranny of the mob, as Slashdot’s Rob Malda once called it?

If so, I’m concerned. I like the traffic Digg gives me, but I also like the editorial function that Slashdot provides. I have no clue how something becomes popular on Digg - I’m constantly surprised by the types of stories I get Dugg. But I know how to get something Slashdotted: Deliver something that Rob Malda finds interesting.

Certain kinds of stories are more likely to be Dugg: anti-Microsoft screeds, pro-Linux (and especially Ubuntu) and Apple posts (See below). To get Slashdotted, an article needs to chart new territory, even if in these old paths. That’s because Rob knows what is new and interesting, and what isn’t. Digg doesn’t. It’s just a crowd (Read: Lowest-common denominator).

Again, I’m not complaining about the traffic. I would simply like to have the crowdsourcing power of Digg with the editorial oversight of Slashdot. Impossible?

Interestingly, CNET is the biggest driver of traffic to this blog. The problem is it only works as a driver for CNET-based traffic. I find that being one link among many in any publication is not a big traffic driver, whether on CNET or elsewhere.

Top Posts on The Open Road - All Time

In the “why didn’t I think of that” category, an enterprising couple of media types (Web designer Jona Bechtolt and freelance science writer Claire L. Evans) were so knocked out by the Steve Jobs Macworld keynote that they decided to create and market a laptop case for the new MacBook Air–based on the simple manila office envelope Jobs pulled his new laptop out of on stage.

The AirMail is little more than a simple Web site and a prototype photo right now, but the designers promise to start shipping the handmade bags in about two weeks–when the MacBook Air itself is set to hit store shelves.

According to the AirMail Web site, the case is “handmade out of durable upholstery-grade vinyl, and lined with fuzzy, soft fleece.” How protective can even a padded manila envelope be? The promotional material warns, “[The] AirMail laptop cases are lined with thick fleece, will protect your laptop from any cosmetic damage and smudges, and keep it safe from bumps in daily use. It is not suitable, however, for any extreme use.”

The AirMail case is available for preorder right now for $29.95 plus $6 shipping, with an estimated ship date of January 29.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Wilson Audio Specialties didn’t invent high-end speakers, but its original WATT speaker, introduced in 1986, changed the rules of the game.

Up to that point, state-of-the-art speakers were all large beasts, but the WATT was a comparatively tiny stand-mounted speaker. Its distinctive pyramidal shape went on to spawn countless imitations.

The WATT was soon joined by the matching Puppy (woofer), and over the ensuing decades the two-piece WATT/Puppy system evolved, culminating in the WATT/Puppy 8 in 2006. Well over 15,000 WATT/Puppys have been sold since 1986, but rather than move to the W/P 9, founder David Wilson decided to start afresh, so now we have the Sasha W/P ($26,900/pair).

Wilson Audio Specialties’ director of sales, Peter McGrath, came to New York City to present the Sasha W/P to the press at Wilson dealer Innovative Audio last week. The new speaker’s sweeping curves and refined shape make for the best-looking Wilson speaker of all time.

It’s a three-way design, with a 1-inch inverted dome tweeter, 7-inch midrange, and two 8-inch woofers elegantly housed within the 197-pound cabinet. Build quality is off-the-charts impressive, and the 12-step automotive paint job is absolutely flawless. The tweeter and midrange drivers are identical to the ones used in the $68,000 Wilson MAXX Series 3 speakers. Wilson Audio just recently expanded its factory in Provo, Utah.

McGrath played a mix of music styles that night, but his own high-resolution classical recordings were the ones most breathtakingly rendered by the Sasha W/P. It was one of those rare, “you are there” audio experiences where you feel transported to the musical event. The Sasha W/P’s ability to unravel massive works with ease is what separates it from merely excellent high-end speakers. The Sasha W/P can unleash uninhibited dynamic contrasts that belie its modest footprint.

It used to be so easy to be a proprietary-software vendor.

That is, until the open-source neighbors moved in. As noted in a Gartner analysis from late last year, proprietary software is on the wane within enterprises while open source is gaining:

Open source gaining at proprietary's expense

(Credit:
Gartner)

That’s not the sort of chart that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to wake up to, but it’s a message to which CIOs are increasingly warming.

The reason? Well, cost is the primary driver for open-source consideration, as a recent Forrester report suggests, but what is most significant is the overwhelmingly positive experience CIOs are having with open source, as this same Forrester report suggests.

Consider the following responses to the question, “How has open-source software met your organization’s expectations in the following areas?”:

Reduced costs…87 percent (met or exceeded expectations).
Improved quality…92 percent.
Eased integration and customization…86 percent.
Quickened the pace of innovation…82 percent.
Improved support…84 percent.
Standards compliance…91 percent.
Decreased time to market…82 percent.

These are numbers that money can’t buy. In fact, the open-source world is giving them away…literally.

Open-source software isn’t perfect, and its quality varies widely, just as in the proprietary-software world. But unlike proprietary software, open source actively de-risks the IT purchasing decision by enabling you to try before you buy, buy on subscription (i.e., no long-term commitment), and pay a lot less for equal or greater value.

Small wonder, then, that CIOs are voting with their wallets, buying into open source while cutting investments in proprietary software.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

A digital rights group in Ireland condemned legal action taken by the major music labels against an Irish ISP.

The idea of requiring ISP’s to filter has picked up steam in recent months. Most notably, the manager of rock group U2, called for ISPs to more aggressively scrub copyright-infringing content from their networks.

While Europe has taken more of a regulatory approach, in the U.S. there is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which proponents say relieves ISPs from responsibility for copyright violations by users.

Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group brought legal action against Eircom, the largest telecommmunications operator in the Republic of Ireland, according to the report by Siliconrepublic.

Lobby group Digital Rights Ireland warned that attempts by the four largest music labels to hold ISPs accountable for copyright violations committed by users threatens privacy, and Ireland’s reputation as an “Internet-friendly country,” according to a story on Siliconrepublic.com.

“Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are intermediaries. They are not, in law, responsible for what Internet users do, any more than An Post is responsible for what individuals send in the mail,” Digital Rights Ireland chairman, TJ McIntyre, told the online publication.

The FutureGen project is meant to test cutting-edge carbon capture and storage technology, which is supposed to dramatically reduce emissions from fossil fuel-burning power plants.

Carbon capture and storage is considered an important technology to reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions, but the technology is unproven at a large scale. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year called for government funding of carbon capture projects in the United States to work out technical issues.

Separately, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce speech on Tuesday that President Bush’s budget proposal next week “will start to deal with” tariffs on imported ethanol. “I think this industry is pretty close to being able to stand on its own,” he was quoted as saying.

A Department of Energy representative issued a statement saying only that the agency needs to reassess the project because of rising prices and technological advances.

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to pull its support of a $1.8 billion project to build a power plant that captures pollution underground, according to published reports.

But ballooning costs and a dispute over the location prompted the Department of Energy to pull its support, according to an Associated Press article citing lawmakers who were briefed by the agency. An announcement is expected in the coming days.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like
Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

Chris DiBona, Google's manager of open-source programs

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.