via Brian - Consensus at Lawyerpoint: Hollywood Wants to Plug the "Analog Hole"

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the "Content Protection Status Report" with the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, laying out its plan to remake the technology world to suit its own ends. The report calls for regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific, medical and entertainment devices. Under its proposal, every ADC will be controlled by a "cop-chip" that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material -- your cellphone would refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the copyrighted music coming from your stereo.

The report shows that this ADC regulation is part of a larger agenda. The first piece of that agenda, a mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over digital television technology, is weeks away from coming to fruition. Hollywood also proposes a radical redesign of the Internet to assist in controlling the distribution of copyrighted works.

This three-part agenda -- controlling digital media devices, controlling analog converters, controlling the Internet -- is a frightening peek at Hollywood's vision of the future.

Please make sure you go and read the whole article. It makes chilling reading. My students, in particular, should be greatly concerned as this will directly impinge on their future professional careers. The consequences of these proposals being adopted are just too awful to contemplate. A wee thought experiment: imagine if the (equivalent) of these proposals had been in place fifty years ago. Do you think we would have had the innovation and consumer products we now currently enjoy? Would the Intentent have ever got out of the research labs?

To quote Brian - "Holy Shit!"

WeblogsInEducation(at)SchoolBlogs.com : The Holy Grail

Discussing the pros and cons of various software may been a pleasant time-filler but it should never become a quest for the edublogging 'Holy Grail'. That will only lead to a lack of application on the educational frontline. As some commentators have pointed out, teachers are not interested in the intricacies of the software itself. They want to see what it delivers in terms of teaching and learning. They will been convinced by a body of evidence that weblogging might be worthwhile for classroom use. The conviction among teachers that it may be worthwhile will be converted into classroom implementation not by perfect software, but by blogging educators who are willing to exert an influence in their own environments. The revolution is not software driven but rather led by educators who are comfortable with their own choices of imperfect software and who will provide a positive sphere of influence for those around them.

Amen. Perfectly put. A thought provoking article that deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in the use of weblogs (and content management systems) in education. The paragraph after the one cited above can be summed up as 'use what you know and are comfortable with'. It looks like I'll be involved in a project at the local school in September under the auspice of Extreme Learning (XL) and since I'm most comfortable with Conversant that is what I'm suggesting the school use.

WeblogsInEducation(at)SchoolBlogs.com : The Next Step

Outsiders complain about the teaching profession being resistant to new developments. However, I think teachers are just numb' to change. They are so used to hearing the latest 'theory' or the latest decree prescribed from the educational establishment, that they are automatically sceptical of even the best new ideas. Consequently, teachers will not be convinced by words alone when it comes to the potential of weblogging in education.

It looks like my nephew Tim has beaten me to www.smeed.net ;-) What you might call a minimal web presence!

Some of my work colleagues nipped out to see the Queen on here walkabout in Glasgow. Would you like to work with any of these people ;-)?

via hbwt - MacCentral | One school's cost of going Wintel

Jon Udell: Conversant and the art of the press release

Conversant, by the way, is interesting in ways that are orthogonal to Radio. It's a server-based product, not a desktop product, and is useful for all the reasons that any featureful and scriptable groupware-and-document-management system is. So now that I've got the story straight...congratulations, Seth!

Derek has a new toy - powazek » log » it's here. I'm envious. One of those would look good on my empty desk doncha think ;-)?

Big Brother is back on the box. The viewing public get to nominate the first two contenders for eviction next Friday. It's an absolute certainty that Jade will get one of the nominations. She's sooooo annoying!! Even when the cameras are on the others you can hear her whiny voice droning on in the background. She never stops. Ugh! Seems I'm not the only that thinks so since she's currently lying last in popularity in the online poll.

Bringing rapid-fire photos to digicams - Tech News - CNET.com

NuCore's design allows images to be processed much more rapidly, meaning the user can squeeze off many more photos of quick-moving subjects. The first still camera to use the company's signal processors--the Lumix DMC-F7 from Panasonic--can shoot five frames a second. Typical digital cameras need up to a few seconds between shots.

In his Support Your Neighborhood Developer piece Brian Carnel eloquently expresses what is my POV too. He rounds off with:

"Winer's silence is a bit puzzling from someone who relentlessly champions small developers. Microsoft buys a couple companies with "great developer communities" and that's news, but someone releases an amazing piece of software built on top of Winer's platform and it's a non-event. What's that about."

Maybe there's a hint in this snippet from Scripting News?

"On the other hand, I totally agree that we have no obligation to point at anything."

Most of the Conversanteers have picked up on the fact that Conversant has largely been ignored by the very person they would have expected to pay it some attention. We've had our say but IMO there's little to be gained in wringing our hands any further. Whilst it would have been nice to have had a link from a high-traffic site like Scripting News, Conversant can make its own way in the world.

Unless one of the BigPubs picks up on the anomalous behaviour of the developer that shall remain nameless, I believe the best course of action for the Conversanteers is just to use every opportunity to sing its praises. It'd be rather too negative and lame to hang a publicity campaign on a "it is worthy but it's being ignored" ticket. I can think of someone else - who shall remain nameless - that regularly uses such a tactic and I wouldn't want to emulate that person.

