Update - 04/22/2007 - 04/28/2007 - LAST ONE WOOHOO I'M GETTING OUT OF LOS ANGELES

For my final entry I read The Xbox Auteurs by Clive Thompson in The Best of Technology Writing. The first thing that came to mind as I was reading the first paragraph was Red vs. Blue, which I had first seen 3 years ago, and true enough it was exactly the subject of the article. I've seen quite a few episodes, though certainly not all of them, but didn't really know much of the background behind how the project got started. I found it pretty funny that to make the characters "talk" and such in-game they just wiggle them around and try to bob their heads and such, as it always seems to be pretty decent in the episodes I've seen, though I guess they've gotten pretty good with coordinating the voice overs. The part about the creators getting a lot of fan mail from actual soldiers was amusing, though not surprising since the videos don't really have actual combat most of the time, something that is paralleled in reality.

The part about Bungie and Microsoft not really minding the creators infringing upon their intellectual property wasn't as much of a shock to me as the author. As he later points out, it was good publicity that non-usual gamers might receive, and in my own experience, I can remember the days of Asheron's Call (a mmorpg of Turbine and Microsoft) when it was trying to compete against Sony and Everquest. Everquest was dominating and energetically tried to hunt down online auctions of in-game items (such as ones listed on ebay). Microsoft, on the other hand, just turned a literal blind eye to such auctions. I always speculated that Microsoft thought if they allowed casual/new gamers in Asheron's Call to buy gear and in-game money online to advance their characters faster, they'd be more likely to keep playing AC instead of having to do most everything from scratch in EQ (though there was of course an underground market in EQ, just harder to access and with more fraud risk involved).

The stereotypical gamer definitely came out in the part about the ad for Audi made using Torque...with the 42 year old guy lusting over some digital character woman he wanted to buy to use in the ad for crying out loud. The section about the Sims characters not cooperating and behaving like childish brats, I mean real actors, was nothing if not humorous for the art imitating life aspect.

The behind-the-scenes aspect given in the article was interesting, but I still don't think there's going to be a huge market, or even a dependable decent sized market, for these types of movies. Hopefully for the creator's sake they can find some niches like Red vs. Blue to do and keep them going as long as they can, and while I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to do this for a living for a while longer, I don't think they should bet their retirement on it either.

Update - 04/15/2007 - 04/21/2007

This week I read The Bookless Future by David A. Bell in The Best of Technology Writing. The beginning mostly sounded like parts of the Google Print article, focusing on how you can find so many things online now that you had to go to a specific library for in the past. Thinking back on the papers I've written the last 4 years and the times I've needed additional resources for engineering projects and assignments, I even surprised myself when I realized I hadn't been to the science and engineering library once, and had never looked up a book at all for class purposes. I pretty much agreed with Bell's sentiment that traditional writers will and have baulked at the idea of only making digital editions of books and that the experience will not be the same, but that the digital shift will continue to grow nonetheless. However, while I do much prefer looking up resources I need for classes online, I still prefer having an actual book when I'm reading something for pleasure, as reading it one the screen in that circumstance just doesn't do it for me.

Strangely enough, some of the arguments for and against ebooks were similar to Wikipedia arguments. Among these were the issue of anyone being able to publish, less traditional peer reviews by academic scholars in a particular area, having material change as information becomes more accurate or errors in publication are found and so on. As for Bell's monetary arguments, I certainly can't argue with him there. Digital scholarly works allows people to far greater access of past and present works at far less cost than attempting to buy or find a library that actually has the money and desire to purchase a paper copy.

I was rather amused by Bell's admission that he recently downloaded a book and instead of trying to read through it on his monitor, he simply searched for quotes and copy/pasted them into the paper he was working on. I certainly haven't read each and every one of the thousands of power slides I've been given access to, and Control + F has certainly been a blessing in my opinion. I hadn't even heard of the physical ebook devices Bell mentions, but they didn't really seem all that enticing in their current forms. In the end, Bell takes a more moderate view of the future, with a balance of sort between old and new eventually being reached. I find this the most logical view, with more obscure type books falling into pure ebook form with the popular books of the day still being published as long as the paper copies are still making enough money for the parties involved.

Update - 04/08/2007 - 04/14/2007

This week I read The Right Price for Digital Music by Adam L. Penenberg in The Best of Technology Writing. My own experience with digital music goes back to high school. Back then I simply bought CDs I liked and either played them directly or ripped them to my computer. I simply used Winamp to play my music and had never used iTunes. Then three years ago, my freshman year in the dorm here at USC, there was an iTunes frenzy and a bunch of people bragging about all the music they "found on the network." So one day I downloaded iTunes and true enough, I saw that I could access the music libraries of quite a few people in my dorm and other dorms on the USC network. While this was nice, if people didn't have their computers on and iTunes running, you couldn't play their music so I didn't see at first what the big fuss was about. A short while later I found out about the big craze at the time...myTunes or something similar to that, where if you could play a song in someone's iTunes music collection, you could also download the song from them and call it your own. Some of the people in my dorm were downloading so much music that they exceeded the bandwidth limit and had their internet connection shut off for a short while and received a written warning. In any case, I've never been much into generic pop songs of the month (as I joke I did a search and found 15 or 16 different people in my dorm with some version of Toxic), so it wasn't the big deal to me that it was to so many other people. I remember in the Spring of freshman year there was the big deal about the music industry suing people and such, but it seemed as if only my roommate took it seriously (he later deleted many many GBs of music).

