So I’ve unpacked enough to set up my “office” in the apartment and crank up the ol’ PC.  So now I can get around to writing on my blog once more.  Huzzah!

Which brings us to the first topic on my mind then, AT&T U-Verse.  What is it?  Is it all that it’s cracked up to be?

Well, AT&T U-Verse is basically just your every day cable/internet/phone bundle from AT&T.  It’s “fiber optic”.  Which basically means DSL in fancy-speak.  Yep, ye olde phone line is what powers U-Verse.  And your cable channels?  IPTV of course!  At least that’s near as I can figure anyway.  I didn’t opt for the phone option, as my cellphone is sorely underutilized as it is, so I don’t know if U-Verse uses VOIP or honest to goodness regular analog phone like old DSL options did.  Either way doesn’t much matter.  The point is thanks to companies like Tektronix, we’re able to find ways to push crappy old lines to data rates never even remotely dreamed of.  That crappy old DSL technology that couldn’t even remotely compete with cable … now can!

Mostly.

First, the caveat.  The setup in my apartment is not ideal.  Let me just say that my apartment complex, The Landmark at Hatchery Hill, has been somewhat less than ideal so far in that the apartment has a plethora of niggling problems and so far hasn’t even acknowledged that they should maybe get around to fixing any of the problems on the move-in checklist.  The apartment manager happily checked off the whole list as all ok, only for us to find 36 real issues.  From cosmetic “small hole in wall” type things, to water damage, mildew damage, shower door problems, phone jack broken, missing screws in electrical covers, etc.  Some things we’ve fixed ourselves out of necessity.  Everything else is a nuisance, but “livable”.  One such obvious hindrance is that broken phone jack in the living room, where our main TV is, not to mention my “office” where both my wife’s computer and my own reside.  So the primary TV and internet usage is in the room with the broken phone line on what is essentially a DSL-based service.  It brings out both the good and the bad of AT&T-s U-Verse.

That caveat stated, first let’s look at the good:  AT&T was able to provide us with a wireless setup.  I don’t just mean Wi-Fi.  I mean a wireless TV signal as well.  The secondary TV in the bedroom is actually set up as primary TV as far as AT&T is concerned.  It gets the wireless router with built in DSL modem.  And it gets the actual DVR.  And to connect to the living room box, it gets a wireless TV antenna connected via ethernet cable to the router.

In the living room we get a wireless TV box that takes that wireless TV signal (effectively one heck of a good wireless router system I guess, on a different bandwidth I hope) and gives us TV.  As a fortuitous surprise, the wireless TV box in the living room also has a network port which I have successfully glommed all of our living room’s networking off of!  I wasn’t expecting that, but it’s been a life-saver since the wireless router has to be in the bedroom in this broken-jacked apartment.  (At least until maintenance finally gets around to doing something about it.)  And that all works.  (Though I have not tested the networking speeds.  They seem quite good, which again suggests that this isn’t a simple Wi-Fi system delivering the wireless TV signal.)

And, like any modern system, you can access your recorded shows on your DVR from the other boxes as well.  So that’s something.

The TV boxes are pretty good in theory.  They have HDMI jacks and even component and composite wires and stereo analog and optical digital audio.  They have coax.  Great!

Now, the less-than-good and the bad.

Yes, the TV boxes all support High Definition.  Almost.  It’s everything that you could ask for in a box, really.  …Except 1. no pass-through and 2. no 1080p.  You read that right, in this day and age, where HD can practically be taken for granted because the standard is so old by now, and we’re all wondering when the next iteration of HD is coming, AT&T limits you to 1080i at best.  That’s pretty sad.  Not life-endingly sad, but certainly not the best technology can offer … has been offering for many years now.  I suspect this is how AT&T broadcasts their HD signals, so even if the box supported 1080p you’d still be stuck with a 1080i signal.  I have no proof, but that’s my guess.  It does significantly cut down the bandwidth after all, even if it is a less-than-ideal technology.

Speaking of substandard technologies, so is AT&T’s wireless router.  It’s an IEEE 802.11 b/g standard with minimal security.  Yes, you read that right.  My personal ancient router is a b/g/n, and AT&T is still pushing g as their standard?  Not only that, but my ancient router has real firewall feature built in and takes security seriously.  AT&T’s router?  Not so much.  So that’s why I have (and likely will keep it that way) my own router as the main point of connection for all of my PCs, wired and wireless.

And while it’s been claimed that we can watch four shows at once, that simply isn’t true.  DVR three HD shows for the same time slot and the thing wigs out and forces us to switch to viewing one of those three shows – at the recording.  It doesn’t even let us watch the channel that it’s recording like my old crappy Frontier cable box would let us do simply at the press of a button.  It forces us to switch to the DVR and watch the recorded show.  Three.  Not four.  Three.

