The View From the Outback© 2000-2006 Richard C. Rhodes
A great deal of what we read in newspapers, magazines, and books, and what we see in the movies and on TV is written and produced in New York City or Los Angeles. Much of the "political wisdom" comes from the PR machines of the White House, the Congress, and from the Washington media corps. In short, one might conclude that all knowledge, wisdom, and wit are confined to those who inhabit New York City, Washington DC, or Hollywood. I am now a senior citizen, in my 7th decade. My experience was gained in many cities in the U.S. and in about 30 foreign countries. That experience has included the U.S. Marines, law school, the ATF, the CIA, Fortune 500 executive, writer, public speaker, educator, editor, and publisher - for openers. Some insights come from talking with ham-radio operators in every major country and such idyllic places as the Cook Islands. For over 20 years, I have written articles off and on for various magazines and newspapers. I've had an enormous number of letters published in major national publications. The Outback is the rural area in Northeast Texas where I have lived for the past 15 years. Since most visits to my pages come from searches, I am no longer trying to keep on a regular schedule for updating the Outback. Click on a Topic to go directly to that topic. October 27, 2006 As part of my daily Web surfing of news, I always check out http://news.yahoo.com, which has the news arranged by topics. The default stories in most topics are from the Associated Press (AP), my least favorite source of news. Finally, I caught on that the Yahoo site has choices for sources for most categories. For instance, my two favorite sites are Technology and Health. In Health, you can see AP, Reuters, AFP, NPR, ASCS News Today, and My Sources. My Sources allows you to add URLs of your choosing, if you have a Yahoo ID and are logged in so the Yahoo coookie(s) can keep track of your choices. Under Technology on Yahoo News are the default AP, along with USATODAY, PC World, PC Magazine, AFP, and My Sources. I would much rather read an article at PC World or PC Magazine than one at AP by a pseudo technical expert, or an AP canned press release from a software or hardware company. Some stories may only be on AP, but you quickly learn where the "best source" is on a given topic. If an AP article says, "As reported in Friday's New York Times," then STOP. Go to the New York Times and get it from the horse's mouth and usually in greater detail. Rarely are the references to "paid content" at the Times, for example. October 23, 2006 The e-mail program Eudora is going open source! In the first half of 2007 a free open-source version will likely be ready. Qualcomm says that Eudora simply does not fit in with its core business objectives. The open source model will be based on code used in the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail program and will work on multiple operating systems. They claim it will have the same feature set as the current Eudora. I hope so, because I tried Thunderbird for a couple of days and uninstalled it. I failed to see what Thunderbird had that gave it a semi-cult following. In the meantime, you can download the latest (and probably final paid version) Eudora for Windows or Mac for a perpetual license fee of $19.95. (wwww.eudora.com) Eudora users can only hope that in the interim between the current (last?) paid version and the release of the free open-source version, no serious security vulnerabilities creep in. October 18, 2006 Sen. Barrack Obama was on "Oprah" today. He is not shy about mentioning that he had a White mother, although the liberal media and the Democrats always refer to him as African-American - in keeping with the idiotic "one-drop-of-black-blood" convention. (see the Outback for August 21, 2006, about the silly lengths the media will go to avoid saying, "his mother was white and his father an African.") I am always impressed with Sen. Obama and would rather see him President than Hillary, for example. But, I think he is too young and inexperienced in world affairs to run in 2008. The adulaltion from his current book tour seems to have made him a little giddy. So, my next comments are not an indictment of him but of the lack of work ethic in the Congress. Mind you, they take long vacations several times a year. When they are in session, Sen. Obama, whose family lives in Chicago, says that he usually leaves Chicago late Monday night, is in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday and is usually home by Thursday night. I read that as working Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday. Better at-home hours than a traveling salesman or many corporate managers. And you wonder why nothing gets done in Washington. First, they argue all the time about who is the bigger idiot. Then hours every day are spent in fund raising. Finally, they are not in session long enough to get anything meaningful done. I hope the Democrats win both the house and Senate and the Presidency. Then, with the complete lack of work ethic and a constant bickering over nothing, we will see how great a job the Democrats can do. All hat and no cattle, I suspect. It ain't the Republicans or the Democrats, per se. The system is broken. Campaign money and lobbyists control most of what gets done - and even then precious little actually gets done. October 15, 2006, 10:50 p.m. CDT I find many reasons to be contemptuous of the Associated Press (AP), whose articles are copied verbatim by thousands of news sources. They continue to show that our educational system is going downhill rapidly. Consider the following headline:
