Getting Around Copyright

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081120/GJLIFESTYLES/811209906

In light of last week's Copyright lecture, I give you the following article.

Article Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008

"DOVER — Although our movie license restricts us from publicizing the title, the Dover Public Library will have a free showing of the recently-released Disney/Pixar animated film about a small waste-collecting robot who has an adventure in outer space. "

There's another paragraph including time and place, but that's the bulk of the article right there. Too funny - they can get the public performance rights to the movie, but they are still not allowed to say its name. I guess that's one way of getting around copyright, although one could argue that they gave so much of the plot away that there's no other movie that it could possibly be. It makes me wonder just how legal that is.

Obviously, somebody told the library that they weren't allowed to name the movie that would be shown, but I would think that giving that much information would pretty much void that. The copyright guidelines I have state that the rights purchased with the public performance rights vary depending on who is selling them and how much the purchasers are willing to pay, so it's not a cut-and-dried issue, but by my thinking, I'd say that saying all but the name would be violating something, even if you did have the rights to the movie.

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History

http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/consequences-of-social-media/

An interesting concept. The author here states that because of things like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all sorts of this-is-what-i'm-doing-right-now technology, history will be recorded more accurately than before, and it will be easier then to reminisce with friends about what they were all doing on a certain day in the past.
I'm not sure this is as good of a thing as the author makes it out to be. For one thing, there is no need for me to remember what I was doing on every specific day in the past. And what if it was a bad thing, a fight that happened on that day? Does that need to be dragged out years later and re-aired? Even if the memories are good, the point of a memory is that something memorable happened. What's the point in saying "remember that day last July when we didn't do anything specific at all? Wasn't that awesome?"

The blogger here also states that, like the government using Google maps to track flu outbreaks, we'll be able to get so adept at tracking things like the spread of disease that they won't happen at all. I'm not sure about that. I think things are going to happen anyway, but we may be better able to track and/or contain them. Although I'm not sure what Google has to do with it. Now that coordinates are readily available from any mapping agency, we could do just as well with pushpins on the wall. It's just more convenient to do it online.

Besides - this isn't really changing recorded history. It's changing the way that our current time will be seen by future generations, or how we see ourselves now, but not how we see the past. If that were the point, I'd suggest the author head over to look at Europeana, the new EU-wide free online library that's housing video, audio, written record, and images from national libraries across the continent. That's going to help with recorded history; no more will we simply have to hear "the battle took place there," but we can see video footage (depending on the age of the battle; sources at the moment have video back to 1914 in this database), see digital reproductions of photos and paintings from various time periods, and communicate with people from where such events took place. In my opinion, that trumps the meager arguments of the above blogger any day.

Gadgets To Be Thankful For

In the spirit of the current holiday season (next holiday being Thanksgiving, of course), I give you the following article/slideshow:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-17938_105-87.html?tag=rtcol;newsNow

This article showcases a variety of gadgets that consumers are thankful to have. I appreciate the kudos that the submitters give to the products, but I even more appreciate the title. I've been getting tired of hearing, "I can't live without my ___", when obviously, yea, you could. You just don't want to.

The other thing I liked about this article was the appropriate use of the word "gadget," meaning "something that's fun to play with but that I could probably do without, even though I don't really want to." Although I'm not sure that a laptop counts necessarily as a gadget, I can throw caution to the wind just this one time and call it that.

I especially appreciated post #2, which is a car stereo. The author here has gotten a rather snazzy stereo system, but it is one that she says she "can grow into," so she doesn't feel the need to continually go out and buy new stuff, and she got it because her old system was broken, and not because it was the wrong color or something like that. Honestly, I appreciate that she wrote plenty of candid thoughts on the product and why she likes it instead of just saying, "this is cool, so I bought one."

I also liked post #3, where the author stated that he was at first reluctant to use the product that he, in the end, liked best of all. It's almost a Cinderella story of gadgets. I appreciated that the writer here gave both positives and negatives for the thing as well as saying why he's thankful for it in the end. It makes things less like a product endorsement.

