...more recent posts
Good legal news for file sharing networks:
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
This will only be interesting to people posting here (unless someone wants to tell me how other blogging software deals with this issue.)
[update: sorry had an error in the block quote. Fixed now.]
HTML entites:
Character entity references, or entities for short, provide a method of entering characters that cannot be expressed in the document's character encoding or that cannot easily be entered on a keyboard. Entities are case-sensitive and take the form &name;. Examples of entities include © for the copyright symbol and Α for the Greek capital letter alpha.These are useful. Here's a list of Latin-1 entites. Here's a list for symbols and greek characters. Here's a list for special entites. In those lists you should be looking at the two 'entity' columns (the first is what you put in your post, the second is the character that will result when viewed in a web browser.)
Great. The problem is if you use HTML entites in a post, and then go back to edit the post, when the system puts the entity into the editing text box in your browser, it displays the entity, not the code for the entity. In other words if you make a post with > your post will display the greater than symbol: >. But when you go back to edit, instead of seeing > in the editing box, you'll just see > which isn't what you want (because you'd have to change it by hand back to >)
I wonder if that's clear? Anyway, the work around for this is non standard, but will work on all pages here: insert an underscore after the ampersand. So instead of © to make a copyright symbol, you should use &_copy;
Thanks to Bruno for finding some problems in my first implementation of this.
Esther mentioned Google's purchase of Applied Semantics on her new blog.
From Google's side, interesting too! Last month at PC Forum I was pestering Sergey Brin about whether Google would move beyond mostly abstract algorithms to more explicitly semantic analysis... watch that space!
And today there is a tiny mention in Cory's notes from the "Google, Innovation, and the Web" talk at ETCon by Craig Silverstein, director of technology for Google:
We just acquired Applied Semantics. They do targetted advertising. I can't say more. Semantic tech could be applied somewhere other than ads. If I said more, I'd have to kill you.I'm skeptical about the semantic web, but if anyone can make progress it's probably google...
Aka was slamming. Nice downtown crowd.
Now we're at arlene's grocery for the 3rd annual picture show. It turns out this means quirky indepenent videos shown on a 15 inch low quality TV hanging on the wall.
Ok, correction, now I see. There's another room with a bigger screen. That room is completely packed. It's not that big but still, nice turn out. Seems like a cool thing. Might want to get here a bit earlier.
April 25 - April 28. Arlene's Grocery. Stanton btw ludlow and orchard. Starts at noon tomorrow (saturday.) Goes all day.
This looks pretty cool: martian netdrive. A tiny, completely silent, wireless 120 gb hard drive. Just plug it in, and you have an 802.11b file and print server. Stick it in the closet, under the bed, whatever. Runs a custom version of linux. $479.
Esther Dyson started blogging. Interesting post about google.
Who is she? ICANN bio, edge.org page.
I know just little enough to still hope for a really cool big breakthrough: unlimited decentralized wireless bandwidth everywhere. Or at least everywhere there are other people.
Ad-hoc mesh networking, in other words. Taking the telecom infrastructure that currently underlies the internet and distributing it out into end user devices. In this new model you don't just connect to the internet, you are the internet. Instead of your modem connecting to a router (say, at your ISP) your modem will also be a router. And so will everyone else's.
O.K., that's probably a bit too simple, but something like this is happening. And the key will be software, not hardware. Specifically, software defined radio, like gnu radio. This type of software allows your general purpose computer to reconfigure itself on the fly to work with any known radio format.
Here are Cory Doctorow's short notes from a talk by the gnu radio guys at ETcon.
GNU Radio is a free software toolkit for realtime signal processing things -- radio included. Works for sonar, medical imaging, etc.This flexibility will unleash a tidal wave of experimentation. Think how hard, and expensive, it is to introduce a new wireless technology. The telcoms have to roll out all new equipment (like build towers everywhere!) while the public has to buy all new wireless cards. This sort of outlay cannot happen very often, which is why we still have very poor wireless technology deployed.
Get as much stuff as we can into software, out of hardware.
Turn all the hardware problems into software problems -- all wave forms are encoded, decoded, modulated and demodded in software.
But move all the custom hardware into software, and now we can reconfigure as easily as we download patches for our software, or firmware updates for our machines. This is made possible, generally, by the incredible computational power of ordinary general purpose computing. Or, in other words, the need for building custom (expensive!) hardware to solve technical problems decreases as general purpose hardware increases in power.
What can you do with it?And this is all in software, on the computer you are using right now. Go gnu radio!
* Conventional radio
* Spectrum monitoring
* Multichannel -- one app sucks down the whole RF spectrum; AT&T could support all its legacy phones (GSM, CDMA, Analog) on one tower, without any forklift upgrade.
* Morph mode
* Morph on the fly -- a device that reconfigures itself for what you need, sat phone, cell phone, pager, etc, your 802.11b could talk 802.11g once it's invented
* Better spectrum utilization -- listen-before-talk, then choose an unused band. Accommodates legacy users and lets you move forward.
* Cognitive radio -- minimal power, shaped xmission, etc
Little network problem for the last few minutes. Anybody else notice that?
I can't get Safari to accept cookies from localhost. I dimly recall having this problem before, but I can't find any reference to it here, so maybe I'm dreaming.
Anyone?
More on my latest lust: +1 megapixel digital camera phones. Of course in Japan first. Nothing new in that article, really, but the last two paragraphs are interesting.
Some camera makers are nevertheless concerned that cell phone cameras with 3 megapixel quality would affect the markets of low-quality digital cameras of the 1 megapixel class and disposable cameras."[M]ore formal photo sessions...," huh? Yeah right. The digital camera will be completely subsumed into the phone very quickly for all but the most professional applications. Those companies better move into the +10 megapixel pro range, or strike some deals with cell makers. Who's going to want to carry two devices? Especially when the added bulk gets you less functionality (can't send your picture to someone while in the field with your regular digital camera.)
However, many of them expect that camera-equipped cell phones and regular digital cameras can coexist in the market. "Camera-equipped cell phones can be used for casual snapshots, while regular digital cameras are suitable for more formal photo sessions," an employee of a camera maker said.
Converge damn it, converge!