The word is Niche. It is spelled correctly in the article. But, this should deter AP from hiring high-school interns to write headlines. "Wantud: Hedline Writur with at leest a G.E.D." Update: By Mon Oct 16, 7:53 AM ET, the AP headline spelled "Niche" correctly. Better late than never. October 13, 2006 The patches pushed out on Tuesday related to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Internet Explorer. For those of you who are forced to use these programs at the office, or those of you who bought a computer with them installed, you have my condolences for using these vulnerable programs. Although I download the patches, the only one I use is IE6 and only on a site that absolutely will not work without ActiveX. If you receive attachments from any of these programs, you can for example open a Word Document in WordPerfect (and save a WP file as a .DOC), and download "read only" viewers for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from the Microsoft Web site. The venerable Quick View Plus (www.avantstar.com) also opens for "read only" 225 Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, DOS and Internet file formats - including Word and Excel - and will print them. Quick View Plus is also useful to take a peek inside an e-mail attachment without "opening" the attachment. If I get a Word doc, I first right click on it and scan it with my BitDefender antivirus and then right click and peek inside and print it with Quick View. Me paranoid? Yes, when it comes to Microsoft documents. These are just a few ways you can open a Microsoft Office file without subjecting yourself to potential malware assaults. Although I did read somewhere that one version of Word Viewer had a vulnerability. Since I get very few .DOC files a year, I may get around to finding out if the viewer has been patched. There are only so many hours in the day to look for Microsoft patches and work-arounds. Sometimes, you have to use the computer for doing actual work! Power Desk Pro 6 (www.v-com.com) is the file manager Microsoft forgot to make. It has dual-pane viewing, an FTP module, encryption, and much more. I am addicted to Power Desk 6 and Quick View. When I approach a strange computer without those two programs installed, I feel like I am flying a plane blindfolded. October 12, 2006 Many pundits and politicians say that we need to remember the lessons of Vietnam as we get mired in what appears to many as an unwinnable war in Iraq. Forget Vietnam. The parallel is better made to Korea. We have 30,000 soldiers there 50 years after the end of the war in Korea. South Korea is rich. Samsung and LG and others produce some of the best and most expensive electronics in the world. South Korea makes cars that are increasingly being known as efficient and dependable. Here's the mistake we made. We should have insisted that the South Koreans, once they had a robust economy going, take over the defense of their own country. We never see protests in the street: "Bring our boys home from Korea." So, the lesson of Korea should be applied to Iraq ASAP. Get your act together and defend your own country. This talk of keeping our current troop strength in place for at least two more years is idiotic. There is another tragic irony in both Korea and Iraq. I wrote at length in the Outback about attacks on the U.S. military in Korea. Most Koreans don't want our military there. They have a huge army of their own. Now, we hear the same song from Iraq. "Thanks for knocking out Saddam. Now - get the hell out." As someone who enlisted in the Marines during the Korean War and served with the CIA in Laos during the Vietnam War, I have lost all faith in our government to do anything right in foreign affairs. I have seen how the U.S. government makes sausage. You don't wanna know. Let's organize a demonstration with banners that say: "Let's bring our boys home from S. Korea and Iraq." There is some modest hope of keeping Afghanistan on its road to democracy and free trade. But, that hope is dwindling for those who follow our backsliding there. Afghanistan is the largest producer of Opium in the world! Ridiculous. It may be that the only way to control the Opium Poppy growth is to bring back the Taliban, at least their short-lived policy against growing Opium Poppies. When the Taliban took over in 1996, it took a cut from the Opium Poppy trade. In 2000, the Taliban said that growing poppies was contrary to Islam. The next crop