5 Old-Fashioned Web Concepts That Need To Die

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10065922-2.html?tag=mncol;title

Interesting. Let's go through these one by one.

1- Refresh. The author of this article apparently really hates having to use the refresh button to see the latest information on a website. I can understand the frustration of waiting for news on something and constantly having to reload a site, but having it work automatically seems to be asking for trouble. For example, if the internet went down, you would no longer be able to even look at the page you were looking at before the crash. Also, if information changed on the page you were reading, you would be lost, looking at something else where your article should be. Here's my solution: have a refresh toggle, so if you're in the middle of an article, you can turn off the auto-refresh until you're done, and then turn it back on to see what you missed. See? Everybody's happy!

2- Save. Well, isn't auto-save a pretty common feature at this point? That doesn't mean that you need to take away the save button. Word processors have been doing this all the way back to ClarisWorks, if I remember correctly.

3- Log-ins. "Keeping track of passwords for all the sites we visit is becoming unmanageable. There are better solutions," the author says. What confuses me here is that right before he has said this, he pointed to no more than three of those better solutions. True, they may not all be mainstream just yet, but if they work, then why not use them?

4- One-size-fits-all site design. I agree with this one. There are more and more mobile devices - BlackBerry, iPhone, Treo, and many of the newer cell phones - that will happily load a website for you. The problem there is that the websites it loads aren't made for mobile devices, and as such will take a very long time to load and may not be very useful once they do, because they've been made for a full-size computer screen with capabilities that far exceed those available on a mobile device.

5- Blocker ads. Those pesky things that take over your screen when you're trying to do something else, like the 30-second ads that pop up every time you try to watch something on Hulu. I have no problem watching an ad before and during, say, an episode of Bob Newhart, but when I just want to watch a few SNL clips, and I sit through more commercial than show, then that's getting really old. But what is there you can do about it? As the author states, "You go away, or at least you hesitate before you come back. Sites need to make money, but punishing users for viewing content is not just old-fashioned, it's medieval. The message should fit the medium, and TV-style advertising for the Web is not the right model." Hm. In most circumstances, I'd agree with this for the most part ("medieval" may be putting it a bit strongly for me), but when it comes to Bob Newhart, there's just not that many places that you can watch that show online for free, and sometimes it's worth it to put up with a bit of annoyance to get where you want to be. I think that taking that time to get a cup of tea may be a better solution than abandoning what you were trying to do in the first place.

"Thumbspeak"

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/10/20/081020crbo_books_menand

I realize that I usually write what sounds like my own decrying of the evils of technology, and I don't mean to be doing that, but sometimes an idea that's absolutely perfect is really not that great upon closer inspection (see the King of the Hill episode where they go to a lawnmower focus group for an example). In this case, however, it isn't the technology I'm debating about, but the author's views on it.

I read an article in The New Yorker about text messages. It's the review of a book called Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. The author makes some interesting points. For one, the rise of texting is taking over where email left off, having left phone calls and face-to-face interaction, and good old snail-mail letters, in the dust. He claims that information is spread fastest this way, and the speed at which information travels has been increased incrementally throughout the above list. While I agree that texting is quick, I disagree that it's the quickest way to find something out; in my opinion, nothing beats a phone call or face-to-face chat. In my personal experience, emails often lack vital details, and the loss of tone of voice prolongs any miscommunications because there's no way to tell if you're talkin about a wholly different thing than the person you're talking to. People also tend to leave out vital details in emails, because they assume you already know something. Text messages can be even worse. Because of this, it sometimes takes a day or so worth of emails, or an hour of texts, to accomplish what could be done with a 5-minute phone call (and that includes the niceties). I notice that the author completely skips over instant messaging, which I would use as my preferred medium of communication with friends if I were near a computer.

From a linuistic approach, I enjoyed this article because it shows that languages - specifically the shorthand therein - is becoming more blended as the popularity of texting grows. The author speaks about " 'code-mixing,' in which two languages—one of them invariably English—are conflated in a single expression. Germans write “mbsseg” to mean “mail back so schnell es geht” (“as fast as you can”). So texting has probably done some damage to the planet’s cultural ecology, to lingo-diversity. People are better able to communicate across national borders, but at some cost to variation."

