Category: Tech Talk

Watch Deep Impact…impact!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Bookmark this page: http://www.noao.edu/news/deep-impact/

And learn more about the mission here.

“Sunday night”, at around 2:00 am EST (and I myself am still confused as to whether they mean Sunday morning or Monday morning) a space vessel will ram into a comet. And now, it seems, the event will be televised…sorta. 🙂

UPDATE: Ok, this is taking place Sunday night/Monday morning:

NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft continues to sail through its final checkout, as it hurtles toward comet Tempel 1. Impact with the comet is scheduled for 1:52 a.m. EDT, July 4 (10:52 p.m. PDT, July 3).

Microsoft, Toshiba team on HD-DVD players

Posted on by Nimgimli

Microsoft, Toshiba team on HD-DVD players

The latest volley in the DVD format wars. The article gives MS a lot of weight, which is understandable in the PC marketplace but I’m not sure it matters so much when it comes to consumer electronics.

DVD-HD won’t be ready for the launch of XBox 360, though MS has hinted that you may be able to upgrade your 360 to a more capable model as time goes by.

Meanwhile, everyone that buys a PS3 gets a Blu-Ray DVD player as a ‘bonus’ and to me, that just seems like a huge boon for Blu-Ray in the consumer space.

I’m firmly pro-Blu-Ray and I see this as a slight setback, but nothing to get too concerned over. If the 360 came out with a DVD-HD a year ahead of the PS3 and its Blu-Ray drive, I’d be a lot more worried.

A grim day for consumers, a happy day for the RIAA

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today thehe Supreme Court ruled that peer-to-peer companies could be held responsible for copyright infringement on their networks.
Supreme Court rules against file swapping

“There is no evidence that either company (Grokster or Streamcast) made an effort to filter copyrighted material from users’ downloads or otherwise impede the sharing of copyrighted files,” Souter wrote. “Each company showed itself to be aiming to satisfy a known source of demand for copyright infringement, the market comprising former Napster users.”

Souter wrote that the lower courts had misinterpreted the 1984 Sony ruling as saying that any non-infringing use, no matter how minimal, was enough to relieve a company of liability for copyright infringement.

Now I’m strongly against stealing intellectual property, but decisions like this can have a ripple effect through our lives.

For instance, I have a Tivo. There area few shows that I watch with my girlfriend at her place. So I copy them to a VCR tape, and take that tape to her place where we watch the show together.

I can do that because neither Tvio or my VCR have any kind of built-in DRM technologies, and I really want to keep things that way. Whenever I see the courts make a ruling like this, especially since they mentioned the Sony Betamax trial from 1984, it makes me really nervous (had the Betamax trial gone the other way, we wouldn’t have VCRs or CD-Roms today…at least, not in the format we have them now).

I despise the RIAA. I don’t believe they care about the artists. They just care about their huge cut. I’m much happier when I can buy a CD directly from the artist’s web page because I know then that the artist will get a fair share of my money.

Caveat: I’m certainly no lawyer, so the above are all layman’s opinions only….

Emergence

Posted on by Nimgimli

Finally finished Steven Johnson’s Emergence today. It started off pretty interesting, talking a lot about self-organizing systems, from ant colonies to cities to software. All good stuff. And that was probably the first half of the book.

But then Johnson starts talking about the Web and it starts to fall apart. The book was published in 2001 and the fact that it feels so outdated is great evidence of how rapidly things change today. Johnson is pretty enamored with Slashdot and uses it over and over again as an example of how the Web will operate, the idea being that all our opinions will get bundled together to make ‘clusters’ that we’ll each spend our time in. This would be a better argument if Slashdot actually based its articles on user ratings, rather than just its comments. Another example he cites is Epinions which is all but gone now…at least, the good parts of it are gone.

Actually his best arguments are when he talks about eBay and how it self regulates via users rating users. But still, he talks about how in 2005 we won’t care that The Sopranos is on HBO, since all our media will be delivered via the web anyway. Instead, we’ll see what’s playing in the “Organized crime fiction” cluster, or what have you.

What Johnson never factored in was litigation from the RIAA and MPAA. If these organizations had embraced the web and its distribution methods rather than trying to oppress them, we might be living in Johnson’s world now. He did get some things right, for sure. Tivo was new enough when he wrote the book that he had to explain what it was, and he talked about its impact on advertising. And in fact made some great points about advertising (basically that a person might watch ads if the ads are well done and pertinent to the viewer).

Johnson talks a lot about video games and SimCity and The Sims and so forth. As a game geek it was fun to read about this, until he started talking about how cool The Sims Online was going to be (but to be fair he was basing his thoughts on the advance-hype for the game…of course it shipped horribly broken).

So is it worth reading? Sadly, probably not, unless you read it for the fun of hearing predictions gone wrong. The early parts are interesting but you can probably find the subject explored in more detail elsewhere. Emergence would’ve been a fun read in 2001, but now its just a little sad…