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Nothing says 'Thanks for dying for my sins" like easter bunnies, eggs & candy. lol.

thatmommy — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:55:53 +0000

So, I've been contemplating this whole easter thing and am curious how you wiew this holyday. or holiday, if it's not holy to you. What exactly does this day mean to you?

I've always just taught my kids that the easter bunny ~along with santa & the tooth fairy~ is kinda like Barney. Pretend. Something fun and nonsensical (I know. But you KNOW how I feel about Encarta. And I really *wasn't sure if it was a word) It's something we do to humor grandma & grandpa. But they know the TRUTH. ANd they have no problem telling it to anyone. Whether you ask or not. SOmetimes this is not such a good thing. Like when it makes thier friends cry. And then causes angry parents to call me at night. That's not so fun.

Parent: How could you do that to your child?
Me:How could I do what? *Not lie to them?

I don't care if you do the 'santa/easter bunny thing. I don't tell my kids you're evil incarnate because of it. But WHY would you call and ask me that question? I don't call you and ask why you tell your children a big bunny comes in the middle of the night laying eggs and leaving easter baskets. I'm sorry my child made yours cry and ask if you were lying. We had a talk about it. Really. But he was smarter than me & I had no clue how to come back from his reply.

Me: You know... I know what we believe, but everyone else doesn't believe that. ANd you made your friends cry. So maybe we shouldn't say anything to them about it. Thier parents want to tell them something else. And we should respect that.

Thing 1: I thought the bible tells us to tell the truth about Jesus.

Me: It does.

Thing 1: Then why do you want me to lie to my friends? You always tell me not to lie.

Me, *desperately trying to reason with this boy so I don't have to be screamed at by any more parents: I don't want you to lie. I just don't want you to say anything about it.

Thing 6: That's still NOT telling the truth about Jesus.

There was nothing else I could say. I was out wisdom'ed by a (then) 7 yr old.

So you see, it's not my fault. He knows how to read. And he has good taste in books. And great life application skills. WOW homeschooling really does pay off! Who'dda thunk it? (I can't help it. There is just something about that word. I know. It's like a sickness or something.)

All of that to say Have a happy 'He's alive' day. Or happy EasterBunny day. Or whatever you are celebrating tomorrow:)

Rebecca said...: I've been debating this bunny business also. My oldest is two so he hasn't asked yet and we haven't brought it up. Except last year at an egg hunt at a park he was frightened to take a photo with said bunny. I like the pretending idea, still doing the egg hunts (and stuffing stockings) without that being the focus of the holiday. And it looks like thing 1 got ya there. I'd say its compliments to your parenting. And in the long run I think you'd rather remember phone calls from parents knowing your child wasn't afraid to share his faith.; Sunday, April 8, 2007 8:54:00 AM EDT
Heather said...: lol Becca. How can I argue with such a good point?; Monday, April 9, 2007 8:21:00 PM EDT

The Economics of Spam

samvaknin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:16:56 +0000

Tennessee resident K. C. "Khan" Smith owes the internet service provider EarthLink $24 million. According to the CNN, in August 2001 he was slapped with a lawsuit accusing him of violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and numerous other state laws. On July 19, 2002 - having failed to appear in court - the judge ruled against him. Mr. Smith is a spammer.

Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam applications warned that close to 5 million spam "attacks" or "bursts" occurred in June 2002 and that spam has mushroomed 450 percent since June 2001. This pace continued unabated well into the beginning of 2004 when the introduction of spam filters began to take effect. PC World concurs.

Between one half and three quarters of all e-mail messages are spam or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) - unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some spammers hack into unsecured servers - mainly in China and Korea - to relay their missives anonymously.

Starting in 2003, malicious hackers began using spam to install malware - such as viruses, adware, spyware, and Trojans - on the unprotected personal computers of less savvy users. They thus transform these computers into "zombies", organize them into spam-spewing "bots" (networks), and sell access to them to criminals on penumbral boards and forums all over the Net.

Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots - specialized computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages sent.

As spam recipients become more inured, ISPs less tolerant, and both more litigious - spammers multiply their efforts in order to maintain the same response rate. Spam works. It is not universally unwanted - which makes it tricky to outlaw. It elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow ups, depending on the message. Many messages now include HTML, JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble (or actually contain) viruses and Trojans.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted in 2001 that the number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user will double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs the number at $4.8 billion in 2003.

More than 2.3-5 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages in 2002. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages this year (2005). An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents.

PC World quotes the European Union as pegging the bandwidth costs of spam worldwide in 2002 at $8-10 billion annually. Other damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost of Internet access.

Inevitably, the spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled "Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006", anti-spam revenues were projected to exceed $88 million in 2002 - and more than double by 2006. List blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 25, 2002 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture capital.

ISPs are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims - by expunging the accounts of spammers. But the latter simply switch ISPs or sign on with free services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by the day as the costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.

The use of e-mail and broadband connections by the general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of technologically-savvy operators have joined the market in the last five years, as the dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve Linford of the UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam emanates from c. 80 large operators.

Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISPs and portals are poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"As I first described in my book 'The Road Ahead' in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel the payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time."

Subscribers may not be appreciative of the joint ventures between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant ISPs, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with spammers. ISPs rely on the data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business environment.

The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses to ban the sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink" (the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, the implicated ISPs blame the whole affair on rogue employees.