Personally, I find the loss of variation a small price to pay for the communication skills that it garners. Wouldn't you rather be able to talk to people - especially those people with whom you were close enough friends to be sending messages - without having to worry too much about language barriers? This does raise a point, though: those people who you text with are good enough friends as a general rule that you don't need to worry about language barriers, since you already speak with them. It's a moot point.

I appreciate the author's interest in such a topical subject, but he does make some mistakes in just the two-page article (I'll have to read the book to see if it was the author of the book or the author of the article). For one, "wassup" did not originate in a Budweiser commercial. True, the commercial did make the lingo more widespread, but the backstory for that ad campaign is from a tradition that some friends (the ones who appear in the commercial) used to greet eachother with the phrase, and they videotaped themselves being silly and spread it around (a viral video on VHS). Unless Budweiser lied about its campaign - and, why would it? - the word was around before the commercial was. I have also never seen anyone use the Homer Simpson Emoticon in email, text, or IM form, spiffy as it may be. Perhaps 25 is just too old for me to reap all the benefits of texting.

Utah is on Twitter

http://twitter.com/UtahGov
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2008-09-25-twitter-utah-government_N.htm

Perhaps I'm behind the times, but I don't really understand the appeal of Twitter, which is a page of mini-blog posts about any subject, none of which are much longer than a sentence.

I appreciate the pros of Twitter: it's easy to use, quick to post to, easy to catch up on, and with some programs, now even searchable. It is, however, very informal and very brief, and if there is anything listed in the "tweets" that I'd like to know about, I then have to go research it on my own. I would rather that the blogs be a paragraph long and tell me the basics of what I need to know, rather than a headline and a url.

Of course, this could be my personal bias. I have also blogged about disliking touchscreen phones and Google Chrome, even though I really don't have anything against them (I believe that once my work day is over, I'm too grouchy to appreciate up-and-coming technology). It seems that I'm one of few who aren't big Twitter fans, since the state government of Utah is now using Twitter to stay in touch with residents.

While I appreciate that the government there is staying up to date with technology, the following paragraph confused me a little:
"But when lawmakers convene for a special session Thursday to cut $272 million from the state budget, the first word on what happens will just as likely come from a Tweet, what the short messages are called, as it will from traditional media or blogs. With Twitter, an update takes only as long to post as it does to send a text message."

I know that this says "the first word" and not "the only word," but $272 million is a substantial amount of money, and I think I'd be worried to hear, "we cut $150 million. Details later." Personally, I'd rather wait.

Facebook reveals narcissism!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10052216-36.html

Researchers at the University of Georgia have uncovered a shocking fact: technology-savvy people who think very well of themselves use the Facebook social networking website to self-promote, ending up with hundreds of "friends," status reports updated several times a day, and lots of photos of themselves. This research will be published in October's issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin academic journal.

Narcissism is a psychological disorder in which a person thinks so excessively highly of themselves that they put themselves first in everything to the point of alienating others (the article here calls is "excessive egotism"). The study also states that those with the disorder at first may seem to be very confident and well-composed, but it soon shows through that they're far more than that, and narcissists tend to end up hurting others in order to further their own goals.

This is the biggest news since it was announced that the sky was blue!

It surprises me that this research was funded and supported by UG. It also makes me a little sad... there are so many things out there that need attention... there's no cure for cancer, but now there's documented evidence that narcissism can be seen on Facebook? Anyone who has used facebook a bit could have told the researchers that and saved them the trouble.

This is not to say that anyone with a Facebook page is narcissistic, but... here's a scenario. Now that Facebook has a feed that shows you who on your friends list has done what lately, when you sign on, a page pops up that lists various goings on. This is wonderful for keeping in touch with those friends you rarely see, but when the entire list consists of "Bob is taking a shower! Bob is out of the shower! Bob is going to class! Bob has posted 37 new photos!"... it gets old. In this case, Bob is a narcissist, and it's no surprise to anyone. Sorry, UG.

