Category: Technology

Ten Years of Chilled Innovation

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Robert Hof interviews Larry Lessig on the US Supreme Court’s Grokster decision:

Q: What do you think of the decision?
A: This is a pretty significant defeat here. Certainly the result is better than what the MGM companies wanted — because they wanted the Sony case modified — and [Justice David Souter, who wrote the decision, isn’t] modifying Sony. But still, this intent standard…will invite all sorts of strategic behavior that will dramatically increase the cost of innovating around these technologies.

Q: How so?
A: Imagine that you’re a company with a copyright and you see a company coming out with a technology you don’t like because it’s challenging your business model. We’ve seen lots of these — for example, ReplayTV, or the VCR. Obviously, if the technology is illegal, you can just get it stopped.

But a second way to stop the innovation is just to litigate. Look what happened to ReplayTV: It spent years and millions of dollar litigating to defend its right to have the ReplayTV technology as it was. Essentially, it had to fold the company because the legal standard then was so uncertain that you had to get to trial before you could resolve the case.

Teleporting Over the Internet

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BBC:

Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic “atoms”.
Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.
They came up with the idea based on “claytronics,” the animation technique which involves slightly moving a model per frame to animate it.

Concept Maps

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Wired:

A research institute here is taking software designed in part to preserve scientists’ knowledge and giving it to schools around the world as a tool to help children learn.

The software was designed to literally map out what scientists know in diagram form. The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition is providing the concept mapping software to individual schools as well as training teachers in Panama, the first country adopting Cmaps nationwide.

Apple & Intel? Is it about the DRM?

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Dave points to and comments on Stephen Shankland:

Apple has used IBM’s PowerPC processors since 1994, but will begin a phased transition to Intel’s chips, sources familiar with the situation said. Apple plans to move lower-end computers such as the Mac Mini to Intel chips in mid-2006 and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in mid-2007, sources said.

In light of recent moves by Intel to bake DRM into their chipsets, along with Apple’s growing DRM platform (Fairplay, iTunes and Quicktime – which run on windows pc’s and Mac OS X’s), this smells to me like a deal based on a big DRM rollup – paving the way for Apple’s much discussed HD movie/video download system.
Tom’s Hardware has more on Intel’s hardware DRM (Digital Restriction Management) plans.

GM Gives it up – Discusses Hybrid License with Toyota

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Toyota continues to build volume for it’s supplier network by discussing a deal for hybrid auto technology with GM. Ford did the same with it’s Escape small SUV Hybrid. Generally bad news for domestic parts suppliers.
This looks interesting: Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy

Switching: Apple’s Latest Mac OS X – Tiger 10.4

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There’s been no shortage of articles on Apple’s latest operating system aka “Tiger” or Mac OS X 10.4. I’ve been quite impressed. Spotlight, the ability to search everything on your computer is very handy – and fast. Read on:

Mossberg recently wrote that the “Windows computing platform is in a genuine crisis“. I wouldn’t spend a dime on a windows system these days.