technology

The Ann Arbor News is wearing out it’s welcome 4

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For several years I’ve been becoming increasingly disgusted with the editorial stance of the Ann Arbor News. I’ve continued to subscribe because I wanted the local news and wanted to support the only local newspaper. But I am seriously tempted to give them the boot now. Among the issues I have with the news are:

-They endorsed shrub for president twice!
-They persist in carrying the editorial cartoons of Mike Shelton of the Orange County Register. Shelton is to cartooning as Ann Coulter is to writing
-Most of the stories they carry are straight off the AP Wire or reprinted from the New York Times or Washington Post, which in recent years have proved themselves increasingly un-trustworthy.
-Other than breaking news the re-purposed stories they carry are often at least days and often weeks old. Frequently I have already seen these stories on-line when they were first published.

The AA News has been contributing less and less of value to my life in the last couple of years. The most recent flub is the reprinting of a Washington Post editorial on net neutrality from a couple of days ago.

First of all if you are not familiar with the concept net neutrality means that internet service providers cannot discriminate about what sort of content you get over your net connection. If you want to do your searches on google that is your business. If you choose to search on yahoo or ask.com, they also should not have any say on that. The ISP provides a pipe with a given amount of bandwidth to you for a certain monthly fee. What you do with it is your decision. Companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, YouTube and others also pay their own providers for bandwidth and connectivity. It is part of their cost of doing business. The architecture of the internet is one of connecting to the network and sending out and receiving packets. Everyone pays for their own connection. You don’t pay for your connection and someone at the other end of your connection. They pay for their own. Similarly you don’t charge someone else for sending data that has been requested by a customer has already paid you. In recent months the phone companies like AT&T and Verizon have been making noise about having content companies pay them to be able to send the data that their paying subscribers have requested. Their subscribers have already paid. The ISPs should now just step aside and send the packets.

The Post editorial came out strongly against net neutrality. They also made several outright lies and distortions. For example:

The advocates of neutrality suggest, absurdly, that a non-neutral Internet would resemble cable TV: a medium through which only corporate content is delivered. This analogy misses the fact that the market for Internet connections, unlike that for cable television, is competitive: More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want

This statement is based on a bogus FCC study, that counted all the providers serving a zip code region. The reality is that in most regions not all the providers in a given zip code serve every potential customer in that zip code. Most households usually have access to at best two broadband providers. In many cases they realistically only have one. I have had broadband access through comcast for about 5 years now. Only recently has SBC DSL become available to me and it is still not available at their highest speed tier to match what comcast offers. As a result I have had no real competitive options for broadband. From other people I know personally I know that this is not at all uncommon. Real broadband competition is more a theory than a fact for a very large proportion of Americans. I understand the economic reasons for this. Building out a network is not a cheap endeavor for a company. This is the same reason that utilities like phone and electrical service have been considered natural monopolies for over a century and have been regulated to prevent abuse by the owners of those monopolies. Real broadband competition is more a theory than a fact for a great many Americans and will remain so for the foreseeable future. As a result some basic consumer protections need to be in place to ensure that large (and growing through consolidation ) telecom companies cannot double dip on customers and content providers.

They should not be allowed do decide what kind of packets of data flow into or out their customers homes. They should be providing connections only. They can charge whatever prices they consider appropriate for the market for a given speed. The content of the packets is none of their business. The Post editorial board should be ashamed of themselves for writing this editorial in the first place and the AA News should be even more ashamed for reprinting this editorial.

