R.I.P. George Carlin

Legendary comedian George Carlin died Sunday in California from heart failure at 71. He had a history of heart problems. He was born on May 12, 1937 in New York. Some of his accomplishments include: being the first host of Saturday Night Live, released 22 solo albums, authored three best-selling books, nominated for six emmys, nominated for ten grammys, won four grammys, and made appearances in several television series and movies.

Carlin influenced many contemporary comedians such as Denis Leary, Bill Maher, Stephen Wright, and Lewis Black. In 2004, he was ranked as the 2nd Greatest All-Time Comedian behind Richard Pryor. Carlin's final HBO special entitled, 'It's bad for ya', aired March 1, 2008 and was his 14th special for HBO.

On Tuesday, it was announced that he had been selected by the Kennedy Center as this years recipient of the very prestigious Mark Twain Prize for lifetime achievement in comedy. He will be missed.

Below I have embedded and linked to some of his best skits. Like all George Carlin stand-up, it will have several swear words so I would not open them at work. Enjoy some of my favorite clips, because George did. There are many, many more on youtube.


An excerpt of George Carlin's appearance on 'Inside the Actors Studio'. He talks about teaming up with Kevin Smith in 'Dogma' and 'Jersey Girl'.


Skit known as 'Some people are stupid' (one of my favorites)


Skit known as 'Baseball and Football' (Another favorite and probably the first skit I saw)


Skit known as 'Voting'


Skit known as 'Airplane Safety'


Skit known as 'We Like War'


Skit known as 'Global Warming'


Skit known as 'Things you never see'


Skit known as 'George Carlin on White People'


Skit known as 'George Carlin on Language'


Skit known as 'Ten Commandments'


Skit known as 'Seven Words' that caused him to be arrested for 'disturbing the peace' after a show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1972 after uttering all seven words.

AMD/ATI finally treating Linux on par with Windows

Several months ago AMD announced new ATI Linux drivers and that they were going to open up their GPU specifications. Well, the talk is over and the real thing has finally happened. Over the last several months, ATI proprietary Linux driver has gotten to be on par with NVidia's Linux driver. But there are two open source ATI drivers that are picking up new features and is being improved upon on a daily basis.

AMD continues to publish programming guides and register information routinely for their latest hardware. Now AMD has really stepped up and evolved their linux support by leaps and bounds. They are working to push new high-end features into their linux driver (example is the multi-GPU crossfire support) with their new Radeon HD 4850. On top of that, they are now showing off Tux on their product packaging and will be including Linux drivers on their product CDs too!

Previously Linux drivers were an afterthought. Some examples were when ATI introduced the X1000 (R500) series cards. Consumers did not see any Linux support for seven months after it was released. More recently the Radeon HD 2000 (or R600) series cards took six months for any Linux support to be had. This should now be a thing of the past. With the recently announced Radeon HD 4800 (or RV770) series cards, they will ship the Linux driver on the CD included in the box (unlike nVidia who has never shipped Linux drivers with their product). Plus, they are getting ever so close to offering all of the same features in Windows and Linux drivers alike.

One reason why it would take so long between new GPU releases and Linux support was that the amount of code being shared between the two driver sets was very little. But since last year saw a new OpenGL driver introduced, now more and more code is shared between the two driver bases. This sharing of code is not too dissimilar to what nVidia does with its code between Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Obviously excluding any of the platform specific parts. This has seen nVidia having a pretty good record of delivering support for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris within days of a new product lauch. With the exception of nVidia's GeForce 8 series cards and their bugs and performance issues of late.

As mentioned before, ATI will be prominently displaying Tux on their official packaging and they have asked the AIBs to include Tux on their packaging as well. Which this may just mark the first time Tux will be prominently displayed on a wide-scale computer hardware package targeted for desktop users.

Also, I would like to add that some of the performance numbers being floated around for the new ATI boards show that nVidia may have given up the performance high ground to ATI. It will be interested to see nVidia's response to both the performance and such high quality Linux support. This could really heighten Linux support across the board for all Linux users.

Firefox 3 and XP

Firefox 3

Today is download day for Firefox 3. People all around the world is coordinating to get people to download Firefox 3 today in an attempt to set a record for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours.

