Press Release...

PRESS RELEASE

Merger expected to increase tax benefits, improve cuddle quotent

CENTREVILLE, Va., Feb 5th, 2010 -- Laura Elizabeth Diehl (NYSE:LED), a leading provider of warm and fuzzy art and ninja burger distribution, and Christopher Kyle Kozlowski, (NYSE: CKK)an expert in Information Systems and Internet Spaceships, announced their intent to merge Friday evening in a snowy field, just prior to what was expected to be the largest blizzard to hit the D.C. area in over a century.

"Laura Diehl is the perfect complement to ensuring our internet dominance." said CEO Chris Kozlowski in a statement. "Laura has a proven track record of delivering ninja burgers par excellence in all kinds of adversarial conditions. When combined with our existing portfolio of beam laser and foam dart pistol products, we believe we will be able to deliver unparalleled service to all denizens of the interwebs."

Under the agreement, Laura Diehl will leverage her considerable experience in painting warm and glowing scenes, ultimate chocolate cookie construction and ninja pouncing skill in the formation of a new "Centre of Pouncing Excellence" in Northern Virginia. Revenues from this new operation are expected to top in excess of eleventy trillion credits.

"Chris Kozlowski is an ideal fit for Laura Diehl to expand its growth and market leadership," said Laura in a statement. "Chris has an outstanding reputation in the epic lazor industry, a dedicated computer-fixer customer base, and is a world leader in the coffee and bandwidth absorption markets. We think that this, along with their focus on providing delicious yummies, augments our ninja delivery efforts."

Completion of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. Closing is expected within 2 years. Final approval by both board of directors is expected.

Any statements in this press release about future expectations, plans, and prospects for CKK/LED, including statements about the estimated value of the contract and work to be performed, and other statements containing the words "estimates," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "expects," "will," and similar expressions, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent our views as of Jan. 25, 2010. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any date subsequent to Feb 5th, 2010.

On free speech

TechCrunch has an interesting op-ed here on the EFF's efforts to defend a hate speech site.

Take the time to read the article, and poke through the discussion. My own reply is here.

Instances such as these are really good opportunities to examine just what exactly free speech is and what it means. Judging from the article and some of the comments however, I get the impression that it is still not entirely understood by some.

Our rights are not without their costs, and we are often challenged on just how important they are to us when we're tempted to remove them from others. No matter how obviously false someone's dribble may seem, we must remind ourselves that when defending the existence of sites such as these, we are upholding a principle, not the message.

Why you should care about Google Wave.

I reciently got an invite for Google Wave and had been using it for a few weeks. Given some of the confusion on it, I thought I'd type up my impressions and hopefully give a bit clearer view of what you would use it for (since, in my opinion, Google's videos leave a bit to be desired.)

So Wave is a collaboration tool. Think a cross between having a forum and a word doc collaboration tool. You'd use it when you're having a discussion with one or many people, and there's a lot of back and forth chat, or some sort of evolving point of view or message. It's not a replacement for e-mail, nor is it really intended to be a chat client (even though you can see people typing in real time.)

Here's an example. I'm currently doing Christmas shopping. Laura and her sisters are coordinating with me on who's getting who what, and where's the best place to get it. So I start a "wave" (you can think about it as a forum thread of sorts, but more on that in a min.)

So I make a post on this Wave (Google calls it a "blip", whatever. =P ) and I write out my list. I've got my full range of editing tools, so I make a bullet list and stuff.

I then invite people into this wave. You can do this by entering in their wave address, or just pulling them from your contacts list. (The latter is much easier.) You get a wave address (usually the host name field of your e-mail appended to "@googlewave.com".) as soon as you sign up.

So my girlfriend Laura and her sisters see this wave now. They don't have to be logged on the moment I make it, it's persistent and sits in their inbox. In this sense though, "Inbox" is more akin to a list of watched forum threads, if we were making that analogy.

So Laura looks at my wave. She's got a couple of options:

1. She can add her own message or reply.
2. She can edit or add to mine.

The second option is really where this shines. Let's say she looks at my list, sees a gift I plan on getting, and knows of a place that's having a sale on it. She edits my post, and adds the link. Maybe she sees I don't know what to get someone else, and adds another link, maybe a picture as well.

She can add a reply as well, and we can carry on a conversation with everyone just like a regular forum, or we can add points or whatnot to earlier posts.

