LUX.ET.UMBRA

Image via Wikipedia

Apparently, the online tax for North Carolina hasn’t been bringing in the money that it was supposed to and the thinktank, Tax Foundation, has published a report that says that not only does it hurt the state in the short term, but it also hurts the state in the long term too.

Noooo kidddding.

Amusingly, this is basically the “I told you so” parts where the legislation made decisions on things they knew nothing about and spent budget money that they didn’t have. Again. Nothing new here, folks. Politicians that don’t understand technology and business? Like we’ve never heard that one before.

Interestingly enough, although to no avail, I had spoken about this issue time and again during the time when the “Amazon Tax” during the time period when it was passed and how our legislation thought how wonder it would be to gain some figure in the sky millions in some sort of pot of gold wish.

I mean, seriously. They still continued to budget and spend for this year as if there is this money coming in although there is nary a word from the North Carolina Department of Revenue on whether or not there actually is significant tax revenues coming in due to this tax. I suspect that there is little to nothing, considering they had targeted Amazon, and Amazon cut their ties with North Carolina affiliates and hurt the state in the process. Amusingly, the bad guy that Amazon was made out to be wasn’t so bad and in the end the politicians seemed to have stuck their own foots in their mouth if this study from Tax Foundation has anything to say about it.

From my perspective? Well, one of my businesses just didn’t carry as much revenue this year. Instead of having to pay taxes on the income, it seemed that it was more of a write off this last year. Oh well. Tough cookies for the North Carolina bare coffers.

Tags: Amazon, Law, Local, Observation, Opinion, Politics by darkmoon
View Comments

Image via CrunchBase

I’m really disappointed. So far, I’ve been tracking the entire deal for all sorts of cities on and off for the past week on “Google’s Infrastructure for Communities” venture. Amusingly, I had actually applied for the city of Winston-Salem long before Greensboro even knew about this venture. And with all of the cities, including Greensboro, no one has once bothered to mention that this product is specifically last mile driven. It’s to the homes of consumers. That’s right, it’s basically the same as Wilson’s Greenlight project.

FTTH – (fiber to the home).

It’s documented right there in the RFI, but everyone is trying this gimmick and that gimmick to try to get Google to come. Why not analyze what their business model has been and will continue to be? Why not actually look and see whether or not they have actually purchased dark fiber around your area? That’s information that is vital and crucial to your cause. Those that have dark fiber that has been purchased close to your locale will probably stand a better chance of becoming the venture’s pet project.

What journalists need to focus on, is not whether or not businesses or research institutions have access to high speed Internet. That’s just entirely irrelevant. So what if Google puts in FTTH. That would not effect a school, nor a law firm, or even a medical facility. What people need to find out is what sort of applications could be coming across a high speed connection to your home. Would you discontinue your cable service? Would you go with fiber based HDTV? What if Google was your provider and controlled the line and access points? Why would this be good for what they do?

I think there are many people that are not asking the right questions. Google doesn’t ever do anything for free (yes, Google does mine your Gmail. It’s in your terms of service). And it’s not like the Dell fiasco with the manufacturing plant since any job creation would be very much infrastructure related. Would your city become an instant techburg? Of course. But at what price, and do you have what it takes to do this?

Personally? I think they’re after the television content. Youtube is perhaps only the first step in the long line of things, but having been a shareholder and analyzed their corporation for a number of years, I can say that I can see many ways that they could monetize the information gathered by using similar techniques as their current search but applied in the high-definition medium.

Google is a great company and I would love for them to become a major corporate player in the Triad. But so far, what I’ve seen has been more of the whole … who can throw the biggest party and have the best food for when Google comes. Sorry, Topeka. Just. Not. Impressed. And that just doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes right down to it.

Tags: Google, Internet, Local, Observation, Opinion by darkmoon
View Comments

Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know about you but when I was a kid, I really enjoyed the Super Bowl half time shows. But as times progressed, it just hasn’t been quite the same. In fact, these days, I don’t even bother watching it and actually go do something else. I’m going to venture the thought that this year will not be any different. I mean, “The Who”? Couldn’t they have got a better act like Daft Punk, or Black Eyed Peas?

