With all the bad rap the self-proclaimed “heir to Bittorrent” eXeem has been getting the past couple of months, I guess it was only a matter of time before the P2P community produced its own contender. Anatomic P2P is an interesting little project because it’s so classically open-source: bits and pieces of technology are borrowed from other successul projects and welded together Frankenstein-style into a whole new application.

At its core, Anatomic is a lot like eXeem in that it attempts to decentralize tracking, thereby returning the responsibilities (and liabilities) of filesharing to the actual users. But where eXeem had the kooky strategy of turning every user into a tracker (which even to a non-programmer would sound like overkill), Anatomic takes a slightly more sane approach: it has a SuperTracker entity that caches the IPs of all other (regular) trackers, similar to the way the Gnutella2 network works. So when a bit-torrent client tries to download a file, it doesn’t have to know who or where the trackers are.

In a way, it seems like the whole system is just adding a degree of complexity to a scheme that has worked very well in the past. However, current legal issues have forced Bittorrent to evolve beyond “what works” into “what is legal.” In the words of the developer: “The trackers and supertrackers know little about the files they are sharing […] In the eyes of a tracker it is only tracking a hash and this is less incriminating. The tracker/supertracker cannot control what it tracks so it therefore has the same status as a router on the internet (in theory).”

Read the rest of the interview here. (via the P2P weblog)

Canon and Nikon’s DSLR pissing contest continues, with the upcoming debuts of the EOS 350D and the D50, respectively. The EOS350D shoots at 8.0MP resolution with a new CMOS sensor and features little upgrades all across the board, whereas the D50 (which is mostly just a bunch of rumors at the moment) is staying with a more conservative 6.0MP sensor and possibly, SD cards as storage(!). Since the 350D is expected to debut at a lower price point than its predecessor, I’m assuming that the D50, with its slightly lower specifications, will do the same.

If either of the two models are cheap enough when they become available here, it might be worth dropping a few gold nuggets to get one.

*Picture is a fake, btw.

From Slashdot:

[…] the next version, dubbed Photoshop CS2, is supposed to add several new features such as Image Warp and Vanishing Point, as well as changing around the file browser to allow users access to royalty-free images from five providers for use in their work. The new version is due in May …

To be honest, I’m actually pretty satisfied with where Photoshop CS is at right now. CS addressed the very last gripe I had about Photoshop’s UI, i.e., not being able to pan the canvas past the edge of the document, and all the other CS enhancements (Layer comps, etc.) were really just gravy.

Come to think of it, the one thing I’d really really like would be more programmable actions. For example, I’d love to be able to record an action that could open a layered PSD and save each layer as its own web-optimized file (with filenames taken from the respective layer names).

It’d also be cool if it had some kind of conditional too, so that it could execute different actions depending on the state of a file. For example, if a particular image is longer than it is wide, it’ll rotate it. Little things like that could save you a ton of time when processing hundreds of photos.

Oh, and I’d also love it if there were some way to copy the slice-layout from one PSD to another.

… Hmm. I guess CS isn’t as perfect as I thought.

… Oh, and if they’re gonna come out with Adobe Illustrator CS2, I’d appreciate better anti-aliasing on rasterized fonts please. And slightly more accurate image-slicing.

And rulers that are subdivided by 5’s and 10’s instead of 8’s, for crying out loud!

And Mesh Envelope Distortion with arc-handles that you can turn off.

Yup.

Oh dear, my favorite web-statistics tool has just been bought by my favorite search-engine. Imagine the power of Urchin’s stats engine charting your Google Adsense performance. Oh boy oh boy. (via Scripting News)

Charlene Li gets an extensive preview of Yahoo’s new social-networking cum blogging service, Yahoo 360, and likes what she sees:

Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated “stuff” is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique – and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service.

This is an exciting little concept, and I can’t wait to see what kind of effect this will have on Yahoo’s 160+ million user population.

From the BBC:

The drummer of the Australia-based rock band Crowded House has been found hanged in a park in Melbourne.

Ambulance officers said he had “attempted suicide” and died from strangulation. He was already dead when they arrived at the scene.

I’m actually more confused by the report’s wording (wouldn’t it have been simpler to just say “he committed suicide” rather than say he “attempted suicide” and … well, succeeded?) than saddened by Paul Hester’s death, although I’m sure the folks who are familiar with Crowded House beyond “Don’t Dream It’s Over” would probably be pretty affected by this news.

Gizmodo reports that Sony has just “partnered with Korean internet provider KT Corp. to offer internet service for the PSP via the company’s 14,000 hotspots.” This news is both thrilling and saddening for me, because 1) Koreans get all the good shit, and 2) they’ve got a wireless hotspot for every 5 sq. km. (14,000 spots over a land area of 98,000 sq. km.), which is probably one of the highest ratios in the world.

