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Saturday, January 18, 2003
Since we weren't invited... 
| | You might want to make the Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium at Stanford titled "Solving High Technology Crime: Academic Partnership in Crime Fighting", being held in the NEC Auditorium of the Gates Computer Science building. It features speakers with titles like Assistant Special Agent in Charge, United States Secret Service and United States Postal Inspector, San Francisco Electronic Crimes Task Force. As well as folks from Cisco, eBay, Dolphin and Dolphon. It's next Wednesday. |
DigID, cont'd
Lessig is more
| | Protecting Mickey Mouse at Art's Expense is Larry Lessig's Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times, following up on the Eldred loss (the Supreme court sided with Congress, 7-2). In it he makes a constructive suggestion. Here's the relevant excerpt: |
| | Still, missing from the opinion was any justification for perhaps the most damaging part of Congress's decision to extend existing copyrights for 20 years: the extension unnecessarily stifles freedom of expression by preventing the artistic and educational use even of content that no longer has any commercial value. As one dissenter, Justice Steven G. Breyer, estimated, only 2 percent of the work copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 continues to be commercially exploited (for example, the early Mickey Mouse movies, whose eminent entry into the public domain prompted Congress to act in the first place). |
| | But to protect that tiny proportion, the remaining copyrighted works will stay locked up for another generation. Thus a museum that wants to produce an Internet exhibition about the New Deal will still need to find the copyright holders of any pictures or sound it wants to include. Or archives that want to release out-of-print books will still need to track down copyright holders of works that are almost a century old. |
| | This is a problem that the First Branch could fix without compromising any of the legitimate rights protected by the copyright extension act. The trick is a technique to move content that is no longer commercially exploited into the public domain, while protecting work that has continuing commercial value. The answer is suggested from the law governing patents. |
| | Patent holders have to pay a fee every few years to maintain their patents. The same principle could be applied to copyright. |
| | It's a good idea. And perhaps timely. I think this next Congress may be embarrassed by how totally the previous several had sold out the country to Hollywood. |
Chalking on the wall
| | Until either my webhost or my bosses ask me to take it down, here is a document detailing the design process behind the BBC homepage. The research methods and synthesis they went through is pretty interesting, and hopefully some of the process, artifacts and outcomes documented might be useful for web design practitioners. I'll feedback any comments to the design team involved. |
| | As for warchalking, I thought it was mortally wounded when T€Mobile failed to use warchalk symbology to mark each of the 1000+ Starbucks that feature a wi-fi hotspot. Woulda been a cool idea. |
Pixel dust
| | A couple days ago I bought a new monitor for my main Linux box. I had wanted a flat LCD screen, for a variety of reasons: desk space, heat, electrical cost, noise (the Sony 21" number I'm looking at now — the outboard screen for my Titanium laptop — emits a high pitched whistle that aggavates my already aggravating tinnitis). Looks isn't one of them. They're all pretty, but they all have exactly one native resolution, and all other settings look weird on them. And they all look different. This is most apparent on every Airbus that uses those LCD displays that open down from the ceiling and show movies. Some are tinged pink, others green... Maybe it's a driver issue, but in any case, the differences are there. |
| | At CompUSA I spent an hour with one of the sales guys, tweaking the settings on about twenty different 1040x768 and 1280x1024 screens, all displaying the same screen saver image. There were no 1600x1400 screens, except on some high-end laptops. The message: if you want a screen with resolution that high, you buy a "desktop replacement" laptop to go with it. |
| | I really didn't want one of the lower-resolution jobs, although I considered settling for one on a short-term basis while I waited for the bigger ones to get cheaper. But the best-looking big ones were $700 and up, while the best little ones were still over $300 — much cheaper than even a few months ago, but still no bargain. One was only about $150, but looked terrible. |
| | Then I checke out the 19" VDTs. We set the resolution to 1600x1400 and compared the fine print on their screens. A $229 ViewSonic and a $339 Samsung kicked ass — even Sony's. So I bought the Viewsonic. |
| | Then yesterday I was in Circuit City and saw a neat-looking 15" 1024x768 TV that also works as a computer monitor. It has two good-sounding speakers and costs $500-something. I think Audiovox makes it, although I can't find one on the Web. (This Sharp comes close.) It gave me a momentary twinge of buyer's remorse; but mostly I saw for the first time how TV and computing are going to converge around displays, somehow. |
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