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Friday, April 26, 2002 |
a common noble cause. As i am aware that a few of us here have recently put ourselves under one common noble cause: parenting. That's how this article gets my attention. "Bob Cringely's 74-day old son died of SIDS. Now he wants to kick off an open source research project to understand more about sudden infant death. [Advogato]
5:11:38 PM 
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Keeping in Touch with the Times.
" It was bound to happen — others had somewhat similar designs, but now there’s a high-quality, touch-screen wristwatch being produced in Switzerland — and I can report that it’s very, very cool....
But, the T-Touch is solid — a stainless steel case and bracelet — and it’s smart too.
As for the features, with a touch of the screen the T-Touch can tell you the time (obviously), date, temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, direction (compass) and it also controls alarm and chronograph (stopwatch) functions. My favorite function is the compass. I’ve seen watches that rotate hands when you press a button, but the T-Touch rotates then combines hands into a straight arrow pointing device, then the arrow floats on what seems to be a cushion of air as it points north. You also see your exact bearings readout on the LED screen. Really neat.
There are a lot of watches that can do some of these things, but none I’ve seen can do them with such finesse. Touching the screen is a light tap on the sapphire crystal, not a heavy push (or two) on a small button hidden somewhere on the side of other watches. The T-Touch is the kind of electronic device you’d expect from Swiss craftsmen without giving away the complexity inside. You have to try it for yourself to understand what I mean....
My big problem with the T-Touch? They’re charging too little for it. I even told the Tissot folks so. Tissot has set the U.S. retail price at $595." [MSNBC.com] [The Shifted Librarian]
5:05:10 PM
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The ether is abuzz with talk of Zoe:
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke.
So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context.
Zoe is a email client. It's also a email server. And a long term archive. And a search engine. And an application server. All that at once on your desktop....
It allows you to keep your messages. Over time. For a long period of time. As long as there is some disk space somewhere. It's your personal archive. Always accessible. Always up. Always ready to migrate somewhere else if you choose to (see the email server part). It's your messages after all. Now you can sleep soundly without having to worry about how you will keep -over years, over jobs, over relocations- those hard won messages. They will go where ever you want them to go.
However, by now, it's more than just a big pile of random texts (aka emails). It has been fully indexed to the last significant bit. Information have been extracted. Relationships have been made. Links have been discovered. Information was put in context. Normalized. A knowledge base has been build. For you. Automatically. Accessible at a key stroke. When you need it. Without you moving any single one of your busy fingers to write some arcane filtering rules to some soon to be unmanageable folder structure (see "Intertwingularity") in some cumbersome proprietary email system. No. Instead you get universal accessibility to your very own knowledge base. Automatically. Just for you....
The main point is: you have your own personal "data center server" accessible from all over the planet. Instead of typing www.hotmail.com to check your email, you could very well instead connect directly to your own PC sitting in your very own living room from some internet cafe in the Australian outback...."
It's unclear to me whether this is going to run on my WinME PC at home, but I'll probably be trying it to find out because I'm so intrigued by this software. If nothing else, I'll definitely be installing it at work when my machine gets upgraded to Win2000 next month in order to test it. Did I mention this software is free for personal use?
Last year I bought Powermarks to manage my browser bookmarks because after six years, they were just too out of hand. The nice thing about PM is that you don't have to worry about filing bookmarks anymore. Instead, you can assign keywords to a site, and then when you go to search for something, you type a word in a box and it starts narrowing down the entire list of bookmarks to those that match your query. Type "g" and anything that doesn't start with that letter disappears from the list. Then type in "p" and it narrows down to everything that includes a word that starts with "gp." Add an "s" and then you've narrowed the thousands down to the few that contain "gps" in the site title or in the keywords.
It's a pretty powerful program and it's made life much easier. Many a time have I wished for this same capability in my email, considering that I've got 4,000 messages in my inbox at work alone. Maybe this is the answer! [The Shifted Librarian]
5:02:46 PM
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 Philips Electronics Weighs in on CBDTPA and DCMA
Did I tell you the other day about companies not agreeing on standards? Yep right here.
Today the rubber-met-the-road in the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, where they are held hearing on "Ensuring Content Protection in the Digital Age." The invitations list of people testifying read like a who's who* (below) of the rich and powerful insiders within the Entertainment, Internet, and Technology Industries. [Too bad I didn't get invited. I would have loved to given the Committee a piece of my mind from the standpoint of the educated consumer. ]
However it appears we may have a champion on our side. Today appearing at the hearing, Philips Consumer Electronics North America, President and CEO Lawrence Blanford testified that something's rotten in Hollywood. Blanford explained to the Committee in plain language about the problems being created by the 5C Group who are working together to create Digital Content Protection System for digital video and audio. Blanford representing Philips and customers everywhere, explained that if the current standards being created by the 5C Group were allowed to become a standard in order to support the DMCA and other intellectual property laws, "the customer would suffer by having to replace their DVD players in order to watch digital TV programs they have all ready recorded."
In a copy of his prepared statement before the Committee, I received today, Blanford went even further to explain that the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (AKA the 5C Group made up of Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita (Panasonic & JVC,) Sony and Toshiba are planning an expensive, proprietary encryption program that will interface individually and within the proposed IEEE 1394 (Firewire) home-network standard to block the consumers ability to copy any video or audio program they may wish to use later. Blanford stated:
"Because this proposal would require encryption in the home of free over-the-air digital television broadcasts, and because this proposal would place in the hands of a few companies control of all consumer electronics devices through private, contractual licensing arrangements, Philips believes that the current direction is seriously flawed."
