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Tuesday, March 26, 2002 |
Garmin Rino-GPS Show and Tell
"jspectre writes: "Garmin, makers of fine GPS products, has a sneak peek of their upcoming Rino (Radios Integrated with Navigation for the Outdoors). A new handheld combination of GPS and 2-way Radio using the common FRS spectrum. In addition to downloadable maps, trip planning, weighing 8.5oz and being waterproof you can "beam" your location to other Rino users while you talk to them. Your location will show up on their GPS display allowing you to navigate to each other. Expected availability, June 2002. Great fun for geocaching parties I'd think." [Slashdot]
11:54:45 PM Permanent link here
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"How long will it be until we start seeing judges who have at least some passing knowledge about technology?"
"The answer is they exist already. 'They' being judges who have at least "passing knowledge." The real question is: when are there going to be enough of them so that a modicum of knowledge about how technology works becomes the norm. I don't know. I'm still waiting for it to be the norm for judges to use common sense in deciding cases.
But that raises an interesting point. If you have no basic understanding of how technology really works then what sort of 'common sense' would you, as a judge, apply? The world is changing at an ever increasing rate [see this], and law's speciality has never been to keep up with change. Rather, its time-honored role has been to formalize rules that represent a consensus solution (i.e. one that a significant part of the population can agree is correct). Consensus solutions obviously take time. Lots of time. In short: as the pace of change picks up, our justice system (as it is presently constituted) will pose an ever-increasing barrier to meaningful change. And groups and organizations that exploit the entrenched resitance to change have a significant advantage." [Ernie the Attorney]
Will and I had an interesting chat today in which I think we agreed that the pace of technology will continue to outpace human applications of it in other arenas. You can try to teach concepts, though, which is what Will would like to see happen in our schools. Hearty agreement from me on that one.
11:39:53 PM Permanent link here
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"Compare this estimate of personal storage space to this page of examples of what can be stored.
Note: we are currently at year zero on the storage estimate. A standard Dell machine now sold has 120 Gb of personal storage or 0.120 Tb of storage. We will pass the ability to store all the printed materials of the Library of Congress in 2008. If we had copyright term reform, we could see a world where people carry around the Library of Congress -- legally -- on their laptop." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
And it would be cataloged, too!
11:30:40 PM Permanent link here
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Hamilton Librarian Loses Job After Choosing Heads in Coin Toss
"For no particular reason, Usha Rangachari picked tails. And with that five letter word, the Hamilton Public Library employee got to keep her job. The library held a coin toss Tuesday to determine whether Rangachari or another employee would get bumped into a more junior position." [via Library Stuff]
I'm going to have to dig out my grade school yearbook because I think I went to school with someone named Usha Rangachari!
11:28:13 PM Permanent link here
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Abe Lincoln and the Internet Pirates by Michael Eisner
"Abraham Lincoln would have loved the internet. But he would have hated the internet pirates who commandeer its high-speed circuits to steal....
But he undoubtedly would have disdained those who go to sites with names such as Gnutella, Madster, BearShare, Limewire, Swaptor, Morpheus or Rapigator to pilfer the intellectual property of others." [FT.com]
Commentary from John Robb:
"Michael Eisner quotes Lincoln as a defender of intellectual property rights. He is probably right about that. However, he would have choked on the idea that term of protection for copyrights would last 95 years or more! That's more than the life expectancy of 99% of humanity or nearly 4 generations of Americans! This is the equivalent of saying that a copyright's protection lasts until "hell freezes over." Certainly this isn't what the framers had in mind when they enshrined the protection of intellectual property for a "limited time" in the constitution. There isn't a reading of the constitution that could conclude otherwise." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
My favorite quote from Eisner's editorial:
"These disturbing trends can be reversed. New technologies can be developed by computer companies to make it harder for the hackers to hack. New business models can be devised by entertainment companies to support the consumer's clear desire to access and own content in new and exciting ways. And legislation can be enacted to establish clearly that, just as people pay for fruit at their local fruit stand, they must pay for music or films or books or poems or software on their local hard drive. Most important, what is needed is a common conviction that theft of all things is wrong."
