Phil Spector: The fascinating tweets of a murderer

I've never been incarcerated in Los Angeles County Jail, so I wasn't aware that the headmaster, or whatever you call the harsh-looking chap who's always in charge of these places, gives inmates certain technological privileges.

Music producer Phil Spector, he of the Wall of Sound, rather than the Sound of Found, is currently a resident of LA County's prisoner palace, having been found guilty of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

However, because he is able to keep his laptop (as well as his iPod), Spector has taken to Twitter to express so many things about his time in jail, his feelings about music, and his disappearing wig. Oh, yes, and about his pet cockroach.

His Twitter feed makes for such extraordinary reading that you almost regret Norman Mailer's passing, as he surely would have written a book about it. However, let me at least offer you some of the more interesting tweetlets to whet your appetite.

Here's one, from May 28, to tickle your existential palate: "If the average man is made in God's image, then Mozart was plainly superior to God."

Or this, from the same day: "The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married."

(Credit: CC Loving Shiva/Flickr)

These were posted before he knew that his stay was to be extended by 19 years. That sentencing seems to have gone to his head, in a very cold and brutal way: "As if it wasn't bad enough I got locked up for 19 years, the bastards even confiscated my wig."

He begins to meditate on the subject of belief: "If you talk to God, you're praying. If God talks back, it's schizophrenia."

Many of us are not exactly fond of murderers, but we do seem to rather enjoy reading about them. So I have to say that the more I began to read, the more I became engrossed by what might, or might not, be contained beneath this man's wig.

Again, from May 29: "It's comforting to know that mental health doesn't always mean being happy. If it did, nobody would qualify."

A few minutes later, Spector finds a friend: "Have befriended a cockroach. I'm naming him Wilson."

He finds more friends on Twitter. In reply to someone called MILE, Spector tweets: "One positive thing about old age is that you can remember everything that happened, even if it didn't happen."

Now, I'm not suggesting this is Voltaire quite yet, but few Twitter feeds seem to have such literary potential.

After all, this man was responsible for some truly great music. So here's a recent tweet on the subject: "Most producers don't create, they interpret. When I went into the studio I created a sound that I wanted to hear."

But perhaps not everyone appreciated how great he was. Especially colleges: "I'm concerned with the fact that I have not been made a doctor at any college and Bill Cosby has, even Dylan has."

Spector even tweets about his own potential insanity: "To all intents and purposes I would say I'm probably relatively insane, to an extent." And he suggests a reason: "My mother and father were first cousins. I don't know genetically whether or not that has something to do with who I am and what I became."

What he became, if even his recent Twittering is anything to go by, is a fascinating case, one that is strangely worth following.

In case you wondered, he is about to write an angry letter to try and get his wig back, he's listening to both Engelbert Humperdinck and Lily Allen on his iPod and he thinks "American Idol" is an insult to music.

Oh, and he's currently following only one person: Yoko Ono.

________________________________________________________________

Tech giants reportedly targeted in DOJ recruiting probe

Apple, Google, and Yahoo are among the tech giants being investigated by the Justice Department for possible antitrust violations related to negotiations over the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to aWashington Post report.

The review is said to be "industry-wide" and in preliminary stages, according to the report, which cited two unnamed sources. Companies that agree not to hire away talent could be stifling competition, the report noted.

Representatives for Apple, Google, and Yahoo, as well as the Department of did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tech companies, known for their exhaustive recruiting efforts, have waged fierce battles to maintain top talent. In one closely watched case, Google was sued by Microsoft in 2005 over Google's decision to hire Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft to run Google's research operation in China. The two parties eventually settled out of court.

IBM has proved particularly territorial about departing executives. Last month, the company filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent its former head of mergers and acquisitions, David Johnson, from joining Dell, saying it would be a violation of his contract.

Last year, IBM sued Mark Papermaster to keep him from joining Apple. The lawsuit claims were nearly identical, with IBM charging that Papermaster's joining Apple would cause him to divulge trade secrets and was a violation of the non-compete clause to which he agreed. IBM and Papermaster settled after three months, and Papermaster finally started working at Apple three months after that.

