Life as an Artificial Lifeform

I found Noam Chomsky´s Blog today - Turning the Tide. So the messages there are not exclusively compiled for the Blog but rather taken out of other diskussions they are all messages from Mr. Chomsky himself. Highly respectable read - lands directly on my Blogroll. Something I am saying as well and that sums up so many thoughts is here:

"People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system, who went to the same elite university and even joined the same secret society to be socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers, and who are able to participate in the election because they have massive funding from highly concentrated sectors of unaccountable power that cast over society the shadow called "politics," as John Dewey put it."

Two bad that its not even funny. Great day for the Many to Many communication to get such a prominent supporter.

Posted by fALk at 17:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes Garfield gets his own movie - no no cartoon like live and 3d and hairy. Its gonna be hilarious judging from the trailer. He is getting saved by Lasagne, the hair simulation looks gorgeous the animation smooth and funny and its pure Garfield humor – lovely mix.

Posted by fALk at 12:09 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kid of Speed - the girl driving with her Motorbike through the wasteland called dead zone around Chernobyl has updated her site due to the thousands of hits she got when her story made it on Slashdot some moons ago
So she went again in spring 2004 and added the pictures... They are outright brilliant. Telling on their own they give a deep insight of the death mankind can bring and the power of nature to reclaim deadly environments. Absolutely necessary to check out her pictures.

Posted by fALk at 15:46 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Its shipping. After about a trillion years in computer universe E Ink coparation in cooperation with Phillips and Sony is unveiling the first device with the epaper technology. At an unimpressive 170 ppi (a little higher then the 130 ppi for Notebook Displays) its neither flexible nor thin as paper, requires some heavy 4 AAA batteries to function and looks like a iPod knockoff from Sony for the reading population.
The upshot: no backlighting, easy readable under sunlight and it can serve you 10.000 pages before the batteries need replacement.
Hope this is just the first step and there are some early adopter to the technology so it can move forward. So with the unimpressive clumsy design I do have some doubts about its success. Right now only available in Japan.

Posted by fALk at 12:42 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What is it with these people who wrap some unix commands into a gui and sell this as their own software? No they don´t even design the gui themself they just use apples toolbox. So in fact they are using some FreeBSD tools and some Appletools and then wrap it up and sell it.
Take the RamDisk Creator for example:

Ramdiskcreator

first look and I find out that they are using the EXACT same script that I outlined months ago in my Optimizing for OSX tutorial. Shame on you Mr. John MacDonnel. It should be freeware we have either paid already for the Tools (OSX) or they are open source (FreeBSD). There is no need to make a 20 dollar profit of of that.

For all those who do not want to shell out 20 dollars for that crap I suggest you read the optimizing for OSX tutorial. The Shell RamDisk script is in the appendix and its all free.

Posted by fALk at 11:27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mr. Raymond has spoken again responding to the feedback he got from his first rant against Open Source Interface Design. And again I can wholeheartly agree with him. The responses he got seem to also support his thesis out there that there are even a lot of "powerusers" of Linux and the like not satisfied with the current state of Free Software Interfaces.
That made me think a little further and I think its time for an Open Interface Initiative. You know there are lots of Designers out there who I am sure would dedicate a little time for designing interfaces.

The biggest obstacle seem to be either you are a programmer then you probably do not have the time to study user behavior and try to figure out how an interface would look like that best suites the user or you are a designer and then you have no desire to care even a little bit about coding (and most hate it - except for some rare few crossbreading exceptions).

So there must be a solution to bridge the two breeds. Something beneficial for both with a minimum amount of friction. Maybe a platform where the programmers post their requests with hooks to the code (like programm xy can do zx please make us an interface proposal). A rating system. Maybe even a "Interface Testbed" where you can throw in an interface and test the functionality without a working code underneath - that could be in itself an open source project. The standard interface or the like.

As Mr. Raymond says its hard to gain any market share for the OpenSource if there there are only interfaces that even the hardcore computer users find hard to manage. Some people want to consume and not think about their computers (the invisible interface).

Posted by fALk at 10:35 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a very enlightening heise online forum message. I am only translating and enhancing it a bit here because it speaks for itself:

Through the piracy of music 0 germans die every day.
Because of this we need complete monitoring of all internet traffic.

Through terror 0.001 german dies every day.
Because of that we need complete surveillance of telefon, total video monitoring the german population everywhere they go and RFID chips in our passports and official documents.

Through illegal drugs 6 germans die every day.
Because of that we need total international war on drugsproducers and consumers.

In normal street traffic 20 germans die every day.
Because of that we need complete traffic monitoring of all Autobahnen.

Through alcohol 100 germans die every day.
Because of that we need warning labels on alcopop and mixdrinks for young people.

Through normal smoking 300 germans die each and every day.
Because of that we need warning labels on cigarette packs.