And now for the real kicker, how does AT&T’s wireless TV connection handle every-day life?  Not flawlessly, that’s for sure.  Even with all bars allegedly present, indicating the best possible signal strength, AT&T’s wireless U-Verse TV is … flawed.  It likes to just plain drop its connection on average of once a day.  And I don’t just mean skip for a second.  I don’t mean lag.  I mean flat out FUBAR drop to where the box, after a minute of no signal, finally reboots itself.  (Or if you’re impatient, you get up and yank the power cable out of it to hard-boot it because the box completely stops responding during this time so you can’t soft-boot it.)  Thank goodness this isn’t the DVR!

It did that before I even had my own wireless router plugged in.  Before anything was even using the network at all actually.  Just pure TV, epically failing once a day.  And for the record, those other lags and brief second-long drops happen too, much more regularly.  You’d think you were on an ancient satellite TV system, you get so many flaws.  The only reason that I put up with it instead of cancelling the service is because eventually, when the apartment complex finally fixes my phone jack, I’ll be switching the boxes around so that the wired TV is in the living room and the awful wireless TV signal will be for the rarely used bedroom TV set.

And then there are all of the weird eccentricities.  For example, the channel guide is neither color coded, nor even bothers to show you when a program is “new”.  It must know it somehow, since the DVR can be set to record only first showings, but you’ll never find any kind of indicator that a show is either new or a re-run.  The preview of the channel as you use the channel guide is theoretically a good idea … except that it lags moving on to the next channel until each and every channel has loaded, making it very slow and painful to scroll through channels.  A simple programming change to delay the preview of a channel until you’ve rested on a choice for a second could miraculously solve that dilemma.  There’s no way to set the default recording behavior of the DVR and AT&T’s default settings are not what I would have thought anyone, let alone myself, would want as a default.  And so on and so forth.  It’s just a lot of poor design.

Conclusion?

So, there you have it.  AT&T’s U-Verse is not cable.  It’s throwing a lot of technology at an age-old problem, that phone lines just don’t carry enough bandwidth.  And a lot of that technology is cutting a few too many corners.  AT&T has come up with an “okay” solution.  It’s not awe-inspiring.  It’s barely keeping up with the Joneses.  It’s not 1080P.  The wireless router is cheap crap.  The wireless TV makes you feel like you’ve got unreliable satellite even at its best connection strength.  The box/DVR software has some less-than-ideal design that makes some things awkward to use.  In all, everything about it only just barely does the job adequately.  But, that said, it does the job … just.  I’d give it a 3 unusable phone jacks out of 5.

So I’ve been up all night with a combination of allergies, flu, indigestion, and I’m pretty sure a barometric pressure shift.  I’m an itchy, gurgly, achy, coughy, hot, cold, churny, sore, sinus mess.  So I just can’t seem to sleep.

The brain does funny things when you’re exhausted.  Gears try to turn, but as the engine revs wildly, the transmission slips, and you just never know what’s going to happen.

But sometimes, that’s a good thing.  On that rare moment of pure random luck, you launch like a bat out of hell.

So as I’m not sleeping, I’m watching an old episode of Through the Wormhole about multiple dimensions.  That’s always fascinated me.  Not like sci-fi parallel worlds, but like theoretical physics, string theory, etc.

Except … what if they’re actually related?

I mean science fiction does occasionally prove eerily accurate.  And some awesome writers do try to incorporate real science into their works of fiction.

Still, a moment on string theory.  Really people?  Seriously?  After all these years, you still can’t even agree on a number of dimensions?  Everyone’s math is still imperfect?  And we can add more wild speculation like branes and still nada?  And now we’ve even got someone claiming there’s only one dimension?  Sheesh!  I could throw darts at a board and do a better job of theorizing.

And so, I will!

Here’s an idea that I’ve been refining for a while now, that time is multidimensional.  I don’t care about more than three dimensions in space.  I’m concerned with more than one dimension in time.  And I think the key to proving that is in quantum physics.  Because I’m truly starting to think that when an event happens on the quantum level, it really does have multiple simultaneous states.  We only see one state, but in other temporal dimensions, other states also occur.  At the same time.

Originally my model was perhaps a little oversimplified.  I imagined that similar to how we have three physical dimensions (X, Y, and Z for a lack of better names), we have two temporal dimensions: time and entropy.