PC World begs to differ:

"Ronnie Scelson, a self-described spammer who signed such a contract with PSInet, (says) that backbone providers are more than happy to do business with bulk e-mailers. 'I've signed up with the biggest 50 carriers two or three times', says Scelson ... The Louisiana-based spammer claims to send 84 million commercial e-mail messages a day over his three 45-megabit-per-second DS3 circuits. 'If you were getting $40,000 a month for each circuit', Scelson asks, 'would you want to shut me down?'"

The line between permission-based or "opt-in" e-mail marketing and spam is getting thinner by the day. Some list resellers guarantee the consensual nature of their wares. According to the Direct Marketing Association's guidelines, quoted by PC World, not responding to an unsolicited e-mail amounts to "opting-in" - a marketing strategy known as "opting out". Most experts, though, strongly urge spam victims not to respond to spammers, lest their e-mail address is confirmed.

But spam is crossing technological boundaries. Japan has just legislated against wireless SMS spam targeted at hapless mobile phone users. Many states in the USA as well as the European parliament have followed suit. Ideas regarding a "do not spam" list akin to the "do not call" list in telemarketing have been floated. Mobile phone users will place their phone numbers on the list to avoid receiving UCE (spam). Email subscribers enjoy the benefits of a similar list under the CAN-Spam Act of 2003.

Expensive and slow connections make mobile phone spam and spim (instant messaging spam) particularly resented. Still, according to Britain's Mobile Channel, a mobile advertising company quoted by "The Economist", SMS advertising - a novelty - attracts a 10-20 percent response rate - compared to direct mail's 1-3 percent.

Net identification systems - like Microsoft's Passport and the one proposed by Liberty Alliance - will make it even easier for marketers to target prospects.

The reaction to spam can be described only as mass hysteria. Reporting someone as a spammer - even when he is not - has become a favorite pastime of vengeful, self-appointed, vigilante "cyber-cops". Perfectly legitimate, opt-in, email marketing businesses and discussion forums often find themselves in one or more black lists - their reputation and business ruined.

In January 2002, CMGI-owned Yesmail was awarded a temporary restraining order against MAPS - Mail Abuse Prevention System - forbidding it to place the reputable e-mail marketer on its Real-time Blackhole list. The case was settled out of court.

Harris Interactive, a large online opinion polling company, sued not only MAPS, but ISPs who blocked its email messages when it found itself included in MAPS' Blackhole. Their CEO accused one of their competitors for the allegations that led to Harris' inclusion in the list.

Coupled with other pernicious phenomena - such as viruses, Trojans, and spyware - the very foundation of the Internet as a fun, relatively safe, mode of communication and data acquisition is at stake.

Spammers, it emerges, have their own organizations. NOIC - the National Organization of Internet Commerce threatened to post to its Web site the e-mail addresses of millions of AOL members. AOL has aggressive anti-spamming policies. "AOL is blocking bulk email because it wants the advertising revenues for itself (by selling pop-up ads)" the president of NOIC, Damien Melle, complained to CNET.

Spam is a classic "free rider" problem. For any given individual, the cost of blocking a spammer far outweighs the benefits. It is cheaper and easier to hit the "delete" key. Individuals, therefore, prefer to let others do the job and enjoy the outcome - the public good of a spam-free Internet. They cannot be left out of the benefits of such an aftermath - public goods are, by definition, "non-excludable". Nor is a public good diminished by a growing number of "non-rival" users.

Such a situation resembles a market failure and requires government intervention through legislation and enforcement. The FTC - the US Federal Trade Commission - has taken legal action against more than 100 spammers for promoting scams and fraudulent goods and services.

"Project Mailbox" is an anti-spam collaboration between American law enforcement agencies and the private sector. Non government organizations have entered the fray, as have lobbying groups, such as CAUCE - the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

But, a few recent anti-spam and anti-spyware Acts notwithstanding, Congress is curiously reluctant to enact stringent laws against spam. Reasons cited are free speech, limits on state powers to regulate commerce, avoiding unfair restrictions on trade, and the interests of small business. The courts equivocate as well. In some cases - e.g., Missouri vs. American Blast Fax - US courts found "that the provision prohibiting the sending of unsolicited advertisements is unconstitutional".

According to Spamlaws.com, the 107th Congress, for instance, discussed these laws but never enacted them:

Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001 (H.R. 95), Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act (H.R. 113), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 718), Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 (H.R. 1017), Who Is E-Mailing Our Kids Act (H.R. 1846), Protect Children From E-Mail Smut Act of 2001 (H.R. 2472), Netizens Protection Act of 2001 (H.R. 3146), "CAN SPAM" Act of 2001 (S. 630).

Anti-spam laws fared no better in the 106th Congress. Some of the states have picked up the slack. Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The situation is no better across the pond. The European parliament decided in 2001 to allow each member country to enact its own spam laws, thus avoiding a continent-wide directive and directly confronting the communications ministers of the union. Paradoxically, it also decided, in March 2002, to restrict SMS spam. Confusion clearly reigns. Finally, in May 2002, it adopted strong anti-spam provisions as part of a Directive on Data Protection.

Responding to this unfavorable legal environment, spam is relocating to developing countries, such as Malaysia, Nepal, and Nigeria. In a May 2005 report, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) warned that these countries lack the technical know-how and financial resources (let alone the will) to combat spam. Their users, anyhow deprived of bandwidth, endure, as a result, a less reliable service and an intermittent access to the Internet;

"Spam is a much more serious issue in developing countries...as it is a heavy drain on resources that are scarcer and costlier in developing countries than elsewhere" - writes the report's author, Suresh Ramasubramanian, an OECD advisor and postmaster for Outblaze.com.

