TECHPopuli

German retailer stops using personal RFID chips

AP Technology, via Yahoo!:

German retail giant Metro Group said Friday it will stop putting "smart tag" chips inside customer loyalty cards, a practice that sparked protests by privacy advocates who say the cards could allow stores to secretly track consumers as they shop.

Metro has given out about 10,000 of the cards with embedded Radio Frequency Identification chips since April as part of a broader effort to bring wireless technology into its stores and warehouses.

Henry is watching

Detroit Fee Press:

Ford Motor Co. has begun a two-state project to help reduce traffic jams and inform drivers of bad weather in real time -- potentially preventing accidents and reducing commutes by as much as 50 percent.

The experiment is intended to turn vehicles into mobile traffic-monitoring tools. They'll report their locations and speeds along with road temperatures, whether their headlights and windshield wipers are activated, even if their antilock braking systems have been used.

Playstation mini

twice.com:

Sony Corp. said the North American launch of its first handheld video game player, dubbed the PlayStation Portable, will come in early 2005. Although no firm launch dates were announced, most in the industry had expected the device before the 2004 holiday season.

We're just good friends

The Register:

There is a good chance your kids think more highly of their computer more than they do of you, according to a survey published today.

Children in Britain are bonding, en masse, with technology: nearly half (45 per cent) consider their computer a friend, and nearly two thirds (61 per cent) say they are extremely fond of their PCs. Adults are less sentimental. Even so, a third consider their chunk of silicon and plastic to be a buddy, and close to half say they'd be lost without it.

Here's something I wrote in my blog a while back.

"...thinking that I should get my valuables out of it in case of a flood. The first thing that I thought to protect was my laptop."

Next Generation Personal Video Recorders

CNET News.com:

...digital video recorders are about to get a boost in features that will allow them to zap several video streams throughout networked homes.

Engineers in the consumer electronics lab of hard-drive maker Maxtor , for example, are working on DVR-type devices that can record or broadcast at least six media streams at a time. That compares to three streams in current DVRs, which are hard-drive-based machines that can record video and temporarily pause live broadcasts. Three-stream machines can simultaneously record two live channels while playing a previously recorded program.

In Boston Andrew Grumet is doing some interesting thinking and prototyping for new ways to use your PVR: RSSTV

Do you Google?

Wired.com has a wide-ranging collection of reports and advice on the world's most favorite website.

Wired:

They named their new search engine Google, for the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn't big enough. Today Google's a library, an almanac, a settler of bets. It's a parlor game, a dating service, a shopping mall. It's a Microsoft rival. It's a verb. At more than 200 million requests a day, it is, by far, the world's biggest search engine. And now, on the eve of a very public stock offering, it's cast as savior, a harbinger of rebirth in the Valley. How can it be so many things? It's Goooooooooogle.

Interesting Google alternative: Mooter

Life is so complicated these days.

When I was in High School a big controversy erupted when the technology got small & cheap enough for us to want to use hand-held calculators in class.

techdirt:

For years, [cell phones] were banned in schools. However, following events like Columbine and September 11th, many parents wanted their kids to have mobile phones, in case of emergency. Thus, the schools caught up with the times and changed the rules. However, now some are rethinking the issue because they never thought far enough ahead to consider what happens when a camera gets added to the phone . Like many other locations, they're worried about privacy issues of kids snapping pictures in the locker room, but they're also worried about kids cheating via camera phones.

Change all over the place

One of the themes of TECHPopuli is how technology changes our lives. Check this out.

MIT Technology Review website:

Two recent articles in the International Times Herald point to the ways that modern media are changing the ways people live in relation to national cultures. Both of the stories are interesting on their own terms but even more provocative read side by side.

In the first story , we learn that the ability to access national language and in some cases national origin cable programing is allowing immigrants to maintain much stronger ties back to their mother countries than had been the case for previous generations.

...

The second story reverses this argument, showing the ways that the outsourcing of communications-related job to India and other Asian countries is speeding up the process of westernization.

Another way of filtering the RSS feeds

How about a feature in the aggregator where, for each item you read, you have the opportunity to click THUMBS UP or THUMBS DOWN for that post.

