BREAKING SURF
| The Sims Shadow Government |
| Internet History Timeline |
| History of the State of Washington |
| Central Park |
| Hawaiian Culture Museum |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Intelligent Discussion out on the Edge |
| Eighteen Ways to Make a Baby |
| The Kurt Goedel Society |
| Haystack: a New Kind of Information Manager |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Apple's iTunes Deal for Independent Music Labels
On June 5, Apple held a meeting for representatives of independent music labels where it informed them how to join its wildly successful iTunes Music Store. One of the attendees took detailed notes during the meeting and posted them on Gnutella News. The notes make for enlightening reading and reveal something about Apple's philosophy with regard to online music services. Beyond the technical and legal details, perhaps the most important bit of news is that Apple is treating all labels, no matter their size, the same way. A small record label will get the same basic deal Apple gives the five major labels. On the other hand, individual artists can't use the service unless they have an iTuned label to represent them. Given the huge success and influence already enjoyed by iTunes, every musician and every music producer should read this posting and make an effort to find out more from Apple.Gnutella News: http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/6830
iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
What is it about Martha Stewart that causes such polarized opinions? Is it her reputation as expert hyper-perfect hostess and homemaker? Is it her shrewd and tough business persona, which built a billion-dollar media and fashion empire? Whatever her polarizing attributes, there's no denying that Stewart is a larger-than-life character, now involved in a well publicized business scandal. She is accused of using insider information to profit from the sale of shares of ImClone, whose CEO, Sam Waksal, has just been convicted of similar charges. As part of a public-relations effort, Stewart has created this Web site to address her many fans - the critics probably won't care. It contains a short statement from her lawyers about the indictments, numerous notes from well wishers (over 50,000, according to Stewart), and links to media coverage.
http://www.marthatalks.com/
June 6 marked the 58th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. To commemorate the occasion, the Atlantic posted an article that first appeared in its pages in 1960. The author, S.L.A. Marshall, was a combat historian who felt that official accounts of Operation Overlord were too sanitized. He wrote the article in 1960 to expose the shocking cost that the first units paid to get ashore. Marshall's narrative follows two companies of the 29th Infantry over the course of the day. We won't spoil anything for you, but the ordeal these men went through makes the beach scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" look like a stroll in the park.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/60nov/omaha.htm
The Online Marketing of Iraq's Most-Wanted Playing Cards
Shortly after Iraq's most-wanted playing cards went into production, more than one million decks were sold, making it one of the fastest-selling fad products in history. The New York Times tells how the cards were produced and marketed, largely on the Internet. You almost undoubtedly noticed a huge amount of spam that offered to sell the decks. Rather unfortunately, these spams succeeded - at least as far as spam success rates go. Millions of e-mail messages promised to deliver the decks, and a few hundred thousand of those actually generated orders. The article tells how card companies generated the spam blitz and scrambled to fill the many orders on short notice, and how the spam affected their business. Sadly, the spammers will only learn one lesson from this: that with the right product, they can indeed make money by stuffing your mailbox.http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/09/technology/09CARD.html
The Webby Awards just announced the 2003 winners. Each of the 30 categories has a winner elected by the Webby judges and a People's Voice winner voted on by the general public. The obvious winners in several categories (Amazon.com for Commerce, eBay for Services, PayPal for Finance) won't really help you find decent off-beat netsurfing, but a few of the more obscure winners are truly new or innovative (Meetup for Community, Get Your War On for Humor, NobodyHere for Personal Web Site). We won't belabor the obvious - once you've seen the award list, you know what to expect.
http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webby_awards/nominees.html
And the MTV Movie Award for Best Virtual Performance Goes to...
....Gollum, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". We suspect most of our readers don't even know the MTV Movie Awards exist, never mind not watching them. Yes, Gollum won over competition from other constructs like Scooby Doo and Kangaroo Jack. Andy Serkis, whose acting drives Gollum, accepted the reward in a video clip - well, he was doing that when Gollum showed up and showed him up. And then showed just how foul-mouthed a nasty little digital creature can be. TheOneRing.net is hosting a clip of the hilarious "acceptance" speech.http://www.theonering.net/staticnews/1054890864.html
Could you pass the quiz given by grade-eight chums Karen, Mary, and Kristin on how to chat in teenspeak? We don't think we could and at first, none of the FBI agents they tested did either. That's because what's in and what's like so not isn't the kind of thing normally taught to G-men. When a member of an FBI anti-pedophile operation watched his daughter instant messaging a friend and realized he hadn't a clue what she was saying, he enlisted her and two of her friends to teach agents how 13-year-olds chat. The three girls show agents how to send authentically teen messages and hand out reading assignments from popular teen magazines like Teen People and YM. As agents become better able to read and send teenspeak, they exhibit more authentic image to the online pedophiles they are tasked with stopping. The girls themselves think crime fighting is pretty cool. At their recent middle-school graduation, the trio received commendations from the FBI for their invaluable help. The Washington Post speaks the language, and has a bonus for parents: the meaning of "pos".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10052-2003Jun3.html
How did the Slammer worm spread so quickly last January? The July Wired describes how it did, with Slammer code, and conveniently posts the same online. While most of us are familiar with the TCP that maintains our online connection, there's a lighter and faster protocol called UDP. Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 uses UDP - as do other software packages, but Slammer's author targeted an old hole in SQL Server 2000. It's incredible that Slammer, a program of only 376 bytes, was able to affect the Net so widely, but sysadmins who were late in upgrading the patch for the security hole really deserve a share of the credit. Slammer was tightly coded and unquestionably well done, but bloatware is so common today that one tends to forget that tight code was the norm not too many years ago. Some question whether Wired's tell-all approach is all that good an idea. Frankly, we tend to err on the side of freedom of information. CNET covers the controversy.
Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/slammer.html
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-1013974.html
Electronic gaming has been with us for a while now, and jaded simulation gamers have come to lament the fact that dangerous boldness in the virtual world has no repercussions in the real world. If you, say, take a tank on a suicide mission to stop the enemy, your virtual death is at most an inconvenience. Without a fear factor, anybody will try to be a hero. Kevin Rose, a fan of Mortal Kombat on the Xbox, decided to do something about this. He designed a modification that turns the force-feedback Xbox controllers into 20,000-volt Xshok controllers. Take a hit in Mortal Kombat on Rose's Xbox and you really feel the sting. Despite his own warning - "Again remember, you should not try to do this. It can be very harmful and potentially deadly." - Rose shows how to undertake the mod at TechTV. The process is matched in entertainment value by all the warnings and disclaimers.
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/howto/story/0,24330,3450946,00.html
Trepia Lets You Know Who's Near
If you like meeting new friends, Trepia is a clever piece of software that may help you find some. Download and install on your Windows machine, and it will alert you to other Trepia users in the vicinity. Check their profiles, and if you find somebody worth meeting, you can swap text messages and arrange to meet if the other Trepia user agrees. Trepia claims to be especially useful in new places, such as after a move or during travel. The program works through both wired and wireless networks. It's new and still catching on, so there are only about 6,000 users so far, which ensures that you won't get mobbed with contacts, at least not yet. Some critics worry that this kind of software could be used for stalking but the software provides only general location information and users decide how detailed a user profile to post. The St. Paul Pioneer Press covers the local - for them - story.Trepia: http://www.trepia.com/
Pioneer Press: http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/business/technology/5987828.htm
Off the Record in the Blog Age
Some high-caliber names agreed to participate in the Wall Street Journal's recent conference on matters digital with the understanding that anything said onstage was off-limits to reporters. Such gag orders are common at technical conferences and supposedly encourage participants to be freer in their comments. Some commentators sniff disdainfully that the off-the-record rule is a sham designed to give an aura of exclusiveness to the goings on, and point out that participants aren't likely to blab trade secrets, gag order or no. Regardless, two attendees at this conference, lawyer Denise Howell and venture capitalist David Hornik, posted comments from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in their blogs, and several news organizations then reported the information. Walter Mossberg, one of the conference organizers, doesn't mind that non-reporters defied the gag and even seems to have anticipated that. He's wondering what to do next time, but admits that he doesn't know what to change. As Dan Gillmor points out, in the age of weblogs, everyone's a journalist. Wired has the ungagged story and you can blog about it all you want.http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59116,00.html
