An excellent counterintuitive point that I had not though of before from Megan McArdle:

Moreover, cutting our consumption of oil will not do anything to reduce our dependance on oil from the Middle East.... If we cut world consumption back to 20 million barrels a day, we would be totally dependent on Middle Eastern oil, because they're the low-cost producers--it takes, if I recall correctly, less than $5 a barrel to pull oil out of the ground in Saudi.  The Middle East will be the last place to close the taps.  The more we cut world consumption, the more dependent we'll be on crazy Middle Eastern governments.  Those governments might not be as rich.  But we'll still need them just as much, as long as oil remains critical.

Martin Feldstein proposes

a programme of “mortgage replacement loans” that I believe would stop the downward spiral of house prices. The basic idea is to provide an incentive to stop defaults among those who now have positive equity but are vulnerable to a further price decline. The federal government would offer every homeowner with a mortgage the opportunity to replace 20 per cent of that mortgage with a low interest government loan – up to a loan limit of $80,000 (€55,000, £44,000) – that reflects the government’s lower borrowing rate. Creditors would be required to accept this partial mortgage pay-down and to reduce the monthly interest and principal by the same 20 per cent. That mortgage replacement loan would not be collateralised by the house but would be a loan that the government could enforce by lodging a claim on an individual who does not pay.

Greg Mankiw thinks potentially distressed homeowners won't go for it because this

"mortgage replacement loan" scheme involves tricking homeowners into accepting a deal that is not really in their self-interest. For very little in return, they give up the option of future default. So count me as skeptical.

There is another problem: non-distressed homeowners will go for it. The 30-year treasury rate is a little less that 4.5%. Someone with a 6.5%, $1,000,000 mortgage on a $2,000,000 home has little reason not to have the government refinance $200,000 of their mortgage because it would yield an interest savings of $4,000 per year.

Although making such a loan seems like a small risk (assuming that Feldstein means his loan would not be dischargeable in bankruptcy) the risk is not zero and that means there is a cost to the government of making a bunch of low interest loans to the non-needy.

If, as Feldstein and Mankiw agree, "there are no easy answers" why not let things play out as they are, but use this as an opportunity to try to get government out of the housing market by getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and making other changes along the same lines? There are pretty strong reasons to default to market solutions absent strong evidence that (i) there is a market failure and (ii) the government can fix that failure.

I was intrigued by the economical home site license ($50/year for all the PCs in your house) for the new VIPRE anti-virus and anti-spyware application. With seven PCs of various types in our home, this seemed like a great deal. My experience after several days has been nothing but positive.

I had tried the beta version of the application and found it to be problematic and given my past experiences with AVG Antivirus slowing down boot times, I was afraid VIPRE might have similar problems.

I have been pleasantly surprised. My boot times have never been faster with VIPRE installed (I now boot and am able to load the Google front page in 2:10, 30 seconds fast than with AntiVir. Unlike AVG and Antivir, I don't get popups and slow installations of updates. I am encouraged as well by the fact that Sunbelt touts VIPRE as not being a resource hog. This claim seems to be anecdotally supported in some of the reviews I have seen.

I am using the two-week trial on my home office PC now, but if the trial continues to go well, I will buy a site license and deploy VIPRE on all our home PCs.

Yesterday I installed a Company of Heroes and Crysis on my home office PC. These were the first retail PC games I had installed in over a year.

For the past couple of years I have been playing most games on the Xbox 360 mainly because even solo gameplay on consoles has seemed inherently more social: I on the same floor as my wife and kids, even if they are in another room; and often the kids like to watch me play and this is much easier on a large TV.

But there are some other reasons as well: the console gameplay experience is much more plug and play that that of the PC (where installation (and maybe more) is necessary before actually playing the game); I am not a real time strategy game aficionado and, with three young children, I have lacked the long stretches of free time for turn based strategy games (both genres where the PC has traditionally shined); and lastly, it annoyed me that I could not play the most recent showcase game for PC graphics (Crysis) in its full glory on my 1600x1200 desktop monitor using the geForce 8800 GTS video card I had purchased with my PC.

What has finally lured me back to the PC is the nVidia geForce GTX 260 graphics card. With the release of this card, I could finally play Crysis at 1600x1200 on my PC for less than $300. So I purchased that card, Crysis and Company of Heroes (the two games I had most missed in my PC gaming hiatus) from Newegg for a grand total of about $330 and installed everything yesterday.

The graphics card installation went smoothly. I installed it, connected dual power connectors, downloaded the most recent nVidia WHQL certified graphics drivers and was set-- although the PCs CPU use was high for a good while after the installation for some odd reason.

I installed Crysis, applied the patches and tried to start the game. It failed. It turns out you have to start the game each time before applying the patches, so I had to uninstall Crysis and the reinstall everything using that method. Success.

Company of Heroes (the gold edition that includes Opposing Fronts) installed without any issues, but when the game tried to download the two necessary patches itself the process often go stuck after only about 1MB had been downloaded. Finally, yesterday evening, I was able to complete this process.

