A new recommendations page has been at ed Recommendations -> Free and Open Source Software this page contains best of breed software recommended my Informians for Informians. The About Page has also been updated to better explain the site mission and invite guest authors to submit stories.

Feedback about the site is greatly appreciated and can be sent to my e-mail address found on the about page.

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A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been added to the new user registration page so I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss them.

Alan Turing is one of my favorite mathematicians he was an extremely interesting human (although he firmly believed he was a robot) and I would recommend A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin to anyone even remotely interested in the history of computers.

To boil it all down…

In Turing’s work with artificial intelligence he forsaw a time when it would be necessary to tell computers apart from humans. He predicted a world where a machine that could tell human from robots would be important. That world was closer then he thought. Monitoring the packets that are hitting a firewall we see a great deal of packets generated by automatic systems, zombies, and port scanners. Reality is we deal the automated systems designed to imitate humans every day, referred to further as bots. It is the job of the people who control these bots to procure assets for use in various criminal enterprise. I hope to get more in-depth in a future botnet article. So any publicly accessible system (such as a website) that allows for input from the user could potentially be used by bots unless we filter them out in some way…

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Hummer HX concept car (left) and Halo’s Warthog (right).

It doesn’t take much of a leap to see the similarities between the two vehicles. One being a serious contender for a future Hummer design and the other the most popular vehicle in one of the most popular video game series. This is just another clear sign that the popular world is crossing paths more often with the nerd world. Or that more nerds are making enough money to no longer be ignored by market annalists. Ether way its a great time to be a geek.

According to GM design director Carl Zipfel, the HX wasn’t modeled on Halo’s Warthog but on “modern-day ATVs” — even though he freely admits that both he and several of the vehicle’s designers play Halo.

I’m not a big Mac/Apple fan (I’m a Big Mac fan but thats a different story) and avid PC builder/owner. Watching the Macworld Steve Jobs’ keynote from the crunchgear blog Mr. Job’s vindicated my opinion with the announcement of AppleTV Take 2 the new version of last years abysmal AppleTV. The new AppleTV is a stand alone no computer require unit that allows you to watch videos, rent movies/shows, and watch YouTube on your TV. No new ground broken here thats for sure, these are all things we Informian’s have been doing for a long time.

Again I’m not an Apple fan but before the Ipod mp3 was not a household word. This digital distribution trend wont come to the people without some help from user friendly companies like Vudu, Netflix and Apple.

But what about the pirates? Should I be worried that with standardization of digital media comes the gallows for my eye patch wearing brothern? Fear not, the music industry has all but came to its senses that digital rights management is not only not what people want but bad business. Amazon, Wal-Mart and even part of Itunes have went for raw mp3 with no rights management at all. The reason this is going to be a loosing battle is simple and its what’s called the “analog hole” (be careful when searching for that at work). The simple fact is our eyes see video and our eyes hear sound the same way cameras and microphones record it. So in order for us to use the media as humans it has to be in a format that is record able by hardware we already own.

In my last post about the HD DVD vs. Blue Ray There Are No True Winners In This Format War [HD DVD vs. Blue-Ray] I didn’t mention much about my personal plan. Funny since it is likely of particular interest to those who read this blog. I will be (and have been) skipping this Blue-Ray vs. HD DVD and going right for digital download.

I’m not the only one to notice that no media at all is the next gen format. Netflix has been slowly easing us into digital downloads culminating in their unlimited movie downloads on most packages and a set top digital download box. Hulu (NBC and Fox) allows people to watch nearly commercial free (while in beta, expect commercials to increase when it is finished) first run TV shows from their PC.

The future of media is no media at all, its digital distribution. We have already laid the pipes to deliver this content do we really need a Read Only Memory of some type? Do we really need to keep poking smaller holes in foil? Hard disks are getting cheaper all the time cheap enough to use as a place to stash your collection. Even cheap enough to keep it secure from data loss with a RAID (most new motherboards support hardware RAID right out of the box huge raid diagram right).

Much more how I am currently implementing this after the fold.

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