What Equipment Worked and What Didn't in Iraq
How about a different perspective on the recent Gulf War? Check out this US Marine Corps analysis of various weapons used in the field, based on comments from Marines who used the weaponry in combat. Among the many remarkable passages are those about the failure of various communication technologies to work together and that many jarheads found the M-16 rifle unwieldy in the urban environment. Some Marines took to using captured AK-47s during the urban phase of the campaign. One amazing stat is the nearly universal engagement range for small-arms fire, 20-30 meters. Read this, before someone classifies it.http://www.sftt.org/PDF/article05122003a.pdf
Home DVRs Not for the Casual Dabbler
Want to build your own digital video recorder (DVR), something like a TiVo or a ReplayTV? Get ready to test your programming skills and your wallet. The open-source community is home to several homebuilt DVR projects, but don't expect miracles. Raffi Krikorian, a DVR hacker, compares DVRs to cars: sure, you can build your own, but it's going to cost a heck of a lot more than something off a dealer's lot. He plans to homebuild a souped-up MythTV DVR, and estimates the cost at $1,200, about three times the cost of a retail DVR. MythTV is the most advanced home DVR project, but creating one from scratch will test your ability. After reading this Wired article and visiting one of the home DVR sites, you might just decide to go buy a TiVo and let someone else hack it for you.Krikorian: http://www.bitwaste.com/wasted-bits/
MythTV: http://www.mythtv.org/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59088,00.html
How and Why to Develop a Standard E-Book Format
If you like e-books but hate that they come in so many incompatible formats, Jon Noring's editorial on a potential open standard for e-books is a must-read. Although somewhat technical, his essay lays out what it would take to make a universal e-book standard and how one might go about doing it. Of course, there is one big problem - how do you get companies to give up their proprietary standards?http://12.108.175.91/ebookweb/discuss/msgReader$2165$2165
Make something unreal, win a million dollars. What's not to like? This is a modding competition, brought to you courtesy of Nvidia, Epic Games, and a little outfit called Atari. Hone your modding skills and if you beat the field in one of the categories, you're in for a treat. Contest winners will snag an Unreal Engine license worth $350,000. That'll boost your confidence level when you talk to publishers about publishing your game idea. The license covers only the Windows-compatible engine, and wouldn't it be hilarious if an obnoxious Mac or Linux user won a category and turned down the prize?
http://www.unrealtournament2003.com/?contest
ONLINE CULTURE
How exactly is post-war Iraq like the Sims Online? Well, in Iraq, gangs are trying to take over the country and fill a post-war power vacuum. Sure enough, in the Sims, gangs are trying to take over the game to fill a general power vacuum. An underground group known as the Sims Shadow Government (SSG) has organized itself offline and is meting out mob justice in the game's online world. This group, and others, arose in response to players who cause trouble for other players - grievers, in game jargon. In due course, the SSG and other online gangs of Sims began to resemble a real-life gang as members engaged in revenge, harassment, and symbolic virtual cardiectomies. Is the emergence of such tribal vigilantism due to a lack of interesting game elements and drama, or to a game so compelling that players invest much of their real lives in the virtual world? This story, in the San Jose Mercury News, is short and tantalizing - somebody really needs to write a longer analysis.http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6019958.htm
The Lemon's History of the Internet will jog your memory and make you smile. It's all a joke, enjoyable even by newbies because it touches popular buttons such as Al Gore, Steve Jobs, and StrongBad. Like a good comedian, this timeline reduces trends, technology, and events to one-liners. To wit: "Real Audio released, allowing users to listen to halting bursts of static in real time." Well do we at NSD remember those momentous times! We enjoy the insouciance of milestones such as "Blogging invented. Promises to change the way people bore strangers with banal anecdotes about their pets." OK, one more milestone for the statisticians among you: "After 43.2 million spams, and over 2.3 billion pop-up ads worldwide, someone buys an X-10 mini cam." Five or ten minutes spent scrolling this page will help put things in perspective. This is the kind of sardonically light and amusing site whose URL you paste to send to friends. Or subscribers.
http://www.thelemon.net/issues/timeline.php
ONLINE TRAVEL
History of the State of Washington
Quick, what's the capital of Washington? Who was the first non-Indian navigator to enter the Columbia River? When did the Tacoma Street Railway start service? Find all this and much more at HistoryLink, which delves into all things Washington, with special emphasis on its largest city, Seattle. The presentations, from online tours to study aids, are generally brief but there are many of them, and it's fun to hopscotch across the maps. Great Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon in 1846, ceding all claims to lands below the 49th parallel, and Oregon (which then included the future states of Washington and Idaho) became a US territory in 1848. Who knew?http://www.historylink.org/
If you've never been to New York City, you probably imagine Central Park as a small square of grass nestled among the skyscrapers. In actuality, it's 843 acres of field, water, and woods. Central Park Conservancy, a non-profit agency, runs the official Central Park Web site in an effort to help maintain the grounds by raising awareness. The site has news, history, and a robust section of Things to Do that includes guided walking tours. Ironically, with all the high-tech firms in New York City, the Web site development was done by a firm in Connecticut.
