And they need to pick up the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains an article I wrote titled, “How A Camcorder Sees Light” — or read it online, here.

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“The Prometheus Device”; it’s Johnny Storm meets Peter Parker! As Jonathan Last writes, this might be the coolest — or perhaps hottest — device ever built in a garage.

Shortly after I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997, I remember seeing billboards encouraging high-tech workers to move from warm sunny Northern California…to cold, blustery Minnesota. As HR Magazine noted in 1999, it was one of several state-run campaigns at the time:

Nebraska, for example, discovered that its former residents were fleeing to warmer climates in Texas, Florida and Arizona, with the greatest percentage settling in California. It made sense, then, for Nebraska Works, a workforce development initiative created by the department of economic development (nebworks.ded.state.ne.us), to hold a career fair in California.

However, campaign creators didn’t think it made sense for them to compete with California’s high-tech Silicon Valley image. Instead, they played up the lifestyle available to workers if they moved to Nebraska.

“Californians are amazed at our state’s housing costs,” says Patty Wood, workforce development supervisor for Nebraska in Lincoln. “We also have the best student-to-teacher ratio in the country, a low crime rate, less traffic, small communities and a slower pace.” She says the state hopes these attributes will attract former Nebraskans and workers looking for a lifestyle change.

It seems to be working. Last fall, Nebraska Works ran stadium ads during an important college football game that draws a lot of out-of-state fans. Approximately 14,000 users visited the web site set up for the campaign and nearly 800 people requested job applications and Nebraska living packets.

Wood’s department also piggybacked onto Nebraska’s nationwide “Genuine Nebraska” tourism campaign by creating links from the tourism web page to “Work, Play and Stay” pages that itemize Nebraska’s cost of living and quality of life. In the future, Nebraska Works would like to target military personnel affected by base closures, as well as to continue its job fairs and targeted advertising.

“We’d also like to create workshops on ‘best practices’ in recruitment and retention to deliver [to employers] across the state,” says Wood. “These workshops should be ready by the fall of 1999 or early in 2000. Retention is a huge part of this, not just recruitment.”

Minnesota’s campaign, “Come Home to Minnesota,” also targets former residents, particularly among professional and technical job seekers. “Our ‘Minnesota Living’ brochure, which describes the quality of life, education, outdoor and recreational opportunities and the like, should trigger memories from former residents,” says Gary Fields, deputy commissioner of the state’s department of trade and economic development in St. Paul.

Evidently, it was a success, as Minnesota’s broadband is now straining under the weight of it use:

Internet speeds in more than four-fifths of Minnesota are too slow to support technologies that could draw new jobs, take cars off the roads and bring new services to people in their homes, a new report said Friday.

The Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force is calling for minimum Internet speeds of 10 megabits per second for the entire state by 2015, setting a standard 15 times faster than the current federal definition of broadband.

By that measure, 83 percent of the state needs an upgrade.

The group’s report describes broadband as “an economic and social necessity for all citizens of the state no matter where they are located.” It says faster Internet could enable everything from more telecommuting for workers to telemedicine linking patients and doctors through two-way high-definition video.

“It’s an important economic tool as we try to attract and retain the best companies here so we can have good jobs,” said Rick King, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters Legal and the task force’s chairman.

King presented the report during a hearing before two legislative panels, where lawmakers said slow Internet service is a drag on the state’s economy. They hope Minnesota will compete successfully for federal stimulus grants to expand broadband in rural areas.

“It’s time to start thinking of broadband as a baseline utility accessible to every Minnesota home and business,” said Sen. John Doll, a Democrat from Burnsville.

Based on the number of great bloggers in the region (Fraters Libertas, James Lileks, Ed Morrissey, and two-thirds of the Power Line guys come immediately to mind), I thought it already was!

Harvard discovers the hyperlink:

The Stalinist (sorry — couldn’t resist, Frank) Vast Right Wing Conspiracy sets out to capture the high ground of cyberspace! Don Surber dubs it, “The Axis of Instapundit”:

Oh no!

