Posted by Jerry on May 6th, 2004 — Posted in New media, Technology, Writing
Well I’m skipping around the place – it’s that time of year again – another royalties cheque from my publisher Routledge (UK). The book is called: Virtual States: The Internet and the boundaries of the nation-state – and yes it’s about the impact of the internet on society.
But the word “royalties” is a curious word. There are of course all the prosaic definitions but I wondered about the royal connection, so I went to my trusty Compact Oxford and found a raft of references. The relevant one appears to be that of a “royal prerogative granted by the sovereign to an individual or corporation” granting jurisdiction or rights over something, such as mining rights, or rights over an invention or work of art or book. It dates back to at least 1483 where there is a reference in the Rolls of the UK Parliament to the siezing of, among other things, the royalties belonging to a hapless lordship and manor of Coverton. It seems somehow strange and anachronistic that even in the staunchly Republican US, there is so much litigation over “royalties” where there is clearly no regal sovereign to grant such rights…
And amidst all the clamour about internet piracy, there seems to be at least some evidence that piracy on the internet does not harm CD sales. According to research published in New Scientist, researchers from the Harvard business School and the University of North Carolina have found that in a statistical study tracking millions of music files downloaded over the internet, and comparing them with sales of the same music on CDs, the study found that the most heavily downloaded titles suffered no decrease in CD sales. In fact among the most popular, those that sold more than 600,000 copies over the study period appeared to sell better when downloaded more heavily.
Moreover, unless the work is selling fabulously, my own experience suggests that the authorial benefits are derived more from externalities, such as paid trips to speak at conferences and experts forums in the US and UK – that and the great people I’ve met as a consequence, than from the actual money earned by sales. I reckon we could all learn a lot from the Clue-train Manifesto philosophy. It still holds true regardless of the dot com tech wreck!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on May 5th, 2004 — Posted in New media, Technology, Writing
I was recently reading Rudy Rucker’s excellent book: Mind Tools and was struck in particular by his lucid explanation of why we only need five bits of information to identify any letter of the alphabet. Computers use eight bits to the byte as a minimal identification of specific characters. But using binary logic, Rucker shows that the alphabet has only FIVE degrees of separation! I have often wondered if the same applies to Akkadian cuneiform text, but haven’t had it confirmed one way or the other.
Anyhow, how can English be described as having five bit depth when there are 26 letters to the alphabet? For Rucker, it works like this:
Lay out the alphabet in a row. I am looking for the first letter of my first name, Jerry. Now, with five questions, demanding a yes or no answer locate the specific letter.
First, is it between M and Z? No. That’s level one.
Is it between G and L? Yes. That’s level two
Is it between J and L? Yes. That’s level three
Is it L? No. That’s level four
Is it K? No. That’s level five. So the answer must be J
Check out the diagram to see how this works:
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on May 4th, 2004 — Posted in History, New media, Technology
The internet has come up with a range of standards in relation to information about information – meta data standards. The best known of these are the Dublin Core meta data standards But the issues that led to the Dublin core standards are not new. The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) – just 200 years after Plato, and during the Greek administration of Egypt revealed something really interesting – the existence of meta tags almost 2000 years before the Internet.
The two languages in three scripts on the stone revealed the difficulties of applying consistent language standards across an empire. Just as Web pages today specify a language an script to be aplied, so too, the Rosetta stone includes as part of the inscribed decree, the stipulation that it is to be set stone, in the three scripts: heiroglyphic, demotic and Greek.
What we have in fact is a meta data standard that specified the platform (a stel of hard stone), the language versions, the authority of the specification, (Ptolemy V), and its URL (each of the first,second and third rank temples). In web language these would look like this in the
part of the cartouche:
In other words about half of the dublin core meta data standards are incorporated into the Rosetta Stone. This must surely provide us with an insight into something fundamental about the nature of information, and the nature of official discourse. What is needed to establish the intelligibility and authoritativeness of a piece of text when it is removed from the body (speech) and placed into a third-party medium? This is not a new question – and it is the main subject of my next book …
The Rosetta Stone (in the British Museum, London)
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on April 21st, 2004 — Posted in New media, Technology
A big THANK YOU to The Barrow in The Australian IT for setting the record straight on a supposed Trojan horse virus that allegedly masquerades as an mp3 music file and targets macintosh computers running operating system 10 (OS-X).
Phew – us mac users can play mp3s again safely! Last week the press was full – and I mean full of commentary as they talked about the dangers of a virus that attacks mac OSX operating systems – now these machines have been blissfully free of virus threats for about three years now – good old robust unix-based system! So it was with some trepidation that I began to read of a trojan horse supposedly uncovered by an anti-virus company (hmmm now THAT should have been a warning in itself – like in whose interests is it to advertise a new virus if not an anti-virus company?). Anyhow it all turned out to be much ado about not very much 🙂
It seems there was a piece of software that ran as an application but looked like an MP3 music file was actually completely harmless. Apparently the software involved was real – a proof-of concept showing that it was possible to create an application that was both an application and a legitimate music file – all in one. The problem was that he named the application virus.mp3 – and that’s when the fun started. After mentioning the software on a bulletin board, it seems some enterprising anti-virus company did a bit of ‘sexing-up’ of the information and promptly cried wolf – without the software ever leaving the lab in which it was created! So it hasn’t spread, it is not in the public arena and it is incapable of malicious activity. In short – IT IS NOT A VIRUS DUDE! And this is further confirmed in Mac News Network
cheers
Jerry (Canberra, Australia)
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