Aggregator Overload - Good Stuff - Some Explored - Some Not
Saturday, October 05, 2002Dan Gillmor responds to Jack Valenti. Dan Gillmor interviewed Jack Valenti last week in his column and did the impartial thing, representing Valenti's beliefs as fairly as possible. This week, Dan takes Valenti's arguments apart, looking at what Hollywood's agenda really entails:
So the movie and music companies are going back to Congress for another helping. They are asking for laws that would force technology innovators to restrict the capabilities of devices -- cripple PCs and other machines that communicate so they can't make copies the copyright holders don't explicitly allow. Amazingly, the entertainment industry also wants permission to hack into networks and machines they believe are being used to violate copyrights.Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.
Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know.
Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know
[The FuzzyBlog!]From the excellent TopStyle vendor blog I found this: Seven Tricks That Web Users Don't Know. Nothing here really surprised me but it does a great job of pointing out the difference between computer industry "experts" and Joe User who just wants to get the job done. There is an excellent commentary on why you shouldn't use 2nd browser windows much if at all and she does a better job than others in describing the problems users have with it. The one thing that I would be curious to know is if Mac users know more than PC users. I have no evidence that this is true but I'd suspect so.
Dan Gillmor's reply to Jack Valenti.
Gillmor provides a succinct response to Hollywood's view of intellectual property. The key point:
[McGee's Musings]Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.
Technology Review: Data Extinction.
On the plane this morning got caught up on some magazine reading. I absolutely love MIT's Technology Review - in its latest incarnation, it focuses on all things relating to innovation. The result is a magazine that is full of useful and intriguing information.
This month's cover story is on data extinction (available to subscribers only) - the challenge of preserving access to data as systems, applicaions and operating systems evolve. Some revealing statistics:
- volume of business-related e-mail will rise from 2.6 trillion messages in 2001 to 5.9 trillion messages in 2005 (source: IDC)
- JPEG is becoming outmoded by JPEG 2000; result: in five years it may be difficult for you to view photos taken today with digital cameras.
- Land use and natural resource inventories for the state of New York in the late 60s are no longer accessible - the customized software that produced the inventories no longer exists.
- NASA satellite data from the 70s is completely unreadable today.
Three different approaches to solving this problem:
- Migration: convert current data to future formats. Difficult and unwieldy especially when the volume of data grows. Not scalable, and inevitably some data is lost or modified in some way that may not be immediately apparent.
- Emulation: create an emulator to mimic the hardware/software environment that the data was designed for. Not really a long-term solution, because it puts off a comprehensive solution, and could result in unwieldy chains of emulators - which can become a house of cards.
- Encapsulation: a "way to group digital objects together with descriptive 'wrappers' containing instructions for decoding their bits in the future."
Then there's the long-shot, a "universal virtual computer" - which would simulate the basic functions of a computer, create a basic architecture (memory, registers, rules for exchanging data) and define it in a way that any application on any platform would be able to store two versions of a file - one in the proprietary format and one in the UVC format. The article includes some support for this concept, and early tests indicate it may be possible. The result would be that future applications would have access to data created today.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Learned something interesting here.... Morbus Rides In. Morbus has created an excellent resource of places to find RSS feeds.... [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]
A while back, there was some talk about why LiveJournal sites are ignored. Someone had said on their blog that users' journals weren't available as RSS, which is incorrect.
LiveJournal is a free service that lets anyone keep an online journal, readable to anyone who happens by and updated whenever you deem necessary. Your journal can also be retrieved in RSS format, simply by adding /rss to the end of your journal's standard URL (like this)...That's good to know... [jenett.radio]