Category Archives: Culture

Morphing the Family

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I have had an exciting time reading about a project called “The Face of Tommorow.” The website states:

The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity.

The large metropolises of the world are magnets for migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical inhabitant of this new metropolis look like in one or two hundred years if they were to become more integrated?

Anyhow, I got a little excited and downloaded, gtkmorph for Linux (looks like there is a Windows version too!)

Yes, Denise and I are both in the picture… relax, the gender thing is okay, Denise does not wear a beard these days. :-)

UN vying for Internet control

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We all lose on this one… The UN would like to tax the Internet, control it, yada yada… the usual power grabbing stuff. My favorite quote from the article:

“Since the Internet’s infancy the UN has crafted detailed proposals to tax online traffic. Rasmussen calculates that one 1999 plan for a “bit tax,” adjusted for today’s number of Internet users, would raise 12 trillion dollars this year – roughly equal to America’s Gross Domestic Product.”

Well, as soon as I have to pay more than an access fee… such as to an ISP… I quit.

Study Predicts Political, Economic Turmoil If UN’s Internet Governance Schemes Succeed

Sony is in a world of trouble

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They made a huge error. One that lacked judgement, thought, and caring. It could cost them multi-millions of dollars / euros / pounds / yen. Why? They installed a trojan on customers computers without their customers consent. They installed it -without- their customer’s knowledge! Not only that, hackers are now using Sony’s backdoor to develop Trojans of their own… and of course… people are suing.

Sony’s DRM woes deepen
Sony DRM Trojan Discovered
Sony Rootkit Trojans Emerge
Sony rootkit under fire in court
At Sony, The Customer Is Captive
Sony’s uninstall tool worse than the problem
Sony unapologetic, but disables virus-helping software

Wow, as much as I do not really care for Walmart or big media like NBC… when was the last time you had a tracking chip installed on a product you bought, like a television, without your knowledge? Imagine this tracking chip reporting back to NBC and Walmart when you recorded a television show.

What if you bought a piece of software, let’s say, Microsoft Office… You pull them out of the packaging and make a back-up copy of the CD’s in case the original ones got scratched… and it then proceded to connect to the Internet without your knowledge and told Microsoft?

What happened to privacy? What happened to consumer rights? What happened to owning something? What happened to using something your purchased, in your own home how you feel?

What many consumers do not understand is that big trans-national / multi-national / international corperations would have… is THEM telling you how you use your products. Music bought, will be played where you are told to play it. Movies watched will be watched on what THEY want you to watch it on!

It was once said like this, “In Soviet Russia, tv watch you” -or- “In Soviet Russia, computers use you…” Maybe market economies are moving this way. I for one will vote with my dollars in the hopes that we will not.

.doc and why it should go

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Here is a beautiful example of why .doc should go the way other file formats have gone before it. It’s proprietary.

During the… Open Format Meeting that was held in Massachusetts by the Mass Technology Leadership Council in regards to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopting the .odf document format for official state business…

Microsoft National Technology Officer Stuart lectured Secretary Kriss on how Microsoft’s intellectual property is key to the company’s revenue generation and tax payments and then asked Kriss “Are you talking about extinguishing IP rights?” Responded Kriss:
Of course not. IP is extremely important, but when it comes to this specific issue and the definition of a file format, you can always make the claim of IP to the definition of a file format and that is any corporations or any individual rights to do so.. Its just that doesn’t serve the needs of a sovereign state. Here we have a true conflict between the notion of IP and the notion of sovereignty. I would say 100 percent of the time in a democracy sovereignty trumps intellectual property.

Okay, but what about in a business or a school? I do not think we should always strive for the easiest solution in the short run, because in the long run it can come back to haunt us. Think forced upgrades, information loss due to outdated file formats, inability to control the information contained in the file format, etc, etc…

This weblog article has a good summary:
Microsoft vs Mass.: What ever happened to ‘The customer is always right’?

For extended reading on the topic:
Carr gives Microsoft a taste of its own OpenDoc medicine (and I pile on)

$50 iBooks

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This has got to be one of the funniest stories I have ever heard, I almost busted my gut laughing at the people in this story.

Apparently a county in Virginia was selling 4 year old Apple laptops for a bargain-basement price of $50.00. People starting lining up at 1am and it just went nuts from there… cutting in line, bruises, scrapes and mayhem… I guess they had 1,000 of them, and about 12,000 people showed up.

This kind of reminds me of stories I have heard about during those after Thanksgiving day sales when stores give away free stuff for the first 50 shoppers or whatever.

Here’s some quotes that I enjoyed from CNN:

Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman standing in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself.

-and-

Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him. “I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, ‘Bam,’” the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station. “They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just,” he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/16/computer.frenzy.ap/index.html

Intellectual Property

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For a good read on copyright and trademark… check out this little clash of thinking between Microsoft and opensource folk.

The best part is more towards the end, and here’s a little quote to whet your appetite.

“In 1950, he said, copyright lasted for 20 years after the creation of a work — the same as a patent. Now, 54 years later, the life of a copyright is 75 years after the death of the person or company that created the work”

Wow. That is crazy. Corporate, Corporate America, HOOOOOO!!!!!! I just imagine a convention hall full of suits salivating over the thought of this just before it was passed into law in the latter part of the 20th century. :-(

Freedom Web

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WOW! I remember back in 1996-97 when people had no option but to choose the technology that would serve them best on the Internet. It may come as a surprise to some, but the Internet does not even equal the WWW.

How many today have heard of things other than Instant Messaging, P2P and the WWW? How about FTP, telnet, IRC, SSH, USENET, or even relatively new technologies like RSS? There are too many that get -EVERYTHING- in there daily lives served to them on a platter… and never look for choice.

I do understand however that the WWW is usually the most exciting and easiest to use part of the Internet… but have we as consumers even lost there? Consider an obvious failure by Microsoft to serve it’s customers with a web browser that continues to improve. Internet Explorer does not support a lot of web standards, you get pop ups galore, who knows what kind of back doors (appearing regularly), and it is on 1 platform. Many websites on the public, open WWW (GASP!) -require- Internet Explorer. Go buy Windows if you want to use these services and these sites. ???!!!??? What if I don’t want to pay $299.99 for Windows XP Professional?

Listen… that’s what you get with a legally declared monopolist.

It seems today that 90% of the market blindly uses whatever they are spoon fed. Those who have a “pre-installed” browser are content with that and never venture into the world of “choice.”

We have freedom to choose information and not always accept the path that is pre-chosen by the corporate money hungry.

Dot-commers

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Times have changed soooo quickly… I remember writing tons of letters via snail mail… people didn’t know how to write an email, and when I would give out my email address, I wouldn’t say karl “underscore” herrick “at” yahoo “dot” com, I would say karl “underscore, not a dash, but shift-minus-sign” herrick “at, that would be shift-2 on most keyboards” and then “period-C-O-M”. But now-a-days everyone knows what a dot-com is, and where the @ sign is on the keyboard. I suppose we have progressed. Some cities, like Half.com have changed their legal names to capitalize on this Internet business… well, I guess you can’t type in just Half.com, or else your reach eBay stuff… though if you type in http://town.half.ebay.com you’ll reach it just fine. So where do we go from here… We drive to Iowa and Indiana to see people face to face, and go home and e-mail until we drive long distances again. :-)