shrunk to almost nothing. But, they did not require the destruction of the existing stockpiles. Now that they are back to being an "insurgency" and needing money, they have decided that growing poppies is not contrary to Islam. Some estimate that Afghanistan now produces about 92 percent of the illicit Opium in the world. October 11, 2006 The headlines that proclaim that President Bush says that we have no intention of invading North Korea are simply comical. What troops would we use to invade N. Korea? Our troops are working 2nd and 3rd tours in Iraq. The personal, family, and business lives of our National Guard and Reserves are being destroyed by long deployments. So, it boils down to collecting a rag-tag bunch of paintballers and survivalists to invade N. Korea. Who is kidding whom? We couldn't invade Grenada again at this point in time. The media, the U.S. administration and the world in general is in a state of hysteria over North Korea testing a "nuclear weapon." Maybe I missed something in the past couple of days, but the U.S., the Japanese and probably the Chinese, have sensors that can detect rather minute amounts of radioactive material. Yet, I have not seen or read a single source that has confirmed that the North Korean underground blast created any radioactive residue or fallout. Add to that, the somewhat puny kiloton output compared to what was anticipated. Add to that the fact that, as I recall, the last two N. Korean long-range missiles were basically duds. Was the recent N. Korean blast really a nuclear one? Somebody must have some evidence, one way or the other. Perhaps this is naive, given the CIA's recent track record. Don't we have any spies in North Korea who could tell us if this was or was not a nuclear explosion? If ever there was a society where an offer to pass on information for maybe a $1 million a year, North Korea should be that place. You recruit spies because they don't agree with the ideology of the regime, or they want money - and once in a while by blackmail. If we don't have a bunch of people in North Korea spying for us, then maybe the CIA should be disbanded. I think back to my good friend Tony XXXXX, who was a member of the Chinese Red Guard. You don't get much more loyal to the regime than that. He wangled a trip to Hong Kong to visit his ailing father and defected. We ended up working together in Laos in the CIA, with his main job slipping people into and out of China and my job concealing microdot readers, code pads, money, or whatever, in common items that would not invite attention by the Chinese border guards. As a bargaining chip, it is to N. Korea's advantage to swear on a pot of Chimchi that the blast was a nuclear one. It is to the rest of the world's advantage to claim (pretend?) that the blast was nuclear. This helps bring more folks into the consortium of those willing to sanction and "get tough" with N. Korea. Here is the Outback, I want to see the readings from the instrumentation that shows this was actually a nuclear explosion - and if so that it was a significant one. Some are claiming the plutonium was not hit sufficiently hard with the primer to do its full thing. Since I know that even Customs Officers can detect radioactive presence with a hand-held device, isn't it reasonable to assume that we, the Japanese, the Chinese, and others, have devices sensitive enough to detect the detonation of a nuclear hand-grenade - let alone a nuclear bomb? The nuclear hand-grenade refererence is only for comparative purposes. There is no merit in having nuclear hand-grenades - unless you are a suicide bomber. Sadly, that day is coming. Have a nice day. Consider moving to the Outback. October 3, 2006 Tennessee Titans defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth stomped twice on the bare head of Dallas Cowboy's center, Andre Gurode. Gurode required 30 stitches to close his wounds. There was no indication that the two players had exchanged any previous words during the game and no indication that Haynesworth has a history of playing dirty on the field. One of the possible side effects of taking Steroids is unprecipitated outbursts of anger. I have no idea if Haynesworth takes Steroids. But, it would explain an otherwise inexplicable action. October 3, 2006 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who make outstanding CPUs for computers (I have an Athlon 64 CPU in this machine), is alleging that Intel paid a computer maker millions of dollars to cancel a new product containing AMD CPUs - among other anti-competitive actions. Lawsuits and investigations in Japan, Korea, and Germany have already shown a propensity for Intel to use illegal marketing tactics to exclude AMD from various markets. An EU Commission has been investigating Intel to determine if it used illegal techniques such as unfair rebates to prevent smaller AMD from expanding its market share. Oh, dear. It's Microsoft all over again. In case you have forgotten, Microsoft, among other things, forced computer makers to load Microsoft Office, Word, et al. on their