A blogger at Harvard has discovered that blogs link to one another:

At the moment I will not address the merits of the criticisms, but focus instead on the interesting diffusion process that followed from the initial criticism from Coburn. Each day it was picked up by another few blogs. A quote from John Stossel provides a sense of the tone of the postings: “This summer’s town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether.” Initially, I would infer, the first few blogs must have been on some distribution list from Coburn’s office (i.e., they weren’t just watching his website) because there were quotations from materials from Coburn that were not on his website. Thereafter you could see how different blogs picked up on the story, typically quoting or copying from another blog. So what one sees is a signal propagation process through the blogs. And as the signal propagates it evolves. Thus, for example, Stossel quotes from the Heritage blog, but then adds his distinct emphasis. The link and copying structure reflects the attention each blogger is paying to other blogs, however one would guess that each blog has a different but overlapping audience.

So the lesson here is that bloggers communicate with other people, including fellow bloggers.

Eureka!

This has to be the ultimate example of “I need a study to tell me this?” Though as Don writes:

Actually, it is quite flattering. I just love how a blogger in Poca, West Virginia, with a few thousand hits a day is placed on par with Sean Hannity, who reaches 10 million listeners. There is something very American — and very strange — about that.

Don adds, “Heaven help us if Harvard ever discovers Twitter.”

Heh. Maybe we can give them a head-start if they’re following blogs linking to their breakthrough study.

Sorry for that Lucasian cliché. But as Katherine Mangu-Ward writes at Reason, “There Is No Way To Write A Punchy Headline About Metadata:”

When you write in Microsoft Word, record an audio file, take a photo, or otherwise digitally create stuff, you’re also creating metadata—a bunch of information about who, what, when, where, and how that adheres to your data.

A ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court yesterday means that from now on the metadata of public records is now part of that record, and has to be handed over in response to a public information request. The original Arizona case concerns a police whistle blower, who suspected that bad performance reviews had been created after the fact in the digital personnel files to justify his demotion. The department refused to hand over the data about the creation of those records, but now the court has ruled that they must.

Transparency advocates are excited about the ruling, because—among other things—metadata has been useful in revealing the influence of lobbyists and other special interests on the legislative process:

One of the most famous metadata lobbying goof-ups occurred in 2004, when Wired busted California Attorney General Bill Lockyer circulating an anti-P2P [peer-to-peer filesharing] letter that, after a look at its Word metadata, appeared to have been either drafted or edited by the [Motion Picture Association of America].

Not Bill Ayers?

As the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro writes, “Windows 7 arrives; Windows Vista leaves”:

The waiting is over, and the upgrading can begin. Today, Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system arrives in stores and on new computers. Microsoft is celebrating the occasion with characteristic hype, staging a gala event in New York to unveil the software.

I will likely start switching over at some point, if only to access the extra RAM that the 64-bit system allows, unlike the 32-bit version of XP Pro.

I’ll eschew the launch party though. Unless it’s this kind of launch party:

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Ray Kurzweil believes that “By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain.”

As the Hollywood knew in its golden days, it’s what you don’t talk about that makes it intriguing. In other words, this is a pretty *$#*@#-ing good parody of an otherwise staggeringly lame advertisement:

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(VodkaPundit and James Lileks will debate this and the dreadful original version of this ad on the upcoming edition of PJM Political this Saturday.)

Update: Proof that at Microsoft, some things never change. Found in the comments section of Lileks’ post is a much earlier Microsoft promo video, designed to explain the miracles of Windows 386 to nascent computer retailers. As the comment below it suggests, click on the button below the video that advances it to the 7:00 minute mark when the decent into ‘80 Hell is complete.

Great moments in Urban Modern prognostication:

1997 NYT Flashback: DVDs Can’t Match “Pop-and-Play Ease of VHS Tape”

Oh, people of 1997: how easy it is for us future people to mock you, sitting in the fancy Jetsons-like high-rise called Hindsight. Twelve years ago today, the New York Times asked whether an upstart new technology called “DVD” could possibly succeed.

