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Saturday, January 03, 2004 |
Wes Felter says
that the new top level domain, dot-name, started off with the right
idea, but then morphed to be just like all TLDs. Wes explains the right
idea: you can't buy smith.name, but you can buy john.smith.name. This
is even neater than the idea I discussed yesterday. Read the comments there, good stuff, as usual. [Scripting News] 
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How many bytes to store all human speech, ever?.
Interesting discussion of the number of bytes necessary to store all
the syllables ever uttered by every person who ever lived, and when
acquiring that number of bytes will be in the realm of affordability.
First, the proposed configuration would amount to 1.2 petabytes, which
is a thousand times smaller than 1.2 exabytes. Second, a 5 exabyte
store would roughly be eight thousand times too small to store "all
words ever spoken by human beings", at least in audio form. Therefore
the 2007 cluster's storage would be too small by a factor of about 32
million rather than a factor of 4. I freely confess that maybe the
authors were thinking about text -- but in the first place I'm a
phonetician, and in the second place most human languages have not had
a written form. So bear with me here for a while.
Link
(via Ben Hammersley) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Public Sterling interview on the WELL.
Bruce Sterling's doing a public interview on The WELL -- it's just been
running for a day or so, and it's already accumulating some primo
SterlingRants:
Spammers are not monsters ten feet tall. Spammers are vermin.
If we all looked, acted, thought and behaved as badly as
spammers do, our world would be reduced to desperate penury.
Spammers are parasites. They contribute nothing to the
general welfare. Spammers couldn't trust each other with
five bucks to walk down to the corner grocery and bring
back a loaf of bread. They are wicked and malicious
and they should be brought to justice.
The day when the delete key still ruled, well, these
cool clean technocratic days are over on the Net. Microsoft might
patch some security holes here and there, but there are
no technical solutions to semantic frauds like
phishing. The Internet has become a massive, worldwide medium.
It has become a global arena of massive popular struggle,
It's Chinese Indian American Brazilian European, the world wide works,
and it reflects our own faults and deficits with cruel accuracy.
When we look at the Net these days, we are staring
straight into the portrait of Dorian Gray.
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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Warren Ellis: moment of phonecam zen. Author and blogger Warren Ellis shot this phonecam snap with a Nokia 3650, then opined aloud:
"What I just clicked into is that futurephones are very good for the
micro, and that weird impressionistic smudging and the odd focal length
creates its own suite of weird effects.
This was made by touching the phone's top down on some gravel on the edge of a puddle in a back alley.
The photo is upside down -- if you look closely at the top half of the
picture, you can just make out the stones underwater in the puddle. I am oddly pleased with this little picture."
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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Why we hoard.
A Bronx man was trapped for two days under an avalanche of harded
magazines and catalogs with which he'd filled his apartment. The NYT
investigates the emotional and intellectual basis for haording,
including these delicious little case-studies:
One woman, for example, found throwing out a newspaper so unbearable
that her therapist instructed her never to buy one again. Another could
not pass a newsstand without thinking that one of the myriad
periodicals on sale contained some bit of information that could change
her life.
And a third, trying to explain why she had bought several puppets
that she did not want or need from a television shopping channel, spoke
of feeling sorry for the toys when no one else bid on them...
Toby Golick, a clinical-law professor at Cardozo Law School,
described the case of an elderly Manhattan man who rescued broken toys,
discarded toasters and dilapidated umbrellas from the street until even
his kitchen and bathroom were too crammed for use. The situation came
to light only when the landlord could not squeeze in to fix a leaky
faucet.
Link
(via Making Light) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Futurismic blog starts accepting fiction submissions.
Futurismic, a terrific group-blog run by sf writers, has decided to
begin publishing fiction online, paying a nominal-but-respectable $100
per story. I love this idea, if for no other reason than it will give a
bunch of writers an opportunity to read "slush" (unsolicited
manuscripts), something that really helped me learn what mistakes new
writers make and how to avoid them. Some other stuff I like: in an era
when most magazines still insist on paper submissions, they're only
reading via the Web, and insisting on ASCII, pasted into a form, for
submissions. ASCII is the new PDF!
Stories should be compelling and well written, with a strong emphasis
on characters confronting or embracing imminent cultural, social,
technological, and scienctific changes. Post-cyberpunk, Information
Age, and near-future extrapolations will be welcomed--serious or
satirical, straight-forward or gonzo, optimistic or pessimistic. We are
not interested in fantasy, horror, or more conventional SF themes such
as space opera, time travel, first contact, or alternate worlds.,,
Our reading period for the first half of our publishing year will
begin on January 3, 2004 and end on February 3, 2004. Any manuscripts
sent before or after these dates will be deleted unread. Because of the
short timeframe, you may send two stories during this reading period,
but please do so in separate submissions. We'll begin to respond some
time in mid-February, and hope to respond to all submissions within
three months of the reading period's closing. At this time we're only
planning to publish one story per month, so only six stories will be
accepted during each reading period. (The second reading period of the
year should occur in July 2004.)
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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How to rip vinyl, per the NYT.
The NYT has published a detailed how-to for converting vinyl LPs to
MP3s or CDs. When Napster started, it solved two distinct problems. The
obvious one was that you might not have the CD handy that you wanted to
listen to (either because you hadn't bought it or because you'd left it
somewhere else, i.e., at your parents' place while you went to
college), but the more subtle one was that ripping CDs used to be really hard. You needed specialied software, tons of hard-drive space, and you had to title all those tracks by hand.
This meant that once one person had gone to the trouble of ripping a
disc, it made a lot of sense not to replicate that effort: better to
download someone else's rips from her Napster share than to go through
that fooforaw on your own.
Today, ripping CDs is literally a one-click operation, but
ripping vinyl is still very freaking hard. Newsgroups like
alt.binaries.sounds.78-era often get nice payloads of ripped wax,
shellac and vinyl, but the general attack on P2P means that this stuff
is getting harder and harder to find on demand, which means that more
and more of us are having to individually rip our music, one side at a
time, in order to transfer and preserve it (80% of the music ever
recorded isn't available for sale -- if you want to hear the song on
that groovy LP through your iPod's headphones, you're gonna have to get
ripping).
Some LP restoration software suites, including Pinnacle Clean Plus
($100), come with an external preamp that plugs into a U.S.B. port and
works with your existing sound card. (Clean Plus and other software
choices are described in more detail in the accompanying article.)
There is also the iMic from Griffin Technologies ($40,
www.griffintechnologies.com), a small input device that converts analog
signals to digital outside of the computer, eliminating the possibility
of electronic interference from other computer components...
You also need lots of hard-drive space, because sound files
occupy about 10 megabytes per minute; that would be almost a gigabyte
for all 77 minutes of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Trout
Mask Replica."
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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