Archive: Posts from March, 2004
March 31st, 2004, 5 Comments »
Here’s part two of my article on peer-to-peer networks, file trading and the evils of the music and movie industries from the Yaletown View (and, apparently, the Kitsilano View). As I said last month in the introduction to part 1, my geekier readers are probably more familiar with these topics than I am, but some of you in the general populace might enjoy it:
Last month, I discussed the history of file-sharing from Napster to Kaaza. Additionally, I described the various tactics that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have used try to put a kibosh on it. From suing 12-year-olds to tiresome ads before movies, the RIAA and MPAA have dealt with Napster and its successors in all the wrong way. They’re employing the same panicked approach that has failed repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. Radio, television and the VCR are all technological innovations that the music and movie industries originally fought, but eventually proved to earn them enormous amounts of money.
Read more…
5 Comments »
March 31st, 2004, 4 Comments »
After months of neglect, I finally updated the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. The new Hall has 37 images (well up from the previous 15) and is easier to navigate, thanks to the excellent free image-management software, JAlbum.
Since I launched the Hall, I’ve been meaning to cite this bizarre press hit I got on it from the Italian Libero News. I asked my Italian-speaking ex-pat friend James to translate a paragraph:
The man who makes sense of senseless instructions is the American blogger Darren “Barefoot”. On his site, he has listed about 15 examples gathered from here and there. First in the list is a figure tripping over a curved line that extends out from a big box. The caption reads: “If you drop this packing box on a dog, be careful you don’t trip over its tail.”
I’m not sure how they concluded that I was American. The quotation marks around my last name are understandable, given its unlikelihood as a surname. James goes on to write that “the rest of the article describes other entries on your list – one that receives particular note is the dildo-like fitting (next to last in your list) – the commentary reads ‘No comment.’”
Regular readers may recall that back in August, 2003, I got Slashdotted. Fool that I am, I’ve submitted the revised Hall to Slashdot. While I don’t like my odds of acceptance (I’m batting about 3-for-11 for story submissions), I figured I’d chance it.
UPDATE: I see that my story submission was accepted by Slashdot, but it hasn’t been posted to the front page yet. Once it does, this site will probably get jacked for a few hours as the Slashdot Effect kicks in. I’ve warned my ISP, but there probably isn’t much they can or will do.
4 Comments »
March 31st, 2004, 1 Comment »
Via BoingBoing, we find this amazing tool that renders news as a 2-D map. From the creator’s notes:
The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you – no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, gets filed as one single entry.
Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster.
This does for breaking news what MusicPlasma did for music–depict a lot of data in a way that’s easy to consume.
1 Comment »
March 31st, 2004, 8 Comments »
Left Behind is a 12-book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins which offers a literal, bloody version of the Book of Revelations. The twelfth and final book, Glorious Appearing, goes on sale today. Collectively, the books have sold more than 40-million copies, supplanting John Grisham as the most popular novelist among adults. There was also a feature film starring Kirk Cameron that, oddly, failed miserably.
I haven’t read these books, but I’d like to read at least one (there’s an excerpt from the first book here). The pro-America sentiment might be a bit hard to swallow. One article I read (not available online) indicated that the books render Satan as Russian and demonize (quite literally) the EU.
While Left Behind is relatively mainstream, it serves as an example of what I call ‘the Christian economy’. Millions and millions of dollars are exchanged among Christian businesses in Canada and the US in a sort of parallel marketplace. I’m speaking here mostly of media products–books, television and movies. It’s fascinating to me that all of this creative material gets produced and consumed but, with rare exceptions, doesn’t get recognized by the mainstream media.
8 Comments »
March 30th, 2004, 2 Comments »
Julie went to San Francisco in February. She took a bunch of photos, and I’ve posted the best ones here. The reason I included this one (yes, those are the local sea lions) was to tell the following anecdote.
In 2000, when I worked for this company, the Vancouver development office went on a team-building exercise down to San Francisco. We spent a day in the main offices, shaking hands with all the marketing, sales and tech support folks. That evening, we all went out to Neptune’s Palace on Pier 39 for dinner. It’s on the second floor of the building in the aforementioned photo.
That night, I had horrible food poisoning. I was up half the night with a nasty stomach ache. I knew things would improve if I vomited, so I stuck my finger down my throat and went to it. Suffice it to say, I missed the following day’s team-building event, a treasure hunt that, according to my fellow employees, was pretty goofy. The moral of this story: avoid Neptune’s Palace like the plague.
The photo at the top of this entry is one I took while up at Grouse Mountain (a couple of others can be seen here). It’s not a yeti, it’s a snowboarder flying down the hill. Despite it’s appearance, I didn’t actually apply much Photoshop magic to this photo. I like it’s somewhat ethereal quality, so I left it as is. Click the thumbnail for a desktop wallpaper-sized version.
2 Comments »
March 30th, 2004, 2 Comments »
I’m kicking around the idea of going to Gnomedex in September. Has anybody been? Do I have enough geek cred? I see that their pre-registration rate of US $99 ends tomorrow, so I should decide soonish. Does anybody want to go with me so I’m not a wallflower?
2 Comments »
March 30th, 2004, 6 Comments »
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Dave Pollard was seeking the most Canadian of songs. He’s assembled a list of 76 possible songs, which need to be reduced to a list of 12 finalists. Being an imbecile, I volunteered to be one of the judges. In the nex week I have to listen to all 76 songs and chose my 12 favourites. A quick assessment shows that I own or have heard 24 of these songs. At the end of this post, I’ve added the list with the ones I’ve got covered in bold.
If anybody has a copy of, say, Frederic by Claude L’veill’e or Wade Hemsworth’s The Black Fly Song, let me know.
Read more…
6 Comments »
March 30th, 2004, 1 Comment »
All three of these articles come from the defenders of our digital rights at Slashdot:
- Two university researchers found that file-sharing has no significant impact on CD sales. “Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their ‘most pessimistic’ statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002. I’ve also written about this here, with part 2 coming out on April 1.
- The Australian music industry has just had its best year ever, and they don’t want you to know about it.
- 18 to 34 year-old men are watching less television (New York Times registration goodness required). That’s certainly true of me–I spend all day in front of this silly computer thing. It’s not directly discussed in the article, but I suspect the popularity of reality TV shows have had a minor impact as well. Most of the popular ones–American Idol, The Apprentice, Top Model, the sundry ones related to marriage and romance (not to mention Queer Eye, etc)–definitely skew toward a female audience. I know lots of men watch them, but I suspect that demographics-wise, a majority of viewers are female.
1 Comment »
