Into Tech

A PC for editing AVC

I’ve bought a new HD video camera which records in AVCHD. When I looked at the Pinnacle editing software supplied with it, I read that the minimum requirements include an Intel quad core processor running at 2.66GHz. I have consulted PC World, Dell and HP, and none has a home computer running at this speed. What can I do?
Richard Cooke

JS: AVCHD is one of the high-definition movie standards used by Blu-ray and HD DVD and allows for pictures that are 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. It is a highly compressed format, to save space, but as a consequence it requires a great deal of processing power to reconstruct the original image. What the camera salesmen don’t tell you is that just displaying 25 of these large images a second is beyond many PCs, unless they have accelerated graphics. Editing them can be a nightmare, and a common approach (taken by Apple’s Final Cut Pro, among others) is to transcode them into something that is easier to handle. The Wikipedia page on AVCHS lists some of these converters.

Editing native AVCHD is not, of course, beyond reach. However, such powerful PCs are generally not off-the-shelf items, but assembled to order. First, pick your Intel Core 2 Quad processor from Intel’s spec sheet: the Q6700 is the cheap 2.66GHz chip, but there’s a newer, better 2.83GHz version, the Q9550. Next, look for a PC with that Q number, 4GB or 8GB of memory, and 64-bit Windows Vista. An example is the Mesh Xtreme X9550GTX with a Q9550, 8GB of memory, a terabyte of hard drive space, Blu-ray player and 24 inch widescreen monitor displaying 1,920 x 1,200 for £1,199 inc VAT.

On its own, Pinnacle Studio 12 will run OK on a 1.6 GHz Dual Core processor with 1GB of memory, so the problem is down to the videos you want to edit. You could reduce the PC hardware requirements by reducing the size of your videos. Instead of shooting 1,080p, for example, you could use 1,440 x 1,080 or go down to 720p (1,280 x 720 pixels), like broadcast HDTV. However, my experience is that editing MPeg-2 movies is a pig on a fast Pentium, and I’d expect editing MPeg-4 Part 10 (ie AVC) to be much piggier even on a quad core PC. I’d want more power, not less.

Newsletter mailing

I run a small business from home, and send a regular newsletter. I have a TalkTalk phone and broadband package. I now find that I am unable to send more than about 20 newsletters in a block.
Annie Hall

JS: I can’t find any mention of this on the TalkTalk website, but internet service providers usually limit the number of emails you can send at once, to discourage spamming. However, I’d have thought 100 was a more reasonable number than 20. You could try contacting TalkTalk for help, but ISP email services are not a selling point but an overhead that I suspect most would rather be rid of. Larger companies, including the Guardian, often use outside services such as cheetahmail.com and jangomail.com to send out promotional emails. You could try a local supplier such as Subscribed: there must be lots. These companies tend to be hostile towards anything “spammy” as it could affect their business.

Maximising battery life

What are your top tips for maximising the life of rechargeable batteries?
Richard Brown

JS: Different kinds of battery require different approaches, so it’s a bigger topic than it sounds. However, BatteryUniversity.com provides comprehensive coverage and a handy summary in table form. With the increasingly common Lithium-ion (Li-ion) types, the main advice is not to discharge them more than once a month: try to recharge them when they are on 20% or so. Alas, they are only good for a limited number of cycles and age even if not used. They may need replacing after 18-24 months or 350-500 cycles, but can last longer. It’s always worth checking the device’s manual for information and advice.

Blogs by location

Is there a way to search blogs by location?
J Bourtoni

JS: Not really. There are blogs from all over the world sitting on the same servers run by American companies such as Google (Blogger) and Microsoft (Spaces), and there is no easy way to tell them apart. However, there are sites you can try, such as Blogdigger Local, PlaceBlogger.com, feedmap.net and Globe of Blogs. Bloggers who want to be found geographically can make it easier by submitting their sites. In the longer term, there’s a 10-year plan involving 74 nations called Geoss, for Global Earth Observation System of Systems, which should encourage more location awareness. So should Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle.

Backchat

· Alec Williams was transferring data from an old PC. John Davies says: “I bought Transfer MyPC from Dell to move all my old data across. It did the job very well.” Windows Vista has a built-in program, Windows Easy Transfer, and you can download Windows Easy Transfer Companion to move programs.

· Cathy Matheson wanted a laptop for her son, who is going to study architecture. On the Ask Jack blog, Webweasel said: “As a recently qualified architect, I would wait and see what the facilities are like at the university in question. I would not advise buying any hardware or software until your son is a student, as generous discounts are available.”

· Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

The Associated Press has been having a hard time keeping up with the times. While there was the highly publicized situation where it threatened some bloggers with its own, highly questionable definition of fair use, a much bigger deal is that it’s increasingly competing with its own member newspapers by doing things like cutting deals with Google that take traffic away from those member papers’ own sites. Apparently, some of those newspapers are paying attention. Romenesko points us to the news that the Star Tribune in Minnesota has alerted the AP that its canceling its membership. It will be worth watching to see if other newspapers start joining in as well. The AP has had many years to learn how to adapt and change in the internet era, and so far it’s failed repeatedly. Seeing its member newspapers leaving is just the inevitable result of its botched strategy.

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You may recall stories involving a small patent holding firm called Klausner Technologies, which claims to hold patents on the concept of “visual voicemail.” It seems to have interpreted these patents pretty broadly to the point that it considers anyone who offers any graphical interface to voicemail as infringing. Over the years, that’s meant lawsuits against AOL, Vonage, Apple, eBay, AT&T and others. Apparently, suing one by one was too much trouble, because Klausner has now sued another bunch of companies including Google, Vonage and Embarq. Of course, the company is playing up the fact that all those other companies it sued settled, but we’ve seen that game before. There’s not much new here as this scenario is all too common. We have a company with an overly broad patent on a concept that was a natural obvious progression of the art, suing pretty much every company that actually innovates, thus making actual innovation more expensive.

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When old school journalists complain about the supposed “threats” from companies like Craigslist and Google or things like blogging, one of the common refrains is: “but who will pay for investigative reporting.” The idea is that these other services can replace the basic news facts, but it’s tough to see how true investigative reporting will get funded. Yet, as with all markets in a state of flux, we’ve seen that if there’s a real demand, new business models will come along to handle it — and that seems to be exactly what is happening in the investigative reporting realm. The NY Times points out a few different experiments in other forms of funding investigative reporting, with the bulk of the story talking about getting interested parties to pay up front for an investigation. In other words, if there is a concerned group of folks worried about, say, dangerous chemicals leaking into the drinking water, it could put that story up, and if enough people contribute to the investigation, a reporter can get paid and do the investigation.

While there are some concerns that this would lead to biased journalism, there’s nothing saying that the journalist’s results have to support the initial worry. In fact, I would imagine that in cases where folks are worried about things like chemicals in the drinking water, they’d be much more relieved to find out that it’s really nothing. Either way, this model fits exactly with the business models we’ve discussed in the past: getting people to pay for the creation of content. The creation of new content is a scarce good, and there may be some group of people for whom its worth paying for. In this case, the example fits the business model we describe for content after it’s created as well, since the organization doing these investigative reports will then offer them to newspapers for free (so long as they don’t want an exclusive right — which would not be free). That’s exactly how it should be: it costs money for the initial creation, but then the content is freed, where it adds much more value (and attracts more people to fund later stories). Who knows if this particular effort will work (execution is everything, after all), but the model is sound, and shows that despite gloomy whining from old school reporters, the new business models will show up.

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A judge in New Zealand has apparently banned the internet publication of the names of two men accused of murdering a 14-year-old boy, though print, radio and TV are all still allowed to use the names. It’s hard to make much sense of this ruling. Many are assuming that it’s to somehow protect the murder suspects from having their name “Google-able,” but that seems a bit silly. They are a part of the news, and it’s hard to see what benefit it does to ban using their names online, while allowing it everywhere else. How do you enforce that from everyone else who hears their name on the radio or TV or in a newspaper and mentioning it online?

And, of course, just in announcing this ban, Judge David Harvey is pretty much guaranteeing that more folks will seek out the names and publish them online. In some ways, he’s accidentally making it even more likely that their names will be found via Google. The news report claims that Judge Harvey is no internet novice, either, having authored an entire textbook on cyberlaw. So, perhaps he realizes that he’s actually just made sure that these two guys have their names plastered in even more locations than they would have otherwise.

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So-called “cloud computing” has taken a beating over the past few weeks. The concept is simple enough, and hundreds of millions of people have been doing it for many years via Microsoft Hotmail. It just means accessing an online application - in this case, email - via a web browser, instead of running a separate program on your personal computer.

Of course, the number of online applications has grown tremendously. It now stretches from simple to-do lists via office-style programs such as spreadsheets and project management to more specialised business services such as accounting and customer relationship management. Users can also store their photos and movies online.

This certainly has advantages. People can access their online applications from any computer at any time, and collaborative work becomes easier. Often, too, these online applications are “free” (paid for by advertising).

