Tuesday, September 3, 2002

I won't let go of the music topic easily this morning. A few of you are probably archiving your music libraries in digital format and, to first order, that probably means you are compressing the music using mp3. There are better things to use. I was in an organization that was heavily involved in creating the superior aac codec. Before spending the time converting a library you should test the codecs against a reference. [...] Hint - (thanks to JJ for the suggestion) try harpsichord music. [...] Now if Apple would just put aac in the iPod (and I can hear Fernando nodding) [Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] Nod, nod. Some of my iPod favorites are two harpsichord recordings, Gustav Leonhardt playing BWVs 996, 904, 914, 992, 998 (Philips 416 141-1), and Trevor Pinnock playing the Goldberg Variations. I listen because I love the music, but I notice artifacts, as I do in a few passages of 192kb conversiopn of the amazing JSB organ recordings of Helmut Walcha. 10:51:30 PM

Of PowerPoint and Pointlessness. The number of teachers using PowerPoint presentations in class is on the rise. This raises a question among education theorists: What is the point? By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News] Too many vapid business presentations and a few delicious satires make PowerPoint an easy target. But there is at least one good reason for its popularity, which is that it includes a somewhat usable outliner. If there is one computer tool that schools should teach widely but do not, it is how to use an outliner to organize, refine, and rearrange one's argument. It doesn't help that the outliners packaged in popular applications are much less usable than the sadly exiled Acta and MORE. The newcomer OmniOutliner is a breath of fresh air, although it needs better export capabilities, maybe via plug-ins or XML, to work well with other writing and presentation tools. 9:44:31 PM

Consumer groups fight spam epidemic. Consumer watchdogs plan to ask the federal government to implement new rules to alleviate deluge of unwanted e-mail. A new tool lets people tell their spam horror stories to the FTC. [CNET News.com] Technical and legal measures may dent spam, but the only thing that will really control it is stopping the spammer's freeride by charging for SMTP (port 25) packets. Individual packet metering is not needed, just bulk peering arrangements. If you send me much more SMTP traffic than I send you, you pay me for the difference. The per-packet cost is set low enough to be easy to fold into standard ISP charges for "nice" users, but high enough to create a real cost to abusers. Since ISPs are responsible for paying for the traffic they generate, they have a real incentive to stop abuse, or pass the cost to abusers, who would then become much more discriminating in their spamming. "Hit-and-run" schemes in which spammers sign up for ISP accounts, generate a spam flood, and leave town without paying would be easily controlled by requiring an upfront deposit to allow more than a set number of SMTP packets per day. Open relays would be quickly shut down as the host ISP would come after them to stop costing them peering charges. If a few big ISP and backbone providers started this, and refused SMTP packets from non-agreeing carriers, everybody would fall in line quickly. 7:36:36 PM

Hack attacks on the rise. August was the worst month on record for digital attacks, with the number steadily increasing due to rising political tensions, say experts. [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY] Again rolling out usual experts and playing the still speculative cyberterrorism angle. While the real daily damage is the wasted time and other resources by millions of end-users and systems administrators fighting floods of Klez-generated messages, let alone spam. I've had the misfortune of having my email address in the address books of one or more Klez-infected machines that are now spraying the world with messages purporting to come from me. I get the bounces and the stern automatic mailings from virus detection email gateways. At least these gateways could be smart enough to recognize Klez spawn and stop bothering me. While the press worries about "political tensions," we are flooded by net effluvia created by a bunch of low-rent hooligans and confidence men exploiting the products of an irresponsible industry enabled by ignorant and easily manipulated consumers and governments. 6:40:42 PM

Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web [Slashdot] As expected, existing scientific publishers say it cannot work. But imagine that just a fraction of what academic institutions spend on journal subscriptions was diverted to fund electronic publishing of scientific papers. Many free journals could be supported. The challenge is to create a funding model for scientific publishing that is cooperative, long-term but also decentralized, to avoid bureaucratic control. Some academic institutions are already funding implicitly particular efforts like the Journal of Machine Learning Research. 12:20:30 AM