Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Cunning

Quite amusing little thing showing the power of a little marketing.

An 'exceptional' piano player called Joyce Hatto was well known for her quality of playing. Can't see any mention of her live performances here, but she had a good number of piano CD releases.

Unfortunately when people put these into their PCs, the computers would think they'd put a CD of someone else into their disc drive.

Turns out her recordings were suspicously similar to those of other artists.

Lesson is - if you're going to copy something, change the length of the CDs, the computers can't catch you then!

Friday, February 16, 2007

Fantastic Pictures

Really impressive little doodle from some American guy. Usual hippy terror story with lots of stuff against all the silly things Americans do (and us smug Europeans too!)

Really like the one of the mountain view made up of SUV logos.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

My brain


Just got one of those brain training games. This is the result me giving it a go while very drunk... It does come out slightly better when I'm sober!

Thursday, February 08, 2007

More Videos

Web 2.0 Explodes, Mind-Expanding Video Shows Who's Teaching Who - Gizmodo

I don't know who it was who made this video, some professor of something made up.

However, I have now seen this video appear on Information Aesthetics, Boing Boing, Slashdot, "Talent Imitates, Genius Steals", Lifehacker, Telegraph technology, Pocket Lint and Slashdot.

I'm not sure how valuable the video is, but it's definitely shown the power of blogging. Despite all this publicity, it's only received 150,000 views (t time of writing).

Digital Ethnography sounds slightly made up. I do hope there's not too many gullible students paying good money to study trends in youtube and what happens on world of warcraft.

Basically, KSU seems to have come up with a cunning way to make money. I don't know what you can do with this degree they've made up, but I know I'd be extremely reluctant to employ someone who'd spent £10,000 on a degree that looks very questionable in value.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Anti Hippy Movies

You know video on demand has come of age when Wal-Mart starts offering it.

In their characteristically brash manner, they've managed to annoy geeks everywhere by supporting neither Firefox nor Mac users.

Pricing is supposed to be the same level as DVDs. However, they haven't offered the option to burn the movies to a (TV watchable) disc. Which means it won't be that useful to people here in the UK.

I would be that there's also some kind of protector thing to stop us watching them. It does strike me that the $20 download fee is less than the current cinema price in central london.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Google's "Masterplan"

Nice little video by what looks like some design students. Really reminds me of the graphic design which was part of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. Their concern centres on the privacy issues around Google.

This blog is written on Google software, they can see what I search for (personalised search), what I read (Google Reader and Google News), and even what files I look at (Google Desktop). This will translate into a very detailed picture of me.

Google's performance shows that the majority of people are willing to accept services in exchange for a loss of privacy. It is quite impressive how much information Google currently has on me, but I am quite comfortable with that. There have been no examples of Google abusing privacy so far (that I am aware of).

As with all web services, Google are acutely aware that their competition are only one click away. If you even think that there's a small possibility that Google could do something that would make your life worse, you're going to go to the competition. Hopefully Google will keep that in mind when they're being tempted to abuse their data.