I went ahead and downloaded it but I have not installed the final version yet. Most of my extensions do not support Ff3 yet. So I'm going to give them a little more time to get their stuff together before I start using it. Otherwise, I will have to go out and find replacements for them.

XP

Windows XP, arguably one of the best versions of Windows to ever be released, is starting to creep towards the end of its selling cycle. Microsoft is still on track to use its bouncer mentality to force big PC makers to quick offering XP on new machines. But their strong-arming isn't nearly as influential toward businesses to upgrade to Vista or to sway developers to write Vista-specific programs.

This will only help Microsoft bolster their Vista numbers because people cannot get XP, which is still the most widely preferred version of windows on new PCs as of earlier this year.

I read an article, which I will link to below, that says the big problem for Vista is that 92% of developers are ignoring it. Linux is getting more love with about 13% of developers are writing apps for it this year and about 15.5% are projecting to write for Linux in 2009.

But beyond the 'new graphics engine', a peer to peer mechanisms, a new networking stack, and WinFS. Oh wait, Scratch that last one since it was dropped early on in Vista's development. Plus scratch the new networking stack since it was actually ported to Windows XP.

But beyond that, Windows XP is not going anywhere in the near future anyway. Mainstream support will not end until 2009 and extended support will go through April 2014 anyway. But XP will still be available on PCs from smaller pc makers (aka system builders) through January 31, 2009, ultra-low-cost pcs through June 30, 2010, a low-end XP Starter Edition will be available in 'emerging markets' also through June 30, 2010.

But also, Vista Ultimate and Vista Business come with downgrade rights. So some computer makers are using this option to offer machines that appear to be XP products but are 'factory downgraded' to XP. The bad thing is only the pricier versions of Vista qualify for this, but you can 'upgrade' to Vista for no added fee either. MS says it will continue to make XP discs available to computer makers in order to enable downgrade rights through at least January 31, 2009.

"Pondering Windows XP's demise" by Ina Fried
"The Open Road" by Matt Asay

Olbermann on Articles of Impeachment

While I have not been too fond of Keith Olbermann since he left ESPN and joined MSNBC, I did like this segment of his show on MSNBC covering Dennis Kucinich's presentation of Articles of Impeachment on president Bush. That and Kucinich has a smokin' hot wife.

Link for those who are 'embedded video challenged'.

Firefox Javascript tip and more

Have you ever went to a website and clicked on a link and had your browser resized? Well never fear, I am here to give you a little tip that you can apply in Firefox to stave off that annoyance.

In Firefox open Tools -> Options. Click on the Content tab. Click on the 'Advanced' button beside the 'Enable JavaScript' checkbox. Then uncheck the 'Move or resize existing windows' and you are done.

In case you didn't read about it, Firefox 3 is scheduled for release on Tuesday, June 17th. Mozilla recently released RC3 of the browser. It was very stable and easy to use like a full release version back at beta 5 I thought.

Some of the changes that will immediately be noticeable is its memory footprint. With Firefox 2 it could gobble up lots of memory and bog down your system. That has been fixed with some memory leaks being patched, a change in what plugins have access to, and it no longer pre-caching pages you might visit for a speed increase.

Visually, its pretty pleasing with new looking forward and back buttons. The location bar will be one of the next changes you will notice. When you type in a location you want to visit, a drop down list of matching sites will appear. Each entry is somewhat large but that makes it easy to read I guess.

The location bar does a search of the recent website you visited. Suppose, I watched a video on youtube.com that had the title 'Steel Guitar Hero' and wanted to return to it. I could type into the location bar 'Steel' and it will have a drop down list of places that contains the word 'steel'. In order to narrow down the results, you can further enter 'guitar' which will get me closer to what I am looking for.

Whenever you go to a URL, you will see what I refer to as the 'hollow star'. Clicking it is an easy way to quickly bookmark a website thereby making the 'hollow star' into a 'gold star'. By default, all new bookmarks will be placed in the 'unsorted bookmarks' folder to help keep your bookmarks more tidy. If you want to further organize the bookmark, you can click the 'gold star' again and it will bring up the same menu as if you had gone to the 'menu bar' -> 'bookmark this page' or used the keyboard shortcut 'ctrl-D'.