I know one person here at USC who actually buys songs from iTunes, she refuses to get music any other way, and I think that says a lot, and also leads me into the article by Penenberg. The fact that 800 million CDs are sold doesn't really surprise me as I would hazard a guess that a good chunk of the population either isn't music savy or doesn't believe in "music piracy." The more telling telling number is that only 600 million songs had been sold via iTunes when the article was written (I think it was at around 1 billion songs last Spring). Sure that sounds like a lot, but with all the free pirated music going around, it's really just a cup out of the lake.

I was a bit surprised that Apple only gets 4 cents and music publishers 8 cents from the 99 cent sales of songs, with recording companies getting the rest, but then again I have very little knowledge of how the music industry works. I just expected Apple to get a bigger piece of the pie. Then again, as Penenberg points out, iTunes directly helps Apple sell its iPods and also no doubt helps with their market share in other areas from simply getting their name out there and people used to coming to Apple and their "i" chain of products.

I don't agree with the whole demand determines price argument that Penenberg presents in the rest of the article. I suppose it might help sell a few more obscure tracks, but I don't see the change encouraging people of those genres all that much to buy their music online. If I had to guess, I would suspect that those people would be buying the music in any regard, or getting a pirated copy from other fans they know of the genre. Also, if 99 cents is too much for many people to legally buy music, how is a song in high demand going to sell better for 3 or 5 dollars? As Penenberg points out at the very end, it could very well (and I definitely agree with this) end up pushing people to simply get pirated copies instead.

I think the music industry should just suck it up and offer fast easy downloads of songs for something like 10 cents a track and be happy. There will always be a pirated song movement, but I think digital sales would be higher if cheaper fast downloads of all the music you could want were available in centralized locations.

Update - Week of 04/01/2007 - 04/07/2007

Starting with the CERT site, I examined the statistics and didn't really find them all that surprising. As general internet, email, and WWW use has increased, so have the number of internet security problems. I did find the differentiation of hacker into different categories by hat color (or being a "cracker") interesting, as I had only heard the term in two usages. First, the "Black Hat" hackers that make the news. The other use of hacker that I've seen employed is in multi-player online games to playfully joke at other players who seemingly would have had to cheat somehow via hacking into the game server to pull off a certain action.

The list of famous hackers on Wikipedia was certainly amusing. The fact that a hacker later started up his own internet security business and that another got out of some of his jail time by agreeing to work undercover (undercover?!...it's on Wikipedia...) for the FBI was pretty funny. I did notice most of the entries were on people who were famous for things in the 1990s and early 2000s, so I can only wonder who out there is bored and looking for a challenge/fame (though I would suggest to them that they might consider getting a job). The other site with famous hackers had many of the same people, but a bit more detail that was also interesting. Since most of the people on the second site were convicted of crimes like stealing money from Citibank, it was a good laugh when I saw the creator of Linux on the list. If only we didn't have to pay for Windows and Microsoft crap! :-P

The first article I read on CNN was about a British hacker trying to avoid extradition to the US. In all honesty, I found it depressing that this guy, arrested and indicted in 2002 of crimes in Virginia and New Jersey, is still loafing around in the UK. I do find it funny though that he tried to defend his crimes by saying he was looking for a US government coverup of UFOs when he left notes comparing US foreign policy to terrorism. Though I suppose if he was a really smart criminal he wouldn't have been caught.

The second article I read on CNN was about Microsoft's Xbox Live online gaming service being hacked into. Obviously some hacked accounts are due to people retardedly giving out their username and password, downloading keyloggers, etc. The fact that the article mentions some people had their accounts hacked and their credit card information stolen would seem to indicate that the problem is on Microsoft's end. I don't know of any reputable company in this day and age that would allow you to log onto their site with a username and password and retrieve the full credit card information that you previously paid with.

Obviously internet security issues are here to stay. I just hope I can stay ahead of the hackers with better security options, safe online habits, and a little bit of luck.

