New Scripps Study Reveals San Andreas Fault Set for the ‘Big One’

Bad times. Remember, drink from the top bowl of your toilet first.

Some of you (ok, none of you) may remember that I posted back in 2004 about a cheap kludge to get around some Earthlink DNS bullshit. Well, it turns out that it may not be Earthlink's fault so much.

I'm not going to take the time to vet the blame here, but it seems that if you
configure Exchange to use your ISP's DNS servers (and not your internal Microsoft DNS server) the problem goes away.

Start Exchange System Manager, select Servers->(SERVER NAME)->Protocols->SMTP. Open the properties for the Virtual SMTP Server, select the Delivery tab and click on the 'Advanced...' button. Then clicking the 'Configure...' button and add the IP address(es) of your ISP's DNS server(s) here.

Special thanks to Ian Griffiths, as his blog tipped me off to this solution.

IanG on Tap: Exchange, Earthlink, and SMTP 550 Errors on SBS 2003

By now I'm sure you've all seen some form of this video, or seen it on the Miller Lite commercial - but do you know (or care even) what's going on behind the scenes?

Well, I found some interesting reads about Mr. Carson Williams of Masson, Ohio:

His Quasi-Official Website
Article in the Cincinnati Enquirer
PlanetChristmas Chatroom
Light-o-Rama Controller used

Appearently many folks (including Mr. Williams) have been doing this stuff for years, but for whatever reason, it tipped this year.

Navio has reverse-engineered FairPlay for ingestion onto iPods without Apple
This is not the first (as you will read) - Real Networks did this last year. Interesting move, in that technically I believe it to be a violation of the DMCA, but Apple hasn't been going after Navio (nor Real - due to monopoly concerns perhaps?). I want to know where Navio is shaking out. Definitely want to find these guys at CES.

How Navio may be used - owning digital rights. (Great Business 2.0 article)

Some articles of note, some of my opinions to boot:

Variety Article on Xbox 360
[Note: if you don't subscribe, you'll need to watch the ad to see this article]
Good article covering convergance of the gaming and viewing markets from a content creators POV. Obviously there are a few (more technical) aspects here that Mr. Fritz doesn't grasp (like WMV-HD), but I can clearly see the momentum behind this push building.


Potential Xbox 360 Distribution Models with the Masses
Everyone should already be familiar with these points, but the gents over at cinematical outlined a couple of them in their blog.


Firms haggle over video on demand
(From a Telecom conference in France)
I like some of the points here (especially in regards to how the music industry missed the boat and let Apple steal the show). I also feel strongly that what will help bridge the gap (between paying for what users are used to getting for free) is the deployment of easy, one click devices (like the MCE's and Xbox 360's).


Gates on the Upcoming Optical Format Warz (and the ultimate winner - Digital Distribution)
"Even videos in the future will either be on a disk in your pocket or over the Internet, and therefore far more convenient for you." Perhaps I should take it with a grain of salt, after all "640k is enough for anybody" (yes, I know he never said that…)


Blu-Ray v. HD-DVD - now with VC-1 goodness...
Point of interest: Both formats support VC-1 (WMV9) out of the gate, and the Sony PS3 will have most certainly have a Blu-Ray drive from the get go. That is a big push to help standardize Blu-Ray over the HD-DVD (but probably not enough by itself). The Xbox 360 ships with a standard DVD drive - so the best they could do would be an add-on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray via USB (a tough sell). What this means to me is that we can avoid consumer confusion around the two standards by selling VC-1 (WMV9) HD content on good ol' DVD9's as you are guaranteed a VC-1 decoder in either device. How could this be cooler? Well, it looks like both players will contain a red-laser for DVD backwards compatibility, so whichever format you want to ship your content in (be it Blu-Ray or HD-DVD), you could include a DVD9 with your HD content VC-1 encoded on the same disc! (on the same side with the Blu-Ray (!!!), and on the opposite side with HD-DVD). Yay for Microsoft!