Microsoft Announces Windows Media Connect Technology, Enabling Seamless Media Transfer Between Windows XP-Based PCs and Consumer Electronics Devices
Microsoft Announces Windows Media Connect Technology, Enabling Seamless Media Transfer Between Windows XP-Based PCs and Consumer Electronics Devices01/08/2004 07:36 PM Today at the 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES),
Microsoft Corp. announced Windows® Media Connect, technology designed
to enable hardware manufacturers to easily develop devices such as
Digital Media Receivers (DMRs), which have rich functionality for
playing digital media files stored on personal computers over home
networks. A broad range of industry leaders have announced their
support of this upcoming technology, including leading PC OEMs and
consumer electronics device manufacturers including Arcadyan
Technology Corp., Creative Labs, Dell Inc., Mediabolic Inc., PRISMIQ
Inc., Rockford Corp., Roku, Simple Devices Inc. and Toshiba. Leading
content service providers such as LAUNCH Music on Yahoo!, MusicNow
(formerly FullAudio), and Napster also endorsed Windows Media Connect
for its ability to extend the reach of their content and services to a
new range of consumer devices. Available in 2004, Windows Media
Connect technology will overcome two critical hurdles faced by
networked media devices today: compatibility between proprietary
devices and ease of access to content stored on the PC.
Glasses for Humanity09/25/2004 04:00 PM I had one of those what can I do today moments with the idea of
donating in-kind to Glasses for Humanity. 90% of eye glasses are
wasted -- and Robert Tolmach's foundation is one of the most
cost-effective forms of...
Humanity Stoops to a New Low
Humanity Stoops to a New Low07/30/2004 07:34 PM Lost Dog Held for $10K Ransom
An elderly man went out for a walk with his dog, on the way home, the
dog disappeared. A friend helped him make some Lost Dog posters and he
waited by the phone for some good samaritan to return his only
companion.
Instead, he got a call from someone demanding $10,000 or he'd never
see his dog again. He gathered up half of his savings and went to pay
the ransom. The dognapper brandished a knife, took the money and said
the dog was tied up to a post nearby. It wasn't.
He went home brokenhearted until he heard a car door slam outside and
his dog came running up to greet him. Now he wonders if the dognappers
were putting him on the whole time.
It's impossible to overstate the importance of this morning's
privately funded
space flight by Mike Melvill, who piloted SpaceShipOne into a
suborbital flight 100 kilometers high. Neil Armstrong took a giant
step in 1969, but this was just as important.
I have huge respect for NASA, the U.S. space agency. But NASA needs the help of private
explorers and industry, and of people like Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founded
who funded this mission. We need NASA for the giant endeavors, but we
need privately funded space flight for everything else.
Congratulations to all.
Yes, I know I liked John
Gray's book,
found it liberating in fact, but I still believe people are good at
heart, and their instincts are right if they can re-learn to listen to
them. And remember Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it
is the
only thing that ever has."
So
your argument is that we're going to save the world either by some
massive act of collective altruism, even though such a thing is
unprecedented, or by some subversive act by some clever noble clique
of
do-gooders. You know, some people would say that Bush's neocon
born-again cabal fit Margaret Mead's 'small group of world-changers'
definition perfectly. If that's what she was referring to, small
groups
of nazis and megalomaniac idealists, we're in trouble. Or is your
'small group' going to put birth control in the water supply and
sabotage civilization until we have anarchy and chaos? -- which is
actually the neocons' dream situation, since if that were to happen
they'd just take over and feel self-justified in doing so, as they
would see you as terrorists.
We
overcame slavery, we gave women the vote, we invented written language
and a lot of other amazing things, including birth control
technologies, we've made democracy, an improbable way of running the
world, work, and we've found ways to strike a balance in the economy
between complete totalitarianism and complete laissez-faire. We're
learning what doesn't work,
we have unprecedented peer-to-peer grassroots communication and
organization, and we have more knowledge available to a larger
percentage of the population than ever before. And instead of just
writing dystopias, many people are actually proposing practical ways
to
bring about massive change.
