Link Banana

Disney’s 57 page EULA before you can watch Sleeping Beauty on Blu-ray is why we should remove any legal force from EULAs. Or ban them outright. Or at least require an executive summary so that people will know what cr*p they’re accepting before they (inevitably) blindly do so.

(via BBG)

Speaking of international figures doing unexpected things, Demitry Medvedev has a video blog.

(via Passport)

If you’re wondering why the world hasn’t ended yet, this may be why. Quoth Slashdot:

“A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it’s hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug.”

The other amazing I hadn’t realized was this: an operating temperature of 4.5 Kelvin was too hot for the thing to work properly.

I would like to nominate this experimental feature of Gmail as the most useful common-sense (and overdue) email improvement ever:

if you mention an attachment in your email and hit send without actually attaching a file, you’ll get a pop-up message asking if you meant to send without the file.

(via Lifehacker)

Luke O’Brien has an interesting piece about the philosophies advanced (or not) by the video games of Wil Wright. I admit I’d never much thought about it, but SimCity, The Sims, and Spore can all be read to have very serious real-world philosophical messages. Of The Sims, for example:

“The constraints of consumer capitalism are built into the game’s logic,” wrote Ann McGuire, an Australian academic, echoing earlier complaints about the hypercapitalist SimCity. “The Sims distils and intensifies, through its underlying code, key ideological aspects of late capitalism: self, other, and time are all quantified and commodified. What the player is doing is shopping effectively in order to manage a life in the world.”

You’d have good reason to condemn this analysis as simplistic, silly, or absurd, but I think it’s just enough of all of those things to share. The real contrast: Obama’s site is written in PHP, McCain’s in ASP.

(via clusterflock)

Google Blogscoped shares (of all things) a comic book explaining Google new browser initiative. I wasn’t expecting much from the book, but it’s really quite good. It offers plain-spoken explications of all that they’ve tried to do with browser. Now I just want to try it out.

UPDATE (9/2/08): It’s now available for Windows XP and Vista. I’m using it to write this update and have to say that it’s pretty smooth. It seems faster than Firefox 3, but then it’s also not been running with 20 tabs open for three days. Oh, and there is, as promised, (at least) one system-visable process running for every open tab.

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

Andrew Chen used Google Insights to put together a pretty interesting comparison of what (web 2.0-y) internet sites are most popular in which US states.

(via Waxy)

Farhed Manjoo says that the future of gadgets is constant improvement. There’s certainly good basis for the argument.

But because music players, cell phones, cameras, GPS navigators, video game consoles, and nearly everything else now runs on Internet-updatable software, our gadgets’ functions are no longer static. It’s still true that a gizmo you buy today will eventually be superseded by something that comes along later. But just like Meryl Streep, your devices will now dazzle you as they age. They’ll gain new functions and become easier to use, giving you fewer reasons to jump to whatever hot new thing is just hitting the market.

If this — the Large Hadron Collider that some on the fringe fear will create a black hole to swallow everything — is how the world ends, at least we’ll know we saw the truly amazing pictures.

Andrew Simone points to a piece of internet history.

Like, real jetpacks. (Although technically, it’s not a jetpack.)

On Tuesday, an inventor from New Zealand unveiled what he calls “the world’s first practical jetpack” at the EAA AirVenture, the gigantic annual air show here. The inventor, Glenn Martin, 48, who has spent 27 years developing the devices, said he hoped to begin selling them next year for $100,000 apiece.

(via Boing Boing)

UPDATE (7/30/08); Via BBGadgets, Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) makes a good point:

The bugbear with this type of vehicle isn’t getting airborne, it’s stability. He says that it can go to 8k feet for 1/2 hour. That’s theoretically. I see a device going 1 foot off the ground with 2 big guys guiding it. In fact, I’ve seen not a single untethered pic.

I’d love it to be true, but I see too many warning flags. Sounds like a money raising stunt. Every time one of these companies is about to run out of money, they hold a “demonstration” and make a prediction that they’ll be selling them within some short period of time. I doubt it. Moller’s been predicting that people will be flying to work in 10 years, for the last 40 years.

William Saletan sees the impersonality of killing with aerial drones — now made more videogame-like by Raytheon — as a bad thing:

Is the “synthetic environment” real? That depends on which end of the missile you’re looking at. In the targeted car, it’s as real as death. But from the console, it looks more like virtual reality. If the drone goes down, you’re not in it. The environment you actually inhabit is pretty nice. To enhance “operator comfort,” Raytheon offers “ergonomic, memory seating,” “ergonomically-correct displays,” and “adjustable hand and foot positions.” According to the Associated Press, “The leather chair is adaptable to individual users, who can also control a heating and cooling duct above their head at the touch of a switch.”

If you’ve seen combat in the flesh, you know what the fireball on the screen means to the people in the car. But to a teenager raised on Doom and Halo, it looks like just another score. He can’t feel or smell the explosion. He isn’t even there. The eeriest thing in the demo video is the total silence that accompanies the car’s destruction. The only sound that follows is the pilot’s triumphant verdict: “Excellent job.” It’s like something you’d read on the screen after getting a high score at an arcade.

Though I don’t know how much I’ll use it, I think it’s cool that Google Maps now offers walking (and public transportation — when did that happen?) directions.

(via Gizmodo)

I’m not sure why, but this bit of idle technological speculation caught my eye. Jonathan Hedley wants to know why all modern mice seem to use a clearly inferior design.

Matrix found that the best place for the ball was up front as far as possible between the users thumb and forefinger. The forefinger can be controlled very precisely — much more so than the wrist and forearm. Matrix found that users would move their wrist and arm to move the cursor are large distance, but for fine control relied on the thumb and forefinger.

.. It simply seems that designers and manufacturers have, over the years, forgotten about the benefit of putting the sensor up front, or have placed precision and control further down their list of priorities. I hope that this isn’t the case: that newer research has shown that the current placement is the correct placement, or that something else has changed over time. But if that’s not the case, then I hope that some design team will rediscover either the principle, or the findings — so that we can continue to strengthen the connection between the user and the computer.

(via Big Contrarian)

That is kind of a self-evident fact, but with their increasing use in high-tech gadgets there’s justifiably increasing worry about the depletion of certain elements.

Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017.

(via kottke)

The Air tree shows the Super Soaker 100, which I ended up trading for two Super Soaker 50s (the one at the very top.) It’s amazing how many interations have occurred since.

(via Gizmodo, whose comments point to this video about the inventor of the toys)

Like Mr. Kottke, I’m fascinated by color photos from an era usually seen in black-and-white. After explaining autochrome, he offers these links:

Here’s a slideshow of some photos taken by this process. Here’s some autochromes of Mark Twain from 1908.

More early color photography (not necessarily autochromes): Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii’s stunning photographs of Russia circa 1909-1915, photos of WWI, photos of WWII, and photos of America in the late 30s/early 40s (color corrected).

This may be the greatest thing I’ve seen today.

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

He goes on — and on and on — to personally make just about every gripe that every other user of Microsoft software has.

(via BBGadgets)