...more recent posts
On the web design front: I've never seen this before. Check out the little animation that plays (once) when you load the page. It reminds you to make sure you are seeing all of the horizontal information in the graph. It's a little thing, but it's nice. If I was still on the chi-web (Computer Human Interface) mailing list, I would point that one out. (The chart is a list of costs for credit card transactions. Suddenly I'm hearing a lot about micropayments again.)
Just in case you're looking for yet another summary of the current intellectual property rights in the networked computer age debate, here is an unusually good one. Heavily biased toward the information sharing side of the argument, but well argued, and reasonably presented. And for the rest of your cyber-freedom legal shopping, take a look around the whole Berkman Openlaw site while you're at it.
If I were a different person, it might be soap operas. Or that Blind Date show (O.K., that is me sometimes.) But I'm me, and so the guilty pleasure is riothero. But today I am absolved. He actually had a useful link. Noesis: Philosophical Research On-line.
I love finding stories that remind me I live in the future. Here's one about how the Sydney Olympics are trying to beat conterfeit Olympic products. They have formulated a special ink which contains the DNA of one particular unnamed Australian athlete.
"The DNA-laced ink is being applied to most of the 3,500 official souvenirs -- some 50 million individual items. It's the largest deployment ever of DNA as a security device. McGill oversees a team of 60 'logocops' equipped with special scanners that can detect the DNA ink. The logocops will roam Sydney and other Australian cities, pouncing on street vendors and retail outlets to determine whether their merchandise is authentic."I love the fact that they are keeping secret the identity of the human from whom the DNA was taken. Like maybe some counterfeiting mastermind could kidnap him, take some DNA, and whip up their own version of the ink? Muwahahahahahah. (link from /.)
I don't have a DVD player, and even if I did I'm not sure I would buy this, but I'm glad to see someone is putting the technology to use. And I'm not too surprised it's the Beastie Boys who are doing it. "...This 2-DVD piece will lend sound credence to the rumors that Adam Yauch is a certifiable home theatre geek...."
It's even worse than I thought. Wired's WebMonkey has done some in depth testing to see if web designers really need to stick with the cannonical 216 "web safe colors" palette. Turns out that 216 is a little too many if you really want to ensure that the colors will display properly (especially important if you are trying to hide an image by making it - or it's background - the same color as the page background.) Here's the very sad "really safe colors" palette. As they said in the article, "hope you like green." For more info, here's the conclusions, and here's the start of the article.
If your the sort of person who remembers ruefully the period when Wired eclipsed Mondo 2000 as the technocultures magazine of choice, R.U. Sirius has a little look back. I guess this is what internet time is all about: the web is still in its infancy, and already there is nostalgia for the good old days.
They are crunching numbers over in the FoRK archives. If you're trying to figure where we'll be (bandwidth,storage,cpu cycle cost/byte) in a few years this thread is a pretty good read. Also, if you're thinking about distributed apps (and I know some of you are) this is a mailing list to keep up with.
I've mentioned the Arthur C. Clarke inspired space elevator a number of times. Here's a very informative one page summary of where we stand. And how cool is that first picture? (Nasa's conclusion: "In 50 years or so, we'll be there. Then, if the need is there, we'll be able to do this. That's the gist of the report.")
IP address index. Network numbers, network names, and identitites. (via cam) [as of 02/15/01 this page seems to have been taken down. :-( I'd appreciate it if anybody could point me toward a similar resource. Just post below.]