Technology: October 2005 Archives
I keep forgetting about the fabulous Colloquia series at our Computer Science and Engineering department. I'm really kicking myself for having missed a couple of recent ones, like Patrick Baudisch (Microsoft) on Making Sense on Small Screens and Jeff Dean (Google) on BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. Fortunately, both of those are available on archived video and audio.
There are a bunch of good ones still to come, including:
Gail Murphy (University of British Columbia)
The Emergent Structure of Software Development Tasks
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
Tony Hey (Microsoft)
Cyberinfrastrucure for E-science
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
Lenhart Schubert (University of Rochester)
Turing's Dream and the Knowledge Challenge
Thursday, November 10, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Turing Center Distinguished Lecture Series
Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft)
From Scatterbrained to Focused: User Interface Support for Today's Crazed Information Worker
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
3:30 pm, EE-105
Colloquium
I'm going to try to attend more regularly.
Media Companies Go Too Far in Curbing Consumers' Activities by Walter Mossberg.
The beauty of digital media is the flexibility, and that flexibility shouldn't be destroyed for honest consumers just because the companies that sell them have a theft problem caused by a minority of people.
Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates -- people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.
Cool - hope it helps.
I'm glad to see that the Association of American Publishers can be just as determinedly nearsighted in their approach to the Internet as the RIAA and MPAA.
Woman arranges a book shop display
Google reckons its plans will raise awareness and sales of books
Internet search engine Google is being sued by a group of book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online.
The Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, has filed a suit in New York claiming Google will infringe their copyrights.
As part of its Print Library Project, Google plans to index and scan millions of books from five major libraries.
Google countered that the lawsuit was "short sighted", claiming its idea will lift exposure and demand for books.
I finally got around to watching Dick Hardt's keynote on Identity 2.0 from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in August.
Dick's brilliant presentation style, which violates every rule you ever heard about how to use presentation software, kept me totally engaged at 6:00 am while watching a fifteen minute presentation on what is, let's face it, not the most scintillating of topics.
Dick credits Lawrence Lessig for inspiration on the style, but I think it's a direct descendant of Bob Dylan's brilliant performance of Subterranean Homesick Blues at the beginning of Don't Look Back.
It's a whirlwind ride that does a great job of outlining why digital identity management really is a big issue that is extremely important and has a lot of work remaining to be done. Check it out!
Fredric Paul has a good piece in TechWeb titled Why Everyone Hates The Music Industry, as a response to a Forrester Research study titled Music Lessons: Is Your Industry At Risk?. One question I have is whether we should trust research opinions about record companies from research companies that charge US$249 for an eighteen page report. Anyway, Fredric's opinion piece is worth a look:
the record companies' real problem is that everyone hates them.
He Hate Me
Musicians hate them for habitually sucking the creativity out of the music and the profits from the CD sales. Usually they do it legally, if not morally, but all too often naïve musicians with few options end up swindled out of their rightful earnings.
And music lovers—don't call us consumers; music can't be consumed—see the record companies as greedy, clueless profiteers quick to jack up prices while placing limits on what music gets released and how you can listen to it.
Record companies add little real value to the process of creating and distributing music, and technological advancements make their role increasingly irrelevant. Movie studios and publishing houses still stand for something, some artistic orientation, but the big record companies don't. These days, who knows or cares which label their favorite artists happen to have signed with?
