January 1, 2012 • The podcast link is near the bottom of the page. • Use your browser's enlarge/reduce function to resize text and images.
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Normally This Would Be a TechByter Vacation Day

The TechByter website changes this year won't be as obvious as in some previous years but there are more changes than usual in the 2012 annual site refresh. This year the typefaces will look different, the page is wider (but the e-mail is narrower), and the underlying code is HTML 5 instead of XHTML Transitional.

Support for HTML5

All current browsers support at least some aspects of HTML5 so I've selected the features that are supported by those browsers. If you're using Internet Explorer 6, any version of the long-dead Netscape*, Firefox 4 or earlier, Opera before version 9, Chrome before version 11, or Safari 4 or earlier, it's time to upgrade. The browsers listed above are antiques. IE6, for example, is more than 10 years old. The final version of Netscape (9) was released early in 2008. Firefox 4 was released in March 2011 but then Mozilla adopted a rapid-release development cycle and was at version 9 by the end of the year. So it is with the other browsers. It's important to keep your browser up to date, whichever browser is your favorite.

*Netscape has been dead so long that it wasn't even in the Dreamweaver spelling dictionary any more; I added it.

The full HTML5 standards won't be released until 2022, a decade from now, but browser support and development of the standards are proceeding more or less in sync.

A New Theme and New Music

It was a race against the clock and the final music selections weren't made until early Christmas morning. Like 5:30 early but I knew the twangy guitars had run long enough. The main problem with searching for new music is that so much is available with Creative Commons licensing. Finding something I liked for the theme was easy and it still has some great guitar components.

You'll notice the primary differences in the bridge music between items—what in radio is called the "bumper" but there it's used mainly to make you think that you're getting some entertainment when you're really just heading into or out of a commercial break that may last for 5 or 6 minutes. Here the music is simply meant to separate the reports.

Instead of just 4 variations on a single twangy-guitar theme, I can now select from 15 compositions, each with a slightly different mood.

I hope you like the new music and the updated look.

Microsoft Finally Drives a Stake Through IE6! (Almost)

Report a problem to the IT help desk at a very large (50,000 employees) company and the first response will be "What browser are you using?" Regardless of what you say, the response will be, "Well, this Web application is certified for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Have you tried that?" IE6? Really? This is decade-old technology that even Microsoft tells people not to use. At long last Microsoft seems to be getting serious about this.

Starting in January, Microsoft will force Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade.

In late December, Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's General Manager for the Internet Explorer Business and Marketing division, said that the company will "automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC." For XP users (another bit of decade-old technology) that means IE8. For everyone else, it means IE9 or later. "We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update," says Gavin. "This is similar to the release of IE9 in 2011."

There are, of course, those who oppose automatic updates of any sort even though they have proved to provide timely and reliable security updates for applications such as Firefox and operating systems such as Linux.

Gavin says (and I concur), "The Web overall is better – and safer – when more people run the most up-to-date browser. Our goal is to make sure that Windows customers have the most up-to-date and safest browsing experience possible, with the best protections against malicious software such as malware." We may differ slightly regarding the security of IE9 but we certainly agree that IE9 (or for XP users, IE8) is far superior to any previous iteration of IE.

The only problem I see is that, as usual, Microsoft wimps out: "One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule. The Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker toolkits prevent automatic upgrades of IE for Windows customers who do not want them." So if you decide not to wear your seat belts on the Internet, Microsoft gives you a pass.

Sometimes I wish Microsoft was more like Apple. Apple makes a decision and Apple fan-boys and fan-girls fall into line. Microsoft makes a decision and then backpedals. "Oh! We didn't really mean it! You want to keep your buggy old browser that exposes you needlessly to threats? Oh, sure. That's fine. Go ahead. We'll just sit over here in the corner and eat glue."

A message to Microsoft: Sure, some people will say you're heavy handed but come on. Don't just talk about it. Do the right thing. Until you do, that big company I mentioned earlier will still have its IT support staff tell people to install IE6.

Being Your Own TV Producer

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 is, without question, one of the most important applications used to communicate in print, video, and audio. By creating applications that work together, Adobe has made it possible for creative professionals to use content created by one application in another application. But Adobe has also expanded the powers of creative software for non-professionals. Premiere Elements is a good example.

Adobe Premiere Elements 10 is the more basic version of Adobe Premiere. Both the cost and the complexity are considerably less than those of the professional application, Adobe Premiere. If you have a previous version of Premiere Elements, the upgrade price is just $80 or you can buy a new installation for just $100. (Add Photoshop Elements for just a small additional fee.) If you want the professional application, upgrades start at $180 and the full application is $800 and you may also want to add the other features from Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium ($400 upgrade or $1700 for the full application or $129 per month for month-to-month subscriptions or $85 per month for annual subscriptions.)

New features in Premiere Elements 10:

Real Life Editing

If you're an amateur/home videographer who creates programs for friends and relatives, the Elements version is more than sufficient for your needs. You would need the professional CS5.5 version only if you're called on to create programs for broadcast or, having been a broadcast pro, you want the high-end features the professional version offers. For the home user, Premiere Elements will prove more than satisfactory.

Premiere Elements tries its best to speak plain English. The right-side panel of the organizer view, for example, offers plain-English options that require no translation from techno-geek: Organize, Fix, Create, and Share. The Fix tab has a drop-down menu for full, quick, and guided photo edits and for video edits. What are those photo edit options doing there? The organizer is used by both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements and those who purchase Premiere Elements also receive a 30-day trial version of Photoshop Elements. Adobe assumes that if you're in the market for a video editing program, you may also be someone who wants to edit, organize, and improve photographs.

On Christmas day, I decided to see what I could do with a bit of video from my Canon G12. This is a point-and-shoot camera that offers an option to shoot video and that's what I took with me when we went to younger daughter Kaydee's house for dinner. I returned with 36 video clips that ranged in quality from totally unusable to marginally effective. So my challenge was to (without reading the instructions) see if I could create a video that would be sufficiently interesting that people wouldn't fall asleep while watching it.

Music license: "Silent Night" by MC Jack in the Box (feat. the ccM Virtual Carolers) http://ccmixter.org/files/mcjackinthebox/23830 is licensed under a Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Premiere Elements is installed on a notebook computer. It's a 64-bit system but a relatively slow one—just a dual-core I5 processor with 6GB of RAM. This is adequate for editing HD video such as that produced by the camera but it mean that rendering would take a long time.

After eliminating the worst video clips, I organized the remainder into what seemed like a reasonable sequence and then set about fixing the inpoints and outpoints. What I discovered was that I generally do a pretty good job of stabilizing the camera before I start shooting so most of the inpoints were fine. Where I had to do the most trimming was at the outpoints, the ends of the clips.

One of the clips had good video at the beginning and near the end but the middle part contained a long, boring section. Just removing the middle wasn't an option because it would have created what's called a jump cut; what I needed was some other video between the two pieces that I wanted to keep. After trimming away the middle, I dropped in another short edited piece of video. Problem solved.

Half an hour later, I had a 4-minute video with cacophony as a sound track—disjointed conversations and a lot of background noise. So I turned down the audio track and created a new sound track by using the same 1-minute audio selection 4 times. (Note that this is not a good way to do things but it served for my little demonstration project.)

Next I selected the option to upload the file to Facebook. Rendering the video took about 45 minutes and the upload consumed another 20. Facebook then required about half an hour to render and downsample the video so that it would work as a streaming video. The entire process, from the time I started downloading the camera's video until the time the finished production was available on Facebook was less than 3 hours.

Except for one title scene and one non-cut transition, all of the scene changes are simple cuts and that is by design. Although Premiere Elements provides many fun (and sometimes useful) transition effects, the best transition is almost always a cut or a cross-fade. Just as the best typography is invisible, transitions should not call attention to themselves. If someone says that the transition was impressive or that the typeface you used in a publication is pretty, you've done something wrong.

5 CatsVideo Editing for People Who Aren't Video Editors

What's clear from my little test video is that Adobe Premiere Elements has all the features that a non-professional needs to edit, improve, and cut together video clips from vacations, parties, and other events. If you're willing to spend the time, you can improve lighting, colors, and contrast on a per-clip basis and add a complete sound track to the video. When you're ready to share, Premiere Elements makes uploading to YouTube, Facebook, or Adobe's own Photoshop.com as easy as selecting a destination and clicking a button.
For more information, visit the Adobe Premiere Elements website. There's a 30-day free trial, too.

Short Circuits

Opinion #1: SOPA in GoDaddy's Mouth

The big domain registrar, GoDaddy.com, announced its support for SOPA, the ill-advised "Stop Online Piracy Act" but when thousands of customers who were annoyed by that position threated to move their domain registrations elsewhere, the company relented. More or less.*

GoDaddy says that it is "no longer supporting" SOPA but that doesn't mean that it's opposing SOPA, which is what it should be doing. Instead, GoDaddy has gone from being a supporter to being "neutral". Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, says that it's important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. "Getting it right is worth the wait," he said. "Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Among the large and respected organizations that oppose SOPA are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla. The following organizations are known opponents of SOPA: 4chan, AOL, Boing Boing, CloudFlare, Craigslist, Creative Commons, Daily Kos, Disqus, eBay, Embedly, ESET, Etsy, Facebook, foursquare, Github, Google, Grooveshark, Hostgator, Hype Machine, ICanHasCheezburger, Kaspersky, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Linode, MediaTemple, MetaFilter, Mozilla, Namecheap, OpenDNS, O’Reilly Radar, PayPal, Petzel, Quora, Reddit, Scribd, Square, StackExchange (Stack Overflow), TechCrunch, Techdirt, The Huffington Post, Torrentfreak, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YCombinator, and Zynga. And although not as well known as these organization, I add TechByter Worldwide to the list.

SOPA is the wrong solution to a problem. The bill is being positioned ("spun") as being a tool to shut down pirates in "rogue foreign states" but nothing could be further from the truth. SOPA is a bill that was written by lobbyists for the benefit of their Hollywood clients. Had this legislation been in effect 10 years ago, many of today's most popular Internet services (YouTube, Facebook, and many others) would not exist. That's because SOPA would hold the service liable for bad actions by users.

If one YouTube user posts a bit of copyrighted video, the Feds could swoop in and shut down YouTube. What's wrong with the system we have now: If one YouTube user posts something that's copyrighted, the copyright owner notifies YouTube and YouTube then removes the offending video and cancels the account of the offender.

Read more about SOPA here:

The list could go on and on but the main point is this: It's bad legislation that's being pushed by lobbyists who propose using a nuclear weapon to kill a mosquito. Let's go after the mosquito and allow the rest of the Internet to survive!

*After this program had been prepared, GoDaddy announced that it has shifted to opposing SOPA after first supporting it and then announcing that it was neutral.

Fahrvergnügen for Volkswagen's Eurpoean Employees

Remember the 1990 VW ad campaign for fahrvergnügen—driving enjoyment? Now the automaker says that it wants its employees to have more fun when they're off the clock. No more checking your corporate e-mail account with the company-provided BlackBerry. That's because the devices will function only from half an hour before the work day begins until half an hour after it ends. The change applies to unionized workers but apparently not to managers.

This is an interesting concept, assuming that the company is implementing it for the reasons stated (making sure that employees obtain a better balance between work life and home life) and not just as a cost-cutting measure. Another German company, Deutsche Telekom, says that it expect workers to deal with company-related messages during work time and that it does not expect them to work during their off-hours.

One problem with being connected to the office 24/7 is that the line between work and home becomes blurred. The phone rings and you answer it. An e-mail arrives and you read it. VW and Deutsche Telekom seem to be on the right track here and this seems like an idea that would be welcome in the United States, too.

