Back when news first surfaced about Microsoft’s plans for creating a “trusted platform” which effectively provided DRM support at the hardware level, I wrote somewhere, probably slashdot, that such a thing was doomed to fail because any time you try to make something people want to do difficult, you create a black market that seeks to satisfy their demand. When that black market could potentially amount to a significant portion of the market for consumer PCs, there is a lot of money at stake, enough that it could become a big business to buck Microsoft and any hardware partners it managed to line up, like Intel and AMD. My guess was that this would be just the sort of thing that China could exploit to give its hardware industry a big boost (they already have a state-sponsored x86 clone chip, though it isn’t exactly fast, yet.)

I’d say that this story provides a pretty strong endorsement of my thesis:

It was doomed to fail

Boing Boing: Super-correcting DVD players make pirated discs watchable

Jiangsu Shinco Electronic Group is a Chinese company that manufactures “super-correcting” DVD players that automatically correct for the low quality of pirated DVD discs (though the article doesn’t say whether this corrects for bad pressing or bad recordings, I suspect it’s the former). They get some of their parts from Sony!

In this great clip from the Daily Show Jon looks at how the repetition of “talking points” shapes public perception of candidates.”

They illustrate how GOP spokespeople all repeat the same little sound bites, reinforcing the concept they’ve been instructed to convey. This isn’t anything new, which, I guess is why it takes a cable comedy show to help remind us that “these people are spewing nothing but propaganda,,” while the broadcast news and print media just pass on the BS without interpretation or context.

All Things Considered had a story tonight on how Bush rallys are limited to ticketholders, and those ticketholders are card carrying, loyalty oath signing Republicans, guaranteing that there is no voice of dissent to muddy the message or confuse the pinhead candidate and his voters. Unsuprisingly, the republicans interviewed thought that this was just great, and reflected the efficiency with which Bush runs the country.

I view this as absolute bullshit. What kind of political campaign is it if people are cut off from the political process? What kind of democracy do we have if only sworn supporters can hear the president of the United States speak?

The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. Die-hard Bush supports make up at most 1/3rd of the population, they aren’t going to be swayed by any dissenting voices. That isn’t likely to be enough to get re-elected, so he’s going to need to bring others into the fold. So why isn’t he willing to take the chance on a few hecklers for the chance to win over some undecideds? The presidential campaign is in full swing.

I can imagine a few reasons. Is it that it will ruin the image projected to the TV news, this decreacing the propaganda value of the rallys in the mass media? If so, I’m sure that Goebbels would approve, but as a freedom loving American, I don’t much like it. Perhaps they think they have the election in the bag? But why would they, unless Floriday in 2004 was just a dry run?

Paranoid? Perhaps, but I can’t imagine that anything good lying behind such tactics.

This sort of behavior might be defensible in some sort of contested primary, but the presidential primaries are past, the Democratic convention over, and the Republican convention is a forgone conclusion.

The story notes that the Kerry campaign is much more open.

Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident is running for the Illinois senate as a Republican against Barak Obama, who made his nation debut to wide acclaim at the Democratic National convention.

Doesn’t this seem wrong? The guy doesn’t even have the decency to rent an apartment in Illinois before announcing his candidacy. I know that this has been happing for quite a while, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it were a bi-partisan practice, but how can this guy represent the people of Illinois when the only ones he knows are the ones are probably the ones that recruited him (if they were even local)?

It’s just bullshit. We are working for the politicians. They should be working for us.

Geekable.com: July 2004 Archives

Sounds like Mary Jane is a real bitch….

So, this guy reads something on a high-class gossip site about Kirsten Dunst splitting with her actor boyfriend, because, it is asserted, she’s making more money than he is.

So, what does this blogger go do? He links to it, using not one, but two obscentites to describe the actress.

Maybe next time he’ll do the right thing and 1) treat a rumor as a rumor and 2)worry about something more important, like the skewing of priorities and the lowering of standards of civility on the old World Wide Web.

I’m posting this with a demo copy BlogJet.  BlogJet is a blogging client that supports a variety of weblog systems (including MovableType).  It is commercial software with a price tag in the $20-30 range.

I installed it because I am looking to dramatically streamline the effort of posting images in my blog.  As it is, I haven’t bothered posting any images because I’m lazy.

I was hoping that BlogJet would do the job.  It doesn’t.

First off, if you simply drag a photo off your local disk into the browser window, it gives an error because it is a local file.  This is strange,  because it has a button for inserting a picture that lets you pick a picture from the local filesystem which it will presumably upload to the server when you make the post.

The second annoyance is that it doesn’t seem to do much with the photo.  I can resize it, but its just modifies the size tag, it doesn’t resize the image, so anyone who views the page ends up downloading the full=sized file, which the browser then does a crappy job of resizing.

This is what I think BlogJet and every other rich blogging client should do.

1. Support drag and drop of images from the local filesystem.
2. Automatically resize the image into a preselected thumbnail size using a high quality resizing algorithm.
3. Allow the optional but automatic creation of a larger image linked from the thumbnail.
4. Allow customization of the JPEG quality settings.
5. Allow very basic image editing.  I think cropping should be enough, though one could also make the the case that adjusting levels should be added.  Anything more though should really be the domain of an image editing tool
6. Only generate the resized images when the entry is posted so you can tweak things without degrading things.
7. Automatically upload the images when the entry is posted.

I’ve looked at Zempt, MTClient, Bloggar, BlogJet and Ecto.  None of them really come close.  Most don’t support any image operations beyond embedding and uploading it to the server.  Ecto has a little file-upload tool that creates thumbnails, but it doesn’t have a what-you-see-is-roughly-what-you-get editor for the HTML (in fact, the editor doesn’t even try to do a nice job of formatting the HTML source).

Other than that, BlogJet seems pretty slick. I’d buy it if it just had improved image support.  I think it would appeal to far more people than the “Attach Voice” functionality.