http://www.centralparknyc.org/
If you're thinking of visiting Hawaii, you might also think of stopping by the Bishop Museum when you get there. For a preliminary look, check out the online portal of this century-old museum. Originally founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop to honor his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last descendant of the royal Kamehameha family, this museum aims to preserve the cultural legacy of Hawaii. The museum boasts millions of artifacts, photographs, and documents. Although you won't find too many images of the museum holdings online, you will discover what the museum can offer visitors. You'll find an enormous amount of info contained within the Web site, much of it promotional. With ongoing activities that include exhibits, research projects, and tours, the museum offers patrons a chance to explore the rich, vibrant, and warm culture of Hawaii.
http://www.bishopmuseum.org/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Where Art, Design, and Vomit All Meet in One Small Package
Airline sick bags are generally unobtrusive, plain, and discreet, unlike the typical act of using one. A nifty design to jazz up the otherwise dull chunder receptacle could really add sparkle to your inflight puking experience, and so Design for Chunks has solicited ideas from designers and showcased the fruits of their creativity. The submissions range from simply urging you to "Think nice thoughts" as you heave into the bag to spectacularly graphic and realistic pictorial depictions of the bag's function. Of course, blowing chunks at 35,000 feet can be an undignified experience, so on one bag a cartoon Elvis reminds you it could be worse ("I died taking a shit"). Will any of these designs actually be taken up by airlines? Somehow we doubt Virgin Airlines will follow the suggestion of putting a picture of CEO Richard Branson's distinctly emetic face on their sick bags. Plan to spend some time here. It can be hilarious.http://www.designforchunks.com/
The well done Flash opening of the Legacy of Genghis Khan provides a nice transition from the usual Net babble into the meat of the site. Dealing with art and culture in Western Asia during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art pages are easy to navigate and richly illustrated. Four dynasties of Mongols occupied much of the known world during this time: Ilkhanids controlled the Islamic world, the Golden Horde laid claim to southern Russia, and central Asia was the domain of the Chaghatay. The familiar Yuan retained control of China and Mongolia itself. During this time, the Mongol culture evolved from a nomadic lifestyle with a taste for transportable arts into more sedentary habits in which less mobile art assumed greater importance. The cutural exchanges among various parts of the empire were felt throughout, but perhaps most acutely in countries such as Iran. A good deal of information is presented here, with some breathtaking artifacts illustrated in Flash.
http://www.lacma.org/khan/index_flash.htm
There's one simple way to mimic the lives of the rich and famous and that is to start your own personal art collection. Of course, as artists tend to price their works according to merit, you may not be able to amass a collection of quite the same artistic and financial value as the big boys and girls, but you can always copy the author of this Web site and start to collect paintings from thrift stores. Beware, those who go this route should have a taste for artwork "old or weird" or, more politely, "naive" - as the site puts it - but masterpieces of this genre can normally be had for $25 or less. To get a feel for the paintings you could add to your collection, take a look at the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art. If you go the collector's route, be prepared to shell out as much for frames and wall-hooks as for the canvases themselves.
http://www.thriftstoreart.com/
Can artificial intelligence (AI) create art? Real art? Art requires human creativity - or does it? What is art, anyway? You're likely to ask yourself such questions if you run the AARON shareware screensaver, which creates original digital art as you watch. AARON was created by painter/computer scientist Harold Cohen and developed by AI maven/inventor Ray Kurzweil. The Learn page states that AARON "is an artist in the truest sense. AARON's approach to art, color and composition are authentic." Impressed, we wanted to watch AARON paint online, but we couldn't get it to work. We were able to view the gallery, however. The downloadable screensaver demands at least 64 MB of RAM, a screen resolution of at least 1024x768, and various flavors of Windows excluding Windows 95. After three free days of use, AARON asks you to pay the $19.95 shareware fee, but if you don't pay it will run anyway.
