b.cognosco
A quest to examine, inquire, and learn.
Home · Consulting · Presentations · Essays · MapInfo · Archives · About
Recently
By Topic
By Audience
Thursday, September 26, 2002
P2P Radio -- Rock On
For the PeerCast team, they see their goal as advancing the technology of online music distribution, in lieu of the music industry's reluctance to do so. "We're based in Japan. The Japanese tend to embrace new technology rather than hiding from it like the music and movie conglomerates have done in the West," says Goddard. "We have to find a better way to publish music. At the moment the people who control that appear to have no incentive to move forward. So if they can't, then the rest of us are going to have to do it for them."
Now, if someone could just get Doc to fix his weblog so his RSS feed didn't repost every article, every time, in one long, continuous post.
Meanwhile the Great Workaround continues. DigInternet Radio the P2P way, by Howard Wen. And thanks to Hanan for the link. [
Source: Doc Searls Weblog]
Vista -- Secure IM for Small Business
Something to track as Allie tries out another critical component of the small business intranet -- secure IM. If I'm right the product Allie refers to is Vista, a product of i3Connect. Here's what the company says:Secure IM Solution for Small BusinessThis is a very cost effective secure instant messaging solution. It is designed such that it can be installed and maintained very easily. It is targeted at the rapidly growing corporate messaging solutions based on Linux (available Q4 2002) and NT servers. [...]
The company lists Jabber compatibility as well as all the public IM protocols. Looks like pricing starts at $500 for 50 users. I'm eager to see what Allie finds performance-wise.
Secure IM Solution for Small Business."Secure IM Solution for Small Business "
This looks very interesting. It seems like it is one, small, light-weight client for both IM and RSS news grazing. I am going to give it a try.
The product name is "Vista". [
Transparency in the Music Industry
When the Nazis or the Soviets launched brainwashing campaigns labeled as education we called them propaganda or human rights violations -- here we just call them advertising.
Artists join industry campaign against music piracy. SiliconValley.com Sep 26 2002 0:41AM ET[...]The music industry is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to combat Internet music piracy by appealing directly to fans to stop stealing.[...]
[...]Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the education campaign is part of a multifaceted strategy that includes combating file-swapping services in court; supporting paid alternatives such as pressplay, MusicNet and Rhapsody; and lobbying for new laws.[...]
[...]The print and television ads starting today enlist nearly 90 recording artists and songwriters -- including such superstars as Eminem, Madonna, the Dixie Chicks, Luciano Pavarotti and Brian Wilson -- who say illicit Internet downloads threaten the livelihood of everyone in the industry, from artists to record-store clerks.[...]
[...]"What we're doing is we are robbing our cultural past and we're destroying our cultural future," said David Benjamin, Universal Music Group's senior vice president of anti-piracy.[...]
[
The new laws we need to be lobbying for are those that will force full disclosure by any industry that wishes to mandate personal behavior. Before we let the RIAA and MPAA into our living rooms to run our lives, let's get a peek into their bedrooms and see just how much money really goes to the artists, just how much do the execs rake off, and just what sorts of practices do BMI and ASCAP use.
If you want to stand up in public and claim to be the Good Guys, stopping those who would rob our culture and destroy our future, you should have the fortitude to prove your motivations, your actions, and your vision are superior to the alternatives.
PaSaMuF - P2P Document Management
Recently I wondered out loud if there wasn't someone working on legitimate avenues for P2P. Specifically, I asked about small, decentralized collaborative editing and document management systems.
PaSaMuF is a filesharing system which indexes and shares common document types (Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, plain text, etc). Still under construction, PaSaMuF extracts information from the documents along with basic file metadata to ease searching. More in the project description:The project goal is to implement a tool for sharing documents over the internet.
Unlike Gnutella or Morpheus, the tool is meant to be used by small communities to have a simple and reliable document sharing/ management solution that works cross-plattform.
The application will support common file formats like PDF, DOC, XML, etc. The system analyses those document types and extracts meta informations that are useful for other peers searching for documents.
As we do not want to reinvent the wheel, the system will use many commonly used software products available for free. [...]