If you actually think about it, the last five years have been acts that were in the prime like almost twenty years ago. Maybe more. When was the last time anyone really listened to Prince?

Don’t get me wrong, I like The Who but it’s not what I consider something that grabs the younger crowds. Heck, where are the singers from like the New Year’s Eve bashes? Those are the ones that are recent and the cool acts. It’s also within this decade of music history.

I think whomever schedules this for the NFL really is living in the past. Next thing you know, we’re going to bringing back the Monkees. Nothing wrong with that, but if you ever wonder why your viewership during that time has drastically dropped off? There might be a good reason for it.

Now that I think about it, perhaps the NFL needs to work with Apple’s iTunes marketing team. They find the greatest music that is absolutely catchy and often bands that no one has heard before. And that’s fresh and new, but what do I know. I don’t have billions of dollars hanging in the balance.

Tags: Observation, Opinion, Sports, Television by darkmoon
View Comments

Image via Wikipedia

If you didn’t know already, the encryption for GSM’s antiquated algorithm has been cracked. All 64-bits of it. And guess what…. apparently most carriers haven’t upgraded to the 128-bit algorithm because… well, I’m not exactly sure. I suppose security by obscurity is probably the key reasoning behind this, but A5/1 which has been around since 1988 was replaced by the GSM Association in 2007 with A5/3 but most carriers haven’t bothered to upgrade.

It’s not anything spectacular since the 64bit keys were cracked through brute force, and with the computing power these days along with parallel computing, you can pretty much crack the smaller length algorithms through brute force easily. And this doesn’t allow you to listen in on the calls just yet, it just opens the doors to any of the communication that runs on those bands if the carriers haven’t changed the codes on you not to mention the legality of breaking those codes outside of academic research.

There are a couple ways around this problem. One is to upgrade to a larger key such as 128 bit (which is pretty standard considering many banks run SSL certs on 128 bit encryptions). Not the super-safe, but it does create a lot more combinations to guess through brute force. The other way is through the methodology similar to RADIUS with WPA for Wifi. Wifi keys are easily broken, but if you have a service that continuously rotates those keys and makes it a dynamic password, then any hacker is left with a time limit to break in. From a security standpoint, this becomes a more daunting task.

And as far as iPhones are concerned… oh… if you own one and didn’t know already…(as do most of the world’s mobile devices), they run on GSM carriers. But then again, so will Google’s Nexus One.

Tags: Cellular, Hacking, Observation, Opinion, Security, Wireless by darkmoon
View Comments

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I have to say that with my first couple days with the Droid, I’ve noticed some things that no one else has really bothered to mention. First, if anyone think that this is a contender for the iPhone, I would say that Apple really has some competition. This is definitely the first phone that I’ve touched that overall has a better feel and the apps actually are close enough to really give Jobs some heartburn.

Likes
Very smooth. If you have it linked to your wifi at home, when the signal disappears, it actually switches off to 3G immediately. No fuss, no muss. The interface moves very well. It does lag sometimes if you don’t have the right apps to shut down the apps that you quit from (why you can’t quit from an app is another annoyance that Google has to fix).

I love the notifications. I mean, that’s one thing that iPhone doesn’t do well, and notifications here are out of the way and are there when you want to look at them.

Maps integration and voice dial? Awesome. The entire Car Mobile feature is sweet and I think Garmin itself might have a contender on its hands. I’ll have to test it out more to find out.

The multimedia station sync is great. Immediately, my phone also became my alarm clock. Will have to note to self not to chuck alarm clock across the room…. not that I do that anyways, but still.

Vibrate function is super powerful. Now this might be somewhat annoying and I sorta wish people would make it so that you could control the level of vibrate sometimes, but a powerful vibrate always helps when you’re in a loud place and your phone goes off. There’s nothing more annoying than waiting for a call and missing it because you didn’t feel the vibrate feature. Entirely useless then, isn’t it?

OpenGL support. Android is basically a flavor of linux (don’t believe me? kernel is 2.6.9….), so we shouldn’t be surprised here but that makes 3D gaming and animation completely possible and with the smaller resolutions, you can guarantee some interesting gaming coming your way.