In the Philippines, by contrast, we have, oh, 1 hotspot per 600 sq. km. (a little less than 500 spots* over a land area of about 295,000 sq. km.). Not that that’s a big deal, considering that less than 10% of the population (4 million out of 85 million, as of 2002) are regular internet users, and half of that reside in the Metro Manila area. So actually, if you consider that Metro Manila only has a land area of about 600 sq. km., and you assume that about 80% of the country’s hotspots are probably in that area, it’s not a bad ratio.

*A rough and probably baseless estimate; the leading wireless internet provider in the country has about 90 operational hotspots, so 500 seems to be a decent ballpark figure.

Power pop demigods Teenage Fanclub aren’t set to release their 7th studio album until the first week of May, but you can listen to one of the tracks over at Scenestars right now. (Or you could download the whole thing brand-new at indietorrents, come to that.)

I’m listening to the collection, entitled Man-Made as I write this, and my first impression is that it’s almost as if the past decade never happened for these guys. Their sound has gotten a bit more polished and their melodies aren’t as overtly pop, but the timeless Byrds-meets-Big-Star, fuzzy guitar sound is still all there. “Time Stops,” the track available at Scenestars, is telling in that it’s reminiscent of their very first single, “Everything Flows,” from way back in 1990. (It’s got a killer jam at the end, btw.) The other thing I noticed is that the selection is a lot more consistent than their previous albums, which had gems and rough spots in equal measures. Nearly every track in Man-Made is above average, with a fair bunch of standouts, including the aforementioned “Time Stops,” “Save”, the all-too-brief “Slow Fading Pictures” and the high-flying “Falling Leaves.”

I haven’t heard anything that’s likely to dethrone “Sparky’s Dream” as my Favorite Song of All-Time though, but maybe this is the sort of collection that improves over time. Either way, it’s easily one of Fanclub’s best efforts, so check it out.

Sony’s 3-year legal battle with Immersion Corp, a small Californian tech firm that specializes in vibrating gamepads, came to a head 2 days ago, when a federal judge ruled that Sony was infringing an Immersion copyright with their dual-shock controllers. Sony has been ordered to stop selling PS1 and PS2 units with said dual-shock controllers, as well as some 40 game titles. The payout amounts to a little less than 2% of Sony’s total earnings from PS1 and PS2 sales, which admittedly isn’t much. However the court also granted Immersion a license on the dual-shock technology, which Sony must pay for as long as dual-shock-related sales continue. US$90M is more than four times the annual revenue of Immersion Corp (just a little over US$20M) but is far less than their original target of US$299M when the case was first brought forth in 2002.

A lengthy conversation with mike and kel about the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS last week has convinced me that a portable gaming device may be a very reasonable object to plunk down some hard-earned cash for next month. I’m still undecided as to which of these two 10-ounce wonders will be afforded the great honor of becoming my Official Boredom Alleviator, but both seem to have some fairly unique qualities.

Before I start comparing, I thought I should first list down the similarities of the two devices, namely:

1) they both sport dual processors (the PSP has two RISCs, while the DS has two ARMs)

2) they both weigh about 10 ounces (with the PSP heavier by about half an ounce)

3) they both have some form of wireless networking built-in (Wi-Fi for the DS, Bluetooth for the PSP)

… well, that’s actually about the only things they have in common, as the two devices are worlds apart in terms of form and function.

At first glance, the Nintendo DS is a bit on the ugly side, as you can see from the photo. I suppose you could argue that this is all a matter of taste, but I’m the sort of guy who’s willing to pay a premium for good looks, and that DS ain’t it. It does however, have some other things going for it, namely a second screen in its bottom half (that’s touch-sensitive, no less) and support for old GBA games. Not that I actually own any old GBA games, but backwards-compatibility is always a plus. Oh, and it also has about 8 hours of battery life, which is pretty impressive considering that it’s powering two screens and two processors. Another cool feature is that you only need one copy of a game to play over Wi-Fi with your friends, which is something I haven’t seen since the floppy-disk days. It’s even got a built-in microphone and rumor has it that some rudimentary phone technology might be in the works (although admittedly, the form factor doesn’t exactly lend itself to phone-type usage).

Did I mention it has a touchscreen? That little doohickey might just be the solution that first-person-shooter fans have been waiting for, according to this Ars Technica review; they call it the closest thing to “mouse/keyboard emulation outside of the PC.” Kinda makes you wish someone’d find a way to port Quake 2 into one of these things, doesn’t it?