The
last century featured more murders, more imprisonment, more torture,
more war deaths, and greater extremes in distribution of wealth and
power than any in our history. Every technology we've invented has a
dark side that has been more effectively exploited than its positive
applications. And as for communication, the digital divide is wider
than ever. You shouldn't judge the state of the world by the view from
your rosy little corner of it.
Stories
are all we are. When we have learned new stories, we have become very
different creatures very quickly, in a generation or two. It's our
ingenuity, our ability to change and respond to new and intuitively
better, healthier, happier ways to live, and learn from each other
peer-to-peer that makes me optimistic and hopeful, not new
technologies, which I admit are a double-edged sword.
Stories
also allow fanatics and maniacs to raise huge and bloodthirsty armies,
and allow cults, including most modern religions and political
parties,
to brainwash people to act against both their personal and collective
interest. Myths and other stories allow people to tolerate and live in
denial of atrocities going on all around them. Religious stories have
prompted most of history's most brutal and protracted wars. And we're
so adaptable that we learn to live a life of never-ending oppression,
subjugation and deprivation, and we delude ourselves that our pathetic
lives are good, healthy, deserved, getting better and the only way to
live.
But we
are also capable of forgetting, forgiving and moving on quickly, when
a
better story, a better way of living, is told to us. And in the last
decade a significant minority of the population is on a roll -- better
informed, more inventive, more attuned to and knowledgeable about
that's needed, what's happening and what's possible than ever before.
They're able to use networking technology to make creative, synthetic,
analogical and metaphorical leaps, collaboratively,
in ways that would have been almost unimaginable even a generation
ago.
We have already witnessed, in the 1960s, a huge shift in mainstream
thinking and worldviews occurring in an astonishingly short period of
time, and if we could do something like that again now we have much
more powerful tools and much greater knowledge to do it with, so it
might actually endure this time.
Pure
romanticism. The 1960s weren't nearly as rosy and liberated as you
remember them. Many guys jumped on the bandwagon in complete ignorance
and indifference to the peace and liberation movements -- they were
merely attracted by the promise of cheap dope and easy sex. Your faith
(and it's nothing more than faith, since there's no solid reasoning
behind it) that we could start a similar movement in this century and
this time it would endure and bring about ubiquitous change, is simply
the left-wing version of the right-wingers' Rapture. People don't
change, cultures don't change, and there's an unprecedented level of
investment in maintaining the status quo working against any little
movement that might threaten that. We are programmed by our DNA to
spend almost all of our time and energy living moment to moment and
distracted by the minutiae of constant and trivial decisions. And even
if this were not so, as Gray argues so articulately we have no 'free
will' or collective consciousness. Even as 'individual' creatures we
are merely collections of cells, molecules and organs, each doing what
they do, largely for mutual benefit, and almost entirely (99.9999%)
subconscious. So belief that we can somehow get our personal
act together, let alone one at the level of some higher social order,
and transform ourselves into what we are not, seems to me the height
of
folly, a form of leftist religious fanaticism.
There
you
go, relying on science again, that collection of unreliable and creaky
models of reality, to make your argument. The whole, at every level of
aggregation, is always greater than the sum of the parts. Gaia is much
more than just all individual life on Earth. We as individual and
wondrous creatures are more than a mere collection of our cells,
molecules and organs. And I'm not being spiritual here. Forget about
'consciousness' and these other academic and utterly meaningless
concepts. We as individuals, and our planet as an organism of a
different order, are mostly what happens between our composite parts.
We are sensation, reaction, communication, learning, understanding,
and
the stories that recall them. Most of what we are at both the creature
level and at the Gaia level are what is happening in the
intersections,
margins and edges around the component parts. That is where our true
sense of self and meaning resides, that is where our instincts draw
their wisdom, that is what our DNA remembers and tells us to do. Your
myopic science, looking at individual organisms in isolation, is no
more able to understand the great truths of life, and the nature of
our
existence, than a collector dissecting dead monarch butterflies is
able
to comprehend the astonishing transformation of that creature's life,
or how it could have 'learned' where and how to migrate when three
generations have transpired since the last generation, or how sun and
flowers and smells make a butterfly happy and inform its understanding
of the purpose of its life.
