Author Archive for site admin

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Nice Tablet Quote

from: a Bricklin interview

The pen isn’t about handwriting recognition. That’s completely wrong. That’s like taking a sound card and viewing the sound card by how well it does voice recognition–rather than the fact that I can now do voice over IP, and rip MP3s and play back MP3s, and do learning at a distance with Flash movies, and view streaming video with audio.”

Succinct point for Pen/Tabet PCs. Computers arn’t particularly good pattern recognition devices (unlike the brain). And in any case handwriting is inescapably slow.

Just added his blog to my rss feed reader yesterday when I heard his name in the news and remembered he was a tablet proponent from way back.

Movielink/Rant

Just saw Movielink (warning: IE required) brandname a few times today–screenshots of it integrated with WMP10 and on this tabletry blog.

On the one hand, I’m glad that the movie industry is actually adopting the online movie model which has been around for a while now, without their participation. On the other, the restrictive Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) stuff sucks. As the blogger I linked to noted, you are allowed to watch up to 30 days after you download…BUT once you start you have to finish in 24hrs. Oops. Double timed. You download the file but despite the fact you paid for it, it will still fizzle after 30 days, even though theres no technical reason to .

Hard DRM, on both occasions which I’ve encounted it on WMP have failed, it looks like Loren had a similiar bombing. Oops. And what if your hard disk dies, yada ya.

I seem to recall every one of these foul DRM systems for music failing until the kinder DRM’d iTunes MS came around. Part of me would love to see the same thing happen for this. Are movies different though? The large files are typically a pita to download if you don’t have a vibrant college campus LAN handy, unlike music. You rent movies, you don’t rent music. People are used to not having rights when it comes to movies.

Hah, I like the college.movielink.com bit, down to the animal house-esque font. They ‘get’ where the people who know all about downloading movies are and that they’re a worthy target, and a harder sell. Still $3.75 for one viewing might be a little high.

Heh, maybe if dormies got together and pooled for it. Oops, thats violating the TOS. Ah well. Walls walls, everywhere.




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