computers. MS threatened vendors with price increases for Windows and/or withholding Windows if the vendors did not agree to Microsoft's terms. That was why the superior word-processing program WordPerfect lost so much market share and kept competitive Web browers from being installed on computers at the factory. It was only the WP faithful like me, who either built their own computers and installed WordPerfect as the sole word processor, or those willing to buy a computer with "free" MS products and pay substantial amounts to buy WordPerfect. That has changed. You see WordPerfect loaded at the factory on several computer makes. Many technical types find the AMD CPUs superior to Intel CPUs. AMD came out with a true dual-core CPU, for example, when the best Intel could do at the time was put two CPUs in one package and call it a dual core. Intel is now caught up with dual-core, but there are other AMD niceties that Intel does not have. So, we can only hope that the U.S. Justice Dept. and the FTC will take a hard look at Intel's marketing practices. Microsoft got away with marketing murder for years. Bill Gates did not become so rich by playing fair. Now, his conscience must be bothering him. He is giving away much of his money. The Intel tactics against AMD need to be halted in a more timely manner. I have started reading the delightful Australian tech site for APC Magazine (www.apcstart.com/site/). Their insights into the new Intel Quad-core chips coming out in November are in typical Aussie "tell-it-like-it-is" fashion. From APC: "The CPU will have a dramatic jump in heat output from the relatively cool 80W of the current dual core X6800 Extreme Edition up to a Netburst-worthy 130Watts of egg-cooking power. Time to pull out those water cooling kits again folks!" " ....the Core 2 Quad QX6700 and Xeon brother will use two monolithic Core 2 cores on one die; as opposed to a single four-core chip. Picture sticky taping two Core 2 Duos together, add a smacking of FSB overhead and a dribble of disappointment and you get a Quad." "The reasoning behind the sticky tape method is that it’s faster. Not faster in performance, but faster to make from an engineering standpoint (and faster to get cash registers ringing)." "But frankly, it’s still a hack job, and the peanut gallery, a.k.a. international press, wasn’t impressed." Oh, these guys are fun! The writer of this long piece from which I quoted is Nick Race, who is at an Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as a guest of Intel. This may his last invitation from Intel! October 2, 2006 Both Symantec and McAfee, who produce security software, are accusing Microsoft of locking them out of the core of the VISTA code needed to produce effective security addons, such as firewalls and antivirus software. Here are a few thoughts. Don't buy VISTA until you are absolutely pushed into a corner where Windows XP will no longer do the job for you. Don't buy any Symantec products. They are more and more being defiled on the Web - by the geeks who know - as bloatware, buggy software, and a huge drag on computer resources. I rid myself of all Symantec products a long time ago, although trying to uninstall them trashed a couple of my computers. Don't buy McAfee products. They are not held in high regard by the "in crowd." You could not give me a McAfee product. Buy a Macintosh and let Microsoft, McAfee, and Symantec fight it out in court. September 29, 2006 NASA gets more than its fair share of criticism, including from me for the poorly designed and aging shuttle fleet, which is a nail-biter every time it takes of or re-enters the atmosphere. But, not much is said about the Mars Rovers. They were designed to last about 30-90 days and are now in operation on Mars after nearly three years. One suspects that Century 21 put some money into this project, so they could scope out some prime real estate for housing developments. Whatever the Mars team did, the rest of NASA needs to look over their notes and examine in detail the Rover prototypes. Seldom has anything done by NASA exceeded expectations to this degree. September 22, 2006 For reasons that defy logic, both Facebook and YouTube are talking about selling out for around $1 billion each. These sites are nothing but glorified Web home pages where you can link to other people. Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, has pointed out that these valuations are placed on businesses that make no money. We are reminded of how Web-based e-mail programs were sold for astronomical figures. My son Rick, the programmer, could whip up one of those sites in about one day. I know. Why didn't he do it? Who knows? Why didn't we all buy Microsoft or Intel stock when it first came on the market? But, the most searing memory is when Marc Cuban sold Broadcast.com for billions. At least it had some uniqueness to it. Now, however, because of the money he made, we are subjected to the immature Mr. Cuban ranting and raving at games of the Dallas Mavericks, which he bought. And although his HDNet on HDTV uses top HD cameras and production equipment, Marc Cuban has forever disgraced himself in the eyes of many. He is going to put Dan Rather on HDNet! So, please spare us from any more potential "kid billionaires" who are trying to peddle pedestrian Web concepts like YouTube and Facebook for billions. That is an insult to the intelligence of anyone in the corporate world. We'll see which moron decides that a business with no truly unique features and no profit is worth $1 billion. There's a sucker born every minute. Do you Yahoo? In the Outback, a Yahoo is a rube or a moron. September 21, 2006 Rachael Ray, the bubbly, almost-too-energetic cook and general fun gal dubuted her syndicated TV show. One of her early guests was Oprah Winfrey. King World and Ms. Winfrey's Harpo Productions share development credits for "Rachael Ray." Ms. Winfrey, among her many other accomplishments, is running a "farm-team system" to develop new syndicated talkers. First, she gave us Dr. Phil. A couple of his shows in a row is about all most of us can take. Unless you like to watch totally dysfunctional people. I did watch when Phil's wife Robin came on to promote her book. What a beautiful and intelligent woman! After two episodes of Rachael Ray, I dropped her from my DVR Timer list to record every show. I am a type A personality - and often hyper - even at my advanced age. But, Rachael Ray, is in a class by herself, a type AAA! She wears me out. I do feel an affinity, since our initials are both RR, but I will have to ration watching her program. One episode can leave you exhausted for a week. The University of Southern California published a study that may be in the Top Ten of being a useless waste of time, talent, and money. "Celebrities have more narcissistic personality traits than the general population, and people with narcissistic tendencies seem to be attracted to the entertainment industry rather than the industry creating narcissists." This is called a "ground breaking study." "Narcissists generally crave attention, are overconfident of their abilities, lack empathy, and can evince erratic behavior," said Dr. Drew Pinsky. He is an assistant clinical professor of Psychiatry at USC. What a revolutionary concept, Herr Professor. We would have never guessed any of this in a thousand years without your diligent and probing research. The Segway scooter recall brought a smile to my face. This has always been an invention looking for a solution. Just before the recall, there was a photo on the Web for days of one of President Bush's daughters riding a Segway. Bad timing. Did they give her a Segway for posing for that picture? Why else would she do it? If you want to see an example of the level of education of the masses in the U.S., read Web forums. Spelling is atrocious ("there" for "their" is a favorite), initial capitals in sentences seem to be too much trouble. Someone will ask a question and 139 people will chime in with speculation, poor insights, and soon the topic is off in left field. My experience is mostly reading the forums relating to satellite TV. Some of the forums associated with single products often have real answers, but after you sort through a ton or irrelevant (or as they say "irrevalent") stuff. One guy was complaining about the "fake German accecent" of Dr. Z in the Chrysler commercials. Dr. Z is, of course, German. Maybe the dipshit on the blog thinks that all Germans should sound like Gov. Arnold of California, who is Austrian, not German. Even in Germany, there are several regional accents, as I learned when I lived in Frankfurt and traveled throught West Germany. And there is no excuse for Gov. Arnold speaking with such a heavy accent, except to perpeuate is "immigrant made good" story. The HDTV revolution is in full sway. "Wheel of Fortune," "JEOPARDY!" (both syndicated), "Today" on NBC , "Good Morning America" on ABC, "The View" on ABC, "The Young and the Restless" on CBS (no, I don't watch any morning shows or soap operas), most of primetime, Leno, Letterman, Conan O'Brien, football and baseball on ESPN and ESPN2, pro football on FOX, CBS, NBC , and so forth. Plus, the premium channels like HBOHD, HDNet, DiscoveryHD and a bunch more. DirecTV and DishNetwork both have dual-tuner HDTV Digital Video Recorders (DVRs). And there are DVRs from Comcast and other cable operators. And the venerable TiVO. If you don't have HDTV and an HDTV DVR, you are missing a sea-change in TV viewing. Advertisers Beginning to Get Really Nervous About Commercial SkippingThe concern among advertisers continues about the use of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) to skip commercials. If CBS would not pay David Letterman $30 million a year for "phoning in" a stale and repetitious show, for example, they would not have to cram so many commercials into the program. People might watch two or three commercials, if they were imaginative and not repeated over and over - and not seven-minutes in a row. And if we did not have to do hear about yet another drug that we "need to ask our doctor if it is right for us." If you have seen a commercial once, that is probably all you need to get the message. But making a commercial costs big bucks, partly due to the inordinate compensation for those who appear and partly due to costs associated with "union contracts." Look at the credits for any TV show and see how huge the payroll must be. Does it really take that many people to produce "Wheel of Fortune" or "JEOPARDY!"