ISPs, spam monitoring services, and governments in the rich industrialized world react by placing entire countries - such as Macedonia and Costa Rica - on black lists and, thus denying access to their users en bloc.

International collaboration against the looming destruction of the Internet by crime organizations is budding. The FTC had just announced that it will work with its counterparts abroad to cut zombie computers off the network. A welcome step - but about three years late. Spammers the world over are still six steps ahead and are having the upper hand.

Copyright Notice

This material is copyrighted. Free, unrestricted use is allowed on a non commercial basis.
The author's name and a link to this Website must be incorporated in any reproduction of the material for any use and by any means.

The Internet Cycle

The Internet - A Medium or a Message?

The Solow Paradox

The Internet in Countries in Transition

The Revolt of the Poor - Intellectual Property Rights

How to Write a Business Plan

Decision Support Systems

The Demise of the Dinosaur PTTs

The Professions of the Future

Knowledge and Power

Grammar Quiz

teachthemasses — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:48:02 +0000

What you really need on a Saturday morning- a grammar quiz.

Are You Grammatically Incorrect?

Perplexed by possessives? Tongue-tied by tenses? Hornswoggled by whose and who's? Who came up with the rules of English anyway? Even the most educated among us are occasionally stumped by a grammatical puzzler. Here's a chance to show your old English teacher that you learned a thing or two about grammar and usage.

_______ two ways to get there from here--my way and the wrong way.

There's

They're

There are

Having to share a room with my sister has definitely _______ my ability to concentrate.

affected

effected

infected

The professor gave the most difficult problems to Andrea and _______.

myself

After working on my car all evening, I finally _______ down to sleep at around midnight.

laid

lied

lay

He tells everyone at school that I'm his girlfriend, _______ of the fact that he never calls me.

irregardless

regardless

regardful

I feel _______ about revealing your imprecise use of the English language.

bad

awfully

badly

He acts as if he _______ the coolest guy in school.

was

were

I can't get the VCR to record; _______ instructions are too complicated.

its

it's

My English teacher seems convinced that _______ students will never use proper grammar.

me and the other

I _______ made a perfect score, if there hadn't been so many trick questions.

could of

could've

coulda

Answers will follow...............soon.

But if you can't wait - http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/quiz/quiz.aspx?quizid=51

Insomnia!: Gadget Anyar nan Canggih Dari Nintendo Untuk Yang Sulit Tidur

papario — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:31:14 +0000

Electronic Dreams

Tokyo, 31 Desember 2012

Di pergantian malam tahun baru 2012, Nintendo merayakan sekaligus dengan melaunch sebuah produk elektronik nan canggih yang diberi nama : Insomnia!.

Insomnia adalah sebuah gadget bagi penderita Insomnia. Berbentuk seperti 2 buah piring yang saling menutup. Tersedia dalam warna hitam, namun dapat diganti warna ‘skin’-nya sesuai selera. Bertenaga listrik, memiliki baterai recharge yang awet selama 12 jam, dan baterai cadangan.

Bagaimana Insomnia! Dapat menjadi sahabat bagi penderita Insomnia ?. Disinilah kelebihan produk baru yang belum ada tandingannya ini. Setelah dihidupkan, bagian atas Insomnia akan mengeluarkan hologram berwarna indah seorang wanita cantik berukuran tinggi 1,5 meter bernama ‘Princess’ yang akan memandu anda untuk memilih satu dari 2 menu. Menu pertama, anda memilih untuk tidak tidur dan pilihan kedua anda memilih untuk akan tidur.

Apabila anda memilih pilihan pertama, maka anda hanya akan diajak ngobrol secara interaktif oleh pemandu cantik ini seputar apa saja yang bisa anda obrolkan. Uniknya, pengetahuan pemandu cukup luas. Karena semua pengetahuan langsung diambil dari beberapa site seperti wikipedia, Encarta dan Ensiklopedia Britannica. Bahkan anda dapat menambahkan link pengetahuan Princess dari website lain, misalnya website Gossip, website televisi lokal, radio lokal bahkan blog seseorang. Sehingga info dan gosip teranyar dapat anda tanyakan langsung.

Princess juga dapat diajak bernyanyi bersama. Database lagu juga diambil dari beberapa sumber di Internet. Suara Princess sangat merdu. Princess juga dapat mengajarkan anda beberapa hal. Seperti belajar alat musik, belajar berbagai bahasa dunia, belajar beladiri. Bila anda sudah pegal pegal dan masih belum bisa tidur, Princess dapat mengajarkan anda exercise (olahraga) ringan. Pokoknya, Princess akan menemani malam tidak tidur anda sampai pagi.

Pilihan kedua, adalah pilihan dimana anda akan dilatih untuk dapat segera tidur dengan berbagai cara. Mulai dari seni pernafasan, seni taichi, yoga bahkan hipnotis diri. Pada percobaan di lab Nintendo, 95% perderita insomnia berhasil ‘ditidurkan’ oleh insomnia!.

