NewsScan Daily, 29 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 29 May 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Maker of Phony Pop-Up Ads Settles Lawsuit
        V-Games Help Cultivate Horse Sense, A Cool Head & A Keen Eye
        Sony Crosses Over
        Mind Made Up: Munich Likes Linux... Will Get Unique Pricing Plan
        Open House at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: The Last Dance
        Mailbag: The World As We Find It

MAKER OF PHONY POP-UP ADS SETTLES LAWSUIT
Bonzi Software is settling a lawsuit that accused it of tricking computer 
users with deceptive Internet pop-up banners made to look like error 
messages. The messages, which guided people into looking at a Bonzi 
commercial, had phony warnings such as "Your computer is currently 
broadcasting an Internet IP address. With this address, someone can 
immediately begin attacking your computer." Bonzi has agreed to place the 
word "advertisement" in their advertising banners and discontinue using 
fake user interfaces. (AP/USA Today 28 May 2003)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-05-28-bonzi-suit_x.htm

V-GAMES HELP CULTIVATE HORSE SENSE, A COOL HEAD & A KEEN EYE
Researchers at the University of Rochester have concluded that young people 
who regularly play action video games with car chases and gun battles 
develop better visual skills than those who do not. The study did not 
address the question of whether video violence affects personality or 
psychology, but instead focused strictly on how a person's ability to 
process visual information developed by playing the games. [We borrowed our 
title for this item from "Trouble, Ya Got Trouble, Right Here in River 
City," a song in "The Music Man" -- a show that can't be seen too many 
times.] (San Jose Mercury News 28 May 2003) 
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5961917.htm

SONY CROSSES OVER
Sony is offering a "crossover" PlayStation 2 video game console with a 
built-in DVD recorder and hard drive for storing data. Called the PSX, it 
will go on sale in Japan this year (and in the U.S. and Europe early next 
year). A Sony executive explained: "We want an extreme product to represent 
a new platform out of Sony." Industry analyst Richard Doherty of the 
Envisioneering Group says the new PSX platform "will not pay off 
immediately. But it's a very good direction. A lot of consumers in all 
geographies of the world are tired of having two or three things attached 
to their TV." (AP/ABC News 28 May 2003)
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Business/ap20030528_1294.html

MIND MADE UP: MUNICH LIKES LINUX, WILL GET UNIQUE PRICING PLAN
After months of analysis and discussions, the city government in Munich, 
Germany, has decided to drop Microsoft products completely and make a 
strategic decision in favor of Linux, migrating its entire computer network 
to the open source Linux operating system. SuSE Linux AG and IBM worked 
closely with the city to come up with a Windows-to-Linux migration program 
that will begin next year. A SuSE executive says the company has proposed a 
new price-per-inhabitant pricing model: "We've decided to charge not on a 
PC basis but rather on a resident basis. This approach is unique in the 
industry. Each resident should know what IT costs he or she generates." 
(Linux World 28 May 2003)
http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0528.munich.html

OPEN HOUSE AT THE HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB
Tomorrow at the University of Maryland there will be a special symposium of 
the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), with various lab demos and 
discussions, including a presentation on the International Children's 
Digital Library; new work on voting machine technologies; Ben Shneiderman's 
work on information visualization for digital government; and others. 
Shneiderman is Founding Director of the HCIL and is the author of the very 
well-received recent book "Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New 
Computer Technology." For the full program see http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/soh.

*****

FLASH CARD
      "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time 
we have rushed through life trying to save." (Will Rogers)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE LAST DANCE
      Dance critic Arlene Croce writes:
      "Post-modern ballet is a hybrid that came about when the ballet and 
the modern dance ceased to be hostile camps -- ideology was dying out along 
with creativity -- and began embracing each other. The ballet companies, 
with their rising popularity and longer seasons, needed choreographers, and 
because choreographers had yet to come forth from the academy in sufficient 
numbers, they came from the modern and post-modern dance. To Twyla Tharp, 
Laura Dean, Mark Morris, and a host of other young nonclassical 
choreographers, a ballet-company commission meant prestige, which meant 
bigger grants for their own companies from a new government agency, the 
National Endowment for the Arts. To ballet dancers like Nureyev and 
Baryshnikov who knew nothing of the ideological warfare in American dance, 
fraternizing with the moderns meant a chance to learn new techniques, which 
enabled them to extend their careers. A fair number of the premières I 
reviewed were of post-modern ballets, a development I took for granted at 
the time but now see as symptomatic of the forces that were struggling 
against depletion in the seventies and eighties. They are still struggling; 
the energy of the American dance renaissance that began in the thirties is 
not completely spent, but that postmodern ballet is a twilight (I almost 
wrote 'Twylight') phenomenon I have no doubt."
                                   ***
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374528721/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Arlene Croce's "Writing In The Dark, Dancing In The New Yorker" -- or 
look for it in your favorite library. [We donate all revenues from our book 
recommendations to adult literacy programs.]