Possibly the best video game ever

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Yesterday Max got a new Nintendo DS Lite. He traded in his old Game Boy SP and with a gift card he got for his birthday and some credits he had for games he traded in previously, he had all but $35 of it covered. He also got the Big Brain Academy game. This is one of the Brain games that Nintendo has introduced recently. These brain games give you these mentally challenging puzzles to exercise your brain. You do the various challenges and the game gives you a rating in the form a brain weight. The better you do the heavier your brain. Sofia has had an original DS for over a year. One of the great things about the DS is that has built-in wifi and many of the games allow you to play against other players with DS’s. The nice thing is that some of the games let you wirelessly send a copy of the game to other machines for players who don’t have the game so you can play against each other. When Sony introduced the playstation portable a few months after the original DS a lot of people thought it would beat the DS hands down. After an initial rush however, the DS has consistently outsold the PSP by a huge margin. The reason why is the games and game-play. The psp has a bigger screen with better graphics but the game-play sucks. The DS has the dual screen setup with the lower one being a touch screen. This allows designers to come up innovative new game designs like nintendogs, Mario kart DS and now the brain games. In spite of the simpler graphics (maybe because of it) the designers have put more effort into designing interesting games. Ever since Max opened up his DS he has been playing big brain academy. Much of the time he has been playing with his sister. There is no shooting, no racing, no violence. Just brain challenging fun. Having seen the way many of the DS games draw you in with cool games and an innovative interface, I think Nintendo has a much better chance of success than Sony when the new WII and Playstation 3 come out this fall. The PS3 has great graphic capabilities but the games are the same as all the other games that have been around for years. The Nintendo WII has a new motion sensing controller that may fundamentally change the way video games are played. The DS costs have as much as a PSP but is a lot more fun. And isn’t that what games are all about?

Open source voting 1

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Voting, what could be simpler? You get some choices and you pick one. Then you add up all the votes for each choice. A voting system doesn’t have to do much. Present a list of choices, and tally the number of votes cast for each choice. In the past this was done by printing the names of the candidates on a paper ballot, then people would mark their choice and put the ballot in a box. People would them read each ballot and tally the results. Pretty simple Huh? So step into the twenty-first century where everything must use computer technology. The requirements have not changed. Present a list of choices, select one from the list, tally the results. A computer program to do that is really very simple. So what could one possibly add to such a program that meets those requirements that could require protecting trade secrets? Frankly , I don’t believe anything that requires secrecy should be added to such a system. Secrecy like that is inherently dangerous to a democratic system. There is nothing innovative required to be added to a voting system to meet the requirements. Since a reliable voting system is a necessary to the proper functioning of a democracy all such systems should be open and accessible for complete review and auditing. Manufacturers of electronic voting systems such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia have absolutely no justifiable excuse for keeping there code secret. These systems are bought and paid for by taxpayer dollars. They are used for a public purpose. Anyone and I mean anyone should be able to look at and evaluate the code. If a company is not willing to provide all source code they should not be allowed to provide systems. No arguments. These are the rules, follow them or walk away. Manufacturers of voting systems should be nothing more than systems integrators. Get a pile of computer components, assemble them and install the same software.

The software that comprises a voting system should be completely open source and owned by the public. No private company should be controlling anything so critical as voting system software. Especially a company like Diebold that was until recently run by a corrupt republican political hack like Walden O’Dell. There is only one thing about voting that should be kept secret and that is who any individual voted for. Other than that everything should be completely open and transparent. If it had been in 2004, we might have already consigned George Bush to the history books. To read more on the subject of electronic voting go to Black Box Voting.

Jpeg is saved 2

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JPEG is the image compression standard that is used in almost all digital cameras, scanners and across the web. It is a very efficient format and provides high levels of compression and with high quality. The format is approved by the international standards organization. Today the US Patent and Trademark Office invalidated the main parts of the JPEG patent held by Forgent Networks. Forgent did not create the ideas involved in the patent. They bought company that owned the patent in 1997. In 2002 when their main business wasn’t doing much they decided to try and make some money off this patent. They sued several dozen companies for infringement including Kodak, Dell, Apple and Sony. They reached settlements for a bunch of companies and collected over $90 million. However, the Public Patent Foundation challenged the patent and produced a whole bunch of prior art. Prior art is evidence that the idea already existed before the patent was filed. If a concept is published then you cannot claim you invented something and get a patent. It was shown to the USPTO and the USPTO decided to reject the patent. Apparently Forgent even knew about this prior art before asserting their patent rights. So they knew the patent was invalid but tried to profit from it anyway. Good riddance to another patent troll.

Open source in schools 3

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I’ve always thought that the premise of using windows and MS Office in schools because that is what they will use in the workplace is a crock. First of all it is not the job of the public schools to train kids how to use specific proprietary software packages. Any software tools that are used should be their because they meet a specific need related to the curriculum. If the kids are learning to plot data, the lesson is about ways to represent data in a meaningful way. There are many packages that can achieve this end some proprietary, some open-source. Similarly if the kids have to do research and write a report, they need to learn how to search for information, they need to learn how look up books in the library, and do effective internet searches. Whether they use IE or Firefox or Camino is irrelevant. Search engines work basically the same in all browsers. Learning how to write effectively is more important than learning how to use MS word. If the kids are taught how to write they can type a report or story in any word processor.

