I read with interest the many articles being written around the USB-IF’s decision to give its blessing to Apple’s use of the USB vendor ID, and claim that Palm’s usage of Apple’s Vendor ID in the Pre violates its policy. Now let’s sit back for a minute, and consider what the USB-IF actually is.

The Implementer’s Forum, as it is know, is made up from various companies that helped develop the USB standard and its newer, faster derivatives. The USB-IF acts as a central clearinghouse that provides USB vendor IDs to manufacturers who wish to use USB ports in their products. Every vendor using USB is supposed to register on this forum and pay its fees, which then gives them the right to use the USB logo on their products, and an individual vendor ID, which combined with a product ID, identifies every device on a USB bus.

In theory, this is sweet and dandy, but in the real world, shit happens. Anyone who has played with hardware peripherals long enough will have seen at least once a device identified by Windows as something else – this happens when a vendor “clones” another vendor’s ID. Some can get away with using the other vendor’s ID and a random product ID, combined with a customized driver on CD. In fact, there are tons of products shipping today which bear the USB logo without paying any duties to the USB-IF, and thus, running with “pirated” IDs.

The only power the USB-IF has is self-regulation. If you want to bear their logo, you need to pay their royalty, and agree to abide to its policies, including non-cloning of vendor IDs. So let’s say Palm gets booted off the USB-IF. They just need to remove the USB logo from their product (if they bear it at all – check your iPhone as an example), and they’re home free. They are free to use Apple’s vendor ID as much as they want, and there is no legal recourse Apple or the USB-IF has. With so much legal power, don’t you think Apple would have sued Palm already if there were grounds for legal action? Rather, they engaged in a technical cat-and-mouse game involving iTunes updates to kill off the attacker.

Personally, I think Palm is in delusion. Making the Pre compatible with iTunes will not make it any more popular that it already is not. And Apple has every right to place technical blocks on the Pre, particularly if they miss-represent the vendor ID. Still, if I was Apple, I would have just ignored the issue. The Pre is not a threat to the iPhone, which is far superior in all aspects (apart from the non-removable battery).

It’s unreal – every single multiple-input dedicated DVR I am looking at for taking care of recording my home’s CCTV setup, only supports Windows. When network access is provider, it invariably involves loading an ActiveX control, which of course is not supported in OS X. Even more ridiculously, manufacturers such as AverDigi, a branch of AverMedia, claim to run “embedded Linux” as some sort of badge of honor!

Let me get this straight – you use embedded Linux so that you can serve Windows-only ActiveX-infested web interfaces? Far worse, many of them use weird codecs that come in their Windows-only install CDs, which means that you’ll have to go back to a Windows machine or a VM in order to use these things. Mobile support of course isn’t much better, with Windows Mobile devices supported, again, via ActiveX, and Symbian via Java applets.

I’ll keep searching, but my hopes are fading…

It was all due to a clogged up heat sink in the ATI X1900 card that sits inside my Mac Pro – since the idle fan was not pulling in an airflow, it slowly wound up to full speed, until it was full-on all the time. The build-up of dust was quickly cleared by a blast of compressed air…but this brought about an idea – why don’t idle video cards reverse the fan for a few seconds, say once a day, in order to blow back any dust build-up? This way, the heat sink radiator would be kept clean and efficient.

I had been an avid user of Camtasia for Windows until 2006, when I switched to Mac, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read a TUAW post announcing that Techsmith were porting it to OS X. It has been a long-missed app on the Mac, with other contenders available, such as ScreenFlow, not as powerful.

Now, once Camtasia has been released, it looks like ScreenFlow doesn’t have much to fear – the Mac version is severely crippled compared to the Windows equivalent, by the looks of the comparison table available. These are some of the important features they left out:

• Only full-screen recording, you cannot record only a region of the screen – duh!
• Recording cannot be paused.
• No audio-only tracks, ScreenDraw, or markers.
• No captions.
• No audio enhancements or replace a portion of the audio track with silence.
• No production preview or batch production.
• No customization whatsoever of the Flash player controls, the start and end screens, or the about box.

This may seem offset by features like upload to YouTube or iTunes, but these are bland features as they both only take a couple of extra steps to do manually. Frankly, I will stick with ScreenFlow for the foreseeable future.