MAILBAG: THE WORLD AS WE FIND IT

HOMELAND SECURITY VIA WEBCAM
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=8408
      Why does this have to be a paid service? I think back on the MANY 
years that volunteers have monitored the world's airwaves, keeping an 'ear' 
out for those in need of assistance. On both the Citizens Band (CB) and 
amateur (HAM) radio bands, these volunteers have helped thousands over the 
years. To this day, in times of national or local emergency, amateur radio 
volunteers pass along vital information to the authorities. Why not 
replicate such a system online? If all the images from all the surveillance 
video cameras in the country were made public, volunteers by the hundreds 
would monitor them day and night and alert authorities when things seemed 
amiss.
      This wouldn't preclude what the authorities are doing and should be 
doing. It seems to me it would merely add more eyes to the mix. Obviously, 
sensitive images shouldn't be made public in such ways. But images from 
public ferry docks, highways, airports, buildings, etc. are already online 
in many cases. Why not make even more such images public and have people 
such as Jay Walker figure out a way to create sites that localize the 
images and allow volunteers to monitor them? Seems to me you wouldn't even 
need to organize the volunteers. Just make the images available, create a 
method for communication, then let the world know about it. I'm guessing 
the volunteers would be numerous.
      Just a thought. Sometimes I think we over-engineer things. Why not 
use models that have worked in the past? (Stan Orchard)

THOSE EARLY LINOTYPES
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=7925
      A rebuttal of NewsScan reader Keith Cowan¹s claim that Ottmar 
Mergenthaler knew about and admired the California type-case... by Dr Basil 
C Kahan.
See Re http://pages.prodigy.net/jabeckpearce/poor town/tales/eta...
     Keith Cowan's contribution, shows that he was misinformed about early 
Linotypes. True, the keyboards of the models to which he refers had 90 keys 
arranged in six rows of 15 keys with etaoin/shrdlu in the first two columns 
(not rows), a feature of the "Improved Linotype" that superseded the 
original machine, now known as the "Blower." Ottmar (misspelled Ottmarr by 
Cowan) Mergenthaler's first production Blower Linotype was installed at the 
New York Tribune in June or early July 1886 (there are conflicting reports 
of the actual date). The keyboard had 107 keys arranged in four rows with a 
magazine made up of separate tubes of decreasing size with capacities from 
14 down to 8 matrices, whereas the magazines on later machines could hold 
20 matrices per channel. There were duplicate tubes for the most used 
characters but there is no record of the original layout. Diagrams in early 
Mergenthaler patents showed keys labeled alphabetically so early keyboards 
were probably laid out in that order. In the August 1936 issue of the 
American Company publication, The Linotype News, Charles Letsch, 
Mergenthaler's assistant, recalled:
      "After Mergenthaler had received several complaints from operators 
that some of the most frequently used keys were too far away from other 
often used ones, he tore a two column story out of the [New York] Sun and 
asked me to count all of the letters and other characters in it, to 
determine the most frequently used characters. And the result of that count 
set the standard for the arrangement of the keys that has come down to 
today with only minor changes."
      Mergenthaler was a brilliant machinist who had no knowledge of 
printing until he met James Clephane in 1876. He aimed to produce a good 
surface for letterpress printing and provided the impression was 
satisfactory had no interest in typography. Had he admired the California 
type-case as Cowan claimed, he would not have designed an unsuitable keyboard.
      The original layout cannot be deduced from the sole surviving Blower 
Linotype, donated by The Mergenthaler Linotype Company to the Smithsonian 
Institution's Museum of American History. This dilapidated machine was 
refurbished by Peter Whittaker, grandson of Matthew Whittaker an early 
British Linotype Engineer and inventor, who inspired Peter with tales of 
the Blower Linotype. When the machine arrived in England the keys were 
unreadable so characters were allotted according to the etaoin/shrdlu 
arrangement with an alphabet of small capitals that was not on the original 
machines.
      Ottmar Mergenthaler, born on 11 May 1854, at Hachtel in Württemberg, 
was a mechanical whiz kid who restored and maintained the Ensingen village 
clock after clockmakers from Stuttgart had declared it beyond repair. He 
was apprenticed to his stepmother's brother, Louis Hahl, a watch and clock 
maker, and became so competent that he was paid as a journeyman in his 
final year, the only time in 30 years that Hahl had paid an apprentice. He 
emigrated to the USA in 1872 to work for Hahl's son, August. Only 18 years 
old, with no prior knowledge of the instruments that Hahl made for the US 
Signal Service, he soon became as skilled as the other workmen and was made 
foreman within two years. He spoke only German when he landed in the USA, 
but became fluent in English within six months, albeit with a guttural 
accent. He was granted American citizenship in 1878 and thought of himself 
as American.
      Finally, I must take issue with Cowan over his assertion that 
Linotype operators had over-sized left hands. My father was a Linotype 
operator and I knew many others but never saw this deformity. It reminded 
me of Popeye facing up to Bluto. Further, good lino ops did not hunt and 
pick with the right hand, the whips could set faster than the machine could 
cast. (Dr. Basil C. Kahan, via Mike Mallett)