Then, based on those "ratings" the aggregator does some sort of Bayesian weighting of all the unread items in your feeds queue, and displays them sorted with the "most likely to be interesting" at the top of the list. Every time you read a post, and give it an UP or DOWN, the weightings and rankings are recalculated, and the unread list is displayed anew.

Just an idea.

RipFlash Pro-2 Digital Audio Device

MikeW loves his new, RipFlash Pro-2, combination MP3 player, FM radio, audio recorder:

I ordered mine from Comp USA via Amazon for about $175 (including shipping).  It came just as I was headed out the door for two meetings in Cambridge last Thurs.  I threw the recorder and little manual in my pocket and jumped on the subway.

The damned thing worked.  I was able to listen to my favorite FM station on the way to Cambridge and then record two back to back 90 minute meetings flawlessly *without* and external mic.

My only question is, how does it connect to your PC? USB?

Impromptu Supercomputer

New York Times Technology:

Some class science projects get out of hand.

That is certainly the case with Patrick Miller's graduate course in do-it-yourself supercomputing at the University of San Francisco. On April 3, his students plan to assemble the first "flash mob supercomputer" in the school gym.

...

Last week, the class put out a call for about 1,200 volunteers to bring their computers to the Koret Gym here for a day and plug them into a shared high-speed network.

But then in the last paragraph.

After taking a shot at a speed record, the computer will be reorganized to serve as the host of a giant multiplayer video game tournament...

Industrial WiFi

CNet, News.com:

SAN FRANCISCO--The construction site for the St. Regis Museum Tower resembles countless other downtown projects, a jumble of steel, concrete and heavy machinery.

But for several months, perched on a crane high above the work in progress, was a piece of equipment never used in the history of this city's picture-postcard skyline: a wireless hub.

Webcor Builders, the company constructing the 42-story hotel complex , created a wireless network so that engineers and crews could instantly view blueprints and coordinate projects.

Where's Stephanie?

Vote for your favorite of the "Girls of TechTV". I voted for Sarah, but Steph would beat 'em all.

[Warning, click this and you're headed to Playboy.com.]

Check Off that New Years' Resolution

Joi Ito is now in the Internet Movie Data Base. I wonder if I qualify?

Cukoo's Nest II ???

The Register:

Book review -- It's rare to read a book about computer security that captures the spills and thrills of hunting cyber-criminals.

Neil Barrett's Traces of Guilt conveys the intellectual excitement of the chase and sheds light on the real extent of computer crime and the use of computer evidence in a wide variety of cases.

I thought it would be more hi-tech

Airport Terminal screens created with HTML. And subject to bugs. Click on pic for larger.

[Thanks Steve Garfield, Off on a Tangent]

The new business model for musicians

From the website of the band CD Baby:

In case anyone tries to tell you that independent music has no value, is small potatoes, is just "garage bands", or anything else like that - you can tell them that CD Baby has now sold over $10 MILLION in independent CDs.

That's $10 million in CD sales from 1998 to now (February 2004).

$4.65 million in 2003. (Compared to $2.5 million in 2002.)

All of it independent music.

Blogging the Conventions

MF:

The Dowbrigade is very much looking forward to this July in Boston.  The circus is coming to town, and it will be Blogged.

Berkman Weblogger Meeting Notes Feb 19, 2004

♦ Rick Heller reported, with comments from DaveW, on attending a talk earlier in the day by David Jones, who raised a lot of money to produce and present three Dean attack ads. [Rick has now blogged more details about this.]

♦ Continuation of the ongoing conversation about the role of the interntet/blogs in the presidential campaign. "What happens to the Dean campaign now?" "A movement?" "Build infrastructure?"

"Dean was bloggable." -- DaveW

♦ We did some concrete planning for BloggerConII.

Tentative date April 3 [Dave now says possible the 10th]. The beginnings of an agenda here. [I'm looking for a link to Dave's notes. In the meantime here are Jay's notes for the whole meeting. Scroll down for the BloggerConII agenda suggestions.]

One BloggerCon subject that got a strong response: "Blogging the Conventions". Emphasis on BOTH conventions.

♦ Once again we made dinner plans midway through the evening!!!

♦ Rick H and Jay McCarthy described the upcoming appearence of musician who blogs, Dr Frank. Sunday 9pm (am?) at MiddleEast in Central Sq.