Fitur lain yang unik, anda dapat memilih untuk mengganti pemandu anda. Selain Princess, ada Twikee, si anjing putih berbahasa manusia, ada Lunar, mahluk planet hijau, Ada Roy Chan, si pemuda tampan, ada Jimmy, bocah laki laki, Anita bocah perempuan, Gramma, si nenek lincah, dan Granpa, si kakek genit. Pilihan lain yang dapat anda download dari website Nintendo yang tersedia sekarang ini adalah pemandu Batman dan si cantik Kyoko.

Nintendo sedang mempersiapkan opsi pemandu lokal. Untuk Indonesia terpilih pemandu Twokool dan pemandu Teeke. Harga jual adalah US$. 5.000,-.

(ED)

Promise less, prepare for worst

homepaddock — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:18:22 +0000

SOMETIMES the best way to make voters forget their ills - real and imagined - is to promise them less and prepare them for the worst case.

If politicians followed the rule of the possible when talking to the public, they would be better able to sell reforms. Perhaps they could even keep the electorate on side in the event of recession.

This advice come from George Megalogenis, senior writer for The Australian and is applicable this side of the Tasman too.

Remember the shock of Paul Keating’s “recession we had to have” press conference in November 1990 came not from the news itself, but from the denial of reality that preceded it. The then treasurer had repeatedly said that there would be no recession.

Imagine, for a moment, that Australia’s luck finally runs out, and a recession that may be engulfing the US and Britain reaches our shores by the end of the year, or early in2009...

Obviously, Kevin Rudd won’t want to talk the local economy down when the chances of recession seem low. But how would he go about changing the national conversation if things suddenly went pear-shaped? The Prime Minister would, of course, blame the previous Coalition government, and the rest of the world, in that political order.

Yet the lesson of recessions past is that governments lose credibility long beforehand, by overselling their ability to run the economy. They claim credit for the positive numbers, then look for scapegoats when the national accounts throw up a couple of quarters of negative growth.

It is a little difficult to remain credible when you claim the credit for economic growth which largely happens in spite of your government then deny responsibility for a downturn which is happening, at least in part, because of your policies.

The truth, if any leader were prepared to admit it, is the role of government is limited when the economy is humming. Stay out of the way of the market, take the opportunity to secure reform because change is easier to implement in good times, and keep a lid on expectations. The last bit is always the hardest, because in good times leaders err on the side of the bribe.

That brings to mind interest free student loans and a variety of other baubles we tax payers are funding.

It is only in recession that governments are really called on to manage the economy. They provide the safety net for those who lose their jobs and the public investments to prop up demand.

Sadly, we are cursed with politicians who spruik their expertise when it is not required, and who dodge their responsibilities when systems and markets fail.

Who does that remind me of?

p.s. I had to look up Spruik so in case you don't know what it means either here's a couple of definitions:

From Encarta - to promote goods services or a cause by addressing people in a public place;

And from Wordsmith - to make an elaborate speech, especially to attract customers.

The Revolt of the Poor - The Demise of Intellectual Property?

samvaknin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:55:18 +0000

In 1997, I published a book of short stories in Israel. The publishing house belongs to Israel's leading (and exceedingly wealthy) newspaper. I signed a contract which stated that I am entitled to receive 8% of the income from the sales of the book after commissions payable to distributors, shops, etc. A few months later, I won the coveted Prize of the Ministry of Education (for short prose). The prize money (a few thousand euros) was snatched by the publishing house on the legal grounds that all the money generated by the book belongs to them because they own the copyright.

In the mythology generated by capitalism to pacify the masses, the myth of intellectual property stands out. It goes like this: if the rights to intellectual property were not defined and enforced, commercial entrepreneurs would not have taken on the risks associated with publishing books, recording records, and preparing multimedia products. As a result, creative people will have suffered because they will have found no way to make their works accessible to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy, goes the refrain.

But this is factually untrue. In the USA there is a very limited group of authors who actually live by their pen. Only select musicians eke out a living from their noisy vocation (most of them rock stars who own their labels - George Michael had to fight Sony to do just that) and very few actors come close to deriving subsistence level income from their profession. All these can no longer be thought of as mostly creative people. Forced to defend their intellectual property rights and the interests of Big Money, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at least as much as they are artists.

Economically and rationally, we should expect that the costlier a work of art is to produce and the narrower its market - the more emphasized its intellectual property rights.

Consider a publishing house.

A book which costs 20,000 euros to produce with a potential audience of 1000 purchasers (certain academic texts are like this) - would have to be priced at a a minimum of 50 euros to recoup only the direct costs. If illegally copied (thereby shrinking the potential market as some people will prefer to buy the cheaper illegal copies) - its price would have to go up prohibitively to recoup costs, thus driving out potential buyers. The story is different if a book costs 5,000 euros to produce and is priced at 10 euros a copy with a potential readership of 1,000,000 readers. Piracy (illegal copying) should in this case be more readily tolerated as a marginal phenomenon.

This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. The less the cost of production (brought down by digital technologies) - the fiercer the battle against piracy. The bigger the market - the more pressure is applied to clamp down on samizdat entrepreneurs.

Governments, from China to Macedonia, are introducing intellectual property laws (under pressure from rich world countries) and enforcing them belatedly. But where one factory is closed on shore (as has been the case in mainland China) - two sprout off shore (as is the case in Hong Kong and in Bulgaria).