Since Michigan schools have had increasingly tight budgets in recent years thanks to the tax policies of the Republican legislature, it is ever more important to reduce costs. Ypsilanti schools got new computers about 5-6 years ago. For PC’s this is a long life span. At some point in the future they will need some upgrades. There are now several Linux distributions that are specifically geared to the needs of schools both for workstations and servers. There are also many open-source educational programs and also programs like GIMP for image editing, InkScape for drawing and blender for 3d modeling and animation. Of course OpenOffice provides all the functionality that is needed from MS Office at ) cost. As updates are needed the district IT staff should really need to consider moving to open-source solutions. Linux generally needs much less in terms of hardware resources than Windows (and with last weeks release of the hardware requirements for Windows Vista that one is out of the question without complete hardware replacement) The existing hardware could be updated with new open-source software at much less cost.

Free video for small devices

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I recently replaced my Motorola V710 cell phone with a palm Treo 650 smart-phone. The phone came free as a result of a class action settlement with verizon wireless. The timing worked out great because although the v710 worked great for me as a phone, the batteries in both the phone and my palm tungsten T2 were at the point where they would barely hold a charge anymore. So I took the opportunity to replace 2 devices with one. After I got the new phone I remembered a site I heard about some months back shortly after the Ipod with video support came out.

There used to be a concept called public domain. When the copyright on a work expired, that work entered the public domain, so that others could use it and adapt it to create new works. This is how the Walt Disney company made most of there fortune. Movies like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Treasure Planet and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are based on stories that have passed into the public domain. The way intellectual property laws are going these days it is entirely possible that copyright protection may become perpetual and no more works may enter the public domain.

Anyway back to my original point. There are a lot of old movies on which the copyright has expired which are now in the public domain. There is a site called public domain torrents that has a list of almost 800 films and serials that are in the public domain and available for purchase on disk or free download via bit-torrent. If you are not familiar with bittorrent, it is a completely legal open-source technology for peer to peer file sharing. It is being used by many companies for enabling faster, cheaper downloads. It is also used for a lot of trading of copyrighted works but that does not detract from it’s legitimate uses. Azureus is an excellent cross-platform (works on windows, Linux and mac) bit-torrent client. The videos on public domain torrents are available in variety of formats (mp4 and divx) prepared for different hardware platforms, including the ipod, the playstation portable, and various pdas and smart-phones. I currently have Nosferatu, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and the original Little Shop of Horrors (including one of Jack Nicholson’s first film roles) on my 1GB SD flash card.

Of course the treo doesn’t come with software that can play these files but fortunately I found TCPMP. The core pocket media player is an open-source (there’s that term again) project that is available for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile platforms. TCPMP has codec plug-in support for most of the popular audio and video codecs including mp3, ogg, wma, divx, xvid, mpeg1, mpeg4 and many others. On the bright 320×320 screen of the treo these videos look really good. The treo and tcpmp is also great for watching video podcasts like Rocketboom a daily 5 minute video starring Amanda Congdon.

Browser stats

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Checking my blog stats today I see some interesting trends. Since the beginning of this year I have had the following number of hits from various browsers:

3954 Mozilla Firefox
2814 Internet Explorer 6
462 Apple Safari
439 Mozilla
59 Netscape 4
47 Netscape 3
41 Internet Explorer 5.5
32 Internet Explorer 5
15 Opera 5
11 Opera 8
10 Opera
6 Konqueror
3 Mozilla Firefox 1
2 Opera 7
2 Internet Explorer 4
1 Internet Explorer 3
1 Opera 6

Some interesting things pop from these numbers. I’m glad to see that the number of readers using Firefox outnumbers IE by a pretty wide margin. This is ahead of general internet share numbers which currently have Firefox at about 12% of the total market and IE at somewhere between 80-85%. But I have a question for those of you using IE. Why? If you are checking from work, I know some employers are still stuck on using IE and won’t allow alternative browsers. But if you are not locked in to IE why are you still using it? The chances of getting your computer infected by spy-ware and viruses without any intervention on your part is remarkably high if you use IE. Unless you go into the IE settings and disable a lot of the features you will almost inevitably get infected if you use IE. If you are using IE I highly recommend that you try out firefox. When you first install it, it will ask if you want to import your IE settings. There are tons of extensions that add extra functionality to firefox. Try it, you’ll like it.