I’m not fond of keyboards, but the hardware keyboard is actually a nice one and compared to my Nokia n810 Wimax, it feels pretty good. The on-screen one could use a little work when it’s trying to detect what you’re trying to type so it corrects it after learning what letters you hit off in portrait mode.

Android Market is awesome. It might be a little more simple compared to the iTunes store, but when people complain about how there’s just not enough apps? From one geek to another, I’m going to say that there’s plenty out there. Plenty. Sometimes I wish open source apps were this easy to find.

Forget the in-the-box browser. Get Dolphin. Know how iPhone users are all talking about how they can zoom and such? Dolphin can do that. Now if only Google put it in all of their apps like Google Maps and such.

Dislikes
I don’t like the fact that BT headsets don’t have voice dialing. This is a problem of Google’s Android OS, and not the phone itself. Very annoying considering it’s a phone built by Motorola, and every past Motorola phone actually had BT voice dialing. This should have been brought up during testing by product development on Motorola’s side since it’s a feature they’ve had since… well, forever.

Don’t like the fact that you can’t quit from an app. Some apps might need to be persistent but out of the box, there are many that don’t have to run in the background. Very annoying out of the box. Fortunately, I went and grabbed Task Manager, and life is good again.

I also don’t like the fact that you can’t group contacts together from different sources. While an auto-merge might be a little crazy, the fact that you can sync your Facebook contact information with your Google accounts means that you’ll get a lot of duplication. Merging the two in a pseudo-group format would make life a lot easier and provide profile shots for those that you didn’t have profile pictures. Personally, I think the Android is missing out here but then again, somehow I doubt the iPhone can do it too (can anyone tell me one way or another? ).

Camera auto-focus. What? Seriously, the time it takes to auto-focus for certain apps, I’d rather do a manual focus feature. Oh wait, you can’t. But seriously now, this sounds like a fix that can be done via firmware.

In portrait mode, the on-screen keyboard is pretty blech. If you have big hands, it’s hard to type with it on there. Fortunately for landscape mode, eh?

Synopsis
It’s really a blanket bomb of my thoughts, but I really don’t see any reasoning why you can’t send text messages and surf and such while on a call like the iPhone commercial. Having worked in the telecommunications industry for over a decade on the infrastructure side, there’s not really any reason that it couldn’t happen unless the phone itself occupies resources that otherwise can’t be used for a call when on data, or vice versa. Of course, if people wanted to do it, it could still be done by using the same techniques as PTT on CDMA. Think about it.

I still haven’t seen any driving or flying games that require the accelerometer for turning that I’ve seen on the iPhone. But based on the sensitivity of Google Sky, I would say that the Droid can totally pick up the same type of gaming.

Battery life seems a bit lacking, but nothing out of the ordinary with a smartphone. Most of your battery goes to the radio and the LCD in a smartphone anyways. Some power-save features might be nice.

If you get down to the Verizon over AT&T for service? I’d agree completely on voice and data. There’s just no question when you compare the two networks. Part of the reason why I haven’t bothered with an iPhone.

With Google’s coffers, I think the Droid and Android phones in general have a really good shot at taking on the number one smartphone maker. There are a few things that I would start pushing and remind Google that when you’re gunning for the number one spot in mobile devices, your product can’t be in beta. Some of the dislikes that I mentioned above are staples of the mobile industry and need to be patched for all current and future phones. If you just let it be, people won’t want to use your product. Just as RF is finicky, domestic mobile users are finicky. And you just can’t rely on that type of situation when so many vendors are looking to your OS to end the slaughtering.

Tags: Apple, Cellular, Google, Linux, Observation, Opinion, Wireless by darkmoon
View Comments

Hate to say it, but Time Warner Cable really has annoyed me the for last time tonight. It was such a little thing, but with the really terrible Navigator “upgrade” that slowed down your actual channel surfing to a crawl and seemingly not have tested this in QA since it basically looks pretty but doesn’t actually function like the old firmware, it was amazing for the stupid parts to really become a problem.