In germany about 600 people die of fishbones every year
I want total banning of all fish.

Posted by fALk at 10:58 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Ein Schöner Tag comes a great link to a site where you can put together a map where you have traveled so far. I thought its worth a shot... so here you go my personal lifelong travel map.

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

I think they should add Mars to it somehow.

But seriously I think all those maps have political flaws. Because they do not seperate Israel and the Palestina. Or include Tibet and HongKong into "MainlandChina" (and Taiwan as well!). I really have my problem with that, not only because I have travelled those but I think its an insult to the population who are struggling with this. Sites like this make it look even more so that the world has given up on the problems there, discouraging any and all resistance.

Posted by fALk at 21:59 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After all the conspiracy theory stuff I thought I need to post something serious that has found its way onto our secret wiki site.

Americans have landed on Mars

Posted by fALk at 21:49 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reading my last post again I think the last stuff needs a little bit of explaining. You know it could be put off as another conspiracy theory but I think there is compelling evidence that it could benefit the big corporates and the media so much that it needs a little bit of attention.
The flood of Spam and Viruses (that seem to work hand in hand and both are getting more sophisticated) is really getting on the internet users nerv. Even those proclaming that the internet should be free and anarchic to a point are now convinced that there needs to be rules put in place to stop this from further spreading. Thinking about this whole topic, reading some spam and all I just can not think that it still benefits people to put out advertisment this way. I mean it is buried underneath tons of scrambled text and even for h4x0R slang literates is sometimes hard to decipher what the spam wants to sell you combine this with hundrets of spam mails in my mailbox I can not believe that its really worth the hassle to send out the spam - at least not by making your buck with selling Viagra.
In some of the latest virus code there seems to be a battle going on with one accusing the others of "helping destroy the internet" and in return the offended party returning fire by saying "you destroy our bussiness and our grand goal". That hit me. What would that grand goal may be and what is the bussiness of Spam and Viruses all about? Then about two weeks later Bill Gates comes out with a solution to all problem. No I will not misstate his claim as other news outlets have, he does NOT want you to pay for email, that would maybe even not such a bad idea. He wants you to install software that would compute a small computation before you are able to send out spam. Hmmmm. aha. Not such a bad idea at first, your computer would perform a small task and then send out the email. Then he goes on, that this could be a small hash string to be created. You mean a small hash string that also confirms that its really you that is sending the email? Its like a trojan put into the email system at large that could just be used to enforce Trusted Computing and I think all the spam and viruses might be a the only way the Computing industry and the Media Moguls have of getting trusted computing into every computer on the planet by making all computers without not usable on the internet. They are the only one profiting from it at large and this secrecy the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) is acting lately is making me suspicious as they surely have not put there idea to rest. They are just searching for a different way to make it happen and Spam/EmailViruses are playing to their favour.
Just a thought.

Posted by fALk at 11:08 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I freed myself from the TV Drug a year ago the media giants doing everything to release the remaining lemmings out into the wild by introducing gadget that will wake them up sooner or later. While the "Broadcast Flag" was passed noone noticed the real deep down problem with a chip inside your TV that controls what you can record, what your TV will output or - and the chip is capable of this - what your TV will let you watch.
This is indeed all interest of the viewer who will then not be able to watch the late braking news on the indy channel and instead is liberated to watch the 100th series of Buffy saving the world.
But the real problemetic thing is that this is a further step to limit the use of media technology. I am already hampered with not being able to route analog video through my Sony Camera "due to ensure that copyright content is protected" as the manual for the camera states. What Hollywood really wants to do is putting the devil back to where he was, but the devil is not only the copying user on the internet, the devil is as well the independent media advocate, the indy film makers, the guy who films a protest making civil rights problems in modern western society visible. All of those that are not brainwashed to death, those not happy with the status quo. It will be increasingly difficult in the future to make your own movies even though the technology should make it more easy today. Its all not so bad right now but all sign are pointing evil. Trusted computing anyone? Oh yeah it will protect us from spam and viruses - what those are initiated spam and viruses are the big companies trying to get a hold on the internet?

Posted by fALk at 10:44 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CNN - mother of all evil - reports that the TV watching habit of the most profitable demographic group - young men aged between 18 and 34 - is going down due to playing video games at prime time. How dare they, they rather should be getting brainwashed by the governments and stupid soap operas. No they are might even get more intelligent now. Bad news for one to many. Good news for common sense.

Posted by fALk at 13:59 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With that in place we only need a screen on top and one below and we have close to the same impact as sound. Something I always said is that we have to get on parity with the sound and that can only be if light in a club gets killed completly and if everywhere you look is visuals. An exagerration to that for the distant future is if the visuals are then in true 3d. Then you are in the middle of the visual world created by the visual mix artist. Ah dreaming. Check out the link to see what I am talking about. Shouts go out to purform.com to make an installation like this possible and thinking of bringing it to AVIT:UK04.