Today, BTW, the Times Business Section had a feature on Redbox, a company that rents DVDs for $1 apiece and is undercutting older distribution models.

A few choice quotes from the 1997 article (emphasis added in bold):

“[Disney] regards DVD as ‘an excellent technology,’ a Disney spokeswoman said, but it has no plans to release movies in the format.”

“Anyone considering purchase of a DVD player should bear in mind certain realities. The presentation of movies on the disks hardly matches the pop-and-play ease of VHS tape.”

“[i]t is almost unimaginable that the Hollywood studios, which agonized long and painfully before splintering over copy protection on DVD, would ever allow high-definition digital software to reach consumers.”

“NASA will sell rocket cars before Hollywood places such technology in video shops.”

Speaking of NASA and rockets, the Times was right on top of that story, as well.

Having previously skewered the lack of logic in Star Wars’ technology, “John Scalzi’s Guide to Epic SciFi Design FAILs – Star Trek Edition” boldly goes where no man has gone before; demolishing the crack design teams of the 23rd century:

The Alien Probe of Star Trek IV

The programming of this probe is even more simple than that of V’Ger, and could be written in four lines in the BASIC programming language:

10. GOTO Earth

20. INPUT “I can has humpback whalez?” A$

30. IF A$=”no” THEN GOTO 40

40. DESTROY EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING

I’m pretty sure this is not optimal design.

Holodecks

In fact brilliantly designed (except for the fact that it’s a little too easy to override the safety protocols, and, you know, die), but none of the movies ever addresses what anyone who’s ever thought seriously about holodecks knows: Given that it’s hard enough to get some MMORPG players today to take care of their basic bodily needs with Cheetos and moist towelettes, what’s keeping the entire population of the Federation from queuing up the “Roman orgy” recreation, stepping into a holodeck, and never ever coming out again? If you say “they have to eat,” allow me to introduce you to the magic of the food replicator.

Given the technology of the holodeck, plus the replicators, and how posh life on Earth in Star Trek’s future is inevitably pictured, I’ve always assumed that anybody who volunteered for a hazardous five year exploration mission in deep space has to be a little nuts. Or perhaps it’s the lack of holodecks on the original Enterprise that helps to explain Capt. Kirk’s licentiousness whenever he encountered shapely female alien life forms on distant worlds. (A weekly occurrence, by the time of the third season.)

Since no pine-shaped air fresheners are ever shown hanging in the Enterprise’s corridors, this is probably also standard issue gear in the Federation to help mask the interstellar funk that must also accompany any spaceship on such a lengthy mission.

(H/T: Moe Lane.)

Related: “To Boldy Wear What No Dog Wants to Wear.” (Hat tip, the captain of the U.S.S. Constitution.)

“Twitter is 40% Pointless Babble, According to Science.”

For our tele-learning class on Twitter 101, click here.

The latest edition of Pajamas’ weekly show on Sirius-XM is now online:

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a snapshot of Washington — and beyond:

• Steve on the cancellation of the F-22 Raptor program.
• James Lileks on Apple’s surprising profitability.
• From this week’s three hour special on PJTV.com, PJTV co-hosts Bill Whittle, Joe Hicks, and Sonia Schmidt discuss President Obama’s health care reform initiatives.
• Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com interviews Republican Whip Eric Cantor, and Congressman and MD Tom Price on health care reform.
• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon interviews Rep. Roy Blunt on health care reform.
• Novelist, screenwriter and Pajamas Express blogger Andrew Klavan calls for greater tolerance for gay rights — or as he satirically titled his video at PJTV, “Eek! Gay People!”
• Produced by your humble narrator. 
  

Click here to listen!

Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv’s daily B-Cast show join me for the newest edition of Silicon Graffiti. After a brief flashback to a period when television really was a Brave New World, we’ll look at the future of Internet television:

• What the legacy media thinks of their successors in new media.
• How it’s supplanting the coverage of stories that old media considers samizdat (see also: the Tea Parties on April 15 and the July 4th weekend).
• How new and old media will eventually converge.
• And more!