? As noted before in the Outback, unions force a lot of often useless people, or people who are paid way too much, into a production force. The Late Show with Letterman has a "head carpenter." Do you see evidence of a lot of carpentry work being required to produce that show? The "cue card" guys on Letterman or Leno are perfect examples. A 12-year-old intern would be glad to print those cue cards for nothing. The ad industry is working more and more to get "product placements" blended into TV shows. You know, where someone is sipping a Miller Lite or a Coke, or a box of cereal on the breakfast table is faced toward the camera. Even the folks at JEOPARDY! are apparently becoming product-placement whores and taking in extra bucks for placements in the clues. In nearly every show, if not all of them, there are clues that refer to brand names, like "which card should you never leave your domicile without," and they show the logo from an American Express card. Some categories are simply a list of famous American businesses, fast-food chains, et al., disguised as questions. Shameful. I cannot conceive that they are not getting paid for these "placements." Today, I bought a 1GB Memorex USB Flashdrive. Later, while skimming through a bunch of new TV shows I had recorded, a guy came to the door of an apartment with a black necklace. Upon closer inspection, it was a Memorex USB flashdrive with the black neck strap that came with my flashdrive. I hope Memorex didn't pay too much for that product placement, as I had to rewind twice to make sure what I was seeing. Then, I laughed out loud that just a few hours previous I had bought the same USB flashdrive and was wearing the "necklace" around the house to see if it was practical to do outside the house. I am going to back up all my important data to this flashdrive and "wear" it around my neck when I leave the house. At least until it gets old. That may be the ultimate "off site backup." A 15-second TV spot would make all the points I just made. The passing Memorex product placement made only a puny subliminal impression at best, since there are now about 20 brands of USB flashdrives in the stores and on the Internet. It would help if the Memorex logo was in bright red on the gray case instead of engraved in the gray plastic. Good thinking. Is it real or is it Memorex? Only with your glasses on can you tell. My Lexar and LG flashdrives have easy-to-read logos. And now that I look at my LG 1GB, which has a lanyard attachment, I think I will put it on the necklace. On the LG, the USB plug slides in and out like a snap knife. It has no cap to fall off in the street. Good thinking, Rhodes. Hot flash for the entertainment industry. It is not only commercials that we skip. If you let a game record for an hour or so, and then start at the kickoff, you can skip all the football huddles, injury timeouts, timeouts, timeouts for challenges - with endless replays and guesses by the announcers as to whether or not it was a fumble - the half-time report (mostly useless drivel). We also miss most of the mindless chatter in the TV announce booth. Do we really need three people to tell us about a game that we can see more clearly than they can way up in the booth? If we are such rabid fans that we must know what a player eats for breakfast, we can go to a sports site on the Web. So, a 3 1/2 hour football game can be viewed in about an hour, without missing a play. During a baseball game, you can fast-forward until you see the little icon that a man is on base and back up to see what happened. Or fast forward until you see someone get a hit. Unless you enjoy watching people adjust their batting gloves, spit, back out to upset the pitcher's rhythm - or are a keen student of pitching and batting styles and enjoy seeing eight pitches fouled off, etc. I played a lot of baseball. It is like being a policeman. Hours of sheer boredom punctuated with a few minutes of excitement - if you are lucky. The "National Pastime." Okay. You stick with that story. So, the industry should quit trying to figure ways to keep viewers from skipping commercials and look more inward as to why people skip so many commercials. Even without a DVR, a commercial gives us a bathroom break, get-a-beer break, a chance to mute the sound and close our eyes to cut down on the constant assault on our senses by what is on the screen during commercials. And they still pump up the audio volume on commercials, sometimes to almost unbearable levels. You would think that the F.C.C. would require commercials to be at the same audio level as programming. The National Association of Broadcasters and the commercial sponsors will apparently