And speaking of games, the DS launched with a rather mediocre game library, led mostly by a refurbished Mario 64 and Sonic Team’s Feel the Magic. The general opinion online is that the rather oddball design of the DS is taking developers awhile to wrap their minds around, but the swiss-army-like features should allow for games that do things we never thought possible, if used correctly.

All this for $150 (about PhP10,000, locally) makes the DS a pretty reasonable purchase if you don’t mind the clunky looking body.

The Sony PSP meanwhile, is a thing of beauty. You’ll have to see the videos of it in action to really appreciate how gorgeous this thing is, but style-wise, it blows the DS out of the water.

Naturally, beauty comes with a price, and the first thing you’ll notice when confronted with a PSP at your local electronics store is that it costs over $100 more (about PhP20,000+ locally). Whether or not that extra $100 is money well-spent depends greatly on what you expect from your games. Whereas the DS performs like the old Nintendo 64, the PSP has graphics comparable to the current PS2 platform (which explains why it costs almost as much I guess).

Features-wise, the PSP sports Bluetooth wireless as well as USB2.0 wired connectivity, and accepts two input formats: Memory Stick Duos and Sony’s new proprietary baby, the Universal Media Disc (UMD). Neither of these two formats are the sort of media you’re likely to find in your average enthusiast’s game den, which is one of the things that turns me off about Sony in general. For the most part, Sony seems to be slowly improving though — if the PSP had come out two years ago, it probably wouldn’t even support MP3s, opting instead to go with that crazy ATRAC audio format they were pushing at the time (it does now, thank God).

But while the PSP brings some major eye-candy to the table, it is relatively conservative in terms of interface. It doesn’t have any of the frills, such as a touchscreen, built-in mic or stereo sound, the DS does and its battery life is positively miniscule (about 3.5 hours tops). That’s barely enough to last you a full day without running for the nearest wall socket, and is less than what you get with most modern laptops.

Personally, I wouldn’t've minded a more powerful battery in trade of slightly more weight or bulk. Neither of these two devices are going to be travelling in your pants pocket anyway; and anything below 15 ounces isn’t going to be very heavy if you’re holding it with both hands.

Although it doesn’t try to revolutionize gaming the way the DS is, the PSP is attempting to expand in another direction entirely, that of the multimedia handheld market. Apart from having MP3 support, it also sports a photo viewer and a movie viewer (although you’ll have to buy your movies on UMD to watch them, which pretty much kills this feature for me), and people have already managed to hack a working internet browser on to it. Unfortunately, the attempt seems pretty half-baked to me considering that you can’t currently buy Memory Stick Duos in sizes larger than 512mb. Pretty laughable if you’re trying to take on Apple’s iPod Photo or Creative’s Zen Portable Media Center.

My honest opinion in the whole matter is that the current best convergent device for communication, entertainment and personal information is the cellphone, something like HP’s rw6100 for example, which has over 160mb of built-in memory, supports the much broader SD format, runs on a 520mHz processor and even has Wi-Fi. Now if they built these things with USB2.0 host capability, it’d totally own, because then you could connect it to your iRiver and watch the movies stored on the iRiver’s bigger hard disk. But I digress.

Although I have a great love for the PSP’s look, I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of the value-added features that Sony keeps bandying around. I mean, I’ve already got a far better audio player (the Iriver) and a better movie viewer/web browser (the TabletPC), so essentially all I want is a good portable gaming device. The thing that’s really turning me off with the PSP is the battery life — its 1,800mAH pack, which is relatively big for a portable device, can barely keep it going for more than 4 hours according to most reports, and it takes about 2.5 hours to charge it back up. Essentially, this means only one thing: you’ll need to shell out more cash for an extra battery, putting your total purchase over the $300 range and well into the realm of second-thoughts.

Conclusions

When I started writing this article earlier this evening, I was pretty sure I’d choose the PSP at the end, but as I read more and more, I can’t say I’m quite as confident backing Sony’s little golden boy anymore. Although it certainly looks and acts like a $250 unit, I see a couple of areas where it’s lacking. On the other hand, the DS isn’t exactly a wonderkind either, with its weird clamshell/touchscreen stylings and its (relatively) underpowered processors.

I’m pretty much back where I started now, and still completely at a loss as to which one to choose. Both devices perform better when your friends have the same units as you, and the PSP’s cost makes that sort of LAN-party-fantasy out of reach.

Maybe I should just spend my money on an SFF instead.

*I lost track of all the links and pages I visited in the course of writing this article, but some of the more definitive references include engadget, zdnet, ars technica and slashdot.