The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

Read the whole thing, as they say in new media.

(Bumped to top.)

“The Complete Guide To Microsoft’s Office 2010” notes Microsoft’s “three screens strategy”, which is the ability for products “to synchronize across the phone, browser, and desktop”, according to Tech Crunch.

(Via Jon Henke on Twitter.)

Mike Sargent of Newsbusters spots “MSNBC’s David Shuster blaming Ruport Murdoch “for Perceived Slight of MSNBC by DirecTV”:

Ah, Twitter.

The fast-moving microblogging technology has become a household name.  It is the technology that aided the recent Iranian uprising, that gave the global supporters of freedom and justice a way to communicate with the people on the ground in Iran – those poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Like much of the Internet, it is also sometimes a hive-mind of absurdity.

Case in point: MSNBC’s David Shuster.  At approximately 4 p.m., July 7, Shuster graced the Twitterverse with this nugget:

By the way, for all of you watching on DirectTV and wondering why MSNBC is not in HD, ask mr. Murdoch/newscorps, the owner of DirectTV.Ah yes, the wonderful figurehead of evil corporate moneymongers – the poster-child for all that is wrong (right?) with capitalism, Rupert Murdoch.  Surely the mighty Murdoch has decreed that MSNBC be broadcast only in low-resolution on his company’s satellites.

This is the stuff on which conspiracy theorists thrive.  The only problem is, neither Murdoch nor News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) owns DirecTV.  That company was bought out by a subsidiary of the Liberty Media conglomerate, which gained a controlling share of DirecTV over a period of time between late 2006 and May 9 of this year.

It’s not as if this news was difficult to find. NewsCorp’s Web site confirms it and major media outlets such as the New York Times, Reuters and USA Today have covered it.  Even a local paper in Denver, Colorado, covered the sale of NewsCorp’s stake in DirecTV.

I blame Sarah Palin.

The weekend prior to my recent trip to Alaska, I had planned to purchase a Flip Mino HD or Creative Lab Vado HD  after reading the review of the two tiny video cameras by Skye at her Midnight Blue Weblog. However, since Best Buy was out of both cameras, but had a Sony MHS-PM1 “Webbie” in stock, I figured what the heck.

About the size of a pack of cigarettes (to borrow a common measuring term now apparently verboten) for the most part, the Webbie is certainly intuitive enough; rotating its tiny lens up from its protective cover turns the camera on, and the buttons below the monitor screen marked PHOTO AND MOVIE are certainly intuitive enough.

But there are several aspects of the camera that are less than intuitive. Clicking the movie button once lights up a small recreation of a typical video camera’s tally light, to let you know the camera’s recording. But then clicking it again generates a note that says “RECORDING”. It’s the camera’s way of letting you know it’s recording the just captured to the unit’s Memory Stick card, but it takes a couple of tries to figure out just when the unit is actually, you know, recording. (Also, you’ll need to purchase the Memory Stick card separately, which bumps the total price of the unit up slightly, as the Webbie’s onboard 12MB is pretty useless except for recording a handful of still shots.)

Right out of the box, the Webbie’s default mode is 720P, which is perfect for uploading videos to YouTube’s recently adopted widescreen format. The above video, documenting my train ride from Anchorage (where my plane got in) to Seward (where we picked up our cruise ship) was shot in the Webbie’s 720P format; mainly because I wasn’t sure how to switch the Webbie into 1080p without first flipping through the Webbie’s instruction manual. The button on the right hand side of the camera marked MENU brings up some commands, but the button to its right, which also doubles as the button to delete unwanted shots is what changes video modes. (VGA is also available as an option, for those who prefer standard def.)

As you can see by the above video, the picture quality is pretty darn good for such a tiny camera. But perhaps the most frustrating feature on the Webbie is the lack of a smooth zoom control. Obviously, because of its tiny lens, the unit uses electronics to generate its zoomed images, rather than adjusting the actual lens itself, a money and space-saving feature common on lots of low-end consumer camcorders.

