Category: Internet

Stephen Hawking, a man I hope to hear lecture someday.
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Salon has an article about ‘One of the Guys’, a novel which depicts the realities of US naval personnel and the underage prositution that they support when stopped overseas at ports in Southeast Asia. Of course the American Family Association isn’t interested in doing anything about impact of the US Navy on Southeast Asian children, they’re just interested in silencing the novelist who is bringing to light the realities.

Had it not been used in the Christian right’s decade-long fight to bring down the NEA, Young’s book might not have gained much national attention. As it is, the book has sold a modest number of copies and received tepid reviews, though it has gotten enthusiastic responses on Amazon.com. In the wake of the AFA’s campaign, however, Young has succeeded in exposing an unseemly side of the U.S. military as well as the Navy’s longtime abuse of citizens of its foreign ports.
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Guests like Ray Ozzie explaining the technology of Groove is the reason I’m on lists like decentralization.
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With his usual hyperbole, Calcanis of SAD calls WebWasher ‘The Most Dangerous Piece of Software in the World.’ We all know that net advertising is not profitable (i.e. Salon going to subscriptions) and as products like WebWasher proliferate, we can be truly assured that none of these net business models are worth anything. Of course software to kill ads on the web has been around for years but is this the one that will break into the mainstream?
Better sell your DoubleClick stock (like it was worth anything to begin with 😉

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Microsoft’s Hailstorm is all anyone is going to talk about this week.
‘The Redmond-based software giant will deliver a suite of basic Web services that will run not only on Windows-based Web sites, but on the Unix platform. This opens the possibility that .Net could take hold on some of the largest Web sites currently running on non-Microsoft software.’
Hailstorm is ‘Scobleized’ at Robert Scoble’s weblog.
For various reasons, I’ve been thinking as well about what kinds of web services companies can provide to augment or create new revenue streams. MSFT’s new direction with Hailstorm looks at first glance to be really, really intelligent- broadening the user base beyond Windows, giving away some services but charging for others, opening up some applications to outside developers, turning everything into XML. Making “Windows” portable and extendable…
With MSFT charging into web services, an area they have invested heavily in so far (Expedia, Hotmail, MSNBC, Slate, CitySearch, etc.) it’s clear others will have to do so- but in other ways.
If you’re a producer of devices that create information (digital cameras, digital video cameras, etc.) it’s clear that one future revenue stream is to provide storage/backup online either via broadband connections or even snail mail as a last resource (the time it would take to upload gigs of video to a Sony DV storage site would be prohibitive…even with a cable modem due to the tiny upload speeds one gets in “broadband.”)
If you’re a producer of software that manipulates information (a la Adobe Photoshop or any music or movie editing software, your new versions are going to have to support XML or SOAP or XML-RPC. This might be the beginning of a cascade of re-writes of software to run on the Hailstorm/.NET platform. Developers, start your debuggers! 🙂
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Bob Johnstone on how Organic LEDs are kewl!
‘Organic light-emitting diodes are shaping up as a superdisplay: brighter, thinner, lighter and faster than liquid crystal displays. They also take less power to run, offer higher contrast, look equally bright from all angles and have the potential to be much cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts.’
“[T]he more they are studied, the more organic light-emitting diodes look to be just about everything their liquid-crystal counterparts are not. For starters, their structure is about as simple as one could imagine: an electrode, some organic stuff, then another electrode. Hook it up to a voltage and, presto, out comes light. There’s no backlight, no diffuser, no polarizers or any of the other baggage that goes with liquid crystals.
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Joel Spolsky on ArsDigita. Ouch. I agree completely.
“When I go to the website today and read that they ‘maximize value for the end-user,’ I think of that dazzling, exciting kid you knew freshman year, who jumped from varsity squash to journalism to drama to campus politics, and was all fired up to change the world. But he got married, has 2 1/2 kids, took a job as an insurance agent and wears a gray suit to work every day.”
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Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 23:11:24 -0800
From: Don Marti
To: pho mailing list
Subject: Re: pho: go after the ones who started this

On Sat, Mar 17, 2001 at 09:12:10PM -0500, Eric de Fontenay wrote:
> Well, while we’re on the subject, what would happen if a group of
> artists were to file a class action suit against the major label for
> distributing their work without taking appropriate safeguards to
> protect their music, technological safeguards that have and currently
> exist.

No such thing. I’ll _eat_ any CD that I can play but not rip.

Copying is possible. Enforcement of the laws against copyright
infringement is possible.

Magic copy-proofing is bullshit.

I’m not saying this because I want to see musicians lose money to
illegal copying, but because I don’t want to see them lose money to DRM
scams.

Please, DRM-mongers, go back to selling reconditioned printer cartridges
or HERBAL VIAGRA.

—
Don Marti
Technical Editor, Linux Journal
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
—

Sony has realized that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” by purchasing the Virtual Game Station from Connectix. They should’ve done this from the start instead of going the legal route. It only benefits Sony and their software makers if Playstation 1 games can be played on more platforms (PCs, Mac, Linux, etc.) than just on proprietary hardware that Sony doesn’t even profit from.
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I seem to be linking a lot to Clay Shirky’s writings on P2P but he’s prolific at the moment. Recently he’s been writing on O’Reilly that we don’t need to wait for standards to begin creating interoperability between P2P platforms. Very sensible and it makes sure that the popular stuff bubbles up because that which gets more traffic and interest will thrive.

Darwin has a cool article on Xerox’s KM/Expert system
NY Times on how to explain Net privacy.