You can beileve in Microsoft's Project Natal

LOS ANGELES--About halfway through a closed-door demo I was in this afternoon of Microsoft's just-announced full-body motion-sensitive control system, Project Natal, another reporter told our host that he was skeptical of what he was seeing.

A minute later, after taking the virtual controls himself of the game "Burnout Paradise" and giving Natal a test, the reporter walked back over to where I was standing and when I asked him if he was still skeptical, he gave me a chastened look and said, "It's interesting."

In other words, he was won over.

Project Natal, as you probably know by now, was Microsoft's big announcement at its E3 press briefing here. It has gotten a lot of attention because of its promise to make it possible to incorporate all kinds of hands-free control into a wide variety of games: Racing games, painting games, shooting games, sports games and so on.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

But until now, I hadn't seen the technology close up. I was part of a small group that got the demonstration deep inside Microsoft's cavernous E3 booth. We were allowed to ask whatever we wanted, but we weren't able to take video or photos of the technology.

One thing that came out of the presentation: Tsunoda said unequivocally that the software behind Natal was developed entirely in-house at Microsoft. But he wouldn't address the question of where the hardware came from, or specifically, if it came from 3DV Systems, a company that has been working on this kind of technology, and which Microsoft recently acquired.

Having seen the 3DV technology a couple of years ago, I can say that what Microsoft is showing today is very much the same, but with a much more user-friendly front end. In other words, I would bet that 3DV is the source of that hardware.

Here's my quick impression: Natal is for real, and it may well change the way people experience video games, as well as anything else that is run through an Xbox 360.

Tsunoda began our demonstration by explaining the problem Microsoft had set out to solve: To make the gaming experience fun for everyone, while not alienating the core Xbox 360 fans.

"The control system is simple," Tsunoda said of Natal. "People can just jump in and have fun. (But there's) an extra layer of fidelity for core gamers."

Project Natal (see video below) is designed to be a one-to-one avatar control system, Tsunoda said. Wherever you move your hands, your body or your legs, the system captures it and mirrors it on the screen and in whatever game you're playing. "No (other) controller in the world allows you to control your whole body," he said. "Every part of the body is in play."

One interesting thing that came up in the demo is that when a woman stepped up to use it, the system recognized she was female and represented her on-screen as a female avatar with long hair. Tsunoda said that ideally, Natal will recognize users and be able to grab their existing Xbox avatars, but that in such a demo environment, it simply represented her the best way it could, given what it could see of her skeletal structure.

Another interesting point was the way Natal recognizes people's skeletal structure and analyzes how we move. Tsunoda made the point that Natal will continue to work even if someone walks in front of a player because it knows how the human body works. So, if a player had his or her arms blocked, but Natal's cameras could still see part of their arm, it can fill in the rest based on algorithms that tell it how that arm should look.

And it's the software, Tsunoda said, that's the "magic" behind Natal, and that allows the technology to "extract the human skeleton."

Natal is designed to work whether someone is standing up or sitting down, and can recognize users very quickly. We saw that in action when, one-by-one, we were invited to step up and play either a kickball game or a driving game. With a couple of exceptions where the player didn't stand in the right place, Natal did seem to almost instantly recognize that a new person was playing and, then, respond to their movements.

This may have been most impressive during game play of the racing game, "Burnout Paradise," when it was clear that Natal was doing a fine job of translating the player's hand movements--mimicking holding and turning a steering wheel--into moving the car on-screen.

Tsunoda said the technology behind Natal includes an RGB camera, an infrared camea, a multi-array microphone and a depth map. These features allow the system to track a player in 3D space, as well as to capture spoken commands from multiple people, none of whom have to wear a headset.

Asked how Natal differs from the many other motion-control cameras that have come along over the years, Tsunoda simply said that nothing that has ever come along before has been able to instantly work when a new player steps up in front of it, or when the lighting conditions change, or when someone else steps in front of a player.