Update - Week of 03/25/2007 - 03/31/2007

I was thinking about food while I was pondering what to blog about and noticed When the Sous-Chef Is an Inkjet by David Bernstein in The Best of Technology Writing. As I began to read the article, I first throught it was a joke...having images of food with organic ink on top of soy and seaweed. Then the author mentions that Cantu makes entire dinner courses this way, using inkjet printers, liquid nitrogen, helium, superconductors, lasers, 3-d printers, and ion particle guns. To say I was torn between thinking the whole idea was beyond stupid and creatively futuristic would be an understatement. I saw that Cantu charges $240 for a 20 course tasting menu, which then brought up thoughts of which bored rich people in Chicago actually go to his restaurant, and that for $240 I would want something more filling than some paper with seaweed.

Cantu's concept of futuristic cooking is certainly interesting, but I think the two comparisons in the article describe it best. The author describes Cantu as Willy Wonka or Salvador Dali, and from a mainstream reality standpoint, I think that description fits Cantu and his style of cooking. The other comparison was looking at the 20 course tasting menu for $240 with an order of steak and eggs. I may be boring and too "in the box" in this respect, but give me a good plate of steak and eggs for a few dollars for a bunch of soy pasted paper that came out of an inkjet any day.

Update - Week of 03/18/2007 - 03/24/2007

This week I read The Book Stops Here by Daniel H. Pink in The Best of Technology Writing. Obviously we've discussed wikis and Wikipedia to great detail in-class. My own personal view is that as long as you aren't depending on Wikipedia to give you rock solid 100% accurate information, it's a great source of easy to find information on a seemingly endless number of topics. The fact that you can go to Wikipedia to find some general background information on a topic quickly without having to dig through something like Google search results for random web pages that may or may not be what you're looking for is extremely helpful.

I found the devotion that some of the Wikipedia users possess to be a little amusing, but not altogether a surprise. The fact that, for the most part, there are more people that uphold the good faith and reason approach to creating and editing articles than the number of the people who just act childish or interject personal opinions is at the same time satisfying and unexpected. While I still believe the human race is generally good, my faith in much of humanity is not exactly what one would call very strong. But as long as people are trying to keep the integrity of Wikipedia intact, it will certainly be a useful resource.

The section about Wikipedia's anti-elitism and the distaste that many people in academia or with more generally recognized credentials was rather easy to predict. Much as many authors are leery of Google Books, it's easy to see why professors would view Wikipedia as a new, unknown, and strange creation that is below them and their respect. If, however, academics would take a more open minded approach to Wikipedia, I believe the content would improve and people would be more easily able to get connected to their more traditional, verified academic work through links for other sources and such. I know that I have used several links from Wikipedia articles to web pages of less fluidity and uncertainty on topics which I needed to have concrete information and not some crazy person's edit they performed as a joke for fun.

I think Wikipedia is here to stay, and I look forward to seeing it evolve and improve as time goes on.

Update - Week of 03/04/2007 - 03/10/2007

For this week I decided to read Throwing Google at the Book by Farhad Manjoo in The Best of Technology Writing. I won't rehash too many of the details since quite a few people did so last week, but I wanted to read it and then respond it after having actually read it. First, however, I was rather surprised when I read that there is no government tracking of granted copyrights. I intend to focus on an intellectual property concentration in law school, and then hopefully find a job in that field. While my internship last summer mostly dealt with patents from various engineering sources, I know copyrights are a part of intellectual property and it is rather strange that copyrights are so loosely dealt with. The Patent and Trademark Office has guidelines, protocols to follow, and personally reviews each patent application. To read that copyrights are merely granted and then not tracked, cataloged, or even remembered in many cases seems rather odd to me. Then again, that's the government for you.

Anyways, on to the article itself. My first impression last week, without having read the article, was that while Google Print, now Google Book, should be allowed to continue in essentially the same manner as it has been. I did, however, have some sympathy for the publishers (okay, less for them) and the authors (more for them, except for the rich and famous in their ranks). However, after having read the article, I no longer feel any sympathy for them in their legal fight against Google. The facts are what the facts are. Books before 1923 have no copyright protection and the vast majority published after 1923 are either no longer in print or have dead authors/publishing companies owning the copyright to them. Furthermore, only 1.2 million different book titles sold in 2004 with 2% of these selling more than 5,000 copies. Unlike the music battles mentioned later in the article, it seems clear to me that Google scanning books, and then allowing users to search them with a small excerpt being available to users, can only help the vast majority of authors in selling their books (or perhaps even creating a demand for the republication of an out of print book). J. K. Rowling, Stephen King, or John Grisham aren't going to have any problems selling their books or getting knowledge of their titles out into the public view. These types of authors, however, do not comprise the majority or even a significant portion of the authors in the world.

While it will be interesting to see the legal decisions and future legislation on the topic, I believe this battle is simply the age old fight between the ideas and concepts that are familiar, comfortable, and in our past and present versus the ideas and concepts that stretch out into unknown territory, have loosely defined borders or none at all, and are helping to shape our future. It may take some time, but I believe that in the end, the future will conquer the past and Google, Yahoo, Amazon and others will win the right to scan the literary history of the planet and make it accessible to to us with a click or two.