But cloud computing also has drawbacks, which the pundits may be much less keen to tell you about. One has been highlighted recently: reliability. Google Docs, Gmail, Twitter and Amazon’s S3 service have all been out of action, and some of Apple’s MobileMe users have had a torrid time. At Webware, Rafe Needleman has posted a list of the 10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 so far.

Alas, even if the online application works, users may not be able to get to it. They may have local problems with their browser or their internet connection. Their internet service provider may have network problems. Remember, the internet is never guaranteed to work: it just operates on the principle of “best efforts”. (We tried. We failed. Hard luck.)

Even if an online application works and you can get to it, things can still go wrong. The company that provides the application can change it in any way (turning the interface you loved into one you hate, for example), without asking, or they can simply close it. Nikon is about to close its Fotoshare photo service, and AOL may well close its Xdrive online storage. If you were a paying Streamload user, all your data has already been dumped. Hard luck.

Still, at least when services close, users are usually given a few weeks to rescue their stuff. It’s much worse when people are locked out because the supplier thinks they have done something wrong, or because their account has been hacked.

Nick Saber, for example, recently found himself locked out of Gmail. That was bad. What was worse was that he was automatically locked out of every other Google service that uses the same logon. If it happens to you, you won’t be able to use Gmail, Google Talk, Google Docs or your calendar; you won’t have access to your photos at Picasa, and so on. It’s devastating.

Yes, people can also lose access to their data when they fail to back up their PCs. We’ve been telling them that for decades. But online data also needs to be backed up, and supporters of cloud computing should be telling people that as well.

How far cloud computing can go is another matter. Applications run much slower online than they do on a local PC, and a browser provides a much more limited interface than a desktop application, so there are sacrifices as well as advantages. Still, it’s not either/or: I think there’s plenty of room for both.

But anybody who thinks the cloud is going to replace personal computers completely is welcome to put their PC in the bin. Indeed, if you have a very recent high-end PC or Mac, I might take it off your hands for free.

While patent system supporters are trying to convince people that Google could be at great risk if software patents were done away with, that seems hard to square with reality. To date, as far as I know, Google has never filed a patent infringement lawsuit against anyone. Yet, it keeps ending up on the receiving end of incredibly questionable patent lawsuits. This latest one, from a company named GraphOn involves four patents. You can take a look at each one: one, two, three and four. A quick glance suggests not only prior art on all of them (a method for creating a pay-for-service website? filed in 2004? seriously?), but that none of these should have passed the “obviousness” test. It’s difficult to believe that no one else would have come up with the same concepts without such a patent.

But, of course, GraphOn has long decided that there’s probably more money in suing over patent infringement than in building products. While the company does have some actual products, over the past few years, it’s sued a long list of internet companies for supposedly violating its patents. Their crime? Building useful web services that do rather obvious things — but GraphOn insists that such obvious things require a license. GraphOn seems to be proving the old saying that those who can, innovate — while those who can’t litigate.

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Pretty much every day or so, we end up getting into a debate somewhere in the comments here on Techdirt concerning the rather important distinctions between “theft” and “copyright infringement.” While there are a bunch (the lack of a “loss” on the part of the owner being a big one), one important one is that you don’t see anyone choosing on purpose to allow theft of their own products in order to boost their business — yet, we see folks purposely choosing to allow copyright infringement to boost their own business models all the time.

In fact, the NY Times notes that a growing number of media companies have stopped sending takedown notices to YouTube, preferring to use the videos on YouTube as a part of their business model. Google has helped them out in this manner by allowing copyright holders to “claim” videos that they did not upload, and choose to share in the revenue created by ads, rather than requiring a takedown. Among those who have stopped doing takedowns entirely are CBS, Universal Music, Lionsgate and Electronic Arts. Universal Music is a bit surprising, given how it’s been even more adamant than any of the other major record labels concerning how evil copyright infringement is. The NYT’s is surprised by CBS’s involvement, given that it’s the sister company of Viacom, who is famously suing YouTube for $1 billion. Yet, CBS has always been much more open to YouTube, recognizing that if its shows were being uploaded, that was a sign of having a lot of fans, not something to be shut down.

The president of digital media at Lionsgate makes the point pretty clearly. saying that the company:

“[Doesn't] like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content. For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it.”

If only others would recognize this simple fact. Of course, a good starting point would be recognizing that copyright infringement isn’t “theft.”