So, no more whining and whinging from me. Time to move on and boost Conversant positively and proactively.

PS There's some deliberate WebBlagging in this post. Can you spot it!? ;-)

via HtP - Washtech.com | Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon - Microsoft Lobbies Hard Against Free Software

David Davies is becoming Conversant ;-)

"Started using a new piece of software today. For the time being I'll be running Conversant alongside Radio on my home iMac. I'll post pertinent observations here but so far both systems seem to happily coexist."

Welcome aboard David. Looking forward to hearing how you get on. One response I have is that if you dedicate Radio as a server and forgo Radio's own unique, CPU sapping, functionality - i.e. Macrobyte has sorted out what to do shut off all of Radio's 'features' - then you do end up with *exactly* the same performance in Radio and Frontier.

You will find Macrobyte and the rest of the Conversant community to be more than willing to help.

David C-T managed to catch a Dave Winer: Pressure to Point posting:

Well, it was here: http://scriptingnews.userland.com/pressureToPoint and it was on the Scripting News home page, but it's been deleted from both locations (no problem - Dave W.'s editorial policy has always been clear that he can do this - it may resurface - who knows?

But as he points out it was deleted soon after. David C-T did quote from the original piece and that's still in his article along with his comments - which I wholly endorse.

In fact, none of the observations about the lack of linking started untl the day after the launch of Conversant. Normally, DW likes to be one of the first to link to things - especially it it's related to his products. I don't think the observations can be construed as pressurisation and, as David, points out, were generally expressions of bemusement rather than coercion.

Curious for sure.

Extreme Computing 2002

NTK and Mute magazine present a gigantic village fete for the 21st century, an off-the-radar cyber jumble-sale, an all-day celebration of do-it-yourself technological unusualness.

From home-made robots to retro video games, from japanese junk food to community wireless networking - if it's outside the mainstream, you can come along and check it out and most likely buy a piece of it to take home.

There's a programme on Channel 4 that's just finished - Daisy Daisy :

Motivational speaking is a huge industry in the States. Daisy Donovan has just four days to learn from the best speakers around and come up with a inspirational seminar of her own. Can she cut it as the new guru in town?

It was just a scam and they even went to the trouble of setting up the Discover Daisy Joy website. What was fascinating was how gullible the public were.

Eagle-eyed Richard - who maintains the [Dragon Data Archive] - noticed the Dragon 64 and the prototype Dragon Alpha that have pride of place on one of my office shelves. He's just sent me an e-mail detailing some of the new additions to the Dragon Data Archive. We'll hopefully get together soon to document all the other Dragon stuff that's scattered around the office.

via hbwt - Enter SSH Passphrases at Login and Store them in your MacOS X KeyChain

The Doc Searls Weblog : And the winner is: bloghole

A number of folks are now starting to remark in private correspondence that they are "not a bloghole," or "don't want to be a bloghole" for not linking to something.

I still reckon my suggestions are better but then I would wouldn't I?

I did send an e-mail to Doc with the BlogBlagger and WebBlagger suggestions but they didn't get a mention in his Blogjam roll B-}

Dave McCusker asked:

"If you know another explanation for this story, please tell me about it. Today my newest coworker told me about a very amusing test he ran. For a particular new server, he was able to get N requests per second. Then he ran the same test while compiling C++ source code in a build. This machine had two processors, so a C++ compilation tied up one.

Guess how many requests the server handled during the compilation? More requests, not less. 25% more than when using two processors."

And later... McCusker May 2002 | zombie dance: scheduler is broken

Both Wes Felter and Martin "Coderman" Peck answered my questions. They're both great and interesting answers, but I'll start with Wes's...

Interesting stuff. My students might like to know that Wes refers to Hennessy and Patterson in his answer ;-)

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Higher special reports | Survival of the fattest as class divide widens

"Under the old binary line system there were many outstanding polytechnic departments and many academics at the cutting edge of their disciplines. It seems that what Margaret Hodge has in mind is something different. Her plans would strip the academic excellence out of the modern universities and turn them into vocational degree factories. And it's not just the modern universities that will be affected. A lot of the 'old' universities will find themselves below the binary cut-off, too."

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Higher special reports | Masters of debt

All the vice chancellors interviewed in this week's Guardian series on the future of higher education expressed forebodings. It was summed up by one who worried that universities would be sucked into a downward spiral where few could be recruited because of the poor conditions and salaries. He was wrong in just one respect. This is not some grim spectre beyond the horizon; it is already happening.

Fifty of England's universities are in debt. In the US, spending per student has doubled since the 1970s; in the UK it has halved.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Higher special reports | Universities in £1bn debt crisis

UK universities are at least £1bn a year short of the money needed to keep buildings and equipment in working order, according to an audit commissioned by the government.

...

"For years now, ministers and vice-chancellors have been trading off the goodwill of staff members to teach larger classes, to reduce the numbers of tutorials, to reduce the contact time and to cut back on their own research time. They can't do it any more."