Unfortunately, with all this time spent on installation I've only just been able to start to Company of Heroes tutorial-- but it looks excellent. In fact, it reminds me of Myth looked when I first saw it 10 years ago!

There is an exellent new Microsoft blog called Engineering Windows 7, that has an excellent post today from Steven Sinofsky, the key manager of the Windows 7 effort. If today's post is any indication, the blog promises an interesting look into how all the different aspects of Windows are developed and should give people a better appreciation for why the final release looks like it does, i.e. why a feature that seems simple to implement isn't there.

The blog shows no indication that it will be revealing features that may ultimately be cut, but it is pretty interesting nonetheless. More More transparency about how complicated the work they do is can only help Microsoft.

The existence of this blog lends credence to Ed Bott's speculation in May that Windows 7 will probably be released in 2009.

Within the past week or so, Microsoft announced that the "Fiji" update to Windows Vista Media Center, would only be available on new PCs purchased from select OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). This upset many of those posting comments on The Green Button (the most prominent Media Center Enthusiast site). Nevertheless, Microsoft has been content to turn a blind eye to those who want to try out the feature pack on a unsupported basis. Many have done so with mixed results.

The best commentary on the significance of this move has come from Ben Drawbaugh (whose post is an allegory to the Goonies), Ed Bott and and a Media Center Show podcast that Ed did with Ian Dixon (with the latter being the best single source of analysis because of wide ranging nature of the dicussion). There are so many quality insights in the above sources that I won't attempt a comprehensive summary, rather, I'll relate my own perspective as a user, why I won't be installing the TV Pack, and some thoughts about the future.

I was disappointed that the only features in the TV Pack in which I would really would be interested are:

• Heterogeneous tuner support-- the ability to use many more combinations of TV tuners (e.g. Cablecard, ATSC, clear QAM and NTSC instead of just ATSC and Cablecard) and have fallback tuners; and
• Favorite channels and channel name searching-- the ability to have a list of favorite channels or to search for a channel by name instead of having to look through 100's of channels.

I would have liked to see:

• H.264 video codec support (so I could watch video MPEG4 video podcasts using Media Center extenders);
• The ability to fast forward and rewind audio files using Media Center extenders; and
• Better updating of the library/index for audio files and photos.

Because most of the functionality added with the TV Pack addressed support for many more international TV signal formats, I can understand why Microsoft did not go to the trouble of making this update work when installed on existing Media Center setups: the few features that would be useful to people would not have justified significant testing and engineering challenges involved in that. Nevertheless I am disappointed that almost 2 years after Vista became final, there has been no real update or Media Center

I don't plan to install the TV Pack because the few extra features of use to me aren't worth the disruption to our home media center which is used by the entire family. Those disruptions would include:

• Inability to access any existing Cablecard recordings (which is about 700GB of content).
• No support from Microsoft.
• The problems those with Cablecard systems have run into when they have tries to install this update.

It appears that most Media Center releases going forward may coincide with Windows releases. This would be a problem if it occurs as Microsoft could fall significantly behind third party developers like Sage if they take this approach. So let me suggest an alternative: save infrastructure improvements for Windows releases, but release annual feature packs that address less structural issues adding features and functionality in the Media Center application rather than those that require changes in the operating system itself.

Despite the disappointment with the TV Pack, at the end of the day, there really is no good alternative to Media Center for those who have a multi-room system that want access to digital cable programming.

I have found that I spend a fair amount of time taking and organizing (tagging, etc.) photos that I have taken. I do the organization and taggin with J River's Media Center and then do most of the viewing using Vista Media Center (specifically and extender hooked up to a television).

It struck me recently, that I should probably take the extra steps of putting some of those photos in some other places as well: (i) Facebook, (ii) a web photo sharing service I could use to email links to family members, (iii) Flickr, and (iv) our home's two electronic photo frames that use SD cards.

Because all but (iii) I can pretty easily do using J River Media Center, and (iv) I can do easily with the Windows Live Photo Gallery, I have resolved to make photo sharing a part of my photo organizing routine:

• J River Media Center can share photos to Facebook with right-click menu selection.
• J River Media Center can also easily share photos to its Pix01.com with a right-click as well. Although this service is pretty limited, it has the virtue of being free, fast, simple and privately viewable.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery can easily share photos to Flickr.
• Using Media Center I can create a playlist of photos for our picture frames by dragging and dropping the photos, and then sync those photos with the SD cards that go in the photo frames.

Why print photos when there are so many other, easier ways to use them?

Here is an excellent 16-minute interview that 1Up's Shawn Elliot did with Id's John Carmack. The interview is really extraordinary for Carmack's candor about the business of video game development, including mistakes that Id has made recently.

Although it isn't necessarily clear from this interview Shawn continues to impress me as one of the most insightful game critics around, a characteristic often on display in the GFW Radio podcasts, which have outlived the Games for Windows Magazine to which the originally related.