This just after I finally figured out how to make free wifi calls to USA numbers from my android phone using a strung-together combination of a softphone app, a free SIP gateway, a strangely free Washington state phone number that routes incoming calls to a SIP gateway, and Google voice. I’ll provide more details on that precarious cocktail of free services if Google doesn’t make it all obsolete this week.
Lifehacker posted an article describing cool things you can do with your flash drives. Some of the tricks have been covered to some extent in earlier SBOT tech tips, but it’s nice to see these all in one place. I don’t think I knew about trick #10 — putting an icon file in the root directory in order to have a custom icon show up for the drive when it’s connected – nice! Here’s the article
Council Member Joseph Jacobson has an interesting issue for us to ponder…
If Apple were to create a system so that if you request a page, such as www.seclaw.com, which has banner ads and other ads supplied by both Google and Amazon.com, what if Apple, instead of just blocking the offending advertising, replaced Google’s ads with its own?
Does this substituting in some way affect the copyright of the page?
Does the copyright include the ads around the editorial material, as a compilation?
Is this action, or even the lesser action of just blocking an ad instead of replacing an ad, a tortious interference with contract? [A famous Texas tort. but one not available everywhere.]
The wrongful tortious interference would be Apple’s screening and substitution denies the Web site owner of the economic benefit, provided by Google.com and Amazon.com of click-throughs, The content provider also loses Google’s and Amazon’s tracking of use, and calculation of Google’s, Yahoo!’s, or Bing’s search engine ranking, etc.
It seems to me, a plaintiff could make the argument that, but for the ancillary income from Google and Amazon, the Web page would be unavailable to anyone.
What if someone grabs your newspaper at 4:30 in the morning and tapes a Nordstrom advertisement of the same size and shape over a Neiman-Marcus advertisement?
You see the same editorial, but aren’t the experiences really different?
Sometimes advertisers and media companies operate under rules for placement, and substitutions may not honor such rules.
One rule may be that in no commercial break, there are 2 car advertisements for different brands, with one following the other. Or there are not 2 competing cereals advertised next to each other, etc. You get the idea.
The same is true in magazine layout. Companies pay premiums to be on the inside cover, the back cover, for spreads, and if Apple substitutes its advertising, the advertisers are losing value, and so are the editorial content providers that are trying to generate income from the advertising from services such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Amazon.com.
Does the advertising benefit have to be visible, since there still is a value for search engine rankings, based upon data from coolies, Web browsers, etc.?
What if a carrier such as Sprint decided to substitute its ads for Google’s ads?
Do developers of operating systems and Internet Service Providers have different obligations to consumers? Different rights? Different regulations?
Discuss…
UPDATE: Here is Steve Jobs explaining the new mobile advertising platform, iAd™.
Install and reboot Soluto, and it tells you how long it takes your PC to boot, provides a list of “no brainer” programs you don’t need on boot, and a list of programs where you have the option not to install on boot or install later during CPU idle time. A third category lists programs you can’t stop from installing on boot including (interestingly enough) this program.
I cut 30-40 seconds off my boot time, although this does not include the inordinate amount of time my laptop requires before it decides to boot in the first place. Don’t know what would happen if I uninstalled Soluto.
Congratulations to C&T member Matthew Hartzell of Houston, who won the iPad yesterday at the annual meeting! Matthew, we’re trying to get in touch with you… Delivered!!
Hope you’ll join us in “meatspace” in Fort Worth for the Texas State Bar Annual Meeting on June 10th and 11th.
As usual, the Computer & Technology Section will hold its own annual meeting there, on Friday, right before lunch time. Immediately preceding the C&T annual meeting will be two hours of presentations – 1st, an hour of “ignites” presented by various Section members and Council members. The ignite format calls for 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes. After the ignites, we’ll have 60 sites and tips in 60 minutes – another information-packed session presented by three of our Council members.
The month of May for me had a unusual amount of business travel – I logged well over 25,000 flight miles. In a perhaps unauthorized move, I purchased a cheap netbook and left my gigantic Dell laptop at the office, using webmail to hit my corporate exchange mailbox. The netbook was dreamily easier to carry around and worked like a charm. It came with Windows 7, and I knew I couldn’t let that last for long once my travels were over, but I’ve been a little hesitant to commence an OS install.
I’ve been an incurable Linux fan since 1993, when I installed slackware on a 386 – it was really *not easy* – I had to feed a bunch of floppies and compile a kernel and all that goes with that, but it was definitely worth it. Installing Linux has been getting easier ever since — zoom ahead to just now, early June 2010.
I did a web search and found Wubi – a windows program you download and run, which then downloads the latest Ubuntu and installs it while you watch. The install was so easy I barely remember it – I specified the amount of space on the hard drive I wanted to use, supplied a password for my account (the installer used the account name I had used for windows), and that was about it. After watching it go for a few minutes, and a couple of prompted reboots, here I am in ubuntu, making this post from the already installed Firefox. Now I have dual boot – I can go to Ubuntu or to my existing Windows 7 install. Nice!!!
I believe it was Dennis Miller who said “I’m ADD-OCD, which means I’m constantly changing what I obsess over.” If you happened to be at either the ABATechshow‘s 60 Sites in 60 Minutes or 60 Apps in 60 Minutes and you concurrently live in the web on a daily basis, you were downloading manna from heaven in Gigabytes. Well, it’s all up in the Clouds now and available for your “InTechLectual” consumption. Enjoy!
60 (iPhone) APPS in 60 MINUTES:Presented by the effervescent and biting wit of Jeff Richardson and the no-nonsense power-consulting of Reid Trautz, this free fall of power-Apps was presented to a packed room — sign of the times of the applicability and use of the iPhone.
Inevitably, we age. We ‘de-learn’ immortality and acquiesce to the scrimping and savings derived from Fear – Fear that we’ll slow down, that someone will pass us, be better, faster, stronger…Fear that we won’t be ‘Relevant,’ as Simon Cowell says.
But every so often there is a technology track, session, speech or movement that draws us back to our youth, our immortality, our lack of fear and allows us to get excited about something. Today that something is Storyboarding, either within or without Powerpoint.
Paul Unger and Nils Jenson have properly advised us. The old rules don’t apply: Some of the new from the “Storyboarding for Powerpoint” session are as follows:
‘Storyboarding is a series of images and headings glued together by your strong storytellingskills.’
‘Interest + Attention = Persuasion’
- Less Text
+ MoreSingle LineSlides
* If using text lines, highlight ‘KEY WORDS,’ then remove the rest
Practice Tip: If you’re using a Powerpoint to persuade a Judge, create a Handout for him/her.
—goto File/ Print/ Handout