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We’ve written about patent hoarding firm RTI before, back when it sued Google. At the time, we pointed to Rich Tehrani’s fantastic article about the company and how it was basically one guy who claimed his rather narrow patents covered pretty much everything having to do with VoIP. Pretty much any company of any substantial size that had anything to do with VoIP had been on the receiving end of threats and/or lawsuits from RTI.

Now, Joe Mullin points us to an absolutely fantastic description from the CEO of Fonality exposing RTI’s patent badgering techniques — and how Fonality fought back and (almost) won. The “almost” part is the sad part. In the end, they still paid the guy a little bit of money, though it was significantly less than what he had been asking for (and what he had sued them for). And, tragically, this plays into RTI’s game plan as well — as part of his initial pitch is sending over a list of all the other companies who have settled over these patents, which makes plenty of companies feel that since those other companies “settled” then it wasn’t worth fighting and they might as well settle too. This is unfortunate.

But at least the post describes how to push back on his various claims. Here’s a short excerpt, but it’s worth reading the whole thing:

It was then that Jimmy enacted the second part of the classic troll playbook. Peer pressure. Jimmy started to list (and provide documentation to support) literally hundreds of other “big” companies that had already settled with him over this same patent. Heck, it seemed like everyone from AT&T to Cisco was on this list. A sustained bout of queasiness settled over me. Yikes, if they couldn’t beat this guy, what chance did I have? He even told us how he had sued the mighty Google for $5B!…

But, then a funny thing happened. When we asked him *how* much he had settled for, he wouldn’t tell us. Nor did asking “the Google” (you know, that series of interconnected pipes) help us much. There just seemed to be a dearth of information on either settlement amounts or terms. Did they settle for a million dollars? A billion? A free iPod? An agreement not to mention that they settled for zero? Well, heck, if nobody was writing about it, and Jimmy wasn’t boasting about it, it probably wasn’t much to boast about anyway. So, when my lawyers called and asked us if we were ready to settle, I did what every strong leader does in a moment of crisis. I put the call on speakerphone, crawled under my desk, and cowered with hands over head. It was from that towering position of omniscience that I gave the proud warrior cry to “fight on!”

Hopefully more folks will start exposing some of the sneakier tactics used in patent infringement lawsuits — and how to fight back as well.

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We get tons of PR spam here at Techdirt, most of which is simply an attempt to get us to write about this or that startup or product launch. It pretty much all gets trashed. Occasionally we hear from various tech lobbyists as well, pushing an angle on a story that supports the angle they’re pushing. But one of the oddest experiences we’ve had was with a firm called LawMedia Group, which we wrote about earlier this year when Declan McCullagh outed the group as having allegedly composed a letter from a group of corn farmers somehow opposed to Google and Yahoo working together. Why corn farmers would be interested in such things isn’t clear — but McCullagh pulled back some of the curtain on the way these sorts of lobbyist groups act, picking a somewhat random “group” and then writing these sorts of letters and simply placing the group’s name on the top — even if (as in the corn farmers/internet advertising situation) the group has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

In our case, as mentioned, the folks at LawMedia Group started out by acting as if we were close friends, and then insisting that they had some really secret info that was damaging to FCC boss Kevin Martin. It’s no surprise why they would approach us on the subject — as we’ve written critically about Martin for years. After ignoring repeated requests for a phone call during which this info would be “revealed,” I finally said that if they had anything they wanted me to see, just send it over. And so they sent a bunch of stuff that basically confirmed what was well known: Kevin Martin has friends who work at AT&T. Shocking, right, that a telco regulator might have friends at a telco? But, of course, it was positioned in a way to make it look really secretive, even to the point of suggesting that Martin really worked for AT&T. In other words, it was totally bogus. I told the guy at LMG that the info seemed pretty pointless, and never spoke to him again — though he and other colleagues keep emailing stories that might make Martin look bad.

Now Declan is back with more stories of questionable activities by LawMedia Group, including what would appear to be a series of op-ed pieces published in newspapers using the names of people who don’t even agree with what’s in the op-ed, but, from the sound of it, may have effectively rented their name out to LMG to use in the op-ed. Most of the article focuses on a guy in Boston who is in favor of net neutrality, but had an op-ed published under his name that strongly argues against net neutrality. The guy admitted that LMG had something to do with it, but refused to provide details. However, when asked his opinion on net neutrality, proceeded to stay stuff in direct contradiction with what was in the op-ed under his name.

While somewhat sleazy tactics like this may be every day business in Washington DC, it’s good to see it exposed, especially when it’s being done so egregiously. At the very least, maybe it’ll get LMG to stop bothering me with bogus conspiracy theories about Kevin Martin.

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