Author Archives: Hamish MacEwan
Southern Cross Cables Network – Continued Price Reductions
“With lower marginal capacity cost we have reduced our prices to the US from both New Zealand and Australia by 44%”, says Pfeffer, “the third largest decline in our history. Often coinciding with capacity upgrades, price declines are not new for Southern Cross, having averaged over 21 per cent annually since 2001. This longstanding practice has promoted the increasing use of retail internet data with reducing cost”.
Pfeffer said “it’s particularly pleasing to see how ISP competition has resulted in big increases to retail data caps over the last year for both Australian and New Zealand internet users, and to see the retail cost of data continuing to fall. Our new initiatives are again designed to support this process as another step towards the new NBN and UFB environments”.
Hoorah!
Predictions 2012: Dawning of a golden age for ICT
Within the home, 2012 will see the consolidation of a trinity of gadgets – TV, tablets, and the former games console turned into a home command centre. I think the humble TV will change the most and emerge as the preferred user interface for both entertainment and communication. People yelling and gesturing wildly at their TV will be normal. 3D TV will lead to a 3D Web. And, the TV will be the interface for controlling the washing machine, fridge and alarms.
Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy | The White House
Let us be clear???online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.
via whitehouse.gov
Rubbish.
Author of U.S. online piracy bill vows not to buckle
“It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don’t mind taking that on.”
Smith stressed the bill would only affect websites based outside the United States and criticized opponents for failing to cite specific sections, saying many have failed to read it and were disguising their economic interests with rhetoric about Internet freedom. “There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites,” Smith said. “So I don’t think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent.”
via reuters.com
Smith’s list of supporters is not amazing to me, tediously typical.
Music in the Digital Age – Andrew Dubber
About the Book
This book is a work in progress. A living document, of sorts. Start reading now, and it will grow month by month. Just don’t get it wet, and never feed it after midnight.
Music is both culture and commerce. Those two things are inextricably linked. In different periods of history, music culture and music commerce are profoundly different.
In the age of print, the main way in which music was produced, distributed and consumed was on paper. Music was dots on a page. The electric age, with its introduction of recordings and broadcasting, radically transformed the ways in which music made meaning for people, and consequently the ways in which it made money.
And just as the electric age was profoundly disruptive to the musicians, businesses and fans of music when it first came along, so too is the digital age.
via leanpub.com
CES Innovation Zones
- AcceleGlove. Equipped with accelerometers that track the exact movements of a person???s hand.
- Cubelets from Modular Robotics. The electronic building blocks are marketed as a toy for children but adults may enjoy it too. You attach power blocks, sensor blocks and action blocks together to make small robots that move, light up or perform other actions.
- Exmobaby. Biosensor baby pajamas feature a snap-on transmitter that measures vital signs in infants, including heart rate, skin temperature, moisture, and movement.
- Romotive. Lets you preprogram your smartphone ??? Android or iOS ??? to drive a small wheeled device in a preprogrammed pattern, or you can use your tablet to direct its movements.
- Solarmer Energy. Developing solar energy cells made of thin, flexible plastic that can be rolled up like a sheet of paper.
- Perpetua Power. Working on products that generate renewable power from body heat. It is developing a wireless wristband to monitor the location of Alzheimer patients
- Sun Innovations. Uses a nanoparticle film to project glowing animated signs on a window that look ???like a display floating in the air???.
- HealthMicro presented its disposable wireless sensors, designed to replace wired sensors that health care workers now stick on a patient???s body for medical examinations like an electrocardiogram.
- Emota.net. Used gesture controls embedded in a stuffed penguin to make social-networking technology more emotionally engaging. It creates a layer of social networking on top of Facebook.
Source of the famous ???Now you have two problems??? quote
As I mentioned in my previous post, my book was just reviewed on Slashdot. One thing that struck me in reading all the resulting comments was the (several different copies of an) apparently famous quote that goes something like:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.It’s apparently quite well known, so it floors me that this is the first I’ve seen it.
via regex.info
Heard it here first
Why HR 3699 Sucks
In case you haven???t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.
via savageminds.org
Legislation, the last refuge of the monopolist.
Dynamic face substitution
Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro play around with a face tracker and color interpolation to replace their own faces, in real-time, with celebrities such as that of Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton. Awesome. And creepy.
See Castro’s video of him doing the same thing, but with a different blending algorithm. His looks more like a maleable mask rather than a face substitution.
Hamish MacEwan 