IMS 201

Even Your Dog Has A Blog

bair5 — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:49:18 +0000

Max, a 3-year-old golden retriever can’t talk, but it doesn’t stop him from blogging his life on blog Max the golden retriever. Aubrey Jones, the dog owner, blogs for her dog and type down what’s new in days in her dog’s voice.

It seems everyone from your neighbor’s grandma to a gatekeeper is a blogger. At last count, the blog search engine Technorati.com shows nearly 113 million blogs on the Internet, and it estimates that more than 120,000 blogs are created each day. Why not let the pets blog?

Not only blogging, some pets are part of their owners’ social network. Some 34,000 users visit Dogbook on Facebook daily. Which allows people to create profiles for their pets. I know someone who has all her cats listed on facebook Catbook and click on their little profile pictures you’ll be looking at an animal facebook kingdom. They all have friends and leaves posts on each other’s walls, like human. Human have feelings and have to express. Animals have feelings too and they should have their chances, too. Besides people can do whatever they want to do. I won’t be surprised if tomorrow I discover some blogs for Tim’s aloe or Tim’s swatch – “I’m a thinking watch, so what?! ”

Dressing them up is not amusing enough and now people started to talk for animals. It’s cute, though.

Do You Think S/he Committed A Crime?

bair5 — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:02:25 +0000

A lot of crimes were reported on TV and only the judge and the jury can decide if someone is guilty or nor. But now you can be the 13^th juror and have your say!

On CNN dot com’s crime page I found this column that asks:” Is Shawna Nelson guilty of murder?” beneath the question there are two choices: Yes and No. And then you can Vote or See Results. Just for the heck of it I was going to click one of them and see what do people think of her. My first reaction was to click Yes, then I thought I really shouldn’t if I don’t even know what she did. So I selected No and clicked on Vote, it turned out only 7% of 3371 people who voted online think Shawna wasn’t guilty. There’s a small line of words that says: “This is not a scientific poll” on the bottom. I started looking for the article about this lady but couldn’t find it on the page.

I wonder how many people out of 3371 actually know what she did and think that she should be guilty of charge. Many of them might just did what I did, since the voting was anonymous and anyone who uses Internet could vote on the issue. Web 2.0 give people a lot more freedom when interacting with others. With the ability to leave one’s opinion on the web and be seen by other people, liability and credibility could be as little as zero. And because of that, when it comes to academics or serious stuff, people say: “This is not a scientific poll.” or “Do not cite stuff from Wikipedia.” Everyone know that Wikipedia always have pretty accurate and complete explanation for almost everything. And I believe no one will decide Shawna’s fate by looking at a web poll result. Web 2.0 let people see, hear, and say about what others display. It provides enormous amount of information and as a web user, I’ll have to decide who to believe and who to doubt with my own brain.

MORE PRIVACY! Invisible Folders On Your Desktop.

bair5 — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:08:10 +0000

Somehow the photo editing applications in my computer disappeared, so I tried to find a third party application on the apple website. Instead I found a coloured_folder_creator.(it was created by an Australian). I downloaded it and it has a pretty cool feature – invisible folders!!. It’s main function of course is to create folders that are non-blue. There are like 7 colors each in 5 different shades, some of them have flags of countries on the cover. Journalists who work with international stuff might find it helpful. Although it doesn’t have all the flags, got most of the English-speaking countries covered. And then, the coolest folder you”ll ever create. Double-click it and there it is on your desktop. I named a few with spaces and I can’t find them now. And maybe because it’s cheaply made(although some of the third-party applications are absolutely professional), it froze after i did something to it and it won’t respond to force quit like other applications do. When i went looking for the applications on the apple website, there are millions of them available. From business & finance to iPods+Itunes to UNIX & open source. And before I saw this colored folder thing, I downloaded a few photo/image-editings and tried them out. Like I said earlier, some of them are very sweet. On the other hand, since there are so many people making those applications and not all of them are quality controlled, I only looked at the ones that were recommended by staffs. I think very few people will go through all the good and crappy ones and not use the staff-pick links, and I feel bad for the creators of the crappy ones, they spent time and energy on their projects and don’t know how many people will actually find them useful.

Forever 21 Against Fashion Copyright

bair5 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:35:54 +0000

I like Forever 21 because their clothings look fashionable and they’re relatively cheap compare to a lot of other American brands. 21 sometimes design clothes that has similar style with famous fashion designers’ designs. Here’s one example I have : the one on the left is in ANNA SUI’s spring collection in 2007, sells for about $200, and the right one belong to Forever 21 and was sold in store for less than $20. ANNA SUI has always been a dream for me. Their dresses almost seem too good for just daily wear and so does the price. This particular one is one of my favorite, I thank 21 for making a cheaper version of such a lovable dress and make it affordable for so many girls who has the same dream. (although you can get an authentic ANNA SUI on ebay for 50 bucks. I don’t even have 50 bucks!)Some people argue that although the logo and labels are protected by trademark law, the designs are not. In fact most of the fashion designs are protected by patent not copyright. But that makes fashion almost irrelevant to patent laws, too, because usually before the patent application gets legalized, the trends’ already gone.I think that “trend” is something one creates, and a bunch of others follow. A trend can become a trend is because of there are many other similar ones. And if there are so many patents forbidding fashion from imitating and transforming, there will be no trends. And don’t forget that art has been about plagiarism.

Private Browsing

bair5 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:56:34 +0000

Tor is a free networking software program that allows you to use the internet anonymously. Why do we need to stay private? Tor website gave us some reasons: individuals may use Tor for socially sensitive communication in chat room and web forums for rape or abuse survivors; or it can keep you from getting fired if let’s say, you are traveling abroad and had to connect to your boss’s computer to send or check e-mail. Some websites recommend its users to use Tor to safeguarding their privacy and security. It’s even recommended as “a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online”. Since you can inadvertently reveal your national origin and professional affiliation to anyone who observing the network, even if the connection is encrypted. (Or you just don’t want your mother to find out that half of the websites you visit are porn sites.)

