Speaking of DVDs... When Disney wants to sell the home video version of a movie, they say "Now available on video and DVD." Huh?
I noticed today that whenever I put a video DVD in my computer's DVD drive, I magically get a cookie from Interactual (a company that licenses video codec implementations). I tried using a network sniffer to see if the DVD player "phones home", and apparently it doesn't. But what information is stored in the cookie? Maybe information about how frequently I watch video DVDs, what settings I use, what the capabilities of my computer and graphics card are, etc. This is all valuable information to a company like Interactual. Perhaps my identity is not revealed -- let's give them the benefit of the doubt. So does it bother me? Yes, it does. Why? I'm not real sure about that. If they are gathering anonymous information that is aggregated and helps them to allocate resources more efficiently in their company, then I really shouldn't be bothered. Assuming there is competition -- and I believe there is -- efficiency is good, because it leads to lower prices for the consumer. Yet something still bothers me about this surreptitious gathering of information. I think what bothers me is the thought that the boundaries are shifting, and who knows where they will be when they stop shifting? If efficiency is an argument in favor of information gathering, then who knows how far companies will go, with a goal of allocating their resources more efficiently?
Wow, what happened to the web site of the ECML Alliance? My guess would be that some sleazy company registered their domain name (ecml.org) and took it over. There are links from Oasis to the ECML.org site, for example:
http://www.ecml.org/specifications.html
All these URLs are now redirected to a sleazy looking portal page.
It's funny about the new ecml.org web site: they don't have a company identity on the main page. Doesn't inspire much confidence in the web site. But it's clearly an attempt to capitalize on a domain name.
The real information on Electronic Commerce Modeling Language can be found at Oasis.
Will the music labels one day offer free portable music players? Agree to a two-year subscription to their music download service, and then you get player for free. That way, they could control the technology that goes into the player.
I am not saying I think this is a good idea.
I just composed an email using Microsoft Outlook 2000, using Microsoft Word as the editor. I wanted to see what the HTML looks like that Outlook produces. The conclusion: the HTML is really bad. If it's rendered, it's fine. But it's impossible to read as plain text because of the amount of line noise (read: HTML "markup"). Microsoft Word documents converted to HTML contain a lot of non-standard markup -- probably more non-standard markup than either content or standard markup.
Where is email headed? We seem to have dumped text/enriched [RFC 1896]. Text/enriched could not compete with text/html. One might think that text/html will eventually become "standard", in some sense. However, with the possibility of people getting their email on small handheld devices, I am not so sure that HTML email is a good idea. If the HTML in an email is HTML as it's used on the web, then it might not be practical to render the HTML on a small display.
What is needed is a compromise: just a subset of HTML. Let's keep the p, br, hr, u, b, i, a, big, small, and font tags (for the sake of color). Let's also keep the tags used for lists: ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd. Let's drop the table (and related tags), form (and related tags), head, title, and others.
Some of the tags I would like to see used in email are not in HTML 4.0 (u, big, small, font). These tags are useful in email. Email messages are written quickly -- very little thought is given to the structure of a message's content. For the immediate decisions that one makes when composing and email -- "I want this text bigger" -- these tags make good sense.
Is XHTML going to offer this compromise? XHTML is supposed to be modular. Maybe there can be a profile that is recommended for email.
Ogg Vorbis tunes in to hardware. An open-source, royalty-free audio format may finally appear in audio players alongside MP3 and Windows Media Audio. [CNET News.com]
How long will it be until Ogg Vorbis is hit with one or more patent infringement lawsuits?
Analysts say the widespread availability of the educational version to shoppers who don't need to show proof of being a student or teacher is a way for Microsoft to discount Office XP for the consumer market without actually dropping the price. [news.com]
Ah, yes. Isn't branding great? To be able to have one product, and sell the same product into different markets at different prices -- it's a company's dream come true!
Groups Rally to Can Spam. Calling the medium 'inherently deceptive,' consumer advocates submit new measures to FTC to attack unsolicited commercial e-mail. [internetnews.com: Top News]
I hate spam as much as the next guy. But I am not in favor of a lot of new FTC regulations. Why can't ISPs, the IETF, and large software makers take steps to solve the problem? Just simple steps?
ISPs: Allow users to create unlimited aliases. Sendmail allows "plus addresses". If my assigned email address is dws@example.com, then sendmail would deliver any mail sent to dws+anything@example.com to my mail account. I could use this to create email addresses that are hard to guess, and I could use those email addresses to filter incoming mail. For example, for important business correspondence, I could use an address like this: dws+8tj11@example.com. That's an address that is hard to guess, and I could filter all mail to that address to a special folder.
ISPs: Provide the SMTP envelope information, so that users can reliably filter their mail. The envelope information includes the sender and recipient used during the transfer of the mail, which is not necessarily the same as the From or To fields in the message itself. The SMTP envelope information is absolutely essential for recipients to reliably filter their mail based on the recipient's address.
Software vendors: Provide simple-to-use filters for mail, including a simple white list of known senders.
Software vendors: Provide a simple way to identify legitimate mail. This could be as simple as adding a new header field that contains a single token. The technique could be an alternative to using "plus addresses" in the case that ISPs don't allow the use of "plus addresses". It's really simple. You compose an email to me at dws@example.com. Before you send the email, you enter the token that I gave you (it's probably on my business card, or somewhere on my web page). The token goes into a header field in the email. When I receive the email, my mail client finds the token and puts the email into a folder that contains legitimate mail.
IETF: (Admittedly, I don't follow this closely, as I should. Perhaps the IETF has already done a lot to provide tools for fighting spam.) Promote Best Common Practices, such as the suggestions above for ISPs and software vendors.
Users: Don't make your email address widely available in machine readable form. On your web page, use a GIF or PNG image that contains your email address. Use an image, too, when you post messages to Usenet newsgroups.
Users: Don't pick an email address that is easy to guess.
All it takes, really, is the initiative of two or three large ISPs, or one large software vendor (Microsoft), to change the whole email landscape with respect to spam. If AOL and MSN started supporting "plus addresses", users would learn about them and use them. Other ISPs would follow suit. Even better yet, if Microsoft added support for tokens to Outlook Express and Outlook, and made them very easy to use, and actively promoted their use, then other mail clients would soon support tokens.
(We would also need a new convention for dealing with tokens. How should they be written? Here's just one suggestion: dws(yy55)@example.com. The token is in parenthesis. Possibly, such an address could be stored just like this in an address book. The mail client software would know what to do with it.)
These suggestions would provide tools to help fight spam. But would tools to help fight spam eliminate spam? My guess is that they would, to a large extent. Spammers send spam because it is cost-effective to them. If the response rate goes down to less than one response per million, or some other ridiculously small number, then spam will no longer be cost-effective.
Intel, others launch effort to ease PC migration. Group includes IBM, Microsoft, Symantec [InfoWorld: Top News]
It's nice that someone is thinking about computers from a user's perspective. Soon, another group might even come up with the idea that users often use more than one computer on a daily basis -- be it at work or at home.
I wonder if MAIF would help.