The other more curious thing is the number of hits from really old browsers. There are over 100 hits from Netscape 3 and 4. These browsers were released almost ten years ago. There are even a few hits from IE 3 and 4 which are also of the same vintage. Netscape and IE 3 were both released in August 1996.browser timeline All of this of course is irrelevant to anything and I welcome any and all visitors here regardless of what browser you chose to use. I just thought it was curious.

A question about IP 6

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Here is a question for all of you. If you have read any significant amount of my posts you may have already realized what I am about to say. I am very troubled by the concept of intellectual property. Two definitions that come from dictionary.com

intangible property that is the result of creativity (such as patents or trademarks or copyrights)

and

(IP) The ownership of ideas and control over the
tangible or virtual representation of those ideas. Use of
another person’s intellectual property may or may not involve
royalty payments or permission, but should always include
proper credit to the source.

The ownership of ideas is the part that bothers me the most. The whole concept is troubling. In a speech I heard by Lawrence Lessig he articulated a concept that resonates with me. If some has a tangible object like a camera, and another person takes it, the original possessor no longer has it and can no longer benefit from it. If one person has an idea and another person uses it, the first person still has the idea and can do what they want with it. The first person has not lost the benefit of that idea. They can still use the idea.

I’m not totally opposed to the idea of patents, because I think if someone comes up with a truly creative and original idea they should be able to make some money off that idea. But that should be based on a specific implementation of the idea. if someone comes up with a different or better way of doing the same thing they should be allowed to do that and compete. The basic idea should be open. That is what creates progress. People taking ideas and improving on them or coming up with better implementations. If someone cannot implement an idea they should not be given blanket monopoly control over a general concept. Even more importantly given the pace of technological development over the last few decades the length of any patent protection needs to be reduced not increased. I’m obviously rambling a bit here, but I’d like to know what other people think. Please comment on this post.

All Hail the RIAA!

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Oh thank you gods of the RIAA! Previously, the recording industry has indicated in court filings that they didn’t consider ripping of cds to mp3 players to be fair use. That means that if you go to a record store and buy a CD they think it is illegal for you to make a copy for listening to on your digital audio player. Now they are saying that they are OK with it even though they still consider it illegal. How kind of them. I say screw them. Before you buy a CD or a song from a on-line music store check the label. If the label is a member of the RIAA, put it back and go find something from an independent label instead. There is a ton of great music out there. Support lesser known musicians instead of overpaid executives who add nothing to the creative process. Go browse through some of the DRM free music stores linked in the sidebar. Browse for musical styles you like and listen to the previews. Try some music podcasts to find new music. Just don’t buy from the big guys. They already have enough of your money.

Thanks for the smog sharper image

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I’m sure you’ve seen the ads for ionic air purifiers that sharper image and other players sell.air purifier The actual benefit of these things is debatable at best. They function by blowing the room air over charged plates which supposedly charge the dust and pollen particles in the air and cause them to stick to the plates. How much of the dust in a room is actually removed is questionable. However, thanks to a new study funded by the National Science Foundation the charging of the air passing over the plates does cause the breathable oxygen gas to be converted to ozone. Ozone, while necessary for filtering out ultra-violet solar radiation, is definitely bad at ground level. High levels of of ground level ozone cause the creation of smog.

In a small and poorly ventilated room, the ozone adds to existing ozone and creates potentially unhealthy concentrations.

“People operating air purifiers indoors are more prone to being exposed to ozone levels in excess of public health standards,” said study leader Sergey Nizkorodov, a chemistry professor the University of California, Irvine.

Ozone can damage the lungs and cause shortness of breath and throat irritation, and it can also exacerbate asthma.

Nizkorodov and colleagues tested various air purifiers in homes, offices and cars. In many cases, ozone levels inside climbed above 90 parts per billion, exceeding California’s basic safety threshold. In some cases, ozone soared higher than 350 parts per billion, which if measured outside would trigger a Stage 2 Smog Alert, an event that hasn’t occurred in the Southern California coastal air basin since 1988.

So if the exorbitant prices that sharper image charges for products of dubious functionality, these things may actually be causing you lung damage. So save your money and change your furnace filter regularly. The furnace filter will probably pull more dust out of your air than this scam gadget anyway.