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Aggregator Overload - Good Stuff - Some Explored - Some Not
Tuesday, December 10, 2002Bandwidth and Latency. I'm pretty sure this made the one of the other news letters, but I thought it was an incredibly well written article. Arstechnicia has managed to convey some fairly complex concepts, in very understandable language (at least I thought I understood what they were saying). :p... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]
Wacky/gorgeous online gallery of burning matchstick art. Artist David Mach creates sculptures from the colored heads of matches, then sets them on fire:
Link Discuss (thanks, Jeff!)"I made my first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of my magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. I was puzzled by this and immediately attracted to this underdog. Of course the reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material...
There doesn't seem to be any limit to the subject matter and of course they all have that lethal incendiary device capability. In fact you can describe three clear lives to these sculptures: the original head with colour; the performance of burning it; and the burned head, instantly aged black and white version of the original. Not bad for a nothing material."
[Boing Boing Blog]
Will Ferrell is a "switcher".
Will Ferrell as Santa Claus in a couple parodies of Apple's Switch campaign...
On Santa's run-in with the law: "Merry Christmas! ... or Happy Holidays! I could go either way."
On Santa's iPod: "980 Christmas songs. And 20 Doobie Brothers. And 1 Sheryl Crow."
Yes, the Ellen Feiss ad is funny. But there's something about Will Ferrell's weary, resigned Santa that's just priceless.
(Note: this isn't Will's first take at a Switch parody. Check out Will comparing the merits of an iMac to a parfait.)
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]In the "The Best Information is the Most Prosaic Department"....
The Department of Energy has published a report on the "Effect of Income on Appliances in U.S. Households" that includes a whole lot of interesting statistics about the distribution of various household appliances based on geography, socioeconomic characteristics and household income. For example, did you know that the "percent of households with a large screen television increased from about 25 percent for the lowest income bracket to 43 percent for the highest income bracket"?
How about cable or satellite penetration by income?
Now, consider that fewer low-income households have a clothes washer than have cable or satellite connections....
There's a lot more good stuff in this report....
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]Is Fair Use Fair?.
New Tool Makes DVD Copying Easy
"Hollywood says that it's illegal to burn a backup copy of your Austin Powers Goldmember DVD, and it builds in copy protection to stop you. But a small firm denies any kinship to Dr. Evil just because it markets software that lets anyone with a burnable DVD drive make an exact copy of a commercial DVD.
Missouri-based 321 Studios has released DVD X Copy, a $99 program that is the first to let users create a mirror image of an entire DVD on a second blank DVD. The copy even includes menus, special features, and enhanced audio, the company says.
The movie industry trade association Motion Picture Association of America contends that such products violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law, currently under review, outlaws providing information or tools to circumvent copy-control technology, including the Contents Scramble System (CSS) used on DVD media.
But Robert Moore, president and founder of 321 Studios, says consumers have a fair-use right to make backup copies of DVDs they purchase....
During a recent demonstration of DVD X Copy running on an 800-MHz Compaq notebook attached to a USB 2.0 external DVD+RW Viper Drive, it took us about an hour to make an exact copy of the DVD Black Hawk Down....
During the copying process, 321 Studios takes three extra steps to appease its Hollywood critics. DVD X Copy inserts electronic controls into copied DVDs to prevent them from being duplicated further. It embeds a digital watermark that can trace the source of any file transmitted over the Internet to the software's licensed owner. And it inserts a disclaimer at the beginning of the recorded DVD, telling viewers that the disc is a backup copy intended for personal use only....
Moore believes that anticircumvention laws like the DMCA are unconstitutional. He cites the so-called "Betamax defense," a response to the motion picture industry's efforts to ban Sony's Betamax VCRs because they could be used to make illegal copies of movies. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that, though some VCR uses do infringe on copyright, a banning the technology was not justified because it had sufficient noninfringing uses.
What's more, Moore says, DVD X Copy doesn't actually break the CSS on commercial DVDs.
Instead, 321 Studio intercepts the video and audio stream after a DVD player has decrypted the CSS code. Moore argues that all DVD players decrypt the CSS code when they plays a protected DVD. Because it intercepts the signal after decryption but before the video is rendered, the product does not run afoul of the DMCA, he says." [PC World]
So now we'll find out if the movie industry really believes in fair use or not. It looks to my non-lawyerly eye that they have taken measures to prevent widespread piracy and they've even included some DRM.
Hollywood, the ball is in your court. Are you with consumers, or against us?
[The Shifted Librarian]