But most camcorders have a fluid zoom effect. In contrast, the Webbie ratchets between positions in its zoom; you’ll want to compose your shots first, then hit record, or be prepared to discard the material shot while the camera zooms, and fluidly focusing on an object then zooming back (see Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon for this technique repeatedly used as a leitmotif) is impossible.

While the unit does have a tripod mount, it lacks a seperate microphone input, so you’ll be relying on the Webbie’s built-in mic, which may be fine for some occassions, and very frustrating for others.

But then, that’s the Webbie in a nutshell, isn’t it? Filling the gap between a cellphone camera and a decent consumer camcorder, the Webbie is great for quick and dirty video blogging, as a handy second camera for shooting B-roll footage, and certainly for home movies. But with a few additions and modifications, it could have been a much more useful little tool.

More on the Webbie from C/Net, which also includes a video of the unit in action:

With the latest Terminator movie in theaters this weekend, don’t miss this PJTV segment hosted by Bill Whittle and featuring an interview with P.W. Singer, author of Wired For War, on the current state, and the near future of robots (and the men who control them) on real-life battlefields.

As James Lileks wrote a few years ago when he broke down the subtext and leitmotifs of the score for Star Trek’s “Doomsday Machine” episode, “I think this will be the stupidest, most geeked-out thing I’ve ever written. I think I need an intervention: dude, it was one cheesy episode of one cheesy show. Give it up.”

Similarly, having doped out how to do a decent transporter effect for the end of last week’s edition of Silicon Graffiti, I figured I’d write up a how-to article, which is over at Blogcritics. If you’ve ever wondered how do beam yourself into or out of your own video…well, now’s your chance.

K’plah!

Newsbusters: “British Politico Urges Video Game Manufacturers to Include Message about Global Warming“–because (a) so few are aware of the “crisis” already and because (b) video gamers just love having their products suddenly politicized:

In Britain, Lord Puttnam, the founding chairman of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and a former chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Climate Change Bill issued a statement ahead of his speech slated for the end of this month at the Terra future conference, urging video games to be used to spread the message about video games.

“Serious games based upon real-life geography should be vital tools in our fight against climate change,” said Lord Puttnam in a statement. “Educating people about the impact of prolonged changes to our climate in an accessible way is the best catalyst for action I know.”

So will we be referring to Duke Hybrid now? Will Laura Croft stop in the middle of a chase to explain the dangers of excessive C02 consumption?

The new green games are best played in a darkened room of course, for maximum impact. Preferably with the TV or computer off, to reduce carbon footprint even further.

Jesse Newhart writes that for a few hours today, apparently all Google search results displayed the dreaded “This site may harm your computer” message:

As I reported earlier while the news was breaking, at 9:27am eastern, all Google search results appended This site may harm your computer to the top of the listing. The topic was wildly speculated on Twitter as everyone tried to decipher the problem.

At first it was reported that perhaps outsourced malware partner, the non-profit www.stopbadware.org was responsible. Stopbadware.org quickly rectified the confusion with a blog post declaring that it was in fact Google that caused their site to crash as millions of people followed the “This site may harm your computer” links back to their site.

It turns out it was human error at Google, when a likely now fired technitian, entered the ‘/’ character into the database as a component of all URLs that contain malware. Of course there is a ‘/’ in EVERY URL ON THE WEB!!! Matt Cutts describes the problem thusly on The Official Google Blog:

Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.

By quickly they meant the problem only lasted one hour. For one hour EVERY PAGE ON THE INTERNET was reported as Malware.

The ‘/’ is truly mightier than the sword.

What does this mean for Google search? I don’t know, but for me it brings Google’s search dominance and lack of any real competition into acute focus.

Indeed–for a time it seemed that Google only added the “This site may harm your computer” tag to conservative Websites. Newhart notes how easy it is for a Google tech to add it to every site’s listing.