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July 31, 2004
Applying Newtons Laws
Reading the Wall Street Journals online site today, Walter Mossburg has an article on the new Sony portable music player set to "destroy" the iPod. Of particular interest was the following:
One major downside of the new Walkman is that it can't play MP3 files, or any of the other standard formats. It can play back only a proprietary Sony format called ATRAC3, or a variation called ATRAC3plus. This means that, when you transfer your MP3 files to the new Walkman, Sony's PC software must laboriously convert them first into ATRAC3 files. Sony claims it designed the player this way because ATRAC3 produces superior sound, and because it has features that extend battery life.(Emphasis mine)
Where does this superior sound come from? Considering most people today are already using MP3s, a lossy-compresion algorithm by design, how can Sony hope to inject audio quality into this conversion process? Are people truly this ignorant?
Posted by Dan at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2004
Files: Did They Stop to Think...
Found an article today on NYTimes.com (remember use BugMeNot for login and password) discussing the research of two Columbia University scientists; algorithms to pinpoint what an eye within a photograph is looking at (research paper here).
After reading the NYT article, the most interesting paragraph in my mind was:
Because the algorithms can track exactly where a person is looking, the system may one day find use in surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior or in interfaces for quadriplegics who use their gaze to operate a computer.
While there seems to be one angle of use with handicap interfaces, the surveillance camera option frightens me. Although I don't entirely believe the "no one has thought of using the cornea as a mirror" before concept. In 1992, Michael Critchton wrote a book titled "Rising Sun" where a major portion of the crime was answered thanks to the reflective surfaces in the room (the eye wasn't used due to the low quality of the video recording).
It seems that in the time it took me to actually fully think this through and post it, Slashdot discovered the same article. D'oh.
Posted by Dan at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2004
The Money Shot
The SF-Gate had an interesting article this weekend on the proliferation of pornography via the Internet, and it's general effect on the psyche. Arguing that the Internet brought about a distribution medium for porn that no longer required embarrassing moments at the video store, the "artists" having made serious moves towards legitimizing themselves, and the mass commoditization of sexual body parts, the article begins making some excellent points.
The most interesting point within the article comes towards the end, where the author hypothesizes that eventually this behavior will end. Not due to any foreseen behavioral changes by the porn industry itself, but rather by our own internal filters on life relegating the simple sex push to a status of white noise. That for this style of "simple" sex to continue to sell, it will be forced to evolve into something of more interest, or face becoming a dinosaur or worse: white noise.
It could be argued for many that this is already the case. Examining the non-tech websites I frequent, the borders are surrounded by ads that flash in a futile attempt to catch my interest. Some are simple words, some are images, some are even porn related. Yet the number of times I've actually noticed these ads, or more importantly tried clicking on one of these ads, is minimal to nonexistent. I scan the page for usable content without even realizing that I've become desensitized to the large amounts of distractions found on the page.
In any case, it's an article worth a read if you're interested in commentary on life.
Posted by Dan at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2004
Video game memories
Found tonight on Fark, is a link to one of those video games of days gone by that isn't easily forgotten: Lemmings. Here's the catch though, the entire site is done in an amazing abuse of DHTML.
Now if only we can see California Games and Winter Games like this.
Posted by Dan at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2004
Where'd All the Comments Go?
It's finally happened. I've reached the point of no longer having the desire to continue the fight. As of this morning, I have disabled comments on this blog indefinately. Typically the level of comments on the blog isn't very high, with one comment for every 10 or 12 posts coming from legit readers. As of recent though I've been receiving 4 comments for every post, mostly from spammers trying to use my site to sell something. I had installed Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist, and it was good for awhile. Recently it's not been heading off the storm quite as well and my patience for spamming has disappeared. So too have the comments.
If you have any future commentary to leave, I suggest either sending an email, where I will add it to the entry itself, or the use of track-backs.
Things I have learned from this though, Movable Type is really awful for making mass changes to an entry. You can do basic alterations, but anything that requires more than changing authors, topics, and names you're pretty screwed. Thank you for a PostgreSQL interface for doing this. If I have the time to hack it, I might just write up a cron job to open up comments again and close those that are N days old. That requires incentive though, and I've none of that today.