At that point, you can rename the bookmark, save it to a specific folder and add a tag. So, if I tagged my website as 'awesomeness' I could then type 'awesomeness' into the location bar and all of the bookmarks that I have tagged as being 'awesomeness' will come up. Or going back to my previous example using 'steel guitar hero', I could tag it with the word 'oblair' and do the same thing.

There are many more new things in Firefox 3 that is just waiting for you to discover them. Like the identity button but you can read about that somewhere else or simply watch the 'overview of Firefox 3' video. The first part it goes over is the location bar and bookmarking that I wrote about.

Download Firefox 3 and enjoy.

HD 3D info

I told some of my friends I see regularly about this but I wanted to blog about it for all of the other people who may not have heard it yet. Matt and I were extras for the filming of Final Destination 4 that was partially shot locally at the Mobile International Speedway.

We all know that most, if not all, of the current big budget films are shot digitally. So, being the techie that I am, I wanted to know some information about the cameras being used to film the movie. I know they used at least 3 cameras to film but I did not know that there were only 5 cameras like those in the world currently. So, I had to find an IT person to get the info about how much data was being captured.

The IT guy told me that the camera would produce 20 Gb per second per eye. In cause you didn't know, 3D is recored per eye. One for the left eye and one for the right eye. So that is a total of 40Gb per second per eye. But it would also record a third stream which was a combination of left and right eye. So, the little tent that would move around with the cameras were each storing 60Gb per second of uncompressed data. Now we didn't ask how or what they were using to store these enormous amounts of data. If you do the fuzzy math, one minute of filming would produce about 3.6Tb of uncompressed data. If anyone has any knowledge of what kind of system they use to store this huge amount of data, please reply or email me. I would love to know.

I cannot wait for sometime in early 2009 to see this movie in the theaters. When myself and some of the people I met at the shoot plan to watch it, I will post it here for my further friends and readers (if there are any reader out there beyond my friends) to come and join us.

iPhone 3G followup

I did a little number crunching after I heard what was said about the iPhone on stage. Jobs said it would be "half-price", but I noticed it actually costs more. Here is my breakdown.

Old 8GB iPhone costed $399. Add on $60 per month for 450 minutes of voice and the unlimited data plan (manditory for the iPhone). Then with a 2 year agreement (since you are required to sign a 2yr contract with AT&T to get the iPhone 3G) it would total $1,839.

New iPhone 3g 8GB will cost $199. Add $70 for the basic monthly voice plan and unlimited data (no word if the 450 minutes is still the norm here). Again with a 2 year agreement it will cost $1,879. Which is $40 more over the life of your contract and neither total includes fees or taxes).

Users who are classified as 'Business users' have a minimum monthly service plan of $85. That extra money gets you the ability to get email via Exchange.

Plus, in order to thwart the hackers, the new iPhone must be activated in stores instead of the comfort of your home and it will not be available to purchase at launch.

*This should clarify the previous post that noted the $199 price of the 8GB iPhone 3G being 'after rebate'. Rather they make it manditory for you to get an AT&T account (if you do not already have one) and pay the extra $10/month to recoup that 'discount'.

WWDC Coverage

So, today all of the hard core Apple people were clogging the tubes with their coverage of World Wide Developers Conference today. I thought I would sip the kool-aid and watch some of the coverage while I was running some tests with my thesis guys.

Steve Jobs announced a couple things today. The one that excited most people, but we already knew for a week or more, was the 3G iPhone (dubbed online as the iPhone 2.0) but more on that later (save the best for last you know).

But beyond that, the announcements were lackluster. The name for the next version of OS X will be called Snow Leopard. One word, boring. The .MAC service will be rebranded as 'Mobile Me'. All .MAC users will be upgraded to Mobile Me. Again one word, boring.

Old iPhone's will have a firmware update to 2.0 software. It will have enterprise, SDK, and 3rd party apps support. It will be free for iPhone owners and will cost $9.99 for iPod touch owners. But some of the numbers quoted by Jobs are astounding if true: "90% customer satisfaction, 98% are browsing online, 94% are using email, 90% are using text messaging, 80% are using 10 or more features." Plus, 6 million have been sold in the first year until they ran out last week.

They had a list of new challenges: 1) 3G support 2) Enterprise support 3) third party app support 4) more countries and 5) more affordable. Some of the aesthetic changes are: black plastic back (I suspect for better reception), solid metal buttons, a nice display, camera, flush headphone jack, and improved audio.