Posted by fALk at 23:32 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Finally Peter Rubin has officially launched the Video Mix project with Gandhies words:

"Be the change that you want to see in the world"

The project is about the vjs beeing part of the media of the future. Trying to knock out the Massmedia and replacing it with innovative forms of many to many communication. The video mix project will help all people considering them self video mix artists getting connected, get funding and GET A MESSAGE. The core idea is to promote ideas that are relevant to the world at large and make them heard (or better seen). Head over to the official wiki and take a dose of alternative media of the future. I personally am very excited about this project that has been cooking for a while now. We hope we can get some momentum and give our medium a voice.

http://www.vmix.org

Posted by fALk at 11:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hot chick driving through radioaktive wasteland with fast motorbike. That is a line that describes lots of Anime comics or 80s science fiction books. Well it describes a heavy weight present. There is a girl who likes to speed through the abondened radioktive zone of Chernobyl because there is no danger of hitting someone else on the road. What she sees and finds you can see at her commented photo gallery. Its surreal. Look at the housing of the city guard on one of the last pages, no scifi author could think of those kind of buildings. Interesting are the wild horses that speed over the contaminated grass planes as if it was the purest best intact nature ever. As far as I heard there is also a village of people who did not want to leave. I was peeking through some planing for a documentary on that. Yes there are people living really close to the reaktor and so far noone has died yet (so they do take some care as to where plant food and how to obtain clean water). There is a priest who takes care of the mostly older people there.

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/page2.html

via slashdot

Posted by fALk at 13:23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I can not stand the constant whining of people about computer noise. Yes noise is generally bad. But having have multiple computers of different brands over the last 15 years the G5 is the most quite of all since the Commodore C64. First people complained about to loud G4s then Apple fixed that with controlled fans - 9 of them - then people complain about chirping noise. Grml yes I have the chirping noise as well. Its especially "loud" when doing network transfer. You know what: Its is so quite that even with some very quite ambience music on you can not hear it. The fan in my powerbook is MUCH louder then the noise. When people are around and talk you can not hear it. If you are so inclined to have a quite computing environment then I guess you better by an Alienware PC (/sarcasm) or put the computer in a closet. The most funny part is something that I noticed a couple of days ago by someone claiming "going insane" because of the chirping noise. He has put the huge G5 tower ON his table right next to his ears. Sorry if you think a G5 is a status symbol you deserve to go insane. Tell me out of the box PC hardware that is more quite then a G5 and as powerful.

Posted by fALk at 13:11 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I ask myself how bad this world really is. How much of the information I get daily is polluted by big companies wanting nothing more then profit. What of the knowledge that feeds into my brain is for real. Last week there were multiple reports in multiple online magazines that the end of the world might be near (nothing new of course) because of the ice-caps melting (also nothing very new) because the gulf stream will stop to flow and the whole of the northern hemisphere will turn into Siberia. That "knowledge" report came allegedly straight from the horses mouth - deep inside the Pentagon and was to change the presidents mind on air pollution and all the bad things happen to our environment (you know about them I am sure).
Today then I head over to my 3d feed and there they post a link to trailer of a 20th century fox (say big bad ass hollywood) production called "The Day After".
Well well well. As said before either good timing or best guerrilla marketing for a long time. Watch it and be astounded how close the story fits to the mentioned Pentagon paper. Scary very scary (and no not because the end of the world is near, maybe such a scenario would actually clean up the world from the real evil of our lifetime, and yes I love snow)

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/dayaftertomorrow/trailer/large.html

Posted by fALk at 10:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

no comment the movie below speaks for itself:

http://www.mauimotionpicture.com/clients/willie/jimmysroad.mov

Posted by fALk at 15:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC reports that Iceland is planning to transform everything energy related to run without fossil fuel like gasolin or oil within 30 years. As replacement for powering automobiles and public transport they want to use hydrogen. The interesting part is that they want to get the hydrogen by using energy sources that they have plenty on their home turf, namely steam from hot springs and waterpower. The astonishing thing comes now: Besides that it is a program that was initiated by the people of Iceland it is funded and supported by DaimlerChrysler and SHELL. Yes this oilcompany that brought so much death to our planet is supporting one of the most futuristic green idea loving projects of our times.

WHEELER:
Just off Reykjavik's busiest road, the construction of Iceland's first Hydrogen filling station is about to begin. Vehicles will simply refuel in the forecourt, as in petrol stations. The plans have been finalised with one of the world's biggest oil companies putting up the money.

MARGRET GUDMUNDSDOTTIR:
Yes, but then we just start distributing hydrogen. We're working with the future as well. We cannot stay behind and just die.

Interesting indeed.

Posted by fALk at 17:07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)