Just lovely. So now we have the big companies cavorting in some engineering study groups deciding how WE the consumer will get to enjoy our soap operas and reruns of MASH, ER and Sesame Street or music after we come home from a long day at work. Flipping lovely. This is all because groups like RIAA and the DMCA have been allowed to run without a bridle.
Clue to Congress: Wait until women who record their soap operas everyday, so they can watch them when they get home from work, figure out this new technology is going to make that impossible. Remember women vote in larger percentages than men. Can you say ticked off voters? Uh huh.
While Blanford admits in testimony that the Philips understands the necessity to balance the the rights between copy holder and the customer. (Philips actually has some of the best broadcast equipment in the business.) Philips has also worked to create a standard which prohibits the direct illegal copying of video tapes through their "Serial Copy Management System," as well as several "watermarking protocols." However Blanford also explained that despite the millions of dollars of development costs involved: Philips gave the "Serial Copy Management System," away for FREE to other companies for the asking.
Blanford continued his comments by also explaining to the committee that Philips supports:
- "Consumers’ fair use rights must be preserved in any technical or public policy solutions to digital age challenges
- Backward compatibility has been the backbone of the consumer electronics industries’ product designs.
- Consumers react negatively and very strongly when their expectations for fair use and ease of use are not met.
- Ever increasing levels of complexity in consumers’ devices will render products increasingly unreliable, more expensive and will constrain consumer activities.
- User Friendliness is a hallmark of CE (Consumer Electronics) products."
Blanford believes that the customer "should not bear the costs, in dollar terms and in terms of technological complexity, when there are much simpler solutions to the agreed upon problem—the prospect of Internet redistribution of digital terrestrial broadcasts."
Amazing. Someone's actually talking common sense here.
What the working groups have been proposing is that the digital television signal would have to carry a special code (or tone) within the upper data section of the transmission that would, no must be decoded, in order for people to be able to use. (For those of you inside the 'Biz, they want to encode more into the all ready crammed "front porch" of the signal. Nice huh? My question is WHERE?) The other group wants to encrypt it once inside the home, makes it impossible to copy or move without permission. And probably a fee. They are all forgetting "fair use."
As you can see none of the companies are really agreeing on what's the right thing to do-- or not do. However, it's comforting to know that Ken Blanford and Philips are on the customer's side on this issue. I just might go buy a Philips DVD player.
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* Invitation to testify was also given to: Dr. Paul F. Liao - Chief Technology Officer, Panasonic/Matshushita Electric Corporation of America, Mr. Richard Parsons - Co-Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Richard Parsons Co-Chief Operating Officer, AOL Time Warner Inc., Mr. Larry Jacobson - President and Chief Operating Officer, RealNetworks, Mr. Joe Kraus - Co-founder Digitalconsumer.org, Mr. Peter Chernin - President and Chief Operating Officer of NewsCorporation, Mr. Assaf Litai - Founder and Acting CEO Vidius.
[Mary Wehmeier's Blog Du Jour]
4:58:42 PM
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16660 » April 26 7:46 AM. Teflon: The biggest accidental invention of the 20th Century. I was wondering how if nothing sticks to Teflon, then how does it stick to the bottom of a frying pan? This search lead me to a really cool site, MIT's Inventor Archives. Organized alphabetically by inventors' last names and also by invention, it's a great jumping-off spot for research information and observing the interconnectivity that keeps research going. [MetaFilter]
4:22:31 PM
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My wife is also running a "photo blog" by taking a picture of Pioneer Square every day (well, every day she is in Seattle).
 [ericfreeman.com]
4:05:20 PM
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eWeek. Allchin on the future of PCs. Sounds similar to my conclusions. Since Allchin is the guy calling the shots at Microsoft and the person behind the retreat from .Net, this is important.
>>> Microsoft Corp. is sticking to its belief that the PC will remain at the forefront of technology for years to come and that it will serve as the hub for a range of devices for homes and offices.<<< Sure, but Jim doesn't understand that it will be webapps and webservices that will invigorate the PC platform and not Windows native apps bundled into the O/S.
>>>I have seen an ultra-mobile PC running Windows XP, and this will be a breathtaking step forward. It is the size of a Pocket PC with all the power of Windows XP.<<< He must have seen OQO too.
>>>We're making deep, deep investments in Longhorn. So what we plan on showing at our [Professional Developers Conference] later this year will be a set of new managed APIs that will let them have access to the new graphics architecture. Today, most machines ship with 3-D, but the Windows interface only uses 2-D. So, imagine if you had all the capabilities to do 3-D that the shell actually uses as well as make it easy for all applications to get to—not just games but any type of visualization.<<< I don't think he has played a sufficient number of 3-D games on a 2-D screen to understand that this doesn't work well for most people. It's confusing. For this to work, the interface needs to migrate to an immersive display using head-mounted glasses, where the users POV is natural extension of head movement (which will open up a whole new class of repetitive neck injuries). This isn't going to happen in the next 5 years. I can see why he is hopeful about this: this is a direction webapps can't go.
>>> The hot patching technology will not find its way into the upcoming .Net Server family, but we have made progress on reducing reboots. <<< Radio already does this. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
9:34:12 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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