Monthly Archives: April 2001

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Cool DVD links …
I finally decided that I would see about playing DVDs on my Dell Laptop. Of course, I had to go and do some research about the status of DVDs, ripping, encoding, etc. I have to say that the DVD/CD drive power draw on the Dell is what makes me want to play movies off of my hard disk. I’ve got dual 18GB drives in the Dell for DV Video editing, so storage is not a problem. (Plus, I’m not going to have a permanent DVD drive on my wearable!) In looking around, I found two very cool sites:

VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale Paris. They are developing some very cool Open Source tools …

InfoMatrix, or InMatrix, has a lot of information and tools for examining your DVD drive, setting Region Codes, and even new firmware that will add new functionality to your DVD drive!

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Very good post on privacy and identity in the digital world …
In our work on digitalme, we have done considerable research into digital identity, centralized storage, and various tracking techniques. This is a really good article which discusses some cool points. Mr. Smith has got it right … must making people aware of the possibilities …

digitalMASS: Preserving privacy. Data privacy has always been a topic that left me completely cold. Honestly, I just couldn’t get my bile riled over the notion that someone was tracking what I do online, where I buy gas with my Mobil Speedpass, or what I listen to with my RealNetworks software. Then I met Richard M. Smith. [Tomalak’s Realm]

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Two XDrive articles in one week …

Windows XP is going to use XDrive …
It appears from this ZDNet article that Windows XP is going to be offering XDrive on the desktop … or advertising a partnership on the desktop. I’m wondering if this is being done with closed, proprietary protocols, or with any WebDAV (or other?) standard protocol and solution.

Another failure being designed before our eyes?
I am always amazed when these types of adventures begin. IMHO, I believe that they are doomed to fail.

First, their storage costs are *so* expensive … why would I pay ~$70/GB/Month for storage, when I can buy a 30GB harddrive at Costco for ~$140?

Second, their main costs are not involved in the storage … it’s the backbone network costs. They are having to pay for the bandwidth for user to send and retrieve data across the backbone of the Internet … to their centralized location.

The way that I believe that this is going to be solved is when every ISP get’s into the storage and caching market … they’ll realize that they can offer their users storage and backup services for very agressive prices … and they already own the bandwidth of the last mile to their users.

Xdrive Sees Outage, Shelves Free Storage for Fee System. The Santa Monica, Calif. provider of storage for end users experiences a brief outage and gives up on giving out free storage for a subscription-driven model geared toward businesses. [internetnews.com: Product News]

Who is going to pay these centralized guys these rates? If people do, I don’t think it will last … I think they are dead already. I’m looking at how this will relate to, and effect, our Novell iFolder solution? We are putting any corproation or ISP into this business. So if an ISP installs iFolder for their customers, they could be getting a chunk of this revenue …

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Putting WYSIWYG into your web page …
There were a whole string of very useful HTML editing tools that were presented this day … and this is a very good article showing some cool stuff that can be done for editing and rendering HTML in a web page editor … check it out.

Need to add a WYSIWYG HTML editor to your Web-page? Try this “InsideDHTML” article out. Or use this product from Ektron. Or this Java applet from RealObjects. [scobleizer]

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Way cool … an “XML Cooktop” for FREE!
This was a really good post that I found which points to a powerful tool for XML hackers. Our DirXML technology uses a variety of XML and XSLT related technologies, and this appears to be a really cool tool for editing these files. And as he says … best of all it’s free!

Are you building XML-centric sites? Check out the XML Cooktop which is a development environment for writing and testing XSLT style sheets, XML documents, DTDs, and XPATHs. Best of all it’s free! [scobleizer]

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GeoLocation service … maybe a good fit for our 802.11b project …
It seems that an important aspect of the mobile Internet, and wearable computers, is relating physical world resources to our current location, or desired locations. There are a number of projects that I have found that provide, what I call, GeoLocation or GeoSpatial applications. This is a very impressive solution to address the location of physical world resources … and one that I might want to use!

Let’s say a user visits your product-centric Web site and then she wants to visit the store closest to her to buy it. How can you tell her where to go? You visit Know-Where.com and use their service. [scobleizer]

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A very cool article about teaching ‘ethics’ in school …
I really liked this CNN article about teaching ethics in schools. What is impressive to me is that people are starting to truly examine the role of teaching the ability to “distinguish” in schools. What I mean by this is that we could potentially teach children to really distinguish who they are being, and distinguish their behavior. Where I believe that the article, and the educators get sidetracked is when they attempt to define absolute right and wrong. Instead, IMHO, if they were to focus on distinguishing, and then consequences of actions, the rest would simply occur …

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The growing number of public hot spots for 802.11b …
MobileStar is one of the more agressive commercial entities expanding the penetration of 802.11b wireless around the country. They have recently partnered with IBM to assist in the deployment. I am still questioning the business model, and think that our team is going to really have an impact on their efforts … keep your eyes open here for more news on our 802.11b project!

More detail on MobileStar’s national deployment plans from EE Times: this article explains in greater detail how MobileStar will proceed.

[80211b News]