BeigeJournal

Is there a problem with people eating these things? Do people munch on the desiccant and then complain angrily that it tastes pretty bad? I suppose it is harmless to warn people not to eat something that they shouldn’t eat, but one wonders what items we will end up so labeling in the future.

Cory Doctorow, novelist and EFF Outreach Coordinator, gave a talk on copyright and the entertainment industry at the University of North Carolina recently, a video of which, as he informs us on Boing Boing, is available for download at iBiblio.

It is available as streaming Real or as a 362 megabytes MPEG-4. I thought it was a great talk and I did enjoy having video so I could see Cory and watch him gesture and move around and basically be the animated person he evidently is. The quality of the recording is OK, with some audience noise but not enough to seriously impede understanding.

There is some practical part of me that thinks that 362 megabytes for a talking head, even with sweeping gestures and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt (a talking torso, then), is somehow, well, a bit big. A few megabytes of audio would be almost as useful, though not nearly as much fun. On the other hand, I do feel like a brave new member of this brave new 21st-century world when I casually download 362 meg, as if it were really not that big of a deal. And in fact, with disk just over a buck a gigabyte these days and ever faster networking, it isn’t that big of a deal.

Even as I railed against excessive wasteful frills I used to download those huge audio files in early nineties from Internet Talk Radio, back when those 14 megabyte files were just huge. That was uncompressed 8-bit 8kHz audio in those days, since there wasn’t anything to compress audio with yet, and high-speed Internet was 9600 bps. My gigabyte hard disk was huge. I actually do still have a DDS tape with hundreds of megabytes of ITR on it, but since my DDS drive broke many years ago, the tape isn’t doing me much good. I could just download them anew from the museum, since the files don’t seem that big anymore, especially in the modern compressed versions.

I suppose that for all my complaints about excessive bloat, I am willing (eager, sometimes) to download huge files (14 meg ten years ago, 360 meg now) if in the end it will actually work. Give me a huge open-format file that I can spend forever downloading and then play on Unix successfully and I’m happy. It’s proprietary streaming-dropouts that I can’t stand.

And speaking of huge files that work, have you seen the Prelinger Archives? A huge collection of educational, industrial, promotional, and whatnot films, all in the public domain. Amazing and wonderful.

I have used Mozilla FireBird 0.7 for some time and have been very happy with it. Now version 0.8 is out, with many a bug fix, and it has been renamed yet again, to Firefox.

(2004-02-23: If you like the endless renaming, try Firesomething, which will randomly change the product name in the titlebar. Fireemu, Lightninggoat, Supersheep, etc. Mildly hilarious.)

The customizable toolbars are nice, the search bar for Google plus a zillion Mycroft plugins is very convenient, the vast array of extensions for seemingly every need are great, and it is a good performer even on what would now be considered very slow hardware, at least if you have plenty of RAM. The new download manager, so far, is nice. The bookmark-add dialog has gotten even more elaborate, which I am so far undecided on.

As is usual in the open-source world, a less-than-unity version number shouldn’t stop you from trying it. If 0.8 is this good, just imagine 1.0. I highly recommend it.

Back when I was a lad, in the nineteen-eighties, TV listings would be marked (R) in those cases when the show was a rerun. Nowadays, to save ink, I suppose, rather than marking reruns, new episodes are marked (N). My impression is that this is less a matter of a lack of new programs than a much faster growth in the number of channels (around 10 back in my youth, but well over 100 now) than in the amount of programming to fill them.

The Discovery Channel group comes to mind. It used to be just the Discovery Channel and TLC. Now it seems they have Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Health, Travel, Times, Kids, BBC America, Science, Home and Leisure, Wings, Español, HD theater, and FitTV. With fourteen channels, there’s gonna be some reruns. I suppose it is useful to have specialized channels. If they had only one channel, there would probably almost always be something new on, but not necessarily something you want to see. With fourteen channels, if you are in the mood for an aviation rerun, well, they have a channel for that. How about some more specialized channels?

• Cute Fuzzy Animal Planet
• Big Sharp Teeth Animal Planet
• Discovery Bull Crap Channel (for Atlantis “documentaries” and the like)
• Discovery Naked Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Naked-but-with-digital-fuzz Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Motorcycles
• Discovery Building Wacky Machines Out Of Junk Channel