But this defies logic: the market today is global, the costs of production are lower (with the exception of the music and film industries), the marketing channels more numerous (half of the income of movie studios emanates from video cassette sales), the speedy recouping of the investment virtually guaranteed. Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which the population would anyhow not have paid the legal price. The illegal product is inferior to the legal copy (it comes with no literature, warranties or support). So why should the big manufacturers, publishing houses, record companies, software companies and fashion houses worry?

The answer lurks in history. Intellectual property is a relatively new notion. In the near past, no one considered knowledge or the fruits of creativity (art, design) as "patentable", or as someone's "property". The artist was but a mere channel through which divine grace flowed. Texts, discoveries, inventions, works of art and music, designs - all belonged to the community and could be replicated freely. True, the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarely financially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce their works of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born. The more massive the market, the more sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger the financial stakes - the larger loomed the issue of intellectual property. It spread from machinery to designs, processes, books, newspapers, any printed matter, works of art and music, films (which, at their beginning were not considered art), software, software embedded in hardware, processes, business methods, and even unto genetic material.

Intellectual property rights - despite their noble title - are less about the intellect and more about property. This is Big Money: the markets in intellectual property outweigh the total industrial production in the world. The aim is to secure a monopoly on a specific work. This is an especially grave matter in academic publishing where small- circulation magazines do not allow their content to be quoted or published even for non-commercial purposes. The monopolists of knowledge and intellectual products cannot allow competition anywhere in the world - because theirs is a world market. A pirate in Skopje is in direct competition with Bill Gates. When he sells a pirated Microsoft product - he is depriving Microsoft not only of its income, but of a client (=future income), of its monopolistic status (cheap copies can be smuggled into other markets), and of its competition-deterring image (a major monopoly preserving asset). This is a threat which Microsoft cannot tolerate. Hence its efforts to eradicate piracy - successful in China and an utter failure in legally-relaxed Russia.

But what Microsoft fails to understand is that the problem lies with its pricing policy - not with the pirates. When faced with a global marketplace, a company can adopt one of two policies: either to adjust the price of its products to a world average of purchasing power - or to use discretionary differential pricing (as pharmaceutical companies were forced to do in Brazil and South Africa). A Macedonian with an average monthly income of 160 USD clearly cannot afford to buy the Encyclopaedia Encarta Deluxe. In America, 50 USD is the income generated in 4 hours of an average job. In Macedonian terms, therefore, the Encarta is 20 times more expensive. Either the price should be lowered in the Macedonian market - or an average world price should be fixed which will reflect an average global purchasing power.

Something must be done about it not only from the economic point of view. Intellectual products are very price sensitive and highly elastic. Lower prices will be more than compensated for by a much higher sales volume. There is no other way to explain the pirate industries: evidently, at the right price a lot of people are willing to buy these products. High prices are an implicit trade-off favouring small, elite, select, rich world clientele. This raises a moral issue: are the children of Macedonia less worthy of education and access to the latest in human knowledge and creation?

Two developments threaten the future of intellectual property rights. One is the Internet. Academics, fed up with the monopolistic practices of professional publications - already publish on the web in big numbers. I published a few book on the Internet and they can be freely downloaded by anyone who has a computer or a modem. The full text of electronic magazines, trade journals, billboards, professional publications, and thousands of books is available online. Hackers even made sites available from which it is possible to download whole software and multimedia products. It is very easy and cheap to publish on the Internet, the barriers to entry are virtually nil. Web pages are hosted free of charge, and authoring and publishing software tools are incorporated in most word processors and browser applications. As the Internet acquires more impressive sound and video capabilities it will proceed to threaten the monopoly of the record companies, the movie studios and so on.

The second development is also technological. The oft-vindicated Moore's law predicts the doubling of computer memory capacity every 18 months. But memory is only one aspect of computing power. Another is the rapid simultaneous advance on all technological fronts. Miniaturization and concurrent empowerment by software tools have made it possible for individuals to emulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A single person, sitting at home with 5000 USD worth of equipment can fully compete with the best products of the best printing houses anywhere. CD-ROMs can be written on, stamped and copied in house. A complete music studio with the latest in digital technology has been condensed to the dimensions of a single chip. This will lead to personal publishing, personal music recording, and the to the digitization of plastic art. But this is only one side of the story.

The relative advantage of the intellectual property corporation does not consist exclusively in its technological prowess. Rather it lies in its vast pool of capital, its marketing clout, market positioning, sales organization, and distribution network.

Nowadays, anyone can print a visually impressive book, using the above-mentioned cheap equipment. But in an age of information glut, it is the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution, and the sales that determine the economic outcome.

This advantage, however, is also being eroded.

First, there is a psychological shift, a reaction to the commercialization of intellect and spirit. Creative people are repelled by what they regard as an oligarchic establishment of institutionalized, lowest common denominator art and they are fighting back.

Secondly, the Internet is a huge (200 million people), truly cosmopolitan market, with its own marketing channels freely available to all. Even by default, with a minimum investment, the likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large numbers of consumers is high.

I published one book the traditional way - and another on the Internet. In 50 months, I have received 6500 written responses regarding my electronic book. Well over 500,000 people read it (my Link Exchange meter registered c. 2,000,000 impressions since November 1998). It is a textbook (in psychopathology) - and 500,000 readers is a lot for this kind of publication. I am so satisfied that I am not sure that I will ever consider a traditional publisher again. Indeed, my last book was published in the very same way.

The demise of intellectual property has lately become abundantly clear. The old intellectual property industries are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their monopolies (patents, trademarks, copyright) and their cost advantages in manufacturing and marketing.