Now don’t get too caught up in the name “entropy”.  I just didn’t know what else to call it.  And I’ll get to explaining why I chose that name.  Because if the total sum of the energy of “The Universe” were actually being split between supporting all multiple simultaneous states of every quantum event, represented as parallels of the same universe, that would mean that the number of parallel universes increases (rather rapidly most likely) over time.  Which would mean that the individual fraction of energy contained in each parallel would diminish as time moves forward.  (And conversely, as time moves backwards these parallels would merge, increasing in individual fractions of energy, eventually into one single massive all-energy event.  Which would certainly model the Big Bang Theory, no?)  It’s something like a tree.  As you move up the trunk (time) the number of branches (temporal entropic parallels) increase.

Now, what is “entropy” if not the nature of the universe to decrease in energy over time, causing the distance between matter to continually expand.

So what seemed like an awfully appropriate name for the second temporal dimension then?  Right!  Entropy.

And I still think that model is generally true.  However I’m starting to entertain the possibility that what I theorized as one extra temporal dimension could actually be multiple dimensions.  Perhaps there are actually three entropic dimensions?  Or four?  Or six?  Who really knows.  I’m not even remotely interested in trying to do the math.  I’ll leave that for people who find math entertaining.  **LOL**

But regardless of the number of entropic dimensions that expand our understanding of “time”, after watching that episode of Through the Wormhole, I’m starting to see a relationship of this model to explaining gravity being such a weak force.  Because what if while most particles like photons are limited to a single parallel, gravitons were instead able to traverse these temporal entropic parallels?  It would explain why gravity is such a weak force.

That is only the beginning of the explanations this model refinement adds however.  Because if gravitons aren’t stuck in a single parallel then this would suggest that the multiple temporal entropic parallels are actually spatially linked by forces of gravity shared between parallels drawing objects of mass together to the same points in space across parallels.

Now, what would happen if all of this were true and, say, a big amount of matter were to exist in the same place (at the same time) across many of these temporal entropic parallels … but for some reason be absent in just one parallel?  That one parallel would see the gravitons enter that parallel en-mass … without matter in that parallel to explain that force of gravity.

Sounds an awful lot like dark matter, doesn’t it?  Gravity without an explanation observable in our parallel.

So there you have it.  Because I feel like crap and can’t sleep, my neurotic brain just explained dark matter to me.  Multiple simultaneous quantum states existing at a single point in time, represented across multiple temporal entropic parallels, creates the playground in which were gravitons able to freely pass between these parallels that dark matter can be easily modeled.

So the universe may physically be a torus, but temporally it’s a tree, according to Arah’s Entropic Theory.  And now I’m hungry for a maple donut. 

DisplaySearch did a worldwide study of consumer TV purchasing, and much to my surprise (NOT!) has found that consumers don’t give a whit about 3D TVs. And internet connectivity didn’t fare much better.

The DisplaySearch study gave consumers 17 factors to weigh for the importance of their TV purchases. Of these were general factors like size and thinness, and technological features such as 3D-capable, internet connectivity, and LED backlighting. The study has results separated by country, though this separation seems to matter very little. Even early adoption countries like Japan showed little variation and a very small interest in 3D technology.

“Even Japanese consumers, long considered to be early adopters, cited 3D as a relatively unimportant factor when deciding to buy a new TV,” said the DisplaySearch Global TV Replacement study.

Ouch.

What did appeal to customers? Power consumption, thinness, light weight, and overall size were the predominant factors. While LED backlighting, internet connectivity, and 3D were amongst the least important purchasing motivators.

Which, actually, is kind of ironic, as it is the move to using LEDs for the backlighting that has allowed modern LCD TVs to be so thin and use so much less power. (Something that I was actually amazed at myself when I recently plugged my LED-backlit TV into my UPS and saw how little strain it actually placed on the UPS’s overall load.) It’s a sales point that TV manufacturers seem to be neglecting badly in their marketing campaigns if consumers are so unaware of this important detail about LED-backlit TVs.

Of other interest were the overall display technologies numbers. The incredible vast majority of TVs purchased, about every 4 out of 5, were LCD-based. Cathode ray tubes (CRTs), those big bulky TVs of old before flatscreen, come in as second and still account for a stunning 13.2% of TV sales. Plasma however, LCD’s biggest flatscreen competitor (technologically wise), came in at third with a mere 6.6%. And random stray bits of display technology like reverse-projection were negligently measurable.

And specifically, as for 3D? Just how many TVs sold were 3D-capable? Only a miniscule 4% of the TV sales in the survey were 3D TVs. Truly, consumers aren’t sold on 3D TV as a feature.

And honestly, who can really blame them?

Having watched in-store demos of 3D TVs, I myself wasn’t sold on the concept. Even the best-case scenarios, the marketing materials, varied widely in usage of depth. Some scenes jumped out at you, almost painfully so, looking positively ridiculous like reading a child’s pop-up book. Where as others made so little use of depth that you really had to concentrate just to see any 3D experience at all. Run together in a loop, it looked positively ridiculous. And made Nintendo’s depth slider on their 3DS an obvious necessity if 3D content producers are so varied in their usage of the pseudo third dimension. Some kind of automated normalizing function would certainly not be amiss.