keep that from ever happening. Money talks. The government only whimpers. Being a Writer Does Not Automatically Make You an Expert on TechnologyI see a sad trend in the mainstream print media. Too many people who are writers think they can write about technical subjects just because they know how to put together a correct sentence. Writing in the "Wall Street Journal for Sept. 13, David Kesmodel discussed the difficulty of maintaining privacy while surfing the Web. "In my quest for anonymity, each time I was done surfing I also deleted my 'cookies,' which are small text files that Web sites use to identify returning visitors. So on my subsequent visits to those sites, I looked like a newcomer," David wrote. "As a result of everything I did, Web surfing got a lot more difficult. It took a few seconds longer for pages to load, and I received error messages from certain sites, which apparently balked at my not having cookies. I also had to re-enter a login name and password when I returned to sites requiring registration, like The Wall Street Journal Online. On Amazon.com, I couldn't immediately see book recommendations based on past purchases -- something I enjoy." I could not believe my eyes. A writer for the WSJ who did not know that in IE6, Firefox, and Opera, (and I presume in Mac's Safari) you can control which cookies you want to accept and which ones you want to reject. You can accept or reject them only once or make that selection permanent, until you edit your "cookie file." I dashed off a very long e-mail in which I noted my incredulity at his lack of understanding of the Web and browsers. As a bonus, I told him of every program I used to control Web access, from cookie control, to firewall, to antivirus, to spyware blocker, to Flash animation blocker (on/off), to ad blockers, to pop-up blockers. I suggested that I had no problem with privacy on the Web, especially with cookies. My list of "allow cookies" is about 12 sites, and relates only to those sites where I have a password to access content (like the WSJ). My list of "reject cookies" is in the hundreds. Strangely, I never heard from David Kesmodel. I guess he was offended when I suggested he did not know anything about the subject on which he was writing. David is not alone. Some of the most inaccurate writing is when a "journalist" visits a TV store, or reads some brochures, or surfs the Best Buy Web site, and then tries to write a long technical piece about Plasma, LCD, and DLP HDTV sets and Digital Video Recorders. I have penned a few notes to some these "instant experts," too. One was with the WSJ. I questioned why he and so many others seemed to be fixated on Plasma and LCD sets, to the exclusion of DLP sets - which are inch-for-inch still the best bang for your buck - and with a terrific HDTV picture. This nice fellow answered me and said that he was stationed in Hong Kong and that because of the limited space available in most housing, Asians were more likely to buy Plasma or LCD - even though nearly every DLP set was also made in the Far East. A DLP of 50 inches is now about 12-inches deep. Not a big deal, if you have even a small table. Fine, but the WSJ is an American publication and we expect to know what we need to know about buying a TV. I also asked the same question about the fixation with Plasma and LCD HDTVs of the editors of a couple of magazines about PCs. Their answers were not satisfactory. One said they were going to run an article on DLP sets. I suggested that if I wanted to read about HDTV sets in a magazine, I would buy a TV magazine, not a PC magazine. Hong Kong and Japan have crowded cities and small living quarters in general. But the Chinese still buy millions of bulky and heavy CRT (tube-type) TVs. I have one in my exercise room. An APEX 27-inch CRT from China, purchased at Wal-Mart for about $150.00. My HDTV DVR "down converts" the resolution to standard picture 480i format. I am not one of those rich bitches who has a flat-screen HDTV in every room. Although this very day, I am taking delivery of a $70 plug-in card for my computer which will allow for over-the-air HDTV to be shown on my LCD computer screens. If it works, I will write an article about it. (Update: later in the day. The HDTV tuner card works in my PC, with some minor reservations). More later. The HDMI Socket - A Failure Begging to HappenSeptember 22, 2006 The Sony PS3 gamebox will have an HDMI output jack to connect to the HiDef input of most HDTV monitors and TVs. Good luck to Sony. The HDMI socket is the biggest mistake in engineering most of us have seen in the last 60 years or so of audio/video equipment. The socket is fragile and subject to failure from minor stresses of the HDMI plug/cable - or at least that has been the experience of DishNetwork and others. The DishNetwork ViP 622 HiDef DVR has an HDMI output, which is vilified at great length on Web forums devoted to DishNetwork gear - with literally hundreds of entries. Some have taken the cover off and discovered that the flat "traces" (similar to the tiny flat strips that