Hey where did everyone go?

It’s spring break here at Clemson, and I just realized it’s been 11 days since I last posted. Really there hasn’t been anything going on to speak of. So I’ll make up some crap and ramble to other things of interest that have popped by.

It’s Spring Break in Clemson right now, so things are pretty slow. I’ve been busy with some other things, so I haven’t even finished the book I’m reading yet. Like last week I spent much of my evenings working on a baby afghan for a friend of mine. Yes I crochet. Look at the About Me section of the page: Jack of All Trades. Anyway she’s due in April, so I wanted to finish it. It seems that baby afghans have become a standard gift from me to expecting friends. Anyway, on to more interesting stuff.

There have been some interesting developments over the past weeks. I’ll break them up by category and maybe chronology.

General politics:

I just wanted to throw this out there for a friend of mine who has been talking about a third party candidate being a real possibility for months now. It seems Smitty that Mr Greenspan agrees with you. I really like that he is retired and can really speak his mind about subjects he didn’t feel free to talk about before. I would actually like to see him do regular pieces in print or appearances on television. My grandfather taught graduate economics, so Mr. G reminds me a lot of him.

Advertising:

Some friends and I recently had a short conversation over e-mail about changes taking place in advertising. Specifically discussed was novel advertising and imbedded advertising. Sony apparently tried another new advertising campaign in the UK. Since I live in the US I have no way of actually finding one, but I did see examples of their graffiti based try in Atlanta. The UK ads look huge and very strange. Some strange is good, but a much of it is just strange. I think Sony needs to look for some better strange ideas. Then Ars had a nice article about the increasing amount of product placement taking place. Again sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s sad and turns one off from the product. Look at the picture on the page and realize that the poster on the window is backwards so that the camera inside the store can read it. Then again it can be done in an obvious and therefore humorous manner as well. They are testing the waters. They’ll sus out what they need to do before too long, but hopefully it won’t involve lawsuits, DRM, and broadcast flags.

Gadgetry:

As an interesting note, there is a brain training game for the Nintendo DS that appears to help fight back the effects of dementia in the aged members of society. Is there nothing games can’t do?

Another study indicates that a large portion of returns for consumer gadgets and electronics id because people can’t get the darned things to work. Most of the time it appears this is caused by poor design, design specifications, and lack of testing with users. Skip to the next section to skit the rant.{rant} I’ll tell you that I’ve used some software and hardware that was very difficult to figure out, and I’m usually pretty good at the “Install it, mess with it, and RTFM as a last resort.” I mean I can set the clock on most microwaves and car radios in 2 tries without touching the manual, but some things baffle me even with the manual. There’s inconsistent or confusing naming, undocumented sequences, strange placement of controls, simple features that would be very useful, aggravating features that you can’t turn off, and the list goes on. We have HP 9050 printers at work that require maintenance kits every 350,000 sheets of paper. After installing the kit you have to go through a power on key sequence to reset the counter for the new kit, except the instructions don’t work. We had to call HP and get transferred to an ENGINEER to find out the proper sequence. That’s nuts. Didn’t anyone test it first? {/rant} HP will probably put me on a list for that.

Crap this is getting long, but that’s why it’s in The Rambling.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a Buck:

Hannibal over at Ars Technica has a nice article up about a panel discussion he went to about civil liberties and national security. It’s a good read, like most of Hannibal’s stuff.

Starforce makes software copy protection that some don’t view it as a good solution, indicating stability and performance problems they believe Starforce caused. As an apparent retaliation Starforce posted a link to an illegal download source for a game that doesn’t use their software. Dumnasses. Do they realize that legitimate games make me have to carry the CD if I want to play the game, while the pirated version has no such restriction? Ars has their take on it too. I’ve used No-CD cracks on legally purchased games just so I don’t have to carry 5 CDs with my laptop if I might want to play a game. Why do you want to piss off the people that actually bought the game?

Content producers had some interesting times as well. The music industry is cited in a class action suit for price fixing and overcharging customers for online music. If you have ever looked at some of the stipulations of the contracts they are outrageous. Apparently if company A and B have contracts and company C negotiates a contract paying more for each song, then A and B are obligated to increase their prices as well. WTF is that? But it’s not extortion to have you contract canceled.

Apparently DRM actually does shorten you life expectancy., well your battery life expectancy. All those hoops your battery operated gadgetry has to jump through to use your legally purchased or created media files sucks down more juice than using unprotected files. No surprises there, but it’s nice to have numbers to illustrate it.

The CRIA kind of shot themselves in the foot with a study the commissioned. Apparently the people trading music online actually buy more music than people that don’t trade music online. Imagine that. It’s like they like music or something. Plus it digs the foundation out form under the music industry’s assumption that each downloaded song is a lost sale. Many of the downloaded songs actually lead to later sales. I have friends that try the album before they buy instead of returning a crappy album later.

Free Range TV

One of the reasons that the copy protection system for DVDs was broken so soon was some weak hardware allowed access to information that sped up the process. Some later weaknesses allowed hardware to do things it wasn’t supposed to normally do. To prevent that with new HD content all sorts of systems are being developed. Intel has one that seeks mandatory fines if weak implementation leads to holes. I’m sure that every hardware maker wants to jump onboard something that is almost guaranteed to cause them fines. Next!

Here’s a rundown of how IPTV, television over the internet, looks to be working out. Yay faster Internet connections. Boo, all the bandwidth is eaten up when watching or recording more than one channel.

HDCP on HDMI video connections were created to only allow you control over HD content that the content creator deems appropriate. I think it’s because we are all dirty pirates at heart. Anyway it lead to a big scare that all the current analog HDTV sets would not be supported at full resolution by new components. Sony has said that their media will play at full resolution, but all other studios still have the ability to set lower resolutions. If they know what’s good for them they will follow Sony’s lead. I can’t believe I just said that. I think I threw up in my mouth a little. I need to go gargle. But then that begs the question of why we need to do away with analog and use HDCP and HDMI protection the first place.

Warner announces release dates for HD DVD versions of movies, and they look to cost a few bucks less than expected Blu-ray discs. Who gives a crap? I’m not buying any of them for at least 2 years anyway.

Hey, scroll down. I’m done with that page.

I’m glad Google fought the fight, even if it was probably to protect their technology. I love how the Judge handed down the ruling in the Google case and was going to decide the extent of complying later. Maybe he was too busy watching American Idol and voting for Taylor Hicks (Shameless plug for Smitty’s favorite) to get it all typed up. Then he came back and ruled Google would have to turn over 50,000 random web addresses but no search terms. I’m not sure what they will use the data for, but that sounds like a lot of work for something they could have done their own web crawl for. I’m kind hoping it’s useless. The future implications are interesting though, hence appreciating Google fighting it.

With all this talk about wiretapping and such VoIP tapping has become a concern as well. Leave it to the creator of PGP to come up with an encryption scheme for VoIP communications making them much harder to listen in on. This could be fun to watch.

New Wrinkle in Tiered Internet

Tiered Internet is a scheme to improve the transmission speed of certain traffic by prioritizing instead of upgrading the lines to bigger ones. That sounds fine until you realize it means the people who pay for “priority” get the short end of the stick, and if everyone pays then it’s the same as if no one does. You buy a connection of a certain speed, but you never see that speed because you didn’t pay extra for “priority.” It’s especially problematic for low or fixed income groups. So stepping up on the side of network neutrality is none other the AARP. I think the ISPs should throw in the towel.