TaoSpace

Socal Security

Fafblog has posted a hilarious FAQ about the current Social Security Chaos in the US. Even if you are not american, this is required reading!

Tagging, categorization, ontologies, and other chaos

Over at Many2Many (which is an excellent group weblog btw!) there is an intense discussion about tagging and categorization.
The arguments used are wide-ranging and the discussion often strays into the realm of "the future of the web". Here's the latest post at the time of writing. You need to read the rest of it to be able to follow it.

Here's my 2 cents however.

Rise of the Superbullshit

Here we go again!

"The basic theme [behind superplatforms]; is that they are all-encompassing; they not only provide application servers but also provide portal business intelligence"

They do what? Come on people, didn't this non-sense die together with the .com hype?

Judge for yourself.

Can someone explain?

Boing Boing posted a summary of an editorial somewhere about P2P. I have to admit: I still don't get it.

What's the point of having legal P2P music downloads? It just makes no sense. Legal music should come from fast servers with insane amount of bandwidth, not from some motley band of dailup users and people with stuttering connections.

The reason P2P works for non-legal stuff is because everyone contributes some music, thus increasing choice. Some people may have better copies then others, and that might increase file-size, which may or may not be a problem for someone downloading. So there is choice in that sense too.

In case of legal downloads "all" music is basically available and in good quality. What's the need for using P2P here? If there is only one near-perfect copy, what is the need for having everyone share it? Bandwidth? Come on! The world is flush with bandwidth! There is so much bandwidth we have to invent things like "Internet 2" and "Telepresence" etc. just to have an excuse to use some more of it.
The price of the bandwidth needed to transfer a song is totally negligable compared to the 99 cents or whatever the song costs.

If someone were to charge 99 cents for a song that is distributed via P2P you would basically be ripped off, as there is no investment required by the distributor at all anymore. No website needed, no bandwidth to pay for etc. Perhaps that might be something that appeals to the distributors of course, but it should not appeal to the average consumer.

Another argument is that people can choose to share what they like and that you could use that in a kind of FOAF way to find new music. This is basically nonsense too, because P2P is largely anonymous. You don't know the person (or persons) that has the file you are downloading. Oftentimes you don't even notice his nickname or whatever. This basically means that this is not some kind of blogosphere filtering/FOAF/social network aggregation/etc. thing. Of course one could modify the software to work more in that kind of a way, but what is the point? Every legal music store has Amazon-style suggestions ("If you like this, also try...") which are more or less the same thing.

Am I missing something here or is this really just yet another misguided idea taken up by the media?

Postal fun

Have a look at these experiments. Some people really went all the way to find out how well the US Postal Service handles various items.
I've been reliably informed that other -- european -- postal services will probably perform in a similar manner. Very interesting!

Picasa 2.0 released

Google just released Picasa 2.0. Loads of new features, like more image processing tools (Including an automated one called "I feel lucky!"), keeping one picture in multiple albums, print ordering and....IPTC support!

Captions should now be saved to the picture in IPTC format. Not sure if any other info gets saved as well though. Since I do not have a PC here I can test with I'll have to see later. I'll try it out soon and post a small review.

Moving cities

Next years Macworld announcement!

The Mac Shuffle!

It's the size of a deck of cards, a 10Gb HD, a 500mhz G3 and will sell for $199.
It does not come with a monitor; actually you can't even hook one up as there is no display adaptor.
There really is no need for one, as the Mac Shuffle will randomly do work for you. It will randomly open email, download websites and serve files...or maybe not...maybe it will fileshare all your personal files with the rest of the world...or may be not. When you connect to it via the network it MIGHT be running a webserver...or not...perhaps it is writing rude emails to your boss or girlfriend instead! You'll never really know, will you?

What if it decides to play "highway from hell" or Aphex Twin at full volume in the middle of the night? BOOM! How cool is that?

This cool, new, unpredictability will lead to a new era in computing!

Hilarious and cautionary

Just when you thought you'd heard them all: The People Who Owned the Bible.

Now this...

This I want! The first desirable looking phone in a very long time. But from Sanyo?!?!