But worse, really, even at their best, the 3D videos really just felt … lifeless and fake. There was no subtlety, no bump mapping, depth blending, no attempt whatsoever to portray any sense of reality. At least when it comes to TVs, 3D continues to be the gimmick it has always been since its inception. The methodology of displaying it to the consumer may have improved, but even if you can overlook the continued unfortunate need for glasses in most cases, problematic to the optically challenged amongst us, it’s still just so … ridiculously fake. It’s no wonder that Nintendo has warned of potential visual development problems in young children from viewing 3D. One wonders how long it will take TV manufacturers to be required to post similar warnings.

But regardless of my personal distaste for 3D television as it is offered today, and of the limitations of the technology, it stands now in clear statement that I am not alone, that the incredible vast majority of television set consumers are also unconvinced of the merits of 3D TV. And one wonders if this will improve over time and 3D TV will increase in adoption, or if the death knell of the resurgence of the 3D fad has already rung.

I recently went out TV shopping.  Having relocated, my TV was one of the things that I left behind.  Using my monitor as a TV was fine enough as a stand-in, but it was getting old.  And I wanted something new.

I took a few moments to check out the 3D TVs.  I put on the glasses.  I watched the stunning depth.  At first I was pretty unimpressed.  But that turned out to be that particular part of the demo loop that was uninspiring because it really wasn’t taking advantage of the depth aspect.  But then when it started going over some better done examples, like the Beijing Summer Olympics opening ceremony in 3D, I was enthralled.  Amazed.  Stunned!

For maybe twenty seconds.

Because after the initial shock of the whole depth perception really jumping out at me, I started to notice one glaring flaw.  This wasn’t 3D.  This was a TV version of a pop-up book.  Yes, there was depth.  But it was all done on flat surfaces.  It was even less real than no depth aspect at all.  It was a cute eye-candy gimmick, but it wasn’t even remotely close to adding realism.  It was like going back to “3D” video gaming in the ’90s .  Only worse.  Exaggerated.  Ridiculous.  I was actually glad to take the glasses off and go back to the flat world of 2D imagery.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think 3D TVs have a future … in the future.  One day I’m sure the technology will revolutionize television.  When it’s done right.  When the depth perception at the very least has something like bump mapping.  When 3D scenes look real.

And preferably when it can be done without glasses.  I mean what are people who wear glasses supposed to do?  If I hadn’t had my contacts in would the glasses have even fit let alone been comfortable?

But all was not disappointment.  No.  Not at all.  For next to impress me were the new LED LCD TVs.

The “ultra thins”.

Just how thin these TVs were was truly impressive.  Literally thinner than two finger widths.  Even faced with the reality of them, I still cannot wrap my mind around just how thin LED LCD technology could be.

And the image quality!  Oh my goodness were the whites white, the blacks black, the colors vivid, the contrast stunning!  Plasma TVs had nothing on these LED LCD bad boys.

But most amazing of all?  LEDs used for backlighting are the lowest possible energy consumption lighting.  So these LED LCDs are not just “Energy Star compliant”, they far exceed the standard.  They positively sip electricity.  Over the lifetime of the TV they probably pay for themselves in electricity savings over TVs with other types of backlighting.  If not and then some!

That is impressive.

LED lighting really is the future of being green.  And bringing it to TV has never made them more beautiful.

Things just aren’t going so spiffy for Sony lately.  They’re losing to Microsoft in the sales race for motion controls.  The Xbox Kinect seems to be outselling the PS3 Move.  Which probably has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft’s Kinect doesn’t use some gimmicky controller you have to hold.  Well, that and you can plug it into your PC.  Unofficially at the moment, though Microsoft claims they’re going to make it official.

Then add to that Sony’s Playstation 3 master encryption key has been leaked.  Sony is desperately trying to wage legal battles to keep it from spreading.  In the US that means attacking George Hotz, AKA GeoHot.  But now a German hacker freedom fighter, Alexander Egorenkov AKA graf_chokolo has also been releasing his own PS3 3 hack-o-rama in the form of a hypervisor being called the “HV Bible” which helps folks hack their PS3s to install Linux.  Sony is not amused, and has been trying like mad to close down websites and confiscate equipment.

But even that’s not all.  No, Sony is also facing a losing legal battle against LG in Europe over Blu-Ray patent infringement.  The courts have officially approved a ten day ban on the import of Playstation 3s and Bravia TVs.  Sony will likely appeal the ruling, but on the opposite side of that coin LG could peruse continued legal action to extend that ban.  So if you’re across the pond, expect to see the store shelves getting bare.