] "Every site designated 'dot-kids' will be a safe zone
] for children," Bush said in a small Roosevelt Room
] signing ceremony for the domain legislation."

After about a decade of bad ideas the government finally passes a reasonable proposal for creating a kid friendly space online. The fact that ICANN is opposed to it should be proof positive that it is going to work. ICANN is opposed to anything that demonstrates that alternative TLDs are functional. Its a red letter day when the government does something right, particularily online.

CNN.com - Bush signs child Net safety law - Dec. 4, 2002

] "One of the problems the tablet PC is supposed to solve
] is the barrier that's formed between you and another
] person when you use a conventional laptop. The screen is
] purportedly some kind of offensive shield that cuts
] people off from one another and erects an insulting wall
] between them."

There are some interesting observations in this article about the dissonance that laptops have had fitting into a world designed for paper. Laptops with big screens hide faces in meetings... PCs teetering on college lecture desks designed for taking hand written notes on a small notepad...

At Nanog, most of the people in the audience sit on their laptops during talks. People will often get up to speak and make the mistake of commenting on it critically. This is a great way to signal to the audience that "I've never been to nanog before and I'm a little clueless so you can kind of half listen to me." Many of the people in the audience sit on IRC during the talks. The channel is usually about 80% "passing notes in class" and 20% useful filler information and critical thoughts about the talk.

The question is, who will bend:

1. The culture.
2. The technology.
3. The environment (start designing desks for meeting rooms that have cavities for laptops).

The answer will be found by determining how these peices can work together in a way that does not eliminate any of the functionality that each provides.

Any ideas?

Laptops and social norms...

Salon.COM has now partnered up with Francis Ford Coppolla's ZOETROPE magazine and is publishing one story per quarter for two weeks. This is a good read, catch it while you can!

excerpt:
Bart and the team he now worked with -— whom he carefully avoided naming -— had a very early alpha version for a piece of software that implemented the concept of "story actants," active story parts whose data structures determined not only how they would react to manipulation by other agents -— including a story's reader -— but also how these parts themselves moved through the story space, signaling to each other and operating actively upon the unfolding sum of resources that composed the story. The environment in which his story actants ran, a system called DIALOGOS, sounded to me like a whole ecosystem of digital objects updating and informing each other as if they were simultaneously all characters, readers, and authors of their own tales. Here was a true Bakhtinian carnival landscape whose sole interest lay in keeping itself in perpetual motion. The code for the alpha version of DIALOGOS was still rough, unstable, and far from the finished product that Bart and his team envisioned. But Bart asked if I'd like to help road test it. I wasn't doing anything but working on a novel. I said I'd be happy to.

More fun Sci-fi short stories...

Literary Devices

Jonathan Peterson provides line by line facts in response to Peter Chernin's talk, which I discussed here a few days ago.

Way.Nu: Breaking down Peter Chernin's Comdex Keynote

You are selected to wear the watch for two weeks. The watch takes a four-second "fingerprint" of ambient sound every minute. At the end, the watch is returned and the fingerprints are matched to determine exactly what you watched and listened to.

The software behind this system appears similar to that of Shazam, which Tom blogged in early November.

Tracking Moves Offline

] "What about rumors of OS X on Intel?
]
] Marklar is even more of a going concern than ever. Contrary to
] circulating rumors, it is not meant to be a Power PC exit
] strategy. Rather, it is intended to be offered to X86
] users when Apple sees market conditions being fit for it.
] What it means by this is regarding Intel's Lagrande
] technology, and Microsoft's Palladium technology. Apple
] intends on releasing OS X on Intel, when consumer
] dissatisfaction falls to an all time low for Microsoft
] when users become restricted to what they can do on their
] PC's due to Lagrande and Palladium."

Mac rumor site gets inside dope which lends credence to my theory posted here a few days ago.

Mac Rumors: Apple RoadMap Past and Future

A Sunday NYT article provides URLs for several "switch" parodies, including the switch-to-Canada ad discussed here recently.

Apple's Quirky Ads Evoke Parodies of Themselves

] "Once upon a time, computer users felt obliged to upgrade
] their machines on a regular basis. But sales of the
] desktop PC itself have been basically flat for a couple
] of years now."

The PC industry is becoming similar to the automotive industry. They were close to this point in 1993/4, but the internet, and high definition multi-media provided a dramatic new capability set that needed to be supported, and things moved forward. They are going to stagnate again. None of the ideas at the computer companies are going to be nearly as compelling as something like the net, because those ideas are based on what these people need to sell rather then what customers actually want to do.

People will cross-grade because they need to escape DRM, or they may upgrade to something capable of doing digital video editing IF bandwidth and costs improve to make this accessable to the consumer for daily life sort of media work.

In short, we've got what we need. We need to figure out how to use it.

PCs: Is New for You? (TechNews.com)

] "It's wrong because it's a crime."

This is quite an essay. First the guy presents three reasons that people don't think copying an MP3 is morally equivelent to stealing a CD. None of them are the real reason. (Are these people really so stupid that they don't GET this.) Instead, he lists the reasons why people don't like the media industry. He simply claims that these reasons are unfounded. He gives the media industry credit for the VCR. I guess he doesn't recall their fighting tooth and nail to ban VCRs. He claims the media industry isn't really negotiating for every dollar. I guess he didn't read Hillery Rosen when she said "this is about money."

Then, he basically admits, that the media industry is using its political influence to hold the entire technology industry and the economy in general hostage, until they get what they want.

Then he delivers a threat: Do what we want or you can't have your economy back.

I hope they booed him off stage. But, knowing the kind of people that usually show up for Comdex, they probably applauded, because thats what they were supposed to do.

News Corp's Peter Chernin on 'the problem with stealing.'

Reknamorken wrote:
] Analysis of a leaked MS document showing UNIX superiority as a
] server in a webserver context at least.

Please do not read the "analysis" linked here. The register is a higly questionable source of information and this article is no exception. Click through to the actual article in question. It provides a fairly objective analysis of the two platforms. What I found most interesting about the article was where windows exceeded unix, rather then the other way around, and these seem to be performance related. IE if you know what you are doing, IIS is *FASTER* then Apache.

Of course, I would never actually run IIS. Its a security nightmare. They have to give me at least a year with no vulnerabilities before I'll say its worth the effort. But, if its FASTER, that means fewer machines and smaller racks, and that stuff adds up.

RE: Microsoft admits that UNIX is a superior server OS