♦ DaveW introduced "Ash" who is an associate of Jim Moore.

"I was just learning about blogging and I discovered that my 13 year old daughter is blogging. She calls it 'profiling'" ("A persistent form of IMing," someone said.)

Among other things, Ash was involved with the initial business planning for AT&T's WorldNet service. The first (one of the first?) fixed price, unlimited access ISP.

Dave said that he, Jim, and Ash met the night before and talked about what comes after the Dean campaign? "Is there a business here?"

♦ Sooz talked about her project "Exploit Boston". She's looking for "conspirators" to contribute citizen journalist content to the site. "The independent web is important to me."

♦ Andrew Grumet showed the latest version of his ongoing investigation into data-mining the Share Your Feeds info.

Latest: Show feeds like your feed.

♦ Dinner. As we walked down to the Bombay I had interesting conversation with Grumet about his RSSTV project. I also talked with Sooz about being a co-conspirator.

I couldn't stay for dinner, so I left them as they sat down.

Geeky Gatherings

Sam Ruby tells about a spontaneous gathering in a restaurant at last week's ETech conference. Seated around a big table with laptops, food and conversation. He says this kind of thing will become the norm in the future. I agree.

High Definition TVs Under $1500: Quick Look

I spent a couple hours last evening in the local Best Buy trying to get my head around the dizzying selection of High Definition TV sets they had on display.

There were four different screen technologies on display. LCD, Plasma, Rear Projection, and CRT.

Here's my subjective assessment of the types after wandering among them for awhile.

Plasma and LCD has the sharpest, brighest picture quality. I thought Plasma was sharper, but one of the sales guys I spoke to thought LCD.

Both Plasma and LCD are by far the most pricey of all the types. And by extension, they offer the smallest screens for a comparable price.

Good old fashioned CRT, in a widescreen HDTV format, was very bright and had the widest good viewing angle. But the CRT sharpness was not much better than a really good pic from an "old-fashioned" signal.

Rear Projection, by far, the offers the best screen real-estate for your dollar. But the brighness is the lowest of the lot, and is viewable from the narrowest angles. Image sharpness was comparable to the CRT, but only when you're well centered in front of the screen.

My evalution of these sets will be an ongoing process, but here's a quick first look at the ones that were: widescreen, HDTV, and that had a base price of under $1,500. (Keep in mind that all of these sets had manufacturer's rebates of $100 or more, that will reduce the price.)

But will you speak into the mouse?

CNET:

Manufacturers plan to start selling notebook [computers] with integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities...

HDTV card for your desktop?

I don't know if there's anything to this but. The Register writes,

ATI will this Spring allow North American buyers of its All-in-Wonder video cards to view free-to-air digital TV broadcasts.

The graphics chip company will bundle its new HDTV Wonder decoder with certain versions of the All-in-Wonder. The HDTV card will also be offered as a standalone product from ATI's web site.

I love my TiVo (remote)

NYT Technology:

In 1998, design engineers at TiVo , the Silicon Valley company that helped introduce the digital video recorder to the world, set out to produce a distinctive remote control. The result was a textbook blend of complexity and ease of use.

A Mom Buys a Digital Camera

Michelle Slatalla, NYT:

Nobody promised that being a parent would be easy. So I took a deep breath and decided to buy a digital camera online for [my daughter] Ella.

I approached the problem as I would any other child-rearing quandary. In the same spirit in which I once rushed off to read expert advice about how to get an infant to sleep through the night, I now turned to online gadget guides for suggestions.

Online Virtual Commodity Exchange

I haven't really decided whether Gaming is a subject to get into on TECHPopuli, but this sort of online commodity exchange really fascinates me. Take a look.

The Gaming Open Market:

GOM is an exchange site designed specifically for trading standard online game currencies, items, and accounts. Not only are we cheaper than the auction sites, but our trades are instant and secure .

Amazing New Technology

Print on Paper. Spoof TV commercial.

Can I Get a Pepsi Too?

MacCentral via Yahoo!:

Apple Computer Inc. and Target Stores have partnered this week to offer customers a prepaid iTunes Music Store card. In addition, Target will feature iPod kiosks in its stores allowing people to get some hands on time with the iPod.

