Behold the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. This little masterpiece took two years to develop and cost £400,000 (according to the Today programme this morning).
James Cridland has some intriguing things to say about it. He’s also knocked up a more attractive alternative.
Well, well. I’d been wondering about this, and now ArsTechnica confirms it…
With great power comes great responsibility, and apparently with DRM-free music comes files embedded with identifying information. Such is the situation with Apple’s new DRM-free music: songs sold without DRM still have a user’s full name and account e-mail embedded in them, which means that dropping that new DRM-free song on your favorite P2P network could come back to bite you.
We started examining the files this morning and noticed our names and e-mail addresses in the files, and we’ve found corroboration of the find at TUAW, as well. But there’s more to the story: Apple embeds your account information in all songs sold on the store, not just DRM-free songs. Previously it wasn’t much of a big deal, since no one could imagine users sharing encrypted, DRMed content. But now that DRM-free music from Apple is on the loose, the hidden data is more significant since it could theoretically be used to trace shared tunes back to the original owner. It must also be kept in mind that this kind of information could be spoofed.
Concerned users could convert selections to MP3, but there will be a generational loss in quality resulting from the transcoding. We also have to wonder: who is buying DRM-free music with the plans of slapping it up on a P2P share, anyway? It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other ways to get access to music without paying for it…
Now here is something genuinely original from Microsoft — Photosynth. (Well, some of it seems to rely on Seadragon, a technology developed by a company recently acquired by Microsoft, but still…)
It’s software that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
There’s a fascinating TED talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas which demonstrates the idea.
Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link.
Later… Quentin points out that the online demonstrations will only work in IE. Well, what do you expect…?
Before you submit that Nobel-winning article, it might be worth having a look at this from Rob Weir…
It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.
“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”
Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news:
“Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 — for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us — was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word.”
Nature appears to have the same problem…
This morning’s Observer column…
The most interesting event at the conference was the appearance of the two great metaphor snatchers on the same platform. So far as I know, this is the first time that Jobs and Gates have ever appeared live together in public. And it happened, wrote one commentator, ‘despite scientists’ worries that the density of their combined egos could open a rift in the space-time continuum’.
Fortunately, no such singularity occurred. The pair were interviewed, if that is the correct term for emollient ego-stroking, by Mr Mossberg and his sidekick, Kara Swisher. It was fascinating to observe the differences between them. Jobs gets more distinguished-looking as he gets older. He now looks like a Marine corps general from the Vietnam war. Gates is still a nerd trapped inside an expanding waistline. Jobs is suave, charming, articulate, manipulative and dangerous. Gates struggles to get his thoughts out via the relatively impoverished medium of English. As I watched him I was reminded of George Steiner’s description of the music of Bach: ‘Intense force channelled through a narrow aperture.’ But why not see the whole show for yourself. Just go to tinyurl.com/2b95cr – and keep that garlic handy.
Wow! This New York Times report is interesting.
The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.
But now the established pornography business is in decline — and the Internet is being held responsible.
The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.
And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.
After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.
Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings. But to their chagrin, making and distributing pornography have become a lot easier.
“People are making movies in their houses and dragging and dropping them” onto free Web sites, said Harvey Kaplan, a former maker of pornographic movies and now chief executive of GoGoBill.com, which processes payments for pornographic Web sites. “It’s killing the marketplace.”
Aw shucks! The poor dears. Porn industry leaders should get together with record company executives for joint therapy sessions. Primal scream therapy, perhaps?
I’ve been looking out for ages for an acceptable way of recording MP3 audio — without going in for the kind of obsessive pre-amp sophistication that audiophiles insist is mandatory. I think I’ve found the answer — the Zoom H4. I’ve been testing it out and it produces audio that is, in Roger Needham’s timeless phrase, “good enough for government work”. Not that I do any of that, of course.
The H4 records onto an SD card in Wav or MP3 format and has two modes: stereo and 4-track. Plug it into the USB port of my Mac and it looks like an external drive. Useful review here which says that the 4-track operation is a bit lightweight. But that doesn’t bother me: all I wanted was ol’-fashioned stereo.
I got it from here. £220 inc. VAT.
It was Dan Bricklin who put me onto it, btw.
Says it all, really. Front page of yesterday’s Guardian.
Brent Schendler wrote a snooty piece in Fortune About Apple TV, which he doesn’t think much of. He explains further in his blog…
He wrote the column, he says,
to point out that even Apple can bungle a product from time to time. Another thing I probably should have said in the column was that in a broader sense, flubbing is actually a good thing, because it shows that Apple is genuinely trying to raise the state of the art of consumer electronics. As the old Silicon Valley saying goes: “If you don’t launch a dud now and then, it means you aren’t trying hard enough.” Finally, I also wanted to show how even Apple can sometimes make the same kinds of mistakes that Microsoft does.
Mainly, however, with the launch of the much ballyhooed iPhone looming in June, I thought it was important to point out how Apple TV demonstrates that Steve Jobs, the ultimate control freak, is not in total control of all the production values of his new consumer electronics products; at least not as much as has been the case in the past with his computers and the first few generations of the iPod and iTunes. That’s not his fault, but instead is because Apple, as it ventures further afield, no longer “builds the whole widget” to the extent that it has in the past. It must rely on capricious movie studios and TV networks and record companies for content of course, and it increasingly will depend on stubborn telecom carriers for cellular and broadband connectivity and for marketing help.
Steve Jobs loves music, and the much celebrated iPod clearly was not the product of someone with a tin ear. “Elegant” really is the appropriate adjective to use to describe it, because every little nuance seemed right. But Apple TV makes you wonder if Jobs paid any attention at all during the birthing process. Or maybe it betrays how his well-known disdain for broadcast television might have left him with a blind spot when it comes to TV-related products. Or perhaps this is just what happens to a company when it develops the makings of a high-tech monopoly that it wants to preserve and extend, in this case the market for digital downloads. Speaking as a long-time Apple fan, I sure hope not.
David Pogue is underwhelmed…
This new “surface computer,” as Microsoft calls it, has a multi-touch screen. You can use two fingers or even more — for example, you can drag two corners of a photograph outward to zoom in on it. Here’s an article in yesterday’s Times about it.
If this is all sounding creepily familiar, it is probably because so far, all of this is exactly what NYU researcher Jeff Han has been demonstrating for a year and a half now. I’ve written about it several times on my Pogue’s Posts blog…
And he callously destroys my illusions about the device. (I loved the way the table sucked images out of a Canon IXUS.)
Microsoft’s version of the multi-touch computer adds one very cool, though impractical, twist: interaction with other electronics.
For example, in Microsoft’s demonstration, you can take some pictures. When you set the camera down on the table top, the fresh photos come pouring out of it into a virtual puddle on the screen — a slick, visual way to indicate that you’ve just downloaded them.
Next, you can set a cellphone down on the table — and copy photos into it just by dragging them into the cellphone’s zone.
Then you can buy songs from a virtual music store and drag them directly into a Zune music player that you’ve placed on the glass.
How cool is all of this? Very. Unfortunately, at this point, it’s the Microsoft version of a concept car; you can ogle it, but you can’t have it. These stunts require concept cameras, concept cellphones and concept music players that have been rigged to interact with the surface computer.
Wonder if that’s accurate. I’m sure there are compact digital cameras that are wi-fi enabled.
Hmmm… Just checking…
Yep. Nikon do one. And Canon do a Digital IXUS Wireless model. So the demonstration could have been done with a bog-standard IXUS.
Hah! I was right — see this admiring video from Popular Mechanics: