This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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And here I thought Apple would get something big out using this technology first… but nope. Microsoft beat them to it.
Microsoft Surface
Product Overview: Surface is the first commercially available surface computing platform from Microsoft Corporation. It turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more. Soon to be available in restaurants, hotels, retail and public entertainment venues, this experience will transform the way people shop, dine, entertain and live.
Description: Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that’s easy for individuals or small groups to interact with in a way that feels familiar, just like in the real world. Surface can simultaneously recognize dozens and dozens of movements such as touch, gestures and will be able to recognize actual unique objects that have identification tags similar to bar codes.
Surface will ship to partners with a portfolio of basic applications, including photos, music, virtual concierge and games, which can be customized to provide their customers with unique experiences.
(via Gizmodo)
Of course, it has a pretty hefty price tag and is intended to be used in a kiosk kind of form at hotels, malls and other public places like that. But it won’t be all that long until this sort of thing is in other stuff…. including of course the iPhone next month, although it won’t do quite the same things as this table thing.
But I bet you I see my first iPhone in person before I see my first Surface in person.
Was was that old saw about the Internet considering censorship as damage and routing around it?
Someone at a forum somewhere posted the 16 digit hex key which can be used (along with appropriate other knowledge) to break the DRM protections on HD-DVDs. People of course started linking to this.
The industry association responsible for the DRM started sending out cease and desist notices not to where the “bad” information actually was (although they may also have done that) but to all sorts of sites that linked to it. This included Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. And that started to get some attention, and so people started mirroring the information all over the place, and other people set of lists of links to the places that are mirroring it, etc.
One (or more) of those lists of mirrors got a lot of Diggs at Digg. Then, presumably afraid of take down notices, Digg moderators started removing the posts that linked to or contained that information.
Oops.
As of now (4:52 UTC on the 2nd) absolutely every story on the main page of Digg links to or contains in its descriptions or comments (or all of the above) the critical hex key. And more are being created by the minute.
And of course many many people are putting the key on their websites, in their email signatures, in their forum posting signatures… others are selling T-shirts and mugs and such with the key on it… etc, etc, etc.
The number of people who would have known or cared about this silly little piece of information was miniscule before the cease and desist notices started going out. Now, while the number of people who will actually DO ANYTHING with this little key is still small, the information itself has spread so widely and is now in so many places (and spreading by the minute) that it will be one of those memes that lives on the internet long past when it is actually useful for anything at all.
If there is some piece of information that people want, once it is out there is no longer any way to put things like this back in the bottle. And even with a piece of information that was only of interest to a very small set of people… once you start trying to quash it and hide it away… boom… you just made it interesting, and only succeeded in making sure more people see it and are aware of it than ever could have been possible otherwise.
Oh well. Too bad for the HD-DVD people.
Oh, and Digg must be hurting a bit right now too. Their site has been just completely trashed by this. Recommendation… just ignore it and it will die down in a day or two… if the mods start going on a delete fest again now, it will just get worse.
Slashdot has a story about this now too:
Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt
“An astonishing number of stories related to HD-DVD encryption keys have gone missing in action from digg.com, in many cases along with the account of the diggers who submitted them. Diggers are in open revolt against the moderators and are retaliating in clever and inventive ways. At one point, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Search digg for HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, shirts, and more for a small taste of the rebellion.”
Search Google for a broader picture; at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There’s a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved.
Ha.
I want an iPhone, but practically speaking, it may be quite awhile after they come out before I can justify switching to one because the whole family is on Sprint, we have a family plan, switching would be expensive and a pain, etc. But I’ll have Leopard the day it comes out, so this sucks:
Apple Statement
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.
(via Digg)
Sucks. On the other hand, maybe they were holding up new hardware for Leopard and will now go ahead and release those. New iMacs are over due, and we were hoping to get one for Amy this year as soon as the next new revisions come out. I’m getting tired of sharing. :-)
The rumors of this got to a fevered pace over the weekend, but the offiial confirmation was at 12 UTC today.
EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire
EMI Music today announced that it is launching new premium downloads for retail on a global basis, making all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.
The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI’s existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI’s retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI’s new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.
(via Digg and dozens of other places)
DRM is stupid and counter productive. And as people have been finding out time and time again over the last few years, eventually futile. And attempts to make it work by law where the technology won’t do it just result in draconian laws that are completely out of line with the potential offenses.
People will still buy instead of pirating if the service you are providing for the money is quicker, more convienent, and of better quality than the alternitives. But people have to get over the idea that you are paying for the content. Like it or not, content is going to be free. Not as some sort of philosophic dogma that it should be, but simply as a result of old fashioned supply and demand curves. When making a copy of something (without destorying the original) is effectively free, the supply becomes essentially to infinite, and therefore the equilibrium price drops close to zero. The only way to prop that price up is by using laws to try to enforce a price floor through artificial means.
What people will pay for however is a delivery mechanism that does what they want and has the capabilities they want. And some people (not most) will still pay for creation of new content that they want. But the ballgame has changed. And the ways you can make money off it will be completely different.
There are still going to be many many attempts to preserve the old business models, but it will just take time. Those old business models will go away and be replaced by new and better mechanisms.
This might be a good first step. Everything sold this way will be pirated within seconds of the first sale. Might EMI still make money? Maybe. They still have the problem of being a middle man that essentially adds no additional value. But they might still be able to make good money because this will be an easier way to get their stuff than other methods.
In the long run though, these middleman companies like EMI are going to end up morphing into completely new forms where they figure out how to add value in this new world, or they will go away completely. Based on history, they will probably figure it out… just many years later than they should have.
A wild rumor on some of what Apple might have up their sleeve sometime soon.