Anyways, privacy is important. Even if people don’t visit porn sites, somebody will still standout and fight for human rights. We maybe even should have them installed in King.

effectively illegal

bair5 — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:50:18 +0000

Rip your CD with pride! Although not for educational purpose. Look at this CD eating monster!

…well, it’s rather handsome. This white box is called Ripserver, it lets you rip and store all of your music without any additional hardware or software. Ripserver runs on an embedded Linux operating platform to ensure stability and requires minimal setup via a simple web browser interface. It comes in 500GB or 1TB configurations, rips as FLAC files or MP3s, and supports connectivity with USB drives.

People love free stuff, and create such wonderful deivce for you to experience to its maximum. Although it costs more than $1300(the 1TB version, I TB!!). with so much money you can probably buy a full shelf of new CDs instead of storing all the old songs in a box. who’s gonna listen to all those songs anyway?

camera phone or phone and a camera?

bair5 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:38:04 +0000

Camera phone apparently has become one of the top 10 trends in 2008. Go to those cellphone carrier websites and the first thing you see is “Get free camera phones”, like that little optic on the back (or front) of the cellphone was naturally born with it and any cellphone doesn’t have it has some sort of disability. Camera phone is definitely “the future of multimedia phones”. As I recall some cellphones in 2004 had external cameras that can be plugged into the bottom of the phone body. After that they first had 0.11-megapixel cameras on some of the brands. Then 0.3 and 1.2-megapixel quickly became majority. Things change too fast and now we have 5-megapixel phones on the market and they will soon become the new standard of camera phones. It will also provide enormous markets and opportunities for businesses like, advertising on cellular networks. (The brand new advertising experiment)

But the quality of the pictures is questionable. Although some cellphone producers buy special designed optics from world famous manufacturers like Carl Zeiss to promise buyers the control of quality, or develop very specific camera-like functions such as auto-focus, video streaming/recording/blogging, flash lights, face detection, zoom in and out, and multiple-frame takes, a cellphone is a cellphone (yes, and don’t forget that it makes calls too), actual users often find their 5.0 megapixels don’t work as well as a real 5.0 megapixel, and would rather just have a normal camera in addition to a cellphone with a good service coverage.

(To see the rest of the top 10 trends in 2008 click here)

Taking care of business

bair5 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:07:45 +0000

i took a bus to the library this morning and heard the song “takin’ care of business”on radio as a commercial song for Office Depot. i think i’ve heard this song for commercial purpose a lot of times for different office supply companies. i wonder where did they get the copyright of this song and how much are they paying for it.

so first i looked it up on wikipedia. the song’s actually quite popular all over the world. office supply companies in other countries like Australia and new zealand used this song, too.

then i found this. “Takin’ Care of Business” is a song written by Randy Bachman Bachman-Turner Overdrive for their 1973 album Bachman-Turner Overdrive II. Licensed as the theme to Office Depot The Chipmunks).

unfortunately i couldn’t figure out how much they pay for the song. since it was written in the seventies, i guess it’s not old enough to let people use it for free. and if the author(who is still alive) declared his copyright for the song, (of course he did..) that should be a good amount of money coming in every once a while. like rents, except the tanent doesn’t leave.

NEC Fuelcell Flask Phone (what a world we’re living in)

bair5 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:25:58 +0000

if you’ve heard of the combination of Fuel and Cell, you probably heard it from something that’s related to futuristic cars. how i’ve found something takes a little imagination. look at these pretty cellphone babies! (or are they batteries?)

NEC was famous of its pretty design in products, this time it presents a fuel cell powered cellphone. the handset features a touch screen which i guess will glow in the dark..? although i don’t think these pretty stuff in the picture are the actual cellphones. (where do i talk to? ) the company didn’t give out any specific specs about it except the picture. even if it’s true, you gotta be very careful with this little thing, drop it or with a smoke spark it might just ignite itself.

Baidu got sued for copyright problems

bair5 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:32:50 +0000

found this today.

Baidu is a chinese internet searching engine that works like Google. it searches images, musics, news, maps, websites and stuff and has features like blogs, questionaries, and even a baidu-pedia kind of thing.

thearticle was talking about a music industry group in China said it sued Baidu.com earlier this year for the search engine’s alleged violation of copyright involving more than 50 songs. (only 50!?) Music Copyright Society of China released a statement last Friday in which group official Qu Jingming said Baidu had provided “music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its website without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits”.

i used to download free songs from the baidu’s mp3 searching engine all the time back in highschool. just type in any information and the engine will list all the links from other websites that provide music downloads. and if you click the links it goes right into the downloading process. works most of the time. it seems like people never said anything about copyright on these wensites untill a few years ago. and all the singers and artists started telling their loyal fans not to buy pirate copies. they made great effections, too. you can know that from all the parents’ complains about students spending too much money on buying CDs. but still, i believe that in china, millions and millions of people download millions and millions of songs from websites like baidu for free everyday. i do hope that they can solve the pirate music free downloading problem as soon as possible, just because my beloved singers need to make money, too.(not them only of course.) but on the other hand, from a poor student’s perspective, who doesn’t want free songs? anyway, in the baidu case, i don’t think baidu should be completely responsible for the law sue. it’s a searching engine, like we don’t sue google here for providing music links, do we? oh wait a minute, google doesn’t have a music(audio) searching option!! you can find a lot of videos (which are mostly from youtube.com) but not many audio files. hmm they are very different. i’ll look more into it later.