I'm not the only one person is bemused by the fact that the launch of Conversant has so far gone 'unnoticed' on Scripting News. Steve comments:

Platform vendor ignores powerful new software by small independent developer:
Our favorite platform vendor has managed to completely ignore the release of an incredibly powerful server product for their platform, one which will drive sales of their platform, and will go far to show the power and flexibility of the platform...

Let's see how long it is before Conversant gets the mention it so thoroughly deserves from the person it deserves the mention most from?

Conversant rocks! And there are plenty of others that think so too ;-)

I feel guilty! Whilst I was de-junking my office, Seth and a group of alpha/beta testers were readying the phenomenal Conversant and it's excellent installer for release. They've obviosuly been working their socks off and have achieved a great deal. All I achieved was a tidy office. Well, that's not quite true - dejunking the office has helped dejunk me! Of course, I've got lots of chores and tasks still to do but somehow having an uncluttered space is reinvigorating. Also, one of the techniques to overcome procrastination is to buckle down and do the jobs you dislike most first and then reward yourself with a task you really enjoy. In my case, one task I'll use as a reward will be exploring Conversant. It the thought of that reward doesn't make me into an anitcrastinator I don't know what will.

Radio Userland is another 'reward' system that I've been neglecting recently. I was very enthusiastic about RU early on. Still am. Just not as a weblogging tool now. I'm too attached to Conversant and Duncan's Jotter to replace them. Also, RU's propensity to slug my iBook's CPU and drain battery power was a downside. However, RU is still a major part of my web toolkit as I now use it in preference to my old version of Frontier when generating static web pages from BBEdit'ed files. Which reminds me of another reward that I'll be dusting off over the summer and that is to update my guest database version of the BBSite Suite to be more RU tool-like.

So, now I've dedicated my copy of Radio to Conversant for the duration of the beta/evaluation period. Fortunately, this hasn't affected the static web page generation functionality I rely on for my work website.

Today a Manila user e-mailed me to ask about Conversant. I haven't asked permission to post the questions but here are just my answers. You can probably deduce the questions from these ;-)

Q. ?

A. Where do I start!? Bearing in mind that I'm only skimming the surface of Conversant's capabilities in Duncan's Jotter, here are some of my opinions.

Q. ?

A. The similarity is basically skin-deep. The underlying foundations - Frontier or Radio - are similar too.

One of the best summaries can be found at http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2002/05/000025.html

Conversant was actually started before Manila. It's an entirely different architecture 'under the hood'. It is very elegant, powerful, and flexible.

Seth, and the rest of the people at Macrobyte have been actively developing Conversant. I get the impression that Manila hasn't moved on much in the past couple of years. This lack of development rankles especially for those forking out $899pa for the honour of supporting it.

Since I no longer use Manila I can't comment on its buginess. What I can say is that my Conversant-hosted site at Macrobyte seems to be pretty bug-free. When bugs are reported to the FC-Support forum, Seth et al, are very responsive and invariably fix any problems quickly. Since Conversant has been around for three years most of the bugs have been wrung out of it by now.

Q. ?

A. The main features of Conversant are covered on its site. The highlights as far as I am concerned include:

• Robust web-based interface for posting/admin
• Excellent e-mail interface that handles threading of submissions, subscriptions, etc.
• NNTP interface if you need it
• XML-RPC interface with the Blogger API as a subset
• CSS and template driven presentation
• Excellent membership options/handling
• Powerful, well thought out, plug-in architecture
• Support for https
• Integrated search engine/indexer
• Excellent API with lots of conditional macros, etc.
• Now available to third-party developers/hosters
• Works on top of Radio (the extra $40 in the pricing below)
• Lower cost of entry/ownership $499 + $40 for commercial use, $249 + $40 for academic use
• $99 + $40 for personal/development use
• Focus - MacroByte is committed to Conversant. All their efforts are poured into it.
• A really good content/group management architecture

I can't think of anything that Manila provides that isn't in Conversant. The reverse is certainly not true.

Well, at least the launch of Conversant merited a mention on Frontier News. But who reads that regularly!? At least we now know that it's on Userland's radar. But still Dave hasn't mentioned it on Scripting News.

Sean McMain's Amazing Pneumatic Cannon

Recently, I made a trip to our local hardware store to pick up the parts for something I'd read about on the Internet: a cannon, made of PVC pipe and a sprinkler valve, that could launch objects hundreds of feet using nothing more than compressed air. Figuring the amount of fun one could potentially have with such a thing far exceeded the paltry $25 required for the parts, I decided to give it a try...

Cool!

David [SiT] reports a WCC Blackboard Server Outage

That would be the yummy smell of toast arising from our Blackboard server The new worm completely killed it (and perhaps, my attempts at fixing it). We have a backup, but it will take some time to get going.

This is going to be a nasty one I know for a fact that tons of BB systems are unsecured in the same way ours was.

It's the "SQLsnake" Microsoft Worm that's causing David grief.