Note the way he dances around without ever guaranteeing the transfer of existing fair use rights to the digital world. His "new business models" statement refers only to access and ownership in "new and exciting ways," - not a replication of existing ways. I'm sure to Eisner de-fanged PCs that are really just WebTVs is indeed "new and exciting." However, I sure don't see it that way.
We've seen a very clearly delineated path that the entertainment industry would like to see the tech industry follow in order to guarantee their precious intellectual property rights for 100 years or more. I have yet to see something similar from the entertainment industry detailing the path they will take to ensure a consumer's fair use rights. Funny how they keep side-stepping that little scenario, isn't it?
Another question: if they agree that someday a work could fall out of copyright (100+ years), how would your locked-down machines know its rights had changed? Another little loophole for which I don't see anyone making accommodation. I guess if we don't think of it now, then copyright laws really will last forever!
And it's not like I would expect it in this type of opinion fluff, but still no recognition from the entertainment industry of the role libraries play in society. Their digital road map for the future should include how they plan to accommodate existing circulation rights for libraries, too.
11:21:09 PM Permanent link here
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Peter Harbeson: "Metadata in blogs is a terrific idea -- I've been thinking about it too."
"As I've said before, I'd most like to see blog posts enabled for the semantic web. Now, inserting metadata manually is tedious at best, and the author isn't always the best judge of what metadata to insert. I'd like to see an extension of the Google model into automatic generation of metadata."
I like Peter's idea, although it's still based on someone knowing the initial link. I still want the combination of embedded meta tags written by the user plus Peter's Google extension. More brain fodder to chew on....
11:01:15 PM Permanent link here
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"Canadians may soon be smuggling blank CDs across the border in an effort to avoid the high taxes that have been proposed for any recordable media that can be used to store music.
The tax, called the Private Copying Tariff and backed by the Copyright Board of Canada, is intended to compensate musicians for income lost when consumers copy music onto digital storage media.
'If this tax is passed, it will raise the prices on products that most businesses now use to store data,' said Joseph McCormick, a corporate law attorney. 'It's unfair to Canadian consumers and it's unfair to businesses. Not everyone with a CD-burner, a PDA or an external hard drive is a thief.' " [via bOingbOing]
Canada is also facing its own version of the DMCA debate.
10:41:46 PM Permanent link here
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Google versus Church, round 3 - Scientology critics again claim Google censorship, this time through Adwords program
"Sources tell Microcontent News that Google is now rejecting anti-Scientology ads from its Google Adwords program, claiming the right to 'exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site....'
During the first Google/Scientology controversy, users searching for the word 'Scientology' were unable to find any sites critical of Scientology on the first page of search results. Privacy advocates turned to Google's Adword program as a workaround, as several techies and privacy advocates bought ads pointing to Xenu.net....
Sometime last weekend, that measure was shut down as well, as Google began rejecting ads critical of Scientology....
Further inflaming the issue is the fact that pro-scientology ads continue to run on Google. In the multiple Scientology-related Adword campaigns analyzed by Microcontent News, only anti-Scientology ads seem to have been rejected." [Microcontent News]
10:28:47 PM Permanent link here
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Aaron of Montreal's Weblog DTD
"Aaron sent a note on a Weblog DTD he proposed to the one of the tool builder lists. More things to look at 'when I have time'." [More Like This WebLog]
Follow the trail to BlogML. Interesting idea. I think standards (plus meta tags, etc.) advance the blog cause far more than the professional versus amateur journalism debate.
10:02:29 PM Permanent link here
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"Ad Age. New WSJ site to be launched. According to the article, this was the result of a $232 m project and will include a $21 m ad campaign. Wow! The site currently has 650,000 subscribers that pay for access. Now, I can imagine that their business models project that they will expand their subscriber base to 2-3 m people over the next three to five years at an average subscription cost of ~$75 a year. However, that is unlikely given that nothing on the site has really changed. Why? From everything I've read, it sounds like it is going to be a one-way website in the old model. Yawn.
What they need are subscriber weblogs that enable their smart readers to cover the news on the ground in financial markets, corporate offices, and points of sale around the world. That would change the equation, boost the amount of news generated by 20 to 30 fold, and make the WSJ something you couldn't do business without." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
It would be pretty sad if they came out of a $232 million project and didn't even have the basics of what I want to do for $5000 with the SLS portal (like RSS syndication). I like John's idea about subscriber weblogs. I've never paid any money for the WSJ, but I might consider small fees for the tech section if they'd send me the headlines in my news aggregator.
Of course, I'd want them to be pre-authenticated so I could just click on them for the whole story. But that's coming down the pipe, folks are already working on that technology. I get enough news elsewhere that I won't shift into their world. The key is for them to shift into my life where it's convenient for me (just like libraries!).
9:56:21 PM Permanent link here
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"The company's i95cl handset is a clamshell device with a 256-color, 120 x 160-pixel display. The company said the display was designed to accommodate applications such as streaming video and games. it comes pre-loaded with several games including Snood, AstroSmash and MotoGP....
The company said the phone will be available in summer, 2002 through Nextel Communications and Southern LINC in the U.S. and TELUS Mobility in Canada." [ allNetDevices Wireless News]
Additional information from a Motorola press release:
"It contains expanded memory capabilities, enhanced T9® text input and Lightweight Windowing Toolkit (LWT) functionality....
The handset features a color icon-based menu for easy navigation and a choice of six changeable color palettes. Its Java applications are integrated into the user interface, allowing users to conveniently select applications from the main menu.
The phone offers a hands-free speakerphone for conference calls, voice-activated dialing, and a voice recorder. The two-way radio function allows users to communicate instantly with one or hundreds of individuals at the touch of a button. The phone’s rich polyphonic sound can replicate 16 voices or instruments simultaneously and support the sounds of 128 harmonic and 47 percussion instruments."
Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of it. Watch where you step. I'd hate for you to slip on that pool of drool.
8:40:20 PM Permanent link here
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A Better Printable Page: How to prepare online content for offline reading
"The only people who don't print Web sites are those without printers. Even Mormons print Web sites." [NUblog, via meryl's notes]
How to use CSS to create printable pages. This is on my list of mandatory features that whatever software we choose for the SLS Portal must provide out-of-the-box. Either the ability for me to set up CSS for this or a script/macro that creates a printable page automatically. This sounds simple enough, but after months with Oracle Portal, I have no idea how I would do this in that software.
8:25:04 PM Permanent link here
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My Long Bet with the NY Times
"The question: which will be more authoritative in 2007, weblogs or the New York Times?...
My bet with Martin Nisenholtz at the Times says that the tide has turned, and in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want." [via Scripting News]
7:57:24 PM Permanent link here
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"The backlog of undelivered and irradiated mail has not only changed lobbying in Washington, it has cost the Library of Congress (LC) significant revenues in copyright registration fees.
According to the Library of Congress Gazette, the weekly staff newspaper, copyright revenue dropped by $2.5 million during the first four months of the fiscal year, October 1–January 31. Thus LC has asked for an additional $7.5 million to cover not only those losses but anticipated losses from a reduced flow of mail for at least four or five months." [Library Journal]
The Copyright Office should just claim this loss in revenue is due to Napster and ask Congress to step in with reparations.
11:37:19 AM Permanent link here
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Will has come through again and pointed me to a couple of lawyer + blog resources:
Keep 'em coming!
9:32:16 AM Permanent link here
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It's only 8:45 a.m. and I'm already having a mind-bomb morning thanks to David Davies. Here's why:
First, he provides a DIY web service for picture galleries that I can install on my site. I've got some pictures from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix that I want to post, but I don't have the time to make the thumbnails. At some point, I'll probably try David's web service.