But they are faced with three inexorable processes which are likely to render their efforts vain:

The Newspaper Packaging

Print newspapers offer package deals of cheap content subsidized by advertising. In other words, the advertisers pay for content formation and generation and the reader has no choice but be exposed to commercial messages as he or she studies the content.

This model - adopted earlier by radio and television - rules the internet now and will rule the wireless internet in the future. Content will be made available free of all pecuniary charges. The consumer will pay by providing his personal data (demographic data, consumption patterns and preferences and so on) and by being exposed to advertising. Subscription based models are bound to fail.

Thus, content creators will benefit only by sharing in the advertising cake. They will find it increasingly difficult to implement the old models of royalties paid for access or of ownership of intellectual property.

Disintermediation

A lot of ink has been spilt regarding this important trend. The removal of layers of brokering and intermediation - mainly on the manufacturing and marketing levels - is a historic development (though the continuation of a long term trend).

Consider music for instance. Streaming audio on the internet or downloadable MP3 files will render the CD obsolete. The internet also provides a venue for the marketing of niche products and reduces the barriers to entry previously imposed by the need to engage in costly marketing ("branding") campaigns and manufacturing activities.

This trend is also likely to restore the balance between artist and the commercial exploiters of his product. The very definition of "artist" will expand to include all creative people. One will seek to distinguish oneself, to "brand" oneself and to auction off one's services, ideas, products, designs, experience, etc. This is a return to pre-industrial times when artisans ruled the economic scene. Work stability will vanish and work mobility will increase in a landscape of shifting allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration and similar labour market trends.

Market Fragmentation

In a fragmented market with a myriad of mutually exclusive market niches, consumer preferences and marketing and sales channels - economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution are meaningless. Narrowcasting replaces broadcasting, mass customization replaces mass production, a network of shifting affiliations replaces the rigid owned-branch system. The decentralized, intrapreneurship-based corporation is a late response to these trends. The mega-corporation of the future is more likely to act as a collective of start-ups than as a homogeneous, uniform (and, to conspiracy theorists, sinister) juggernaut it once was.

Also Read

Contracting for Transition

The Case of the Compressed Image

The Content Downloader's Profile

The Future of Electronic Publishing

The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine

The Internet and the Library

Germany's Copyright Levy

Revolt of the Scholars

The Kidnapping of Content

The Disintermediation of Content

Pack Encarta 2008 Inglés

tzkracker1 — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:12:04 +0000

Pack de Microsoft Encarta para movil, esta en JAVA, anda en la mayoria de los moviles, contiene:

Microsoft Encarta.jar
Diccionario Encarta.jar
Calculadora Graficadora.jar

DOWNLOAD:

Pack Encarta 2008

PASS:

http://todose.wordpress.com

PD: Aun no sale la version en Español, cuando salga la posteo.

Archives : les perles d'Encarta (2)

fandenimier — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:30:03 +0000

Suite de ça. Et même justification préliminaire : je ressors les vieux dossiers. Par les soirs de pluie et/ou de solitude, il m’arrivait à une certaine époque d’errer sur l’encyclopédie Encarta pour m’esbaudir des aberrations et autres erreurs - commises de propos plus ou moins délibéré - qu’on peut y trouver. On s’amuse comme on peut, n’est-ce pas. Il s’agissait de la version 2003, si j’ai bonne mémoire.

Article "Italie".

Le discours démagogique du Pôle de la liberté lui coûte les élections de 1996.

Et ta mère ?

Article "Ndjamena".

En 1980-1981, au cours de la guerre civile qui a débuté au milieu des années soixante, Ndjamena est occupée par les forces libanaises.

T'was a long way from Beyrouth...

Article "Julius et Ethel Rosenberg".

Cependant, après l'échec des recours en grâce adressés au président Truman puis au président Eisenhower, et après le refus de la Cour suprême de se saisir du dossier, les époux Rosenberg furent exécutés le 19 juin 1953, sans que leur culpabilité ait été formellement démontrée.

Si...

Article "Scoutisme".

Enfin, les Guides et Scouts d'Europe (1963), traditionalistes, et les Guides et Scouts unitaires de France (1971) ne sont pas reconnus par l'Organisation mondiale du mouvement scout.

Rhô ben oui. J'en connais des commissaires qui doivent être contents. Sur le thème : “c'est bien la peine de passer son temps à casser les couilles de ces connards de tradis, si c'est pour se faire épingler par Encarta...”.

Article "Pie XII".

“L’anticommunisme notoire de Pie XII (suscité notamment par les persécutions antireligieuses) confère aussi une coloration politique très conservatrice à son personnage et à son pontificat, d’autant qu’il a condamné par deux fois le marxisme, en 1942, puis en 1949 (choix qui ne pouvait qu’être partisan dans un monde saisi par la guerre froide).”

En effet. D'ailleurs, on attend toujours la dénonciation de la démocratie libérale par le pape ; cette ignoble démocratie libérale, responsable des goulags de Tulsa, dans l'Oklahoma et de Fort Collins, dans le Colorado, récemment découverts. Sans parler des charniers du Massachusetts. C'est comme les films sur le maccarthysme, qui m'ont toujours ému aux larmes. Ces pauvres réalisateurs, ces malheureux écrivains, qui devaient parfois cesser d'exercer leur métier, et pour les plus durement frappés, quitter le sol américain. Qu'est-ce que j'entends au fond à droite ? Être obligé de cesser d'exercer son métier, être expulsé, c'est encore ce qu'il pouvait arriver de mieux à un opposant au régime soviétique ? Mauvais esprits.