So in many ways, it's like having a free-form forum on demand, with who you want, at any time. And because of it's nature, you don't have to scroll through hundreds of posts every time you want to say something, or plow through tons of "re:" messages and try and interpret which belonged where. And because of the ease and power of it's formatting, you don't get the broken HTML you do with e-mail, nor are you limited in ASCII text and the occasional link. You can embed video, pictures, audio, even specialized applets. Some groups have taken to table-top gaming online. =P

Another thing I find it handy for is a long awaited replacement for Google Notebook. Notebook was a persistent scratch pad of sorts in the cloud where I could dump links and blurbs and whatnot and have it accessible anywhere. I could write myself notes, paste passages from things, type notes from class, meetings, etc, and just have it anywhere so I could file it away later (or just have it filed away on there.) With Google Wave, I can do the same. I make a wave, and then never invite anyone to it. (Which is the default functionality.) I can dump links and pictures or little things I type onto it at work and have it when I get home. And it's private.

And there ya have it. It won't replace other traditional ways of communicating, nor will it cure cancer, but for some things, it looks rather promising.

~Koz

Interesting passage...

"In the effort to promote the rights of all, and observe the equality of sovereignty as between the great and the small, we unavoidably give to the little nations opportunities to embarrass us greatly. Faithfulness to the underlying concepts of freedom is frequently costly. Yet there can be no doubt that in the long run faithfulness will produce real rewards."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a letter to Swede Hazlett, during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

The Death Throes of PC Gaming

Part of me is loathe to jump on the cacophony of writers proclaiming PC gaming to be dead or dying. After a slew of bad news culminated by the utter disrespect showed by Infinity Ward, I find it hard to play my usual role as devil's advocate and say that they're all wrong.

Today word came that EA axed 1,500 employees, and cancelled over a dozen projects. Also notable is their decision to buy a mobile/social gaming company, with the suspect intent of producing games for the Facebook/iPhone crowd.

One many remember a year ago, when EA was the "Evil Empire" of the gaming industry, cranking out poor sequels, riding heavily on their series of sports games, in which a developer would upload a spreadsheet of that year's roster, increment the year counter, and sell it for a cool $60.

To their credit, they came around, did some soul searching, and decided that original IP was worthwhile after all. Mirror's Edge was a bit of a disappointment, Brutal Legend and Dragon Age were spot on.

Despite this, the sales haven't been there. Look over to Activision, where it's boisterous CEO proclaims openly about "taking the fun out of making video games" and "exploiting" IP on a yearly or semi-yearly basis. The crowd complains, and yet, their profits grow. What's going on here?

The PC gamer demographic is dying. For years a bit of an exclusive club, many nonetheless attempted to climb the steep costs and technical know-how to play games on what was for a long time, a vastly superior platform. Better multiplayer, vastly better graphics, and a platform open to modification make PC gaming THE platform to beat. While the Nintendo and Playstation were certainly more accessable and sold in greater numbers, the PC market was still too large to ignore.

That is slowly changing. With the current generation of HiDef, internet connected consoles, the PC has lost many (though not all) of the advantages it used to hold. In most categories, the gap has closed to the point that the few advantages held by a computer are made up for in the low costs of a console.

This is not all together bad with the exception of the detriments to console gaming. Consoles are closed platforms, all-up "wooden" boxes where modification is actively discouraged. Worse still, these aspects are not being eliminated, but rather, spread to PCs.

Looking at two major moments of "Nerdrage" in the past year: Activision/Blizzard's decision not to allow for LAN play in Starcraft 2, and Activision/Infinity Ward's decision to do the same for Modern Warfare 2. Both games will eliminate LAN play and dedicated servers in favor of a gaming portal website. Both systems will require players to go through the services provided by these companies in order to play multiplayer.

This is commonly referred to as consumer lock-in, where you can force your product market to using your associated services only, therefore funnelling the added revenue spent on these products to you. I'll leave the legality of such tactics for another discussion, but from a purely business standpoint, the logic is sound.

Let's look at other trends in the game industry, such as paid downloadable content, and the increasing "MMO-ification" of many game titles, and we see a trend. Publishers are looking for ways to make profits of a title persistent across a game's lifespan rather than limited to that rush of sales in the first few weeks. It's hard to see why. Blizzard's MMO World of Warcraft is a veritable money faucet, and publishers have been drunk on the idea of such a steady profit flow for a long time.

It would be enough if the idea was to provide added value over the lifespan of a title, but recall the mention earlier of "lock-in". Why should a company settle with having to compete with free services and content (such as community servers and modders) when you can ensure that the only place to add value to your title is through the publisher?

Consoles offer no expectations towards modification or community run functions, and so this is relativally easy. Whether it's funnelling players to an ad-driven multilayer service, or ensuring only paid DLC is available for a game, publishers can ensure a persistent cash flow.

The PC gaming community is not used to this, and most are antithetical to the idea. But this is where it is going. Modern Warfare 2 will probably be regarded as the first, best example of a limited in functionality, closed system game, a direct "console port", even in spirit. And while some developers may speak defiantly about retaining an open platform, the allure of added profits (often accompanied by the boogyman of "software piracy") will ensure that the PC will get less and less focus as time goes on.