Second, he provides a DIY web service for filtering Radio RSS feeds by keyword. This really sparks my imagination for how I could better aggregate news for SLS staff internally. It's another way I could filter on a more granular level than the whole channel, especially if I can get other library entites to buy into my vision of sharing information via RSS.
9:19:52 AM Permanent link here
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But here's the real reason there is smoke coming out of my ears as my brain hits overdrive. David is heavily into Manila and even getting it to play nice with Radio. I've been racking my brain trying to figure out if some combination of Manila and Radio would give me the tools to build the portal I envision for SLS. The following excerpt would seem to indicate that I could pull this off and that there is even a team of folks writing plug-ins that would help jumpstart my project.
"A big breakthrough for us was exploiting browser cookies to devise a shared membership scheme that didn't use Manila's built-in authentication but rather an external membership database. Our users also authenticate against a regular HTTP realm in WebSTAR for all the static content serving. The single log-in authenticates against the realm and sets a browser cookie for shared Manila access.
Once in a module's manila site here's what you'll find. Metadata is supplied using both John's excellent plug-in to give Dublin Core metadata but also our own subject-based metadata that we use for interoperability with other VLEs in other institutions (e.g. See http://medweb5.bham.ac.uk/databases/interop/mcqs/). We write our own metadata into a message's table in Manila."
Here's the problem, though:
"Our budget? Two Frontier licenses and a lot of my time. Plus the invaluable support of UserLand in developing Manila plus the active developer network."
SLS could afford the Frontier licenses, but time and the learning curve might be too great a barrier. I'm having trouble figuring out how to evaluate this well enough to make an informed decision.
9:19:17 AM Permanent link here
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Here's the other mind-bomb that's exploding in my head right now. Dave's whole setup is centered on creating a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), not a portal. He's using Manila, instead of WebCT, which is what we are using for LibraryU. Given the coming price increase and the difficulty our course designers have encountered working with WebCT, maybe we should consider switching to Manila.
Interoperability might be a big factor here. Could I use web services to provide real-time access to databases in tutorials? Would it make it easier to re-use pieces of a module in others? Would it be easier to duplicate and extend the LibraryU templates in Manila? I have a feeling the answer to all of these questions is yes, but how do I decide that definitively and then persuade others. I anxiously await the results of the technical audit of Dave's system! The trade-off would be the new learning curve, which would be a total 180 for both SLS and me. Of course, there isn't a much steeper learning curve than Oracle and PL/SQL so it might even be more do-able.
9:16:43 AM Permanent link here
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Note to self: don't forget to read through the Usability.gov Guidelines during phase II of the SLS Portal project. I think I already know and even implement a lot of these, but it's good to check during the design phase.
8:34:32 AM Permanent link here
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Current Top Ten list from David Letterman: Top Ten Signs You've Been Watching Too Much Basketball
10. Your skin has turned orange and bumpy
9. After an enjoyable meal, you celebrate by cutting down the ceiling fan
8. You've named your kids Gonzaga and Valparaiso
7. Every couple of days you update your tattoo of the 64-team tournament bracket
6. Make up your own "35-second shot clock in the bedroom" joke
5. You actually know how to spell "Krzyzewski"
4. Instead of telling kids bedtime stories, you summarize beer commercials
3. You've worn out 3 La-Z-Boys in 2 weeks
2. You got sent home from work again for showing up in nothing but a well-placed "Go Hoosiers" sign
1. After watching 9 hours of basketball on CBS you swear you saw a show with a talking baby
I thought the extra "Lately you've been watching CBS more than your grandparents" was funnier than their #1.
7:58:30 AM Permanent link here
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How much data is there in a byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte or yottabyte?
"Whenever we discuss quantities of data, we tend to do it in the abstract. We speak of a kilobyte, or a megabyte or a gigabyte without really knowing what it represents." [James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door, via Dane Carlson's Weblog]
Very cool link! Note that about the last measure of collected human knowledge used is "2 Petabytes: All U. S. academic research libraries."
6:47:34 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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