I want one of these

Hecklebot is an idea by [JoiIto] of leveraging the unavoidable back-channel that occurs at conferences. It is an IRC bot that allows users on a channel to display messages on an LED sign that can be viewed by the speaker.

Hecklebot prototype. The hardware consists of an embedded uClinux device and a programmable LED sign. All the software runs on the embedded uClinux device and boots automatically out of flash. Once configured, there is no user action required to activate Hecklebot. Simply plug it into an Ethernet port and turn it on!

I want Video like my iPod

These guys are on the right track. Here's a quote, then I'll throw in my own 2 cents.

Twice.com:

Akimbo, a start-up video-on-demand over IP service based here, said that next quarter it will launch a new personalized programming service and hardware that will deliver movies and specialized video content to subscribers’ TV sets over broadband connections.

...

Akimbo will offer a hard-drive-equipped set-top box that will plug into a user’s cable, DSL or broadband satellite service to find and download hundreds of videos including movies, specialized television programs and eventually home made videos from its user community.

The system I'd like to see is like the Apple iPod/Apple Music Store. I want to use my regular computer to download videos that are then loaded into my TiVo (or other tivo-like device) and appear in my Now Playing list for viewing at my convenience.

Add to this an RSS type subscription so I can easily download new episodes of serial video programs. For example, I want to automatically download new programs that appear on the pretty cool Channel 101 site.

RELATED entry

The difference between TV and Computers

I've been trying to say this for years. TV and Computers are not "converging", but they are becoming connected.

James Hering writes about how TV and Computer are very different media.

Take a step back and compare:

TV is a passive, eight-feet-away-from-the-screen communal medium.

The Internet is an active, 18-inches-away-from-the-screen individual medium.

We all like to gather around the tube in a group to enjoy an episode of "Friends." But when's the last time you saw four people gather around a PC for 30 minutes to watch someone surf?

Disney Rejects Comcast Offer.

Big Surprise. This isn't over, and it could get very interesting. CNET News.com:

Walt Disney on Monday said it rejected an unsolicited $48.95 billion takeover offer from cable television company Comcast.

Disney's board said it had full confidence in the business, financial and creative direction of the company under Dthe leadership of Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner.

Unix Awk

I'm learning how to use the unix command awk. It's pretty useful.

Canon EOS Digital Rebel -- Quick Look

[These excerpts and links are to provide a cross-section of information. TECHPopuli has not confirmed their accuracy or completeness.]

We're hearing a lot about this camera lately. Seems like a good time to give it a quick once over.

Canon Rebel website:

Rebel 1990 - 2003. The Rebel Has Gone Digital.

Digital Trinity: (1) World renowned EF lenses (2) 6.3 megapixels cmos sensor (3)High speed Digic(tm) image processing.

Photography Without Limits.

Digital Performance. SLR Performance. Simple Operation. Total Imaging System.

DPReview.com (Aug 2003) (this site contains extensive technical specs of this camera):

This six megapixel digital SLR is essentially a feature reduced EOS-10D in the EOS-300's silver body (plastic). It will have a body only priced of $900 in the US, €1,100 in Europe and 120,000 YEN (US$1,013 / €911) in Japan. This camera will be available as a "body only kit" or a "with lens kit", the latter will include a new 18 - 55 mm EF-S lens which has been "optimized" for the size of the D-SLR sensor (sounds familiar).

Macworld.com (Feb 2004):

Canon has lowered the bar for digital SLR (D-SLR) cameras -- the price bar, that is. The least-expensive digital SLRs cost $1,499 until last August, when Canon introduced the Digital Rebel, at $899 for only the body or $999 for the body plus an 18mm–55mm lens. D-SLRs offer top-notch performance, photo quality, and expandability, and the Digital Rebel is a welcome change from expensive, and often slow, fixed-lens cameras.

DigiRebels.com online users group. Just getting started.

DigiRebels.com currently offers a mailing list for group discussion, along with various resource links providing users a 'portal' for all things Canon Digital Rebel. Christian Griffith, moderator and webmaster for the DigiRebels users group explains, "There are many digital camera resources on the web that do a fantastic job of educating the consumer. DigiRebels is the first online users group designed to focus specifically on the Digital Rebel SLR camera providing users 'quick clicks' to important information, user reviews, tips, techniques and fun stuff like photo contests and a weekly photo showcase."

