Ahhhh, Remeber Pre-Printed CDs?

INFO TECHNOLOGY: CD-Rs that are painted to look like music CDs. How strange. Kinda reminds me of those CD-Rs that were painted to look like records. You know, retro-cool. Like, "Wow, remember when I used to buy plastic musical spheres? Ah, those were days."







Problem is, music CDs aren't old enough to be retro-cool. They're just bulky, ugly, and expensive. Maybe if they were only a couple more bucks then regular CD-Rs they'd be cool, but $8 for 5 discs is pretty much a rip-off.



(Via P2PWeblog)

Boinc

DATA: I finally got around to downloading Boinc (which stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). Basically, Boinc is by the same folks that brought you Seti@home. Only, instead of distributing software that is designed for just one "problem" (like, say, finding aliens) these folks are now moving to the Boinc platform that allows users to donate their extra cycles to any number of computationally intensive problems.



Oh, and they gave Seti@home a face lift while they were at it. (Actually, it appears that you can install a number of visualizations; of which this is just one.)







Oh, and if you didn't know already, eventually Boinc will be required to continue working on the Seti@home project. So you may as well download it now. (On a sad side-note, I no longer have access to the Seti@home account I created back in 2000, so I had to kiss goodbye those 1,500 workunits).



Currently I'm donating my extra cycles to Seti@home and Climateprediction.net. As soon as I find a good program for protein folding using the Boinc platform, I'll probably sign on for that too.

Linkcopter

INFO SCIENCE: Ran across two resources for informatics peeps today:



The ugly, but useful, World List of Departments and Schools of Information Studies, Information Management, Information Systems, etc. What fun it must be to try and keep track of every informatics program on earth. Glad someone is doing it; glad it's not me.



CMPros is a "membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices, and strategies." Might be worth a look. Dues are $50/year.

Sony Ditches Atrac

INFO TECHNOLOGY: Could it really be true? Sony finally pulls their heads out of their asses and ditches ATRAC for MP3. Better (very, very) late then never, I guess.

Sony confirmed on Wednesday that it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players--a major strategy reversal that could help it compete more effectively with rivals such as Apple Computer.



[...]



"It's about time they did this. They've been inconsistent in their strategy since their Aiwa products, and some of their CD players support MP3," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst at research firm IDC. "This should help them to be more competitive in the digital audio player market."



Kevorkian noted that Sony does not rank among the top five companies in market share for digital audio players.

Moral of the story? Proprietary formats bad. Open (or at least licensable) formats good.

Salaries Up for College Grads

INFO SCIENCE: Most starting salaries for college grads were up in 2004 according to a The National Association of Colleges and Employers survey. Information Science graduates' salaries jumped almost %11 since 2003. w00t. :-)

Engineering majors are seeing the most cash -- though with narrow percentage changes from last year -- led by gains from chemical engineering graduates, who now earn $52,539 a year on average, up 0.3 percent from a year earlier. Computer engineering graduates follow closely behind with $51,297, a 0.1 percent decrease from last year.



Those graduating with a degree in computer science are seeing heartier increases. According to NACE, information sciences and systems grads earn $42,375 a year on average. That's up 10.7 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, computer science graduates make $49,036 a year, a gain of 4.1 percent.

The Horse Race

DATA: The horse race numbers in Electoral Votes as reported by Zogby (reported in BOLD ITALICS, I might add.)

	Sep 21	Sep 07	Aug 23	Aug 03	Jul 26	Jul 10	Jun 20	Jun 06	May 23
Bush	241	222	214	215	220	205	285	242	218
Kerry	264	273	286	291	275	322	253	296	320

That's funny, it seems I recently read, "Bush clear leader in poll" on the cover of USA Today. (I don't actually buy the USA Today, but do catch the headlines in their newspaper boxes occasionally.) Of course, you and I and USA Today all realize that national polls mean squat in American politics. It's all about the states, not the nation. Texas and Alabama could go 100% red tomorrow and shift the shit out of national polls, but it wouldn't change the election one bit. Meanwhile, ElectoralVote.com notes that

The big news today is that Kerry is once again ahead in the electoral college by dint of his edging ahead in Florida (49% to 48%) and New Jersey (47% to 43% among RVs).