The most humerous part of the blog I linked to with this article is the comment that someone posted underneath, calling the study "completely false and untrue." It seems that the commenter didn't realize that the study said that Facebook helped to identify narcissists, not that anyone with a Facebook page was one.

Technology features I do not understand

In the interest of being able to make my cousins think I'm cool, I've been attempting to stay current with the latest technology trends. It's easy enough to read about a new feature of something and say, "oh, that sounds great!" but I find it less great when the exciting new things your phone can do actually come into play.

Lots of devices now - iPhones, cell phones, mp3 players - are coming equipped with touch screens (Camera phones are apparently no longer en vogue, which is too bad, since I just finally got one). Generally, this means that you no longer have to spend the energy to push those pesky 1/8" deep buttons. According to some people I've spoken to, this is the best thing ever created on earth, better even than fire, sliced bread, and jelly doughnuts. Sadly, I don't see the thrill. Let's say that I have a new touch-screen cell phone, and I shove it in my pocket on my way out the door. Now, I've had non-touch-screen phones randomly call the first person in my address book (my friend Anthony) because their buttons have been pressed when the phone was in a bag with bulky things on top of it, or in a pocket where my jeans mashed the keys when I sat down (ths is why I now have a flip phone - to spare poor Anthony the phone calls of dead air or jingling keys). I dear this would happen with alarming frequency with a touch-screen cell phone. Let's say that I put said phone in my pocket after hanging up with talking to my sister. If the friction in my pocket hits the send key on the touch screen and calls her back, she may hear, "jeez, I never thought I'd get off the phone! Yak, yak, yak." And then she'd never talk to me again. Or perhaps it would call someone while in my bag... can you imagine hearing, "hello? HELLO?!" in a quiet movie theater? I have a friend who was once listening so intently to her voicemail, phone balenced between shoulder and ear while she copied down a phone number, that the touchscreen registered "delete" and the message that was so important was lost forever. I think I'll pass on that feature.

Also new is the trend to make things be able to be controlled with movement, as demonstrated with the Nintendo Wii controller. While fun for a game, this technology is now available in the new line of iPods - shake them, and your songs will shuffle! Fantastic, if you listen while sitting still. Forget about using them on a bus, while climbing stairs, or while working out.

The point is: Newer isn't necessarily better. Just because you can have an animated GIF of a sparkly toad dancing on your website doesn't mean you should. Not all things need touchscreens. And we, as a nation of consumers, need to stop glomming onto the hot new trend, since it may not be so wonderful after all.

Google Chrome

If you're like me, living with a programmer, you've heard nothing but excitement about the new Google Chrome browser that came out last week (and was immediately downloaded and installed as the default browser on all 3 home computers). I, not being a technologist, decided to give it a try, while remaining cautiously optimistic.

Google itself says the following: "We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications, and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for Web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." Now, call me naive, but wasn't that half the point of Mozilla Firefox? This statement also pokes at me for a reason that I find hard to name. I think it's because, on the whole, I am not looking for yet another application that does magic tricks, but something useful. A tool. That's what technology is at its core: the use of tools to accomplish something more efficiently than you would be able to without it. And yes, this is a wonderful research tool... but I fail to see what makes it better than other browsers. Except, of course, that it bears the Google logo, and comes with its own comic strip.

While I appreciate the ground-up approach that Google has taken in creating Chrome, the application, from my standpoint, is pretty much the same as Firefox or the new IE or Safari. I'm proficient in technology, as much as one can be without knowing any programming languages (I've been told that HTML, as a markup language, doesn't count). I surf the web, I check my email constantly, I play an MMORPG, I can hook up and sometimes even troubleshoot a CPU. And it doesn't look very much different to me than the other browsers. I don't really have a problem with the look of it... I understand that aesthetics play a large part in usability when it comes to the common computer user. But there are so many browsers out there already. Why do we need another one?