Posted by Dan at 11:57 AM
July 15, 2004
Questions to Ask
Chris picked up on the some recent commotion with regard to DVD encryption standards. The important question to look at is, are consumers really ready to upgrade all their movies yet again? Personally, I doubt it, especially when the quality advances on DVD still cannot yet be taken advantage of by the casual consumer (high end AV bufs need not apply).
Posted by Dan at 04:16 PM | Comments (1)
July 13, 2004
Say What???
Today in conversation the topic of email spam arose once again. While typically a discussion in how annoying the feature is, the conversation actually focused on some of the techniques currently being used to combat the menace that makes email essentially useless. Tidbits of interest are that the current thought to solving spam isn't by just building filters in email clients, but rather building up a trust network based upon a collection of services and friends.
Anyways, the important point that came out of this was: if we can build a sufficently accurate statistical filter (please note it does not need to be 100% fool proof), at what point does language communication become distrupted when trying to bypass the filter?
We're already starting to see this in current crops of spam messages being sent to INBOX across the world. The subjects contain words with hypens to brace inserted random garbage (i.e. Lev-qjkladjhl-tra), the use of l33t speak (i.e. L3\/1+ra), and the insertion of complete paragraphs that make no logical sense. It hasn't reached the point of being completely unreadable yet, but how far must it go before it does become un-readable?
Posted by Dan at 10:03 PM | Comments (0)
PHP 5
It seems that PHP 5 is finally out. At least the CVS is finally open again and we can get back to contributing code.
Posted by Dan at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2004
Bannination of iPods
Over at suspended conversation, Chris Riley muses on an article from P2P net about why companies should not allow portable storage devices connected to their computers, which invariably leads to them being connected to their networks.
Chris is correct that you have to trust your employees at some basic level, and there really isn't anything stopping them from emailing, printing, faxing, or dispersing the data by some means to a competitor (possibly even using corporate resources). Depending upon the data though, you may wish to keep it completely secured to itself, in which case even the computers won't be connected to a publicly accessible network. Banning at that point does make sense, but overall data isn't that sensitive to encourage such action.
What Chris (and others) has failed to consider is not the theft or infection of data from the portable storage device, but the possible infliction of violating intellectual property rights. Imagine the scenario where an employee has illegally downloaded a series of MP3s (any copyrighted data will do, MP3s happen to be the most common) from the internet, placed them on an iPod (or any portable storage device), brought the device in, and connected it to their office computer. Fine no real harm done yet as the files haven't gone anywhere, but now this is a locally connected drive that can be shared among other machines on the network. Most importantly it can be shared/detected among the IT departments backup server.
There now stands a reasonable chance that the data will be replicated onto a corporate server or archive for the length of time of the archival policy set forth by the IT department. If either the SPA or BSA decide to conduct a search/raid, or are tipped off by an disgruntled employee, the company is now placed into a position of difficulty having to explain how/why these files are there. More than likely, they will also be forced to pay restitution for the violations discovered.
To me, this is the most obvious reason why such devices should be banned.
Posted by Dan at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2004
From the How to Screw With Marketing Files
BugMeNot is probably one of the greatest uses of internet abuse to a prevailing meme on marketing. That meme being the concept of "registration" to track viewer/reader interest in articles on a website. Oddly enough, it's traditionally newspaper sites that promote these login style systems. Odd because if you look at the traditional distribution mechanism of newspapers (corner stands, markets, etc) there is little demographic data that can be collected about stories of interest.
BugMeNot was found on Kevin Kelly's Cooltools.
[EDIT: corrected kk.org link]
Posted by Dan at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
July 01, 2004
IP Banning entry
It seems that some web surfer last night took it upon themselves to inundate my blog with comments typically regarded as spam. Thankfully, they weren't the brightest, and used the same IP all night long. In the interest of hopefully saving a bunch of other people the time and effort of cleaning their blog, you can just IP Ban 66.98.178.227 and get it over with now. Looking at the log files, it seems they have persisted in their attempts through the morning as well.
Posted by Dan at 10:21 AM | Comments (2)