Let's
look at this argument. You're saying, I think, that almost all of what
we are is subconscious, and that an important part of what we are is
our relationships with 'others' outside ourselves. Yes? OK. So then
you're saying that what can/will save us is something in our collective unconsciousness or subconsciousness?
That deep down 'we' intuitively know what needs to be done, what is
happening, and what is possible, and will use that knowledge to
collectively do what is in our collective interest. Well, at least
that's better than relying on gods. But if we had this great
collective
unconsciouness or subconsciousness, wouldn't we have been able to
figure out, even before Einstein did, that almost all human
inventions,
notably in the media (since the invention of writing and the printing
press), in transportation (since the invention of the lever, the
inclined plane, the sledge and the wheel) and in the tapping of stored
energy (since the invention of controlled fire) would have more
negative consequences for our planet than positive ones, and hence
prevent them from emerging? No, don't give me that nonsense that the
global population is leveling off because we somehow 'know' it must,
since people have repeatedly told researchers the only reason they don't have one or
two more
kids each is that they can't financially afford it (for now). If we
('we' being either all humanity or all creatures on the planet) are
our
own collective guiding hand, that guiding hand has done a pretty lousy
job over the last 30,000 years. Just because we've lost touch with
nature and Gaia, you say? I think it's more likely that we're just an
exceptionally fierce and adaptable species which emerged by random
accident from the primeval soup and, like all fierce and adaptable
species in Earth's history, plagued (in the literal sense of the word,
not the moral one) the planet until a meteor came along, or a climate
change or new species evolved that preyed on excessive numbers of the
plague species, and restored equilibrium and the selected preference
of
known life for biodiversity. Disequilibrium is neither new or
unnatural
in the universe. And that, more than the crown of creation, more even
than the sum of our 'stories', is what we humans really are.
Renewing my basic faith in humanity06/01/2004 03:53 PM Though I'm not saying what I have faith in them to do. Still, Oingo
Boingo does say it best, don't they? Nasty Habits and Clowns of Death
(since, after all, boys will be boys...) Mmmm, clowns....
Falk eSolutions AG launched Tuesday a new ad targeting
option to automatically detect pop-up blocker software on users'
computers and instantly convert pop-up and pop-under inventory to
alternate formats for optimal delivery to those
users.
Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled02/18/2004 01:30 PM My latest piece for TheFeature is about researchers at Georgia Tech
who are hacking mobile devices and off-the-shelf components to help
disabled people become more independent. I'm really intrigued by the
wearable "audiitory display," a navigation system for the blind that
generates spatially-located sounds as trail-markers for the wearer to
follow as they walk somewhere. Lin
k
Telstra Considers Enabling Pay Phones with Wi-Fi08/09/2004 04:49 PM Telstra said it plans to build as many as 2,000 new hotspots over the
next two years: It will initially build 15 of those using public pay
phones as a trial. Telstra is trialing a wide range of technologies so
it's not clear that the pay phone idea will ultimately be rolled out
on a wider basis. TechDirt suggests that Telstra might want to follow
Verizon's lead and offer free access to hotspots for DSL customers.
But it sounds like Telstra is more interested in using Wi-Fi as part
of a larger wireless strategy for blanket coverage. The Wi-Fi access
might be bundled into Telstra's mobile networks to offer higher-speed
access where available. On a side note, Australia and New Zealand seem
to be the hot areas for trialing or using proprietary or new wireless
technologies. IPWireless gear is in use in New Zealand by Woosh,
Telstra is trialing Flarion gear, and Arraycomm built a network in
Sydney. [link via Techdirt]...
Create a superuser shell without enabling root01/26/2004 11:27 AM As we all know, it's possible to execute Terminal commands with
administrator priviledges by prefacing the command with sudo, and then
entering the corresponding password. On unix and linux machines, one
usually accomplishes...
Re-enabling Active Scripting After Applying IE Patches
Enabling mobile accounts with Panther Server04/22/2004 04:10 PM Columnist Ryan Faas takes a look at mobile accounts, a feature that is
in some ways revolutionary for Mac administrators and yet is often
ignored when dealing with Panther and Panther Server.