Here’s the thing. Almost all commercials are not normalized for sound. In fact, I have a feeling this is done on purpose since all of them are louder and seem to be set on some sort of setting so that you would pay attention to it. But what really bugs me is when you’re actually enjoying a commercial (yes, there are some that are actually decent) and suddenly it cuts to another commercial in the middle. Now, if I were an advertiser and saw that I was spending money with this corporation and they were pulling me out of my costly advertising, I would be throwing up a fit. This happens on every channel, and has been for a long time but the recent Navigator change really has brought it out as even more of an annoyance.

Why can’t I downgrade back to the old firmware for my cable box? Why are commercials being cut short, or some getting cut right in the middle? Sometimes, it almost seems like they’re trying to fit in more than one commercial in the same slot to gain more advertising dollars. I don’t know that for sure, but there isn’t a darn good reason that not a single employee would not have seen this happen and at least tried to report the problem.

Does satellite television do the same? I don’t know, but I doubt it. It’s not that I really despise Time Warner Cable or anything. It’s just that if you’re going to push a quality product, then it should perform as good as the last one when it comes to software. If you’re telling your customers that are buying advertising from you that you’re going to be showing the ad, then don’t skimp on the “display” side. These are pretty basic when it comes to just the provision of goods and services and otherwise you lose the trust of your customers. And the last thing you need is to do that in this type of economy.

Tags: Advertising, Observation, Opinion, Television by darkmoon
View Comments

Image via Wikipedia

I have to say that overall with national politicians, there’s a pretty easy litmus test to find out if your particular representation is actually listening and serving your needs.

E-mail them.

In the past, I have had responses to emails from former Senator Edwards, and Senator Burr, but never anything from former Senator Dole. I also have received responses recently from Representative Mel Watts and Senator Burr (kudos here for always generating conversation) but nothing from Senator Hagan’s office.

Call it strange, but Hagan replaced Dole so I wonder what that’s about. In any case, in regards to my email, Senator Burr’s office contacted me directly and had a short but very responsive contact. Representative Watts though sent me a letter that basically said that he’d love to support my needs, but since no legislation was brought up in Congress about it, he’ll keep a look out for it. For the most part, it was a generic form mailer. Which, while I appreciate feedback, it’s one of those… ehh… what? It was almost answering a question like: “Is the sky blue?” with… “I’m sure your color has merit, and when the general consensus talks about a sky color, I’ll support yours.”

You sort of have to laugh at it and wonder exactly what politicians do. You’re either for, or against a certain ideal. Perhaps there is merit to either side and you could be swayed to one end. But without actual conversation, the generic stop letter is just not the way to go. Maybe that’s just me from a personal perspective, but it’s only slightly better than the total constituent ignore only because you’re getting it on Congressional letterhead.

Today, this issue really isn’t about Representative Watts’ letter and I apologize to him for using his letter as an example. But from a state where the general populace has been beaten down to a bloody pulp when it comes to employment and trade, the cynicism starts to grow when you don’t see conversations being started by even the aides of the representation. Call it strange but you would hope those are the individuals that are fighting for you in the big city of politics.

Tags: Government, Observation, Opinion, Personal, Politics by darkmoon
View Comments

Image by AMERICAN ARTIST BEN MURPHY via Flickr

Show me a world without politics, and I’ll show you a world where pigs fly.

Sometimes, I have to smile when I get frustrated that everyone seems to live in this ideal world where everything is supposedly dandy and we’ll have all of our problems fixed because in “today’s society”, we shouldn’t have to deal with these problems. Call me a cynic, but it’s been a long time since I have felt that way, and a long time before I ever will feel again like that.

Let’s be frank. You have to deal with certain unfair scenarios in life. It’s just like for some, they have all the luck. It’s not that people cannot achieve their dreams, but for every single person that does succeed in making their dream a reality, there are countless thousands that do not make it. That’s just a cycle of life. But the sooner you realize this cycle, the better your odds become at beating the cycle.