The short end of it is that the console market is much larger and much easier to control than the PC gaming market. Those loud few who criticize and balk at companies like Activision for cranking out unimpressive sequels while limiting consumer choice will have their voices drowned out by millions of tweens all too eager to lay their hands on what should be considered a mediocre title, all too unaware of how good it could really have been.

My faith in the free market still unshaken, I have no good news for this trend. As EA's woes and Activision's success have shown, open PC gaming does not make business sense. I'm glad I at least saw it at it's height.

Ninite

Just a short one, but I came across Ninite after reading about it on Lifehacker. Queue up a bunch of free applications (Firefox, Winamp, Flash, and all the others you usually install when loading a new machine) and it does it all for you. Neat stuff.

Security Cop-outs

Laura showed me how to get Facebook to import my RSS feeds, and with it I think I've now got a way to justify maintaining a Blogger account if I can drop it on everyone's news feeds. So hopefully this will be the first of many future little blurbs from yours truly.

I was interested in do a little writing again when I saw this video out of F-Secure the other day. (Skip to 1:53, and watch the spaceship scene.)

I LOLed when I saw the "ROFL.exe is updating, allow?" and the choices are "whatever" and "whatever". Unfortunately, it's all too accurate. How many of you installed some comprehensive security suite that's blasting warnings at you every time you try and do something? "Allow program X to run?" "Application A is trying to connect to some address on some port via whereever."

How is anyone supposed to keep up with all of this? I do this for a living and I'm still wondering what the hell I'm getting all of these prompts for.

It's a cop-out really. Another security blog (who's post I can't find for the life of me) says something similar: Security software all too often pushes it's decision-making process onto the user, who is (no offense to my technically-minded friends) the least qualified to make the decision. You're trying to load Word or something, and suddenly you have to answer a ton of questions about whether this app should update or connect or what have you. All you want is for the damn thing to work.

If it sounds like I'm simply advertising for F-Secure at this point, I apologize. But it does make me think about some of the software that's out there.

My biggest gripe currently is any of the "Internet Security" suites offered by Norton, Kaspersky, and the like. Beyond just an Anti-Virus, they provide firewall services as well.

Firewalls are often misunderstood, so I'll provide a little run-down here:

You have two computers, and many applications run on both. If App A wants to talk to App B on Computer B, Computer B needs to know what application App A wants to talk to. That piece of information is the Port Number, and when App A says "I want to connect to port 123", Computer B knows that App B is running on port 123, and forwards the message accordingly.

Computers can send messages to other ones unsolicited, and this is something you don't often want. Your PC can share files with other PCs, and between computers in your home, this can be nice. But you don't want the whole internet dropping files on your PC. So you erect a firewall. The Firewall intercepts all messages coming to your computer and if they're unsolicited, blocks the connection. Like a wall surrounding a town, people in the town can talk, but everyone outside can't get in.


Firewalls can intercept messages going outbound as well, and this can be good to ensure that messages don't inadvertently get sent out that you don't intend. If your computer becomes infected with a virus, there's a chance the firewall could stop the traffic before it sends your information out.


Here's where we get into trouble. your computer sends out tons of legitimate requests all of the time. Most firewalls are configured to allow all outbound connections, making this easy enough. No worries, all goes out.


Internet Security apps try to lock this down. Some try to take pictures of outgoing traffic, or use a common list of ports, but all eventually rely on the user to identify what traffic is legitimate or not. This is not realistic. How many people are going to be able to identify HTTP traffic (port 80) from Telnet (port 23) or DNS (port 53), let alone the 4-5 digit port numbers applications such as games, flash video, and others use. If you're trying to get your stuff to work, you're going to click "Yes", "Allow", or whatever you need to get the prompts to stop, if you don't turn it off entirely after 10 or so of those.

It all seems redundant to me given that there should be an anti-virus application protecting the computer all of this time. Assuming it's working, and all of the remaining programs on the PC are ones we trusted, shouldn't all of the traffic be trusted as well? Why should a user be forced to perform a second check? "Look, I know you trust this guy, but do you really want it talking to the world?" "Yes, that's World of Warcraft, let me fuckin' log on already."

As some have noted, prompting the user for every app that wants to use the net very quickly leads to a complacent behavior. And why shouldn't it? If you deny a legit app, your program doesn't work. If you allow it, it does. If an illegitimate application requests access, and you allow, flames do not shoot out of your PC. Your stuff still works. The lesson here is that usability trumps security. People want their PC to work, and work the first time.

To me, Internet Security applications are redundant and only serve to confuse the issue. If you have a router, and you didn't punch a gazillion holes in it (and knowing most of you, you haven't) then you have the only firewall you'll ever need. Keep your anti-virus up to date, and ditch the additional security package. Your sanity will thank you.