computer plug-in boards use) have lifted off or came unsoldered. I have had two DishNetwork DVR 622 HDMI ports fail, and the machines were replaced without a hassle. There are numerous reports of HDMI failures of the new DishNetwork HiDef receiver (Model 211) which is not a DVR. DishNetwork is working on a "more robust" HDMI socket. For the sake of their good name, one can only hope that Sony has found a "more robust" HDMI socket for the PS3. And that DishNetwork obtains a similarly "robust" HDMI socket. There have been many reports of HDMI failures on DirecTiVo DVRs - from DirecTV. It will be interesting to see if the HDMI socket on the new DirecTV HiDef DVR has similar failures. Some of the problem with HDMI and HiDef TVs has been a software problem. Not all TVs implement the HDMI "standard" in the same way. DishNetwork, for example, has made modifications to their software to provide a proper "handshake" between their HiDef DVR boxes and various TVs. As of the last Tech Forum on DishNetwork, the only TV with an unresolved compatibility issue was VISIO. One problem with current HDMI sockets is that the plug is not held in place by any hold-down clamp or screw, like is used in the computer DB9, DB25, and DVI plugs/sockets - and the old Centronics parallel printer plug/socket. The fragile "edge strip" in the connector is thus free to flex under stress. Just the weight of the HDMI plug and cable is often enough to cause an HDMI socket failure! Some connector points may also come unsoldered due to heat buildup in various boxes. On a computer plug-in board, which uses similar edge-card technology with tiny flat traces to make connections, there are significant differences from the HDMI socket. One, the computer board has many more traces, with any possible stress spread out over a wider load area. Two, the computer boards are held captive by a screw at the top of the bracket, which reduces potential stress on the board. Three, the plug-in cards are not being inserted (plugged in) and pulled out repeatedly, as happens with someone who has two or more HDMI devices and only one HDMI socket on their TV. In 20 years, I have had problems with only a very few PC plug-in boards being intermittent. So .... the misguided engineer who decided to "borrow" the edge-card with flat traces from PC plug-in boards for the HDMI socket should be drummed out of the profession. My DVR has a back panel that is 16-inches wide. My TV has a large rectangular plate for many inputs. Just what was the engineer thinking when he decided to "save space" with this tiny and fragile HDMI socket? There is room on my TV input board for a DVI socket and a DB9 for a computer input, for example. In the words of a V.P. at DishNetwork, the HDMI socket was "under engineered." That is polite for "it is a piece of crap and has caused us no end of problems and customer ill will." My advice is that if you any gear with an HDMI input/output; plug the cable in very gently, don't move the box around with the cable plugged in, and don't plug and unplug the HDMI cable repeatedly. Some folks put foam or rubber blocks under the cable and plug at the point it enters the socket, to take stress off of the connector. Some receiver/amplifiers provide multiple HDMI switched inputs. Manual HDMI switch boxes are available online, at www.monoprice.com, and elsewhere. By the way, monoprice.com and cablesforless.com sell HDMI cables at a fraction of the cost of the "name brands" you find in big-box stores. Both vendors receive good marks for the quality of their HDMI cables on the various satellite and HDTV forums. I have four HDMI cables from cablesforless.com, and they work fine. You can also buy cables with DVI on one end and HDMI on the other, and HDMI/DVI adapters at the Web sites. My DVD player has an HDMI output. I run it into the DVI on the HDTV with an HDMI/DVI adapter. Since DVI has no audio path, I use a Toslink (fiber optic) from my DVD player to my amplifier. Newer TV sets are providing at least two HDMI inputs. Double the trouble, I guess. In 60 years of fiddling with audio/video and ham-radio connectors, I have never seen anything as pathetic as the HDMI connector. Interestingly, the USB plug and socket look similar to the HDMI. But the USB is obviously a better and more robust design. For one thing, the USB connector has connecting traces on only one side of its flat-surface mount. Also, the contact traces are wider and longer - with greater separation - on the USB than on HDMI. I can't remember when a USB cable or a USB Flashdrive failed to make proper connection, and I have a bunch of them around here. Return to the List of TopicsCOPYRIGHT 2000 -2006 Richard C. Rhodes You are welcome to quote sections from this page - or the whole page, as long as the source URL is included. Of course, I would be flattered if anyone linked to this page. It is very hard to be the writer, editor, fact checker, copy editor, and publisher of anything. So, I beg your forgiveness for the many mistakes that creep in. 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