RSS Syndication for your TiVo

Andrew Grumet is doing a lot of interesting experimentation with RSS syndication of the content lists of TiVos and other PVRs. He's created a mailing list group for people interested in playing along.

Geek President?

TechnologyReview.com is running a poll asking which U.S. President of the second half of the 20th Century was most effective in promoting technological innovation.

E Ink

Technology Review Magazine (free registration required):

E-book readers—handhelds that display the contents of book files downloaded from the Internet—just got a whole lot more readable. Philips Electronics and Cambridge, MA-based E Ink have developed a prototype electronic display that looks like paper and ink, not a dim, fuzzy screen... It has been in the works for a few years, but this is the first version that is ready for commercial production. Look for the new readers to hit shelves later this year.

Berkman Thursday Meeting Notes

Big group tonite. Toward the end of the nite I counted 20+ people. Lots of great discussion.

***

A couple of attendees, sorry didn't get names, reported on the Larry Lessig talk in Cambrige earlier in the day. From the description the talk seemed to cover Lessig's usual (and very important) themes of big copyright owners trying to control culture, the existing sitution being a "landgrab", Lessig said he was "not anti-copyright" just that he wants balance.

Jay McCarthy introduced a new notion about how copyright might work. Some thought it was pretty unconventional. Perhaps Jay will write more about it on his blog.

***

[Parenthetical aside, not from the meeting: Does one write about something "in" their blog? of "on" their blog?]

***

The group talked for awhile about the aggregator "design" project. Four "premises" were presented:

(1) We kinda know what an aggregator is, but,
(2) There are different approaches to what they look like.
(3) We now know more about what all this blog, and blog-related, stuff is.
(4) There are many more sites to aggregate now than before.

So what does all that mean to the design of our next-gen aggregator?

Later in the evening, but related to this project, we started to talk about the two main UIs for aggregators: the three-pane version, like NetNewsWire, [and the one that Lisa Williams uses], vs the style -- which we need to come up with a name for -- which uses a single "pane" to display aggregated syndicated items.

The project wiki has been more or less restored after the attack. We'll continue to post ideas there.

***

Dave showed Share Your OPML utility: Show Similar Feeds. We talked for a bit about more sophisticated filters to display similar feeds. Sadly, I didn't write any of them down. Hopefully they will show up in someone's blog.

***

In a dramatic, and earth-shaking change, we actually decided on the dinner location before the meeting was over. We were this able to get a rez at the place of our choice -- Cambridge Common -- and set a manageable end-time for the meeting. [OK, I'm being a little tongue in cheek here, but this was a good thing.]

***

We discussed possible improvements to the webcast. Notable was a plan to locate a better way to capture the sound: a better mic, and/or more mics and a simple mixer.

***

Jay McCarthy reported on his appearence on a college (?) radio program where he talked about blogs "impact" on the presidential campaign.

***

jessica reported on a journalism class/seminar she gave where she had a great experience talking to them about blogs and the internet. See her report on that here.

***

Dave reported on his just-ended trip to Microsoft. [Aside, is Microsoft now a place that one can travel to?] Actually he went to Seattle, Microsoft was just one of the orgs he visited.

He told us about his new experience of arriving in the Seattle weather from Boston, as opposed to from San Francisco. And how that was a different experience.

He met with the "research people" at MS and learned from them about some things they are exploring: social software, beter ways to manage photos; and he evangelized them a bit about things like RSS and others.

He also met with the IE team, but under non-disclosure, but he did say that he also told them about the value of RSS, etc.

***

Joey Devilla, who would later serenade us at dinner with his accordian, stuck his head in the door and talked a bit about present and past projects. he was once involved with a project called "Open Cola". The name came from thinking about "what is the most proprietary thing in the world? Well it's Coca Cola." So they came up with the notion of Open Cola, which became both a product name, and an open source recipe for making a cola beverage.

***

Dinner: Excellent as usual.

Talking with Rebecca McKinnon who is a serious big time journalist for a "major U.S. broadcaster" (quote from her website), but is now on sabbatical and doing some really interesting thinking about journalism and the internet.

Also talking with Lisa Williams, Shimon Rura, and others whose names I don't know (sorry), about the usual raft of fascinating subjects: aggregator philosophy, the ongoing death of old media distribution channels, Lisa's new baby.