What makes me think is this: Since I've known the aforementioned programmer, all I've ever heard about Microsoft is that it's a large, evil, monopolistic corporation with no soul, mostly because the company has a tendency to market anything and everything with the MS name and logo on it. But, look around any programmer's office, and you'll see half a dozen items emblazoned with "Google" or "I'm Feeling Lucky!". The two corporations may market themselves in different ways, but the names are equally (or almost as) well-known to the general computer-using public. The difference, I am told, is that Google's products work well, and the people who create them take pride in what they do (apparently Mr. Gates has never ever cared, and just happened to be in the right place at the right time?). Such is the trust that people place in this corporation that they will uproot their own beliefs (this is a guy who started a university-wide campaign to get Mozilla Firefox into the computer labs at Rutgers) and follow the pack to throw away MF and install Chrome, as the default browser, within hours of its release. Google is king! Google is wonderful! Chrome forever!

To this, I feel I must remind the programmers of the world... that's how Microsoft started out, too.

What's the deal with this commercial?

Seeing as this is the first blog entry of the Fall 2008 semester, I've decided that it doesn't especially matter what I write about, as long as the blog has been created and I write two more entries this week, so... for lack of a better topic, I'm going to write about the new Microsoft Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ad that everyone's talking about.

I watched the ad. And, call me dense, but I don't get it. If you haven't seen it, here's what happens: Seinfeld sees Gates buying shoes at a discount store where the salesman is not actually doing much in the way of helping. Seinfeld enters the store, churro in hand, and takes over, helping Gates to buy new shoes, and tells his new buddy to shower in his shoes, so they get clean when he does (cut to pair of shoe-clad feet, presumably Seinfeld's, in the shower). People watching through the window of the store proclaim that the shoes Gates is trying on do, in fact, run tightly, as Seinfeld had said. For some reason, they do this in another language (Spanish, I believe), with subtitles. Satisfied, Gates heads to the counter to purchase his new footwear and proclaims he's a Platinum Member of the Shoe Circus Clown Club (he also shows a Shoe Circus Member Card, complete with very old and very geeky photo). The new friends walk out through the parking lot, now both eating churros, where Seinfeld asks if Microsoft will ever make a computer that's "moist and chewy, like cake, so we can eat them while we're working." He asks for a sign that it's going to happen, and Gates gives him a signal - he shakes his tush. End of commercial.

Now. There are so many things about this commercial that I don't understand. For one thing, why is Gates buying shoes at the same discount store he's been using since he was a teenager? Especially if his shoes were always too tight and the salesman didn't listen to what the customer was saying. There's a point when you have to say, "I have more money than god, and I want shoes that fit correctly!" Or how about even, "it doesn't matter whether or not I have money, I deserve to be treated with respect as a customer of this establishment"? Is this commercial telling me that Gates is so out of touch that he not only doesn't bring the best goods to the rich consumer, but that he doesn't know how to give any single person anything they want?

And why are the gawkers speaking Spanish? Is this supposed to tell me that Hispanic mall-goers are big fans of Microsoft? Is that why they're each eating a churro at the end? Come to think of it, why are the gawkers there at all? And why are they more impressed with Seinfeld's knowledge of the discount brand of shoe than the fact that he's helping Gates try them on?

And then there's the random nonsense about taking a shower with shoes on. I can just see the marketing geniuses at work here: "Let's throw something in that makes no sense at all! Like Seinfeld makes a joke about showering with shoes on - priceless!" Did they not realize that they're making the head of their company seem less knowledgable in general than a man who does something so ridiculous?

So after all that, they walk out to the parking lot, each eating churros. But... at the beginning of the commercial, Gates politely declined a churro when offered. Has Seinfeld's shoe knowledge, as it were, affected him to such a point that he is also taking pastry advice? And does that mean that there actually will be a computer that's moist and chewy like cake? I can't figure what that would be a metaphor for, so I'm forced to take it at face value - edible computers. I can just see it now: a proud parent has scrimped and saved to get the latest MS Muffin for her child. The hyper-expensive computer is left under the christmas tree only for a moment, but a moment is all that is needed for the dog to swoop in and chew the thing until all it does is play a repeating stream of Dexy's Midnight Runners at full blast.

Perhaps I exaggerate. But if anyone can make any more sense out of this commercial than that, I'd love to hear it.