Point-and-Shoot Cameras Will Disappear Soon

This is one of those stories that will seem obvious once you've heard it. Serious photographers will continue to use digital SLR cameras or maybe Four Thirds cameras, Micro Four Thirds cameras, or even high-end point-and-shoot cameras. But the basic point-and-shoot digital cameras are doomed.

The market research company NPD says that smart phones are replacing basic point-and-shoot cameras for both still and video images.

The key consideration here is that the smart phone camera will replace basic point-and-shoot models, the cameras that are the equivalent of the old basic Kodak Instamatic.

According to Liz Cutting, executive director and senior imaging analyst at NPD, “There is no doubt that the smart phone is becoming good enough much of the time." In addition to that, the fact that people have their smart phone with them all the time means that more pictures are being taken than ever before. According to Cutting, “Consumers who use their mobile phones to take pictures and video were more likely to [create photos and video using these devices] when capturing spontaneous moments but for important events, single purpose cameras or camcorders are still largely the device of choice.”

Camcorders and lower-end point-and-shoot cameras appear to have lost the most ground to smart phones. According to NPD’s Retail Tracking Service, the point-and-shoot camera market was down 17% in units and 18% in dollars for the first 11 months of 2011. Pocket camcorders were down 13% in units and 27% in dollars.

Detachable lens cameras increased by 12% in units and 11% in dollars over the same time period, with an average price of $863; and point-and-shoot cameras with optical zooms of 10x or greater grew by 16% in units and 10% in dollars, with an average price of $247.

What this may mean, overall, is that digital imaging is one of the primary causes of statistics.

Oops. Wrong Beatle.

What do you do when you list two members of the Beatles who are dead and you get one of them wrong? In my case, I updated the TechByter Worldwide website with the correct information (and a note about the wrong information) but I allowed the podcast with the wrong information to remain. In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, pages were simply removed and new pages were inserted the "correct" history. I decided to leave the error in place and correct it later. Well, it's now later.

The only trouble with that approach is that the error occurred on the 18th of December, last year's final program, and my first opportunity to make the correction on the podcast is today, New Year's Day 2012.

In talking about the Beatles' movie "Help!" I said "two of the Beatles are dead (John Lennon to an assassin and Paul McCartney to cancer). I'm happy to say that Sir Paul is still very much alive. I should have written that George Harrison had died.

Note that I didn't say that I meant to write George Harrison. I didn't. I meant to write Paul McCartney. Except for John Lennon and Ringo Starr, I never could tell them apart, anyway. But for some reason I "remembered" that McCartney had died. One of the first things you're supposed to learn as a journalist is to check things out.

The old saw is, "Your mother says she loves you? Fine. But check it out." It would have been easy enough for me to check that out. It's not hard to perform a Google search or check Wikipedia but I relied on my memory and my memory, obviously, was wrong.

So now I can say that two Beatles are living: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. I'm pretty sure that I got that right.

Opinion #2: Anonymous Strikes Again

(I'm just full of opinions this week!) The shady "Anonymous" group of crackers struck again around Christmas, breaking in to systems operated by think-tank Stratfor. The company gathers intelligence data for businesses and government agencies such as the departments of Defense and Justice.

The group said that it had stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to the company's clients. The intent, according to one member, was to steal money from accounts and to give the money to charitable organizations.

Stratfor says that it has reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with them on the investigation. Anonymous claims to have downloaded 200GB of data from the company.

One of the victims, and the victims are real people, is Allen Barr. A total of $700 worth of donations were made in his name and with his money to organizations such as the Red Cross, CARE, and Save the Children. Barr, who retired last year from the Texas Department of Banking, will undoubtedly get his money back but the inconveniece isn't trivial.

What surprises and distresses me is that even the high-tech media seem to refer to these thieves as "hackers" and not as "crackers", their proper name. Hackers are honorable. Crackers are thieves. "Anonymous" may be well intentioned but so was John Brown in the years before the Civil War, and they are still crackers and thieves.

"Anonymous" is not a group of "hackers".