by Vinny Carpenter on June 30, 2008
I just want to say that if the future of Internet TV is anything like the Netflix Player by Roku, we are going to be just fine. I was one of the lucky ones who ordered the Netflix Player by Roku right away and have had the opportunity to play with it for the last few weeks. I absolutely love my Netflix player box – unequivocally 
If you haven't heard anything about the Netflix player, it is a little hardware device (box) that allows instant streaming direct to your TV over the Internet.
The box, made by Roku is a $99.99 one-time purchase which connects to your existing broadband (wired or wireless) connection and allows you to instantly watch content from Netflix web site. This box plugs into the same infrastructure over at Netflix that lets you watch streaming movies and TV shows on your PC. The nice thing is that this is part of your standard Netflix membership and there are no extra monthly charges. The same flat fee DVDs you receive are not impacted by your instant streaming. The Netflix/Roku box connects to any TV using HDMI, component, s-video, composite or good old RCA and you get full DVD video quality if your bandwidth permits.
I've had the pleasure of using this box and I have been completely and totally impressed with the design of box, the software and the actual quality of the content being streamed. Setup/installation was incredibly easy and I was able to get the box to connect to my WPA secured wireless network in seconds. The first thing the box did was download an update from Netflix and automatically update itself – nice feature. Once the box was up and running, I was able to link the Netflix box to my online Netflix account and anything in my 'Watch Instantly' queue was available for viewing on my TV. So I start watching Blade Runner and it's almost an hour before I realize that I'm not watching a DVD on my TV and it's actually being streamed live over the Internet. The picture and sound quality is unbelievable and rewind/fast-forward is decent with the little time-series snapshot of scenes to help gauge how far or back you're going. The box supports HD but Netflix doesn't support that at the moment but I fully anticipate Netflix enabling that feature as they build up a bigger library of on-demand material that is of HD quality.
I only have two complaints with the box and I think one of them will probably be handled in a software update. The first one is the lack of a power button – Once the box is plugged in and turned on, you cannot turn it off. There is no OFF button on the box or the remote and that's just annoying. There is a little light that's always on and it's not blindingly bright or anything but I would like to be able to turn it off. The second missing feature is the lack of Closed Captioning – I think this is a big miss and a must for me as I'm often watching movies late at night while my wife and daughter are sleeping. I can live without the power button but I really want Closed Captioning enabled in the next software release – please!!
In closing, I cannot stress how good the quality of the picture is and I haven't had a single issue with video glitches or slowness or pauses while it's buffering or anything like that. I've seen several long movies along with the most of the first season of Heroes and I haven't had a single issue. I do have a nice broadband connection with 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbp up but that's fairly standard these days and Netflix recommends about 3-4 Mbps for the service. The other nice thing about this box and the use of the Flash memory is that it doesn't have a fan and so its whisper quiet. I am also excited about the future as this box runs on a embedded Linux OS and Roku has released a lot (if not all) of the code under GPL. I can't wait for all the mods/patched kernels and apps that are going to surface in the coming weeks and months.
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by Vinny Carpenter on May 20, 2008
Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - In the small, generic plastic box that is the new Netflix Player made by Roku, I think you can see the future of video. Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World - It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the Should we discard Interfaces? | Learning by Experience - Is a class that only has interfaces as dependencies easier to test then classes that have implementations as dependencies? Most of us are eager to say yes, but in fact, frameworks like EasyMock enable us to mock (non final) classes. Graeme Rocher's Blog: Grails.org now powered by Grails - We've just launched a re-write of the Grails.org site in Grails. Previously the site was powered by Confluence (the Atlassian wiki), now in the spirit of eating ones own dog food it is a fully Grails powered site. IntelliJ Tips & Tricks - Listen to Neal Ford, the software architect at ThoughtWorks and a fabulous speaker, giving you some hints on improving productivity through the intensive use of keyboard shortcuts for carrying out various tasks while coding with IntelliJ IDEA. WEB4J - Minimalist Java Web Application Framework -> Criticisms of Spring, PHP, and Rails - The Spring Framework is popular. It has also met with a disturbing lack of criticism. The following remarks are based on Spring 2.0. US billionaire Buffett backs Obama for president - Yahoo! News - Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, is backing Barak Obama for US president and thinks current US economic policy will push the dollar lower against other global currencies Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource - The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editi A conversation Clinton was having…: RE: Java haters, gtfo - Well everyone's favorite potty mouthed blogger is back, slinging poo and doing nothing much to help anything. That said, I've met Hani, and he's actually a pretty cool and down to earth guy. Firefox 3 RC 1 full review - Mozilla Links - A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.
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by Vinny Carpenter on April 22, 2008
InfoQ: Top 10 Mistakes when building Flex Applications - In this post, Adobe’s James Ward teams up with InfoQ.com to bring you another Flex Top 10 (our most recent Flex Top 10). Flex is an open source application development framework for building rich Internet applications that run in the web with Flash Play InfoQ: IntelliJ IDEA Supports Flex Development - JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA is one of Java developers' the most favorite development IDEs. The recent IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.3 release includes some new features supports Flex application development. To understand how Flex RIA developers can utilize InitelliJ's IntelliJ IDEA Blog » Blog Archive » Type Renderers - I’d like to tell you about one of the IntelliJ IDEA features - type renderers. They provide you the ability to customize how objects are displayed in the debugger, offering “logic-oriented” presentation of data vs. structure-oriented as it is by def Cloud Security: Where is Your Computer Today? - A new blog that launched last week–Cloud Security–is devoted to looking at the security issues of cloud computing, which encompasses grid computing, utility computing, software as a service, storage in the cloud, and virtualization Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today. - Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-04-21 | By Galen Gruman - According to NPD Research, Apple's share of the retail market has climbed to 14 percent as of February 2008. Gartner and IDC report that the Mac's share in the U.S. as of March 31 was 6.6 percent. The Norway Vote - What really happened « Topic Maps and All That - The process which led to Norway’s Yes vote on OOXML was so surrealistic that it deserves to be recorded for posterity. Here’s my version of the story. For AT&T, U-Verse Is Picking Up Steam - GigaOM - UBS’s John Hodulik, one of the best telecom analysts, has pegged AT&T as his top pick for this earnings seasons and is expecting some good tidings from Ma Bell. What caught my eye in his note was the progress made by AT&T’s IPTV effort, U-Verse. Virtualization: VMware, Xen, or VirtualBox? (by Jeremy Zawodny) - I wish to virtualize my computer life. However, I face an abundance of choices from which you will help me select the right one. What are the pros and cons here? And are there other solutions worthy of consideration? /var/log/mind » Blog Archive » Turbocharge your string keyed hashmaps - In most most situations the possible universe of keys in the hashmap are known upfront either when writing the code or when starting up the application. If instead of creating hard coded strings or by using various string key parameters from say an XML fi
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by Vinny Carpenter on February 14, 2008
Zimbra's new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be. Ext Road Map - Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus - We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created. A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) - A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u Andres Almiray's Weblog : Weblog - JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java. The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog - The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog - The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks. Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin - MyNetflix (beta) - I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher - Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows. Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics - Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself. Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing - Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.
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