This “article” on the BBC Magazine site wrings its hands and cries:
Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.
I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works. I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering). And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.
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There’s a posting on TUAW about how to set your display’s gamma in OSX Leopard to match Snow Leopard’s. It describes in detail how to go about doing it without actually telling you what you’re messing with. It’s a concept that isn’t Mac-specific, though.
When I was working at an animation studio back in the late 90s, I was introduced to the avuncular Charles Poynton who has made a career out of sitting on panels, making recommendations to technical boards and writing books on video, color and especially gamma. I took a course from Charles along with some colleagues because we needed to implement color correction and set a mutual standard across our studios around the world. So knowing what it was we were trying to achieve was somewhat key. We had digital ink and paint and compositing people on SGIs, color artists on Macs, a renegade CGI team that switched from Maya to 3D Studio Max and then editors on Macs in Avid but did their viewing through expensive Sony Evergreen reference monitors. Finally, an art director who looked at the work on all of these systems and wondered why everything looked different. The majority of people don’t need to ever concern themselves with this stuff and should probably just move on.
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Anybody who hasn’t heard of Google Wave had better sit up. It’s been in development by a team led by the brothers at Google Labs who brought us Google Maps (along with the API that’s helped make it so useful and popular).
They’ve dubbed it as what email would have been if it were invented today. It takes the best of online/offline collaborative messaging and smooshes them together into what the preview announcement describes as product, platform and protocol (which will be open). All of this is currently being made available to developers to start hacking together “robots” and “gadgets” which will surely bring about some terrifyingly brilliant, if not convoluted and sinister collective artificial intelligence which I’ll dub Skynet (when Wolfram escapes into its own robot instance) but is probably closer to Borg.
Anyway. Sounds neat.
Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly? The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”. In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire. Can anybody shed any light on this? Is it just an instant messaging/chat server? Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy? Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially? Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?
This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product. This actually happens more often than I find believable.
Honestly, the thing I love about this story is that it’s a bunch of rich villagers running Google out of town. Finally, the victimized, well-to-do of the world are standing up for themselves.
This whole kerfuffle about Google Street View being a burglars’ aid is ridiculous. You don’t need a map to tell who’s loaded or not, just a car. Or a bike. Or a pair of legs and eyes.
“We’ve already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
By this logic, Chicago, San Francisco and London and all the other (rich) cities that have Street View should have been looted and burnt to the ground by now. What this statement actually tells us is that statistically their crime rate has had a small bump – they’re not out of their norm yet, as in the past 7 years recorded crime in that area (the borough of Milton-Keynes) has hovered around 10-13 reported burglaries per year, and 6 out of 52 weeks is a very small sample period.
Similarly, the terrorist-tool argument is nonsense: if your really a terrorist, you’ll launch at high visibility targets…or better yet, just into populated areas. I don’t need to point out current events in Israel and Gaza to make the case. Clearly, that’s exactly what both sides are doing. And all the claims that the Mumbai attackers used Google Earth to coordinate their activities is speciously anecdotal, being trotted out by hysterical right-wingers. Seriously: I haven’t found a single report that hasn’t been out of the mouth of somebody with the agenda to censor Google’s activities. If you find one, please tell me.