A good time was had by all.

Blog Salon

Susan Kaup, of the Berkman Thursday Blog Writer's gathering, is planning a different format from time to time.

The salon series is an extension of the Berkman Thursday's Weblog Writers Meeting. It focuses on one topic exclusively. Two people with opposing views each have 15 minutes to state their viewpoint (without interruption). Discussion with the rest of the salon participants takes place for the remaining hour. Dinner at a nearby restaurant follows. It will be webcast (at least audio) when possible.

I think this sounds great.

[I think that non-members of the Thursday Yahoo! Group can read the above link. If not, sorry. But if you're interested in this stuff you should register for the group anyway.]

HDTV Blog

Here's a pretty interesting blog that focusses on HDTV from the consumer's perspective.

Info about High Definition TV

This week's Column is about Hi Def TV, so I'm doing a lot of research on that subject right now.

Here's an article from a year ago in Media Life Magazine, "Hi-def TV takes off at last, no joke".

There's been much progress since that piece was written. More set choices, more programming, lower prices. This past summer HiDef really seemed to take off here in Boston as the local sports network, NESN, announced that it had wired Fenway Park and the Fleet Center so that all Red Sox and Bruins home games would be televised in HD.

Technology User Groups at MIT

Here's a really good list of technology-related User Groups that meet at MIT. I know that at least some of these are open to the public. Most listed groups have a website and/or email for more info about eligibility.

BMac meeting tonight

Headed off to the meeting. Tonight's subject: Computer Graphics with Lawrence San. Also a little party to celebrate the Mac's 20th birthday. I'll post a meeting report later.

Be nice to the machine, dear.

Christan Science Monitor:

When pet Lila wasn't getting as much playtime as the other two animals in her Plymouth, Mass., home, owner Genie Boutchia felt guilty. Then when a potential new owner came calling with $850 in hand, Ms. Boutchia felt even guiltier. She changed her mind and deemed Lila not for sale.

Such feelings of moral responsibility might seem normal, even admirable, in a dog owner. But Lila is not a real dog. She's a robot.

Another under $1,000 Digital SLR Camera

Gone East reader GeorgeV, reports another camera sighting.

Digital Photography Review: "The D70 is Nikon's answer to the new sub-$1,000 digital SLR market, its clear competition being the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) announced last August."

Internet Freedoms

Larry Lessig calls our attention to this speech by FCC Chairman Michael Powell:

As we continue to promote competition among high-speed platforms, we must preserve the freedom of use broadband consumers have come to expect. Thus, I challenge the broadband network industry to preserve the following “Internet Freedoms:”

Freedom to Access Content.

Freedom to Use Applications.

Freedom to Attach Personal Devices.

Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information.

Good stuff.

[Sorry that it is only available in a PDF file right now. But worth reading.]

An intimate group of two to five friends

Jeff Jarvis was at the Emerging Technology Conference. He's posted a lot of his notes. Here's one:

Mimi Ito on her research on kids' use of mobile phones in Japan: Most communication occurs inside an intimate group of two to five friends... As social software, it's different from the Internet because it's more personal.... Some say it's now rude to make a phone call without first sending a text message to make sure it's ok; it's the knock on the door....
There's much use of photo mail. "One common genre is the new-haircut shot."

Dowbrigade on blogging into the TiVo

Dowbrigade write about videoblogging

BTW I was one of the "younger cyber-rangers" and "whippersnappers" that he refers to. Cool. And he's got it just right. This is the way it could easily turn out.

But then, last week, some of the younger cyber-rangers of the Berkman crew strongly lobbied for a third path. We need, they said, to get INSIDE THE TUBE. We need access to America's television sets. The technology is already there. Smart video recorders connected to computers connected to the internet and to digital cable can mix and match streams andserve up any combination of programming at any time.

The technology exists now to allow you to get back from the bars at 1 am and then turn on your TiVo to watch 20 minutes of live CNN followed by a 20-minute condensation of the NBC evening news (no commercials) followed by a 20-minute compendium consisting of 5 minutes of Instapundit, 5 minutes of Scripting News, 5 minutes from Adam Curry and 5 minutes from Dowbrigade. Or perhaps more realistically (since 5 minutes of air time is a lot to fill up) 2 minutes each from our top 10 favorite video-blogs.