"Ours, you can play any way you want," he said. "This just works the way you want it to."

Clearly, Microsoft is banking heavily on software developers--who are just now getting development kits--being able to utilize Natal in their games in such a way that players don't have to do any kind of configuration or tinkering in order to get it to work. Absent that instant-workability, the system loses a lot of its allure. But Tsunoda was insistent that that is Natal's value proposition and that developers will have no trouble making it work that way in their games.

If that's true, then it would seem that Microsoft has a real winner on its hands. As I wrote yesterday, any success depends, though, entirely on price point, and how users get their hands on it. But right now, having seen Natal close up, I have to say I'm a believer.

Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful

Google just opened up to a limited audience its very interesting communications experiment called Wave (news stories). Our hands-on evaluation: There's a lot to like. It really is a more contemporary take on communications. But it will knock many e-mail users off-balance.

Even Wave's own Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen told me, "It takes a little getting to," and, "We're still learning how to use it." Imagine how everyone else will feel.

If you want to try Wave, you'll have to wait. Google is making access to the service available to some developers and press, but full availability will not be until "later this year," Google says. The version we tested was very raw, still in development. Many features were not implemented and the system threw us a few errors. But the framework and philosophy is clear to see, and that's what this evaluation is based on.

Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail...

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

What's Wave?

Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you're writing a reply to a message (or "wave") that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as you type it. It will come as a relief to most that the real-time feature can be disabled if you click on the "draft" button (not working in my trial) while writing. But real-time visibility is the default.

You can put your replies anywhere in the message. You can also do this in regular e-mail, but in Wave, your comments are easy to pick out since the app bounds reply text in colored boxes with authors' pictures embedded in them. Those of us who prefer to reply to e-mail messages at the end (or the beginning) and not piecemeal can just reply as usual. But when you want to write a surgical point-by-point reply to a message, Wave makes it easy.

You can drop pictures straight into Wave messages (a neat trick in a browser-based app, made possible by Google Gears), and smart assistants will let you convert addresses to maps, automatically fix spelling errors, and expand contact names.

But Wave is not e-mail. In this image, I am watching co-developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen type replies to my query. The teal tag shows that Jen is typing right now; Lars, who just finished typing above Jens, had his own, separate color.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But it's the reply-anywhere feature combined with the real-time function that's most interesting. It makes Wave the first useful blend of e-mail and instant messaging that I've seen. Unlike Google's previous attempt to meld the two communications modes into one app (Gmail has Google Talkin its sidebar), this one really works. An asynchronous e-mail conversation between two people can can stay that way, or it become real-time when both parties are online, and the dialog stays in place in the e-mail for later viewing. Switching between the e-mail and IM mode is seamless. In fact, the concept of the two different modes vanishes in Wave.

Wave's message handling really shines when a conversation is between more than two people. Using Wave and its specific, color-coded replies, a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions -- or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things.

The Wave in-box pane shows you when there are new messages in your threads by bolding the subject lines, and when somebody is actively typing in a wave, you can see the text come in live, in the two-line preview every message gets. That's really cool, although it can be overwhelming.

Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It's a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it's very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience.

A new communications architecture

A lot of what Wave does is made possible by the fact that Wave messages don't live primarily in the desktop Wave client (which is actually a rich browser-based app), as the traditional design of e-mail dictates, but rather on the Wave server. Messages aren't just dropped off at your Wave client; persistent links to messages on the servers come with them. When you edit a wave with the Wave application on your computer, it's immediately reflected back to the Wave server, and from then out to other users who are viewing that Wave in their apps, immediately.

Wave servers synchronize with each other as needed. In fairness, this is not radically different from how Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange work, but Wave has no legacy support for old e-mail architectures whatsoever, and isn't bogged down by the old methods -- like the practice of delivering messages to users and then severing the links to those messages.

