I have no clue how Yahoo! got the Tolkien estate to give them rights to use Bilbo and Gandalf to advertise how you can text and chat inside Yahoo!’s email offering. Half of me thinks it is oddly interesting to “watch” Mr. Wizard and the Halfling converse as if they were 15 year old girls. The other half thinks it is sacrilegious. You decide which half you fall on.
Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity. It will make you think thrice about how the ancients were able to build what they built.
Via J-Walk
PC Magazine has a short article about how hackers have been able to take control of certain power grids. It seems that several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands and the CIA is taking careful note of what happened to try and prevent it from happening within our borders.
Considering the Internet really does not have any borders, this is troubling news as the world becomes more and more computerized. Let’s hope that the sys admins who manage our vital infrastructure locations have changed their default passwords from “password” to something harder to crack than “p@ssw0rd.”
The new year always brings new resolutions. Mine this year is twofold: to try and post more frequently and to change my eating habits. For the first one, in the words of Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food, I plan to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
For the second, as my first post of the year, I thought I would share some spiffy new designs, devices and user experiences that are in store for us in 2008 and beyond. These are really, really cool. I’m not easily “wowed” these days but over and over again I found myself scratching my head and thinking “how do they come up with this stuff?”
Check out the Innovative Designs and Devices and User Experiences of the Future courtesy of Smashing Magazine.
I love the Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard, the Hi-Tech Office: Eclipse Partitioning System and the Reactable. Most of these are spec only and not for sale which is good for me – it limits the temptation to run out and buy them today.
Who wouldn’t want their very own decorative Flux Capacitor? Maybe someone wants an actual working one, that’s who. How much does 1.21 gigawatt’s worth of power equal anyway?
Via Neu
It was only a matter of time: Digital wanted signs have arrived and are already proving to be quite effective. One guy in Alabama was on the run for 10 days – the police had no leads except for his photo. So, the police posted his photo to a digital billboard which acted as a giant digi “Wanted!” poster and low and behold, the fugitive turned himself in a day later. It seems he felt that with so many people driving by his face all day long, someone was bound to recognize him and better he turn himself in than have the police break down his door.
This is just the first step – the next is when we all have RFID chips under our skin. I say convicts will start to get “chipped” in the next 5 – 10 years, ACLU be damned.
If you love to connect to the net for free and you spent time in NYC, then CBS’s announcement that it will be developing a CBS Mobile Zone, a free Wi-Fi network for laptops and other wireless devices, in the heart of the Big Apple should make you very happy.
This zone will cover the area from Times Square to Central Park South, between 6th and 8th Avenues. It is an experiment between CBS and the MTA and I am very curious to see it if works, especially since Philadelphia has had such trouble proving free Wi-Fi.
Via See-Ming
Is Google outsmarting everyone?. It is quite possible.
Financially, the $2k that I didn’t invest in Apple in 2003 and the $2k I didn’t invest in Google when it debuted are worth around $25k total right now. Apple has gone up about 10x since when I thought about buying it and Google has gone up about 7x. Knowing that I would have only made “small” bets on these companies, and knowing that I would have 99% sold my stakes in them when they simply doubled or tripled, are the only things keeping me from kicking myself on a daily basis.
Some investment decisions should be made by your gut and invest in Apple when the first generation iPod came out and investing in Google when they pulled their dutch auction IPO were no-brainers. I think that is why they are called “no-brainers” – because if you use your brain, you’ll probably think yourself out of making the right decision.
Via Alex (who also crafted the nifty title on another blog post)
DRM stands for digital rights management, aka the utter bullshit that companies use to “protect” their content from the very people who gave them money for said content in the first place. DRM sucks and not just because the song/show/movie you bought will only play on certain “approved” device(s) – there are about 10 other good reasons why it sucks which I’m not going get into in this post. Not only do most music consumers hate the very idea of DRM, now music industry professionals are going on the record against this failed idea as well.
For instance, Ian Rodgers, the Head of Yahoo! Music, the #1 music destination on the web, stated two weeks ago that he won’t spend a single dollar more on DRM. As he so eloquently put it,
“In the end you get what you pay for. I won’t spend another dime paying engineers to build false control, making listening to music harder for music-lovers. I will put all of my energy into making it easier and making the experience better. I suggest you do the same.”
Now for a little history about this whole nonsense: DRM became “hot” due to the Napster and P2P phenomenon which caught publishers by complete surprise. Their only strategy for the last 8 years has been to circle the wagons and go into lock down mode while they try to figure out how to take advantage of this new digital landscape. I do not use “take advantage” lightly; what the music publishers have done over this almost decades worth of time is take advantage of their customers, by first rolling out poorly thought out and poorly executed DRM strategies and then by trying to get everyone to use subscription based models – you don’t own any music, you just “lease” it – to make as much money as they can.
eMusic has always known what users want and has allowed them to buy DRM free MP3s since they first launched their site years ago. However, the eMusic song catalog has always been limited to the lesser (though still good) known acts of the world which has been one of its main drawbacks. The other main drawback is that you can only buy a package, like 30 tracks in a month for $9.99, and not individual songs from eMusic. So, I like the site but I don’t love it.
Apple then got on the bandwagon a few months back by starting to sell DRM free songs in its iTunes store at a premium, which was a step in the right direction but still annoying and not just because Apple basically hid (from a information architecture / usability point of view) this whole DRM free section of the site. As an aside, I have been buying tracks off of iTunes for a while now – mostly because my wife keeps getting gift certificates to the iTunes store so hey, why not right? I love the store but hate the rights managed AAC format. This means that some of my great music can only be played on an iPod. While I do have an iPod now, who knows what the future brings? Being locked into a certain device in order to listen to music I bought and paid for is aggravating and upsetting. Trying to find the new DRM free iTunes tracks is almost as aggravating. Almost.
Then, just about a month ago things got very interesting. Amazon, praise Jesus, rolled out their DRM free MP3 store and hallelujah, there is a real player out there who can honestly compete with iTunes (i.e. the store has over 2 million songs) . Say it with me the way that Marv Albert says it: “Yesss!”
Finally, a major store exists that sells you a product that you, not they, control. You give them money. They give you control. I’m so in love with this new store and the idea of being able to buy individual DRM free MP3s from major artists that I even posted a small banner on my site to the new Amazon MP3 store to try and help our their business. Go check out their store and buy a track while you are at it – it will only cost you a buck (or less).
The even better news is that Amazon is being taken quite seriously. Apple has cut the costs for their DRM free music and I bet that these types of track will become easier to find / more heavily promoted as well.
Y!’s Mr. Rodgers said, “Convenience wins, hubris loses” and I hope he is right.
For those who have a few minutes for a geeky laugh, check out the video below. My favorite part of “Vista Sucks” is when the announcer says, “From the company that taught you to turn off the computer by clicking the start button.” Enjoy.
2013 UPDATE: the video mentioned above has been removed due to a copyright issue – a photo used in it is actually a rights managed photo and I’ve taken the video down per a request from Getty Images.