The Multi-Touch Screen
(David Pogue, New York Times)
After the Jobs demo, I called Jeff Han, fully expecting to hear how angry he was that Apple had stolen his idea without permission or consultation (it’s happened before).
Instead, he knew all about Apple’s project. He didn’t say that Apple bought his technology, nor that Apple stole it—only that he’d known what had happened, and that there was a lot he wasn’t allowed to say.
Anyway, he returned to TED this year for a new presentation, showing how far the multi-touch technology had progressed (hint: a lot). He also set up his eight-foot touch screens in the TED common area, so anyone could try it.
(via AppleInsider)
Anyway, it looks like Apple has hired this guy or licensed his technology or some such. (They also bought a company called FingerWorks who developed similar technology for touchpads.) They showed this technology working in the keynote where they introduced it for the iPhone. But this video shows it can be used way beyond a cellphone screen. Very cool looking stuff. It takes the original “you will want to lick it” of Apple’s Aqua a step or two further. You want to fondle it. Definitely watch the video. There is a second video linked from the Pogue post too, but at the moment it isn’t working for me.
I’m not sure exactly how it would work in, say, a new iMac. I mean, do I really want to touch my screen to move windows around and such? But if anybody can do cool things with a technology like that, it would be Apple. If it turns out this is one of the “hidden features” in Leopard and the new range of iMacs all end up having multi-touch screens and all, I will be quite jealous that Amy is the next one in the family in line for a new computer…
 When I got up yesterday I found in my email inbox a note that the Slingbox client for PalmOS had entered the Public Beta phase and was available to download. So of course I did so right away, straight from my Treo, which is also where I had read the email. I had it installed and working before I got to the car. It took me a bit to figure out the controls, and I admit I did have to check the directions at one point. But it works. It is a little slower to respond than the Mac or Windows clients, and I think it may also be a little bit slower than the Windows Mobile version that Brandy has on her phone too. But it is good enough to use, and it is just a Public Beta, I’m sure it will be refined more over the next few months.
It is good to know that now, wherever I go, if I am stuck somewhere with nothing to do for awhile while I am waiting for something, I can just watch some of my home Tivo for a little while. I will need to get one of those stereo headphone adapters for it though. I feel self conscious sitting there watching TV on my phone with the audio loud enough for people walking by to hear. Headphones are a good thing.
I just discovered by accident that when you are operating your Mac via VNC, and someone sits down at the console and Fast User Switches to their account… your VNC account still controls your original desktop. So, minus VNC latency (which isn’t too horrible if you are on a LAN) you can have multiple people running full screen Aqua Mac goodness, one on console, and the rest essentially on dumb terminals, but with their full desktops and access to everything. Right now I am sitting in the livingroom on a laptop VNC’d to my Mac while Amy is actually sitting in front of it… apperantly doing some sort of Algebra related game.
Very nice. A good discovery.
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven…
Treo Number Seven lasted over a year. I think that is a record for me and Treos. It was a good Treo. But then last week I dropped it. Um… well… OK… I didn’t drop it. I got frustrated with something it was doing and I… um… kinda accidentally… well… um… I sorta threw it. And it hit the ground hard. After that the keyboard didn’t want to work any more. Ooops.
Luckily, this is why I have insurance on these phones. But as it turned out we didn’t even need it. Brandy went into the Sprint store while I was at work one day to just make sure they couldn’t fiddle with a couple screws and make the keyboard work again. They couldn’t fix it. But they did tell her that because of something or other on the plan we have with Sprint, they could replace it there for free. They were out of stock of Treo 650s though, so they would just have to give me a Treo 700. They were out of stock of 700’s too, but they could order those. But I’d just have to settle for a free upgrade.
Drat, I was so upset by that! :-)
Anyway, we just picked up my new phone a couple of hours ago. It has several improvements over the 650, including higher data speeds. So this should be good. Later tonight or this weekend I’ll get all the 3rd party software installed on there that I use regularly and sync with the contacts and such on my computer. But this is good.
And no, I did not do it on purpose so I could get a new phone. Really. :-)
But in any case, now I have my 8th Treo… and my first Treo 700. 700p to be specific.
 One of the reasons I like working where I do is cool stuff like this. I just did one work unit. Only takes a few seconds.
Help Find Jim Gray
Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.
Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.
This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.
Direct link to the MTurk hits to do this work is here. Do one or two.
This thing is incredible, and it is just the first release. Easily instantly the best smart phone on the market by far. Blows away the Treos and Blackberries and Windows Smartphones that are out today. As usual, even when the existing phones have the feature, it just isn’t anywhere near as polished or slick as Apple makes it. You can also see places where certain things are not yet there… but you know they’ll be there in the next revision or two.
Corporate email probably won’t be adding support any time soon, which sucks, but for a personal phone for everything other than syncing with work email and calendars… I know it is often good to wait until the second revision, but the UMF and RDF on this one is strong…
It won’t be out until June though. So that gives a bit of time to digest and plan. We’re on Sprint right now. Getting this would mean getting Cingular. Changing providers is a bit of a pain. Especially since we have a family plan for the three of us plus Brandy’s mom and Brandy and Amy may or may not want to switch too… But I have six months to work on them. :-)
I just stuck it on our list of things to budget for and it is actually quite a way down the priority list. At the moment there are 7 things on the list at a higher priority level. And more will probably jump ahead of it in line before we get to it, so it may end up waiting until 2008 rather than 2007. But waiting will be difficult. This thing is sweet. I must have it.
And then get a new one every year when they come out with better ones. :-)
Full coverage of the keynote at Engadget with all kinds of details on the phone. Apple’s official iPhone page is now up too.
Oh yeah, I want the Apple TV thing too, but at a much lower priority. It is cool, but it is not an “I want it NOW!” item.
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