Nieuwe Google Earth

Maarten — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:13:26 +0000

Hoe langer het internet bestaat, hoe absurder je dromen worden. How's that?
Wel, op het internet (en eigenlijk informatica in het algemeen) worden steeds meer dromen werkelijkheid. Vroeger zat ik soms urenlang op Encarta me te verbazen over hoe groot die encyclopedie wel niet was. Ik zocht trefwoorden met het gedacht "dit zal er nooooit instaan", maar het stond er wél in! Intussen omvat het internet ongeveer 34 miljoen keer Encarta '98, is er ook interactiviteit bijgekomen, weblogs, foto's bij de vleet, video, film, muziek, nog meer muziek, sociale netwerken, etc, etc.

De atlas de 56 miljard keer meer detail bevat dan de grootste atlas die ik in huis heb en bovendien 60 euro minder kost (Google Earth dus) heeft onlangs een update gekregen (m.a.w.: hij is geüpdatet, tevreden G?) waarbij je nu o.a. kunt rondvliegen in een virtueel vliegtuig. Indeed: Flight Simulator, maar dan met levensechte landschappen. Gisteren ben ik van Salzburg naar Brussel gevlogen waarbij ik onderweg een ommetje heb gemaakt langs Brugge om even over de schoorsteen van mijn eigen huis te scheren, en ik heb mijn straaljager nog aan de grond gekregen ook. Het was wel midden in een veld, maar kom.

Weer een droom in vervulling. Waar gaan we volgende nacht over dromen? Vermoedelijk iets heel onwaarschijnlijks. Voorlopig dan toch.

PS: ja, oké, die flight simulator is niet zó baanbrekend, maar het is goed af en toe eens stil te staan en achterom te kijken naar pakweg 2001. Dat is voor mij de tijd van het afstuderen, van Muse met Newborn en van de aanslagen in de V.S. Internet was voor mij niet veel groter dan Hotmail en diende om je mails te checken. En Messenger had nog geen schermafbeeldingen en had nog andere, meer tam-tam-achtige geluiden.

PS 2: Street View is nu in Google Earth geïntegreerd. Maar het werkt een beetje komiek. Je hebt geen pijltjes, maar moet telkens dubbelklikken op de volgende camera verder op de weg. Het is wel schermvullend!

Games People Play

samvaknin — Sat, 24 May 2008 15:29:35 +0000

Games and role-playing are as ancient as Mankind. Rome's state-sponsored lethal public games may have accounted for up to one fifth of its GDP. They often lasted for months. Historical re-enactments, sports events, chess tournaments, are all manifestations of Man's insatiable desire to be someone else, somewhere else - and to learn from the experience.

In June 2002, Jeff Harrow, in his influential and eponymous "Harrow Technology Report", analyzed the economics of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG). These are 3-D games which take place in comprehensively and minutely constructed environments - a medieval kingdom being the favorite. "Gamers" use action figures known as avatars to represent themselves. These animated figurines walk, talk, emote, and are surprisingly versatile.

Harrow quoted this passage from Internetnews.com regarding Sony's (actually, Verant's) "EverQuest". It is a massive MMORPG (now with a sequel) with almost half a million users - each paying c. $13 a month:

"(Norrath, EverQuest's ersatz world is) ... the 77th largest economy in the [real] world! [It] has a gross national product per capita of $2,266, making its economy larger than either the Chinese or Indian economy and roughly comparable to Russia's economy."

In his above quoted paper, "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier", Professor Edward Castronova, from California State University at Fullerton, notes that:

"The nominal hourly wage (in Norrath) is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath's currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many."

Players - in contravention of the game's rules until recently - also trade in EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline. The online auction Web site, eBay, is flooded with them and people pay real money - sometimes up to a thousand dollars - for avatars and their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogate industries sprang around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance, "macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life player - a no-no.

Nor is EverQuest the largest. World of Warcraft from Blizzard Entertainment has 1.5 million subscribers. The Korean MMORPG "Lineage" boasts a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. "The Matrix Online", released by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment and Sega Corporation in 2004-5, may surpass these figures due to its association with the film franchise - though Star War Galaxies, for instance, failed to leverage its cinematic brand.

The economies of these immersive faux realms suffer from very real woes, though. In its May 28, 2002 issue, "The New Yorker" recounted the story of Britannia, one of the nether kingdoms of the Internet:

"The kingdom, which is stuck somewhere between the sixth and the twelfth centuries, has a single unit of currency, a gold piece that looks a little like a biscuit. A network of servers is supposed to keep track of all the gold, just as it keeps track of everything else on the island, but in late 1997 bands of counterfeiters found a bug that allowed them to reproduce gold pieces more or less at will.

The fantastic wealth they produced for themselves was, of course, entirely imaginary, and yet it led, in textbook fashion, to hyperinflation. At the worst point in the crisis, Britannia's monetary system virtually collapsed, and players all over the kingdom were reduced to bartering."

Britannia - run by Ultima Online - has 250,000 "denizens", each charged c. $10 a month. An average Britannian spends 13 hours a week in the simulated demesne. For many, this constitutes their main social interaction. Psychologists warn against the addictive qualities of this recreation.