And that’s where the idealism comes in. I can’t stand it when people want to cry at every single turn about discrimination in the work place. Apparently, this happens to the Asian American community too and I’m sure it does. But to even have a term called the “bamboo ceiling”? I mean seriously, this just bugs me. Of all the stereotypes in the world, I was lucky enough to end up with the one that really doesn’t have too much of a negative connotation, and stereotypes exist just as everything else does. And now people want to play the fact that racism plays a factor in promotions of Asians? Come on. If you want anything that plays a factor, it’s politics. The political play is more eventful, more powerful, and when it comes right down to it, way more legal.

Seriously, who the heck plays the race card anymore? If you are, you’re not too bright considering all of the alternatives in the work place. In a dog eat dog world, the entire corporate structure relies on strategy and tactics that not only pits external competition against each other, it also creates internal conflicts where the strongest rules. It’s always been this way, and it’ll always continue to be this way. If you don’t like it, then join the ranks of the upper crust and you won’t have to deal with it.

Otherwise, there are many that believe that today is entirely black and white and have gone beyond politics where there are sweets and rainbows. The day that politics ceases to play in the corporate environment is the day there ceases to be corporations. And at the rate capitalism is going at right now, I’ll have to bet against the odds of that happening.

Tags: Business, Observation, Opinion, Politics by darkmoon
View Comments

Still think that the economy is improving? If the shutdown of the Dell plant around here isn’t enough to scoff at that mindset, let’s look at an even larger one. Sun Microsystems is looking to layoff three thousand more employees. Now, while layoffs are inevitable during mergers and acquisitions (in this case with Oracle), this also represents something a little bit larger.

It says that until corporations or the government gives a nice jab in the arm on hiring, the overall percentage of buying power has been reduced. This hurt can and will be felt through both retail and financial markets since people without jobs cannot pay loans and mortgages. And let’s face it. Saving the financial institutions do not amount to squat if the people that the money is being loaned to can’t get work to actually pay it back. This is not only brings financial players to a grinding halt, but it shows that politicians do not understand the basics of economics. Everything starts with the beginning of the food chain, not the end.

What’s worse is that until someone does actually gain this bright idea, all of the injection of federal funding is for naught. That means that the taxpayers bear the burden of a costly mistake, of which becomes more and more weight per each individual as more and more people cannot find work. And you wonder how Congress can sleep at night with a twenty or so percent approval rating.

Tags: Business, Government, Life, Observation, Opinion, Politics, Society, World by darkmoon
View Comments

So last night, Time Warner decided to roll out their long-awaited Navigator. It’s supposed to be some great thing that TWC is providing, but so far the only thing I can tell tonight is that it’s extraordinarily buggy with some major headaches.

First, they’re literally beta testing this in the field because instead of having some new firmware that is backwards compatible, they send out a phone call the previous day saying that the mailer they sent out should have the information about what’s going on. For the most part, all I can tell is that they make it easier for you to accidentally purchase premium channels, it’s prettier interface from the original guide, and the actual interface is even clunkier.

Let me put it this way. Before with digital cable, or any HD channel for that matter, it would auto-detect the resolution of your television before the channel came through. It was slow, but it wasn’t terrible. With the Navigator “upgrade”, it will first go to the lowest resolution of the channel (usually 480i), then convert. So it’s like changing the channel twice. Each of these channel changes are around a 2 second delay wait versus probably about half second before, so if you’re flipping through the television channel, it D-R-A-G-S.

It was so slow, that when I was scrolling through my favorites and saw something I wanted to go back to I decided not to go to that show because by the time I rolled through my twenty-five favorites, that segment of that show would be over already.

In my personal opinion, it basically seems like either the testing that was done didn’t produce the slower results, or some manager somewhere thought that having slower results would be better for the overall television experience (I’m not sure why this would be since the television is literally dark while the channel is feeding through). Either way, sounds like bad product management.

If anything? Give me a way to roll-back to my set-top box’s old firmware. Believe me. I’ll have a better cable television experience instead of this junk. Because if I continue on this type of channel surfing, then I’ll probably get frustrated enough to just put it down and read a book or play my PS3. At the very least, the interfaces for either don’t come with a lag time that makes me want to throw a controller.

Tags: Entertainment, Observation, Opinion, Television by darkmoon
View Comments