Monthly Archives: December 2006

A New Goofy Short: “How to Install Your Home Theater”

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Charles Solomon:

It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story” and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”

Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.

I’ve long enjoyed short films. Clusty has more.

Books and the Future of Publishing

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Michael Maiello and Michael Noer:

Are books in danger?


The conventional wisdom would say yes. After all, more and more media–the Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames–compete for our time. And the Web in particular, with its emphasis on textual snippets, skimming and collaborative creation, seems ill-suited to nurture the sustained, authoritative transmission of complex ideas that has been the historical purview of the printed page.


But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.

Revenge of the Garlic Farmers, or More Feeding at the Public Till

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Alexei Barrionuevo:

For decades, the fiercely independent fruit and vegetable growers of California, Florida and other states have been the only farmers in America who shunned federal subsidies, delivering produce to the tables of millions of Americans on their own.

But now, in the face of tough new competition primarily from China, even these proud groups are buckling. Produce farmers, their hands newly outstretched, have joined forces for the first time, forming a lobby group intended to pressure politicians over the farm bill to be debated in Congress in January.

Nobody disputes that competitive pressures from abroad are squeezing fruit and vegetable growers, whose garlic, broccoli, lettuce, strawberries and other products are a mainstay of world kitchens. But the issue of whether the United States ought to broaden farm subsidies beyond the commodity crops like corn and cotton, which have historically been protected, is a big flashpoint.

Baseball & Innovation

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Bob Sutton:

Jeff Angus over at Management by Baseball sent me an intriguing update about Billy Bean’s approach to Moneyball. Bean is famous in the baseball world for developing quantitative techniques to help identify players that are underpaid by market standards and for developing a system that enables such “bargain” players to contribute to overall team performance. There are many signs that the system works, for example, Oakland’s cost per win in 2005 was $450,000 in salary, while the New York Yankees paid 1.4 million. The 2006 payrolls (when Oakland had a better season than the Yankees) were about 60 million for the A’s and about 200 million for the Yankees. Bean and his staff do impressive analysis to make decisions that gain them cost advantages and increase their odds of success. For example, they stay away for star players that are coming out of high school and prefer college graduates because only 5% of baseball players drafted straight out of high school are in the major leagues in three years, while 17% of college graduates that are drafted make it to the majors.

Beane watching is worthwhile…

Udell Chat with U of Michigan’s Wilkin regarding the Google Scanning Deal

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Jon Udell:

My guest for this week’s podcast is John Wilkin. He’s the director of the University of Michigan Library’s technology department, and coordinator of the library’s joint digitization project with Google. It’s been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM’s earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all of us. …

The Google Library deals have been controversial (rightly so). The UW-Madison also has a deal with Google.

Cringely on VOIP Privacy

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Robert X. Cringely:


The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA — I’ve written about this one before) requires “managed” VoIP operators to provide law enforcement agencies a point of interception so they can tap your VoIP calls. What’s a “managed” VoIP service? Packet8, Vonage, Comcast, and AT&T all certainly qualify, but does Skype? Yes, if you think of billing as management, now that there is SkypeOut and SkypeIn. And given the current management at the U.S. Department of Justice, “managed” could mean pretty much anything.

VoIP interception is usually done at the SBC/proxy. The network operator’s SBCs perform decryption/encryption on the “secure” packets as they go through the node. It is a matter of “trust,” as they say in the industry. If you want to encrypt you must also be willing to trust an SBC/proxy in China, Russia, wherever. That’s the attack point.

Top 10 2006 Books via the NYT Book Review

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NY Times:

Fiction & Non-Fiction. The list includes Rory Stewart’s excellent: The Places in Between:

You are the first tourist in Afghanistan,” Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. “It is mid-winter – there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee.” Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures – walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban – belongs with the masterpieces of the travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating, blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines.

Our Lobbyist Friends, the MPAA

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TechDirt:

A few months back, of course, you’ll recall the big scandal over HP’s use of “pretexting” to spy on various people to figure out who leaked some information from the board of directors. Pretexting is a nice way of describing a basic form of social engineering identity theft. Basically, you call up a company pretending to be someone in order to get their information. It seems pretty clear it should be illegal, and while Patricia Dunn was eventually charged with crimes over the practice, there were plenty of questions as to whether or not California laws actually made pretexting illegal. This surprised many people, who then started trying to push through such laws, which haven’t really gone very far. In fact, there were similar laws that politicians had tried to put in place earlier that had failed as well.

A bunch of folks have submitted this morning that a Wired News investigation found out that the California law to make pretexting illegal had strong (nearly unanimous) support… until the MPAA killed it. Apparently, MPAA lobbyists explained to California politicians that they need to use this identity theft method to spy on file sharers. This isn’t an idle threat either.