Other benefits you get from this include the capability to add new recipients to a wave at any time, and for Wave to know, when that happens, what each user has read and what they haven't. Users' views into Wave will highlight what's new to them when they open a message.

And, taking a page from Twitter Search, Wave's search function will be real-time (it wasn't when I tried it). If you are searching for a word or phrase in your inbox of waves, and someone updates a message thread with your search target, that message will pop up in your results the moment they type in the change. (You can save searches in the navigation bar, a nice feature.)

All together? Not yet

At the moment, the only people Wave users can communicate with are other Wave users. Wave addresses look like e-mail addresses, but there's no gateway between Internet e-mail and Wave, so messages send from standard e-mail clients to Wave will bounce. This is a serious limitation, and one Google hopes developers will rectify by writing gateways between Wave and standard e-mail servers, not to mention IM services and other social and workflow systems like Facebook, Bugzilla, and so on. A Twitter interface is already being shown.

However, as Rasmussen told me, Wave is currently spam-free since it's not linked into the global e-mail system. He doesn't want to open up Wave to standard e-mail until he can ensure that this system won't be overrun, too.

In fact, the reason Wave is being released in the way it is right now -- as an early developer-only experience -- is to encourage programmers to write extensions to it. The e-mail gateway is particularly critical, and Google may develop it itself. Without it, Wave is yet another new communications medium that will have a hard time getting off the ground since it duplicates many capabilities people are already accustomed to. Wave is technically a radical departure from e-mail, but for the end users it will still be used for a lot of the same things e-mail is.

Google's Wave team hasn't yet done much integration with other Google developers' projects, although Wave was introduced to the company through a detailed video demo. As Rasmussen told me, "To say we're 'working with' other Google groups would be a stretch." Obvious integrations we're waiting for include Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Voice.

It's about time

The merge of e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative editing is overdue. Aside from the inertia of technology, there's no reason we should we need different applications -- an e-mail client (or site), an instant messenger, and a collaborative editor -- for variations on the theme of textual communication. I give Google a lot of credit for kicking off this experiment.

When Wave comes out, try it immediately. It really is an eye-opener.

Court orders Dish to pay $103 million to TiVo

A federal court has awarded TiVo $103 million plus interest in its long-running patent dispute with EchoStar Communications and ordered EchoStar to disable infringing features found on its subscribers' digital video recorders.

U.S. District Judge David Folsom on Tuesday also found EchoStar, which is now part of Dish Network, in contempt of court for violating a permanent injunction by reprogramming millions of DVRs with a new "workaround."

"The harm caused to TiVo by EchoStar's contempt is substantial," Folsom wrote. "EchoStar has gained millions of customers since this court's injunction was issued, customers that are now potentially unreachable by TiVo."

Englewood, Colo.-based Dish, which has roughly 13.6 million subscribers, said in a statement it would appeal the contempt ruling and file a motion to stay an order that requires it to disable the disputed DVR features within 30 days.

"Our engineers spent close to a year designing around TiVo's patent and removed the very features that TiVo said infringed at trial," the company said. "Existing Dish Network customers with DVRs are not immediately impacted by these recent developments."

The Alviso, Calif.-based maker of set-top boxes applauded the decision.

"We are extremely gratified by the court's well reasoned and thorough decision, in which it rejected EchoStar's attempted workaround claim regarding the TiVo patent, found EchoStar to be in contempt of court, and ordered the permanent injunction fully enforced," TiVo said in a statement. "EchoStar may attempt to further delay this case but we are very pleased the court has made it clear that there are major ramifications for continued infringement."

In after-hours trading, shares of TiVo rose $2.53, or 36 percent, to $9.51, while shares of Dish fell $1.19, or 6.9 percent, to $16.05.

TiVo first sued EchoStar in 2004 for violating a patent on a "multimedia time-warping system," which involved recording a program on one channel while watching another.

A jury in 2006 found that Dish Network's DVRs infringed upon a patent held by TiVo and ordered it to pay TiVo$73.9 million in damages. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling in January 2008, as did a second U.S. appeals court in April 2008.