All we need is the content, and an aggregator to collect it and send it to the VR (video recorder). But here is where we saw a problem. It is one thing to put together a decent-looking blog posting (even a simpleton like the Dowbrigade can do it!), and quite another to master video production, cutaways, transitions, voiceovers and camera techniques. We couldn't see anything less than a team of 3 or 4 experienced specialists doing a decent job.

What an antiquarian mind set we have! We were promptly informed by the whippersnappers at the table, by using iMovie and a decent WebCam, ready-for-prime-time production quality is already within the reach of a solo video journalist, and as video streams become more available tools will be created to enable "regular folks" to cut and paste, juxtapose and comment on video as easily as we currently manipulate copy.

Hi Def TV reaching critical mass?

We noticed over the past year that Hi Def TV (HDTV) suddenly seemed to take off, especially in the area of sports presented in Hi Def. Here in Boston, both the Red Sox and the Bruins now have all their home games available in Hi Def. An article in the NY Post talks about some of the progress:

"It is estimated that of the 105 million TV homes in the U.S., about 5.8 million have HDTV sets. The Consumer Electronic Association, an industry trade group, expects that number to grow to 16.2 million by 2008.

"When HDTV was first introduced about five years ago, an HDTV set cost as much as $20,000. This year the average cost is about $2,000. By this time next year, they are expected to fetch less than $1,000."

MLB's high asking price for online rights

CNET:

Major League Baseball is playing hardball as it shops its coveted online broadcast rights to the Web's heaviest hitters, leaving potential partners fuming at the plate.

With opening day still weeks away, anything could still happen. But sky-high terms and inconsistent offers are pushing the league's negotiations into extra innings, sources familiar with some of MLB's offers said.

Netflix is a stumbling block for online video on demand

TheRegister:

One of the flies in the ointment in open or IP based video on demand, is that Netflix has been giving it a moving target. Netflix needs little or no technology, depending upon whether or not you are its customers, or you are Netflix. While broadband delivered films need more than one technology breakthrough.

You say Camino, and I say Chimera

Mozilla Firebird releases version 0.8 and changes name to Firefox.

The new release also marks a name change for the new browser, which was previously known as Mozilla Firebird. “We are pleased to release a new preview version of Mozilla Firefox,” commented Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation. “To avoid overlap with another open source project, we have decided to change the name of this product from Mozilla Firebird to Mozilla Firefox.”

Along with the new name, Firefox sports a new logo and the Mozilla Foundation is kicking off a grass-roots Get Firefox campaign to spread word about the new browser.

Boston PDA Group meets tonight.

bostonpda.org:

On Tuesday February 10th at 7pm, MIT room 2-105, the Boston PDA User's Group presents a discussion of general PDA topics. The meeting is free, and open to all users of PDA technology.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For the month of February, both the Bopdaug user and developer meetings are moved to MIT 2-105. The location of Building 2 can be found at: http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?mapterms=2-105&mapsearch=go

As always, our resident team of PDA experts can answer almost any question about the care and feeding of nearly any handheld platform, including Pilot, Symbian, Danger, Pocket PC and Newton.

MyDoom Worm attacks Microsoft websites

eWeek News:

A new version of the MyDoom worm appears to be circulating on the Internet and may be responsible for some disruptions to Microsoft Corp.'s Web site Sunday night and Monday morning, researchers said.

Robot dog sniffs out toxic materials

AP via Yahoo!:

The mechanical canines, equipped with just about everything but a wet nose, are wired to sniff out toxic materials at former landfills and radioactive sites, providing environmental information about parks, school yards and other public spaces.

The robots have spurred toxic search projects in the United States, Europe and Australia. They are the brainchild of Natalie Jeremijenko, a lecturer in engineering at Yale and self-described technoartist.

"Technology is a social actor," she said. "These dogs are programmed into instruments for social activism. It's technological politics in another form."

Now SCO, don't get GREEDY

News.com:

In an amended complaint submitted shortly before a hearing Friday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, SCO lists two new causes of action against IBM, both of which include claims for damages of at least $1 billion. The changes bring the total amount sought to about $5 billion. Damages previously had been set at $3 billion.

First Entry

Test test test