http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/
If You've Lost Your Marbles, Look at These
Do you fondly remember playing with marbles as a child? If so, you may wish to take a trip down memory lane at the National Marble Museum - or, if you're not near northern California, at the museum's Web pages. Apparently, we have ancient Rome to thank for the game of marbles, which is based on the lost Roman game of nuts, played at the feast of Saturnalia and even documented by the poet Ovid. The National Marble Museum's site lets you view an illustrated guide to making your own marbles, examine the rules of various games, enjoy fine images of antique glass marbles, and review the history of a marble-making factory in West Virginia. We particularly enjoyed the History page's "Kings (and Queens) of the Ring", on the US National Marbles Tournament.http://www.marblemuseum.org/index.html
The Wonderful World of Wooden Hats
Not everybody would call themselves a hat person, but how many would take that extra step and say that they're a wooden hat person? Yes, that's wooden, as in the stuff that makes up trees. Several wood-turning experts have twisted their talents toward making hats from wood, and not strictly as art - the products are made to be worn. They are waterproof, can be made in any size, and weigh about the same as a fabric hat. Several hatmakers will even accept from you a piece of wood that you particularly like and make a hat from it. Wooden hat styles include bowler hat, top hat, and cowboy hat. As JoHannes Michelsen says, "You should be sporting a 'woody', too!"Michelsen: http://www.woodhat.com/
Woodrum Hats: http://www.woodrumhats.com/index.html
Woods by Wads: http://www.woodsbywads.com/
As the sun sets on film, camera manufacturers and software companies churn out new products so fast that many photographers can only keep up by frequenting sites such as Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights. It's been around since 1996, when photojournalist Rob Galbraith began to self-publish photo documentaries, and has evolved into a source of digital photo news, tutorials, and discussions for professional photographers. The home page has about four screens full of news from the current and previous month and a calendar gives quick access to archives. The site nicely balances attention to hardware and software. Curiously, the only photos we found here were product photos. The Resources page links to sites with galleries, as well as to manufacturers' sites and to external news for both Windows and Mac users.
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/index.asp
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life
Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology
The Animatrix Gift Set (Includes CD Soundtrack)
Designing with Web StandardsIntelligent Discussion out on the Edge
The Edge is a great place to go to stretch your mind. It's like witnessing online Socratic dialogue between experts, and includes deep thoughts about everything from "The Matrix" to Dolly the cloned sheep. We could spend hours on this site, and in fact did. The design is the site's only pitfall. It's a bit too "information overload", if you know what we mean. The site's design relies on the fact that its intelligentsia audience is more prone to scroll (and scroll and scroll) than the traditional online user. Instead, some thought should go toward developing a more intuitive information architecture.http://www.edge.org/
SURFING SCIENCE
Nova presents this online adjunct to its "18 Ways to Make a Baby" show and for sure, some ways are more fun than others. The number is actually arbitrary, and doesn't include, say, a virgin pregnancy from fellatio followed by a stab in the gut. No, Nova focuses more on conventional alternatives to the ol' rumpy-pumpy. The site features four main pages, on counting the ways to love, cloning, fertility with age, and a primer on cell division. This being PBS, you also get the obligatory page of resources and a teacher's guide. If abbreviations like IVF and PGD thrill you, visit here PDQ.Nova: http://www.pbs.org/nova/baby/
Fellatio stab: http://www.urbanlegends.com/medical/virgin_birth.html
Kurt Goedel was a mathematician whose biggest contribution came in the field of logic. The Kurt Goedel Society, named in his honor, is an international organization based in Vienna that promotes research in logic philosophy and the history of mathematics. The organization's threadbare home page is worth visiting for more than the obvious news about its activities - check out the first-rate collection of math and logic links. The site divides its non-news links among four pages: science resources; search engines and indexes; personal home pages; and research groups. The math-inclined will stumble into hours of great netsurfing here, and math and computer science teachers are bound to find something useful.
http://www.logic.at/kgs/home.html
SOFTWARE
Haystack: a New Kind of Information Manager
Haystack is the result of an MIT research project that seeks to create the ultimate personal information manager. Haystack not only seeks to handle all your personal information - documents, e-mail, instant messages, news, bookmarks, calendars, etc. - but also to incorporate the latest ideas about the Semantic Web and user interfaces into its functionality. While the program is explicitly designed to bring Semantic Web technology to the user, all its details are hidden beneath a straightforward front end. The user is not even aware that he's creating Semantic Web structures out of his everyday information. The program is also extensible, enabling programmers to make modules for authoring and interacting with different content types. A great deal of information about the underlying theory behind Haystack, screenshots, and the code itself is available on the project's Web site. Keep in mind, this is still a research project and therefore beta-quality software. You'll need Windows or Linux, and Java to run it.http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html