Can the Donkey Kong world record be broken?

Steve Wiebe, the star of the documentary, 'King of Kong: Fistful of quarters,' working to try, once again, to break the all-time 'Donkey Kong' world record.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

LOS ANGELES--Steve Wiebe is at it again.

The star of the documentary, "King of Kong: Fistful of quarters," Wiebe's past attempts--and failures--to break the "Donkey Kong" world record have been well documented and discussed.

But now, here at E3, Wiebe is taking another shot at the record--currently 1,047,200 points, and held by the other star of the documentary, Billy Mitchell--courtesy of the TV network G4, which, even as I write this, is hosting Wiebe's record pursuit on its stage at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Already today--while most of the E3 world was focused on the big Nintendo and Sony press conferences--Wiebe had taken at least two shots at the record, and with one, had gotten close: He'd topped 923,000. But both times, he'd come up short.

So now, with a couple hundred people watching and rooting him on, with shouts of "Let's go, Steve!" ringing out, Wiebe got going.

As long as you are at least somewhat familiar with the game, even if you haven't played "Donkey Kong" for years, the music it makes when it starts is oh-so-familiar. It's simple, '80s-era digital music, nothing fancy. Yet it sticks in your mind--forever.

Donkey Kong world record in peril

View the full gallery

Wiebe began his third attempt and he was doing well, playing flawlessly--at least to this amateur observer--and racking up the points. Around me, murmurs of wonderment were flying fast and furious.

"I didn't even know how to do that," one audience member said.

"This is the (level) that always kills me," another said.

Watching Wiebe play "Donkey Kong" is a study in calm. His technique, at least what I could see of it by watching his body language and a live video of the game being displayed on screens all around him, is smooth, calm, relaxed, and patient. He seems to know exactly what he's doing and what's coming at all times. Which, I guess, makes sense for someone who is good enough at the game to have a legitimate shot at breaking the all-time world record.

Every now and then, for example, the G4 crew point their cameras at a section of the audience, encouraging them to break out in a big cheer, which they do. These sudden, loud bursts of applause and yelling don't even seem to faze Wiebe.

"He makes this look really easy," an audience member said.

Within about 20 minutes, Wiebe has broken 100,000 points, a very impressive number for an amateur "Donkey Kong" player like me. But then you realize that it's only a tenth of the record score and that he could be at this for three hours, at least.

Watching Wiebe play, I was struck by how well "Donkey Kong" has held up over time, especially having just come from the Sony press conference, where I saw games with graphics and game play that the folks at Nintendo couldn't even have dreamed of back when they were making "Donkey Kong."

At least a couple hundred people watched as Wiebe pursued the world record score.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But the game, as well as others from its era--games like "Pac Man," "Frogger," "Dig Dug," "Space Invaders," and others--are still considered classics and seem to be regularly re-issued by their original publishers, or others. I wonder if the same will be true of today's games in 20 or 30 years.

Suddenly, the video screens showing Wiebe's play went haywire. Clearly, there's a glitch. Is this the end of the attempt?

It turns out that the power was inadvertently lost to the "Donkey Kong" machine, ending that attempt. But again, Wiebe looks imperturbable. It's probably good that he was only 100,000 points or so into the game. I wonder if he would have been so calm if the power had gone at 900,000 points.

Actually, though, he wanders over to talk to some of the G4 folks, and I hear him say to one of the nearby spectators, "The pace wasn't very good anyway." Which means that maybe, just maybe, he kicked the power loose. OK, I'm kidding.

After 5 or 10 minutes, the power is back on, and Wiebe takes his seat again. The machine turns back on, play is pressed, and once again, we hear that familiar "Donkey Kong" music.

And then, just like that, he's back up to 100,000 points.

I wanted to see what happened, and whether he'd break the record. But E3 is a busy event for me, and I had to leave. I guess to find out whether he made it or not, you'll have to turn to G4. But hopefully, I'll be able to update this story later with the final results. Stay tuned.