The addition of 3G to the iPhone will impact data transfers and make them roughly 2.8 times faster. But 3G has been know to suck battery life in phones. Jobs announced that the iPhone 3G will have 300hr standby, 2G talk time of 10hrs (5hrs previously), 5hrs of 3G talk time (most phones have 3hrs), 5 to 6 hours of high-speed browsing, 7hrs of video, and 24hrs of audio.

The iPhone 3G will also have GPS integrated into it. With GPS, it can do tracking and show a pulsating dot moving across a Google Map as the car drives down a road. Plus, 70 countries will now have the iPhone as well, including Canada (as stated several days ago).

Enterprise support includes MS Exchange ActiveSync, push email, calendar, contacts, secure access to corporate resources with Cisco IPSec VPN, WPA2 and 802.1x authentication. Now the last obstacleon the list is affordability.

The 8gb iPhone started at $599 and is now $399. This also caused some strife with people because the price dropped $100 pretty quickly after it was launched so some people received rebates that could be used in the Apple Store. The iPhone 3G 8gb will sell for $199. But this is a bit misleading. It will cost $199 after signing a 2 year contract with AT&T, so its prices AFTER rebate will be $199. Same way with the 16gb iPhone, $299 after service contract, blah blah blah.

But all of this was a bit boring. I expected something on the Macbook line to be announced, like maybe a tablet version. With these features and 3rd party apps coming soon, this has somewhat peaked some interest in the iPhone. But I still will not get one because it is locked to AT&T only. I am very pleased with Verizon and have yet to find a place that I regularly go that does not have near flawless service. Jeremy cannot pass under a cloud without his service crapping out. I can walk around in 'the dungeon' with no worries about dropping or missing a call. Plus, Verizon is buying Alltel wireless for $28.1 billion to further expand their network.

Now if Verizon would only stop monkeying with the firmware on the phones to cripple certain features...

ISP's trying to bring back bandwidth caps

On Monday, I saw an article on Yahoo! News about Time Warner Cable trying out metered internet usage in Beaumont, Texas. People in this area will have a monthly allowance for the amount of data they upload and download. If they go over this limit, they will be charged $1 per gigabyte.

They claim that this is an attempt to fairly deal out internet usage, which they claim is uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers. They also claim 'We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure'. However, the investment should have came from all of the millions of dollars given to telco's by the government over the last several years.

The article also goes on to talk about how phone companies are less concerned about congestion and will be unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers since their networks are structured differently.

Time Warner Cable gave some info about their tiered service. One will be $29.95 a month for 768 kilobits per second and a 5 gigabyte monthly cap and another will be $54.90 for 15 megabits per second and a cap of 40 gigabytes per month. The price covers the internet portion of subscription bundles that include video (think video on demand) and phone services. Both of which the downloads and uploads count toward the monthly cap.

Comcast, which is the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month.

This is just a way for these companies to make more money to pad their bottom line. They see a trend where people are using the internet more and more and feel that its their best way to increase their profits. With iTunes, Amazon, Audible, NetFlix and many other services that use the internet for sales and delivery, these companies have set their sights on us users who use it for entertainment to increase their profit margins.

I have started watching TWiTLive.tv streaming broadcasts of Leo Laporte. The video and audio is 564 kilobits per second. If you multiply that out its in the neighborhood of 2 gigabytes per hour. He broadcast about 25 hours a week. If someone watched all 25 hrs per week and did nothing else, that would total over 100 gigabytes per month.

If you watch a movie from NetFlix, each one would be (roughly estimated) 2 gigabytes or 6-8 gigabytes for a high definition movie. This is completely ridiculous. It reminds me of 1995 when metered dial-up internet was around. Remember what happened to that?

Yahoo! News Article
CNet: The Digital Home Article

Legend Bo Diddley dies at age 79

Bo Diddley (1928 - 2008)

Legendary rock pioneer, Bo Diddley born Ellas Otha Bates, has passed away at the age of 79. He is often cited as a key figure in the transition from blues to rock, introduced more driving rhythms and hard-edged guitar sounds. Plus, who can forget his rectangular guitar.

He was born in McComb, Mississippi about 170 miles from Mobile.