Hrmn, maybe USA Today was just getting its news straight from the DrudgeReport again.



One should note that according to the Zogby table above, neither president is a winner. This is because a candidate needs 270 votes to win. And, yes, it is possible for both candidates to get 269 votes and tie. If that happens, Joe Grossberg's blog lets us know what would happen:

Short answer: the Representatives from each state vote, and whoever gets a majority wins.



What happens if the states are a 50-50 tie? No fucking clue.



The scary part is that, with the exception of Kerry's small lead in Florida, this is exactly what current projections show.

I have a feeling I know what would happen... The courts would decide (again). Wouldn't that be funny if the courts picked a president twice in a row? Well, not "ha ha" funny. Well, not funny at all.

Media Center Keyboard (That you don't have to hide under the coffee table)

INFO TECHNOLOGY:This Belkin keyboard looks like it would be a nice replacement keyboard for my media center. It's nice and slim (unlike most ugly-as-sin wireless keyboards you'd be embarrassed to have in your living room). Too bad it's bigger then it needs to be because of those special function keys at the top of the keyboard that nobody ever, EVER, uses.



I've only used one of those special function keys regularly. It was a knob that turned up or down the computer volume -- brilliant! (And yes, I know a lot of consumers say they like lots of those keys like "Check Email" on their keyboards, but a lot of consumers would probably say the iPod should ship with a built in discoball if asked, but you won't see Apple pandering to the audience anytime soon. Besides, the reason people like those buttons is because they are confused by the software interface to begin with. Solve the problem of bad UI with the software, and you won't need to give every application it's own physical launch button.)



But, I digress. Check out what comes with the Belkin keyboard:

With its built-in mouse, integrated AV remote, and wireless, rechargeable multimedia keyboard, the Belkin MediaPilot integrates your PC with your home theater to create a complete multimedia center. The MediaPilot uses Cypress Semiconductor's WirelessUSB technology in the 2.4GHz frequency range.

Speaking of media centers, the 30" Dell LCD we've been using at home for a few months just dropped in price again. I wonder if this is the first 30" to drop below $2,000?

Librarians (The First Information Scientists) and the FBI

INFO SCIENCE: Librarian.net has "Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library" on their site.







Good stuff! In related news, check out the second hit on google for the search term 'John Ashcroft.' It begins with the brilliant first paragraph:

Much like the Nazis in Casablanca, John Ashcroft enjoys a good song -- as long as people remember their place.

Information Chaos

INFO VISUALIZATION:There are a number of fun information visualization / communication projects over at International Networks Archive.



They are too noisy for a serious or directed analysis of a subject, but I think it's pretty clear that they are intended to be exploratory and artistically engaging and not the basis for serious, empirical information conveyance. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, you could say. :-)



My favorite is the Starbucks Map at the bottom.

ATMs and PINs

DATA: Here's an interesting tidbit about ATM security from The Register.

The modern "PIN entry device" is a physically and logically self contained tamper-resistant unit that encrypts a PIN within milliseconds of its entry, and within centimeters of the customer's fingertips. The plaintext PIN never leaves the unit, never travels over the bank network, isn't even available to the ATM's processor: malicious code running on a fully compromised Windows-based ATM machine might be able to access the cash dispenser and spit out twenties, but in theory it couldn't obtain a customer's unencrypted ATM code.

Amazing stuff. But it seems silly to put so much thought into this potential problem and so little into these well demonstrated problems:



1) Someone can easily steal my social security number and get a credit card in my name and destroy my credit. When are banks going to do something about identity theft?



2) Someone can use my debit card to make purchases with only a forged signature. When are they going to start requiring PINs for POS purchases?



(via EyeBeam via jwz)