(via InfoAnarchy) via [
This is nice. It's probably geek central, and will be a long way from a commercial-ready product, but it's a start. And the stated goal to start with commonly-used components means this may not take too long to get rolling. Good stuff worth more investigation.
Intel Irony
Am I the only who's noticed that the Intel ads during NFL games show a young (patently criminal, moral-free, music-stealing, property-thieving, convicted-by-default, social anarchist) computer user burning his own CDs? And all while Intel's management crawls in bed with Hollywood to make sure such activity is impossible. Isn't that just a bit disingenuous?
WSJ. Wired. The music industry is set to launch an ad campaign against P2P file sharing. "People going into computers"??Ms. Spears, for example, is quoted in the ad saying: "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing: People going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music."[
Seb Goes Zen
Maybe this is what people mean when they keep telling me I think too much.
Oblique Strategies for Would-be Ph.D.s.Jill: Anders suggests two cards for the pack we obviously have to make for PhD students and other stuck academics, you know, like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" pack of cards for artists.
For me, the point in Oblique Strategies is that understanding happens when you stop thinking. I don't know why I keep forgetting it. Getting the big picture is not something you do, it is something that happens to you. It is instantaneous and can only occur when you finally let go of all those little individual puzzle pieces you were fiercely tring to fit together.
Why is it that they always tell us to work hard, if those crucial a-ha moments only come about when we stop? Because we need the raw materials. Chance favors the prepared mind. [
Macintosh System Tracker
Many (ok, many, many, many) years ago when I ran large Mac-based prepress facilities for a living we had to keep track of all the software on each station. Maybe my fogged, aging memory is playing tricks on me, but I'm sure we did not do this by hand. I seem to remember there being some sort of SystemInfo thing that would read the system configuration and software installations and provide a printable listing.I can't find anything like this now. It can't be that hard to do and I'm sure someone has a tool for it -- I've just overlooked it.
Anyone who has a lead on something like this please drop me a line. (I know. I have to get the comment thing re-enabled here.)
Revealing Digital Hollywood
One more way to ruin a good morning. I've got to stop reading my news aggregator.
[...] Most revealing quote of the day went to Brad Hunt, CTO of the MPAA, who at one point summed up the challenge facing the entertainment and computing industries this way: "How do you make the PC a trusted entertainment appliance?" That's the mindset, the shared assumption, underlying the forces on this side of the copyright battle. Wading through two days of that negative energy was a trying experience. [...more] [
Heart Surgery and Brain Damage
My father had heart-bypass surgery several years ago. He has complained ever since about poor memory and slower mental function. I just wrote it off to age and cantakerousness. Maybe I was wrong. We need to fix this.
New Scientist. New ultrasound treatment for filtering fat from blood after a heart operation. Yikes. I haven't heard about this before:Two thirds of patients undergoing major heart operations suffer some form of mental impairment afterwards, such as a reduced ability to perform mental arithmetic or remember phone numbers. In half of these patients the problems are permanent. The cause is still controversial, but most researchers think that minute fat droplets lodging in the blood vessels of the brain are responsible. It is thought these block the supply of oxygen to tiny clusters of nerve cells.[
MIT To Share Open Courseware
I wish someone from MIT could get in front of the Congressional Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and get through to that public menace, Congressman Howard Berman. He and Coble will singlehandedly destroy the Internet and drive the economy into the toilet all to save the jobs of a few worthless record execs. (But we should save those fine folks who brought us American Idol -- there's a real contribution to culture.)
MIT OpenCourseWare opens on September 30th.BBC News: "Why don't we, instead of trying to sell our knowledge over the internet, just give it away." ... "There is no revenue objective for OCW, ever. It will always be free."
What a great idea. Of course, MIT has a great reputation for quality. The long-term implications must scare many, many people shitless. Also see Anders' post. [
| September 2002 | ||||||
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
| Aug Oct | ||||||
Contact
1041 Honey Creek Road
Suite 281
Conyers, GA 30013
770-918-1937 office
404-822-6014 mobile
This Page was last updated: 11/28/2002; 6:11:19 PM
Copyright © 2002 Terry W. Frazier