SPAM-HATERS: SUBSTITUTE PROBLEM-SOLVING FOR WHINING
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=8406
      Spam should be blocked at the outset, not at the point of reception. 
Set up a protocol whereby bulk eMailers need to have an authorization 
number/code from a reputable authority -- just like Domain Name 
registration -- which entitles them to send more than so many mails per 
minute/hour/day to whatever range of destinations or whatever -- clearly 
all parameterisable.  SMTP senders, especially the first one to receive 
mail for onwards transmission, will check the "auth code" against an 
interlinked reliable authorization server -- just like a DNS.  If it's not 
authorized, drop the mail, maybe without even telling the 
originator.  Additionally, one could envisage a smart analytical service 
inside the originating SMTP server that compares mails with other items 
rejected earlier.  One copy of each rejected mail could be sent to an 
analytical engine where today's technology could produce what we might call 
a "map" of the text which could then be passed against a proximity filter 
of other such texts -- by this I mean we can use existing neural network 
technologies to identify messages that are xx percent similar -- probably 
to the level of 99.9 percent -- but that can be customisable.
      So a change of originating address, small changes in the wording 
[Viagraa I see now appears, not to mention p0-n !!] and other such 
alterations can simply be detected.  If in doubt, send that mail back to 
the originator, asking for confirmation of re-transmission...
      How do we detect and reject false confirmations... well, sorry, we 
all have to make a living... I can design it on paid for request!!
      But basically -- come on chaps -- this is not rocket science -- it 
can all be done today.  Stop whinging about spam -- just solve the problem. 
(Scott Pollard)

THE MOVE TO VOIP
Re: http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&id=8429
      Way before Bell [Canada] and U.S. telcos, a Canadian firm will move 
call traffic to the Net. April 22, 2002 is a day worth noting in Canadian 
telecommunications history -- one that passed largely unnoticed. It was on 
this day that Dr. Girish Pathak, chief technology officer of Telus Corp., 
made a long-distance phone call from Vancouver to Toronto over a national 
telephone network using voice over Internet protocol, known as VOIP. The 
quality of the transmission was so good, so much like being there, that 
Telus engineers added a bit of noise to make the call sound, well, more 
normal. Telus will become the first dominant phone carrier in North America 
to make the risky transition, a move much talked about and which Telus will 
make happen on a dramatic scale. The resulting decrease in operating costs 
average 15%, and there is the potential to cut capital expenditures in 
half. (Doug Clark)

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