Others regard these diversions as colossal - though inadvertent - social experiments. If so, they bode ill - they are all infested with virtual crime, counterfeiting, hoarding, xenophobia, racism, and all manner of perversions.

Subscriptions are not the only mode of payment. Early multi-user dungeons (MUD) - another type of MMORPG - used to charge by the hour. Some users were said to run bills of hundreds of dollars a month.

MMORPG's require massive upfront investments. It costs c. $20 million to develop a game, not including later content development and technical support. Consequently, hitherto, such games constitute a tiny fraction of the booming video and PC gaming businesses. With combined annual revenues of c. $9 billion in 2001, these trades are 10 percent bigger than the film industry - and half as lucrative as the home video market. They are fast closing on music retail sales.

As games become graphically-lavish and more interactive, their popularity will increase. Offline and online single-player and multi-player video gaming may be converging. Both Sony and Microsoft Internet-enable their game consoles. The currently clandestine universe of geeks and eccentrics - online, multi-player, games - may yet become a mass phenomena.

Moreover, MMORPG can be greatly enhanced - and expensive downtime greatly reduced - with distributed computing - the sharing of idle resources worldwide to perform calculations within ad hoc self-assembling computer networks. Such collaboration forms the core of, arguably, the new architecture of the Internet known as "The Grid". Companies such as IBM and Butterfly are already developing the requisite technologies.

According to an IBM-Butterfly press release:

"The Butterfly Grid T could enable online video game providers to support a massive number of players (a few millions) (simultaneously) within the same game by allocating computing resources to the most populated areas and most popular games."

The differences between video games and other forms of entertainment may be eroding. Hollywood films are actually a form of MMORPG's - simultaneously watched by thousands worldwide. Video games are interactive - while movies are passive but even this distinction may fall prey to Web films and interactive TV.

As real-life actors and pop idols are - ever so gradually - replaced by electronic avatars, video games will come to occupy the driver seat in a host of hitherto disparate industries. Movies may first be released as video games - rather than conversely. Original music written for the games will be published as "sound tracks".

Gamers will move seamlessly from their PDA to their PC, to their home cinema system, and back to their Interactive TV. Game consoles - already computational marvels - may finally succeed where PC's failed: to transform the face of entertainment.

Jeff Harrow aptly concludes:

" ... History teaches me that games tend to drive the mass adoption of technologies that then become commonplace and find their way into 'business'. Examples include color monitors, higher-resolution and hardware-accelerated graphics, sound cards, and more. And in the case of these MMORPG games, I believe that they will eventually morph into effective virtual business venues for meetings, trade shows, and more. Don't ignore what's behind (and ahead for) these 'games', just because they're games..."

Also Read

The Madness of Playing Games

Notes on the Economics of Game Theory

Microsoft's Encarta and MS Student 2008

samvaknin — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:58:37 +0000

While Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 marked Microsoft's commitment to the Web - Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 marks its commitments to its own technology. The new Encarta relies on Microsoft's powerful, flexible, scalable, and adaptable .Net Framework 2.0. There is a price to pay, of course: the time it takes to install the product is much longer and the user is henceforth prompted to constantly download security updates from Microsoft. It is also recommended to turn off your firewall and anti-virus products during installation.

More than ever, the Encarta is a breathtaking resource. With 68,000 articles (compared to 64,000 last year), it is much expanded (though about 1000 photos and illustrations and 500 music and sound clips were removed from this edition). Certain, resource-hogging features disappeared from last year (for example: the Read Aloud and Live News functions).

The Encarta caters effectively (and, at $30-50, affordably) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, and colorful. Kids have their own encyclopedia-within-encyclopedia, dubbed Encarta Kids with age-appropriate, appetizingly presented content and games to boot!

The 2007 Encarta's User Interface is far less cluttered than in previous editions. Content is arranged by topics and then by relevancy and medium. Add to this the Encarta's Visual Browser and you get only relevant data in response to your queries. The Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product two years ago, and is resident in the Task Pane even when Encarta is closed, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc).

The Encarta's newish Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encarta and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference.

I am not sure how Microsoft solved the weighty and interesting issues of intellectual property that the Web Companion raises, though. Copyright-holders of Web content may feel that they have the right to be compensated by Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products.

Encarta would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Users should be able to seamlessly access content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.

The Encarta Premium includes a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, Discovery Channel videos, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 2500 sound and audio clips, hundreds of maps and tables (with a staggering 1.8 million map locations), and 300 videos and animations. It incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including hundreds of newspaper articles and a plethora of Scientific American features).

The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. Unfortunately, the Encarta still conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. Moreover, last year Encarta released only 26 updates, compared to its annual average of 50-60.

The Encarta is the most comprehensive, PC-orientated reference experience there is. No wonder it has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Particularly enchanting is the aforementioned Encarta Kids interface - an area replete with interactive quizzes, pictures, large icons, hundreds of articles, and links to the full version of the Encarta. A veritable and colorful sandbox. Those kids are going to get addicted to the Encarta, that's for sure!

Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing. It is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet.

Inevitably, in such a mammoth undertaking, not everything is peachy. A few gripes:

As I said, installation is not as easy as before. The Encarta 2007 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2007 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers.

Fully installed on the hard disk, the Encarta Premium 2007 gobbles up less than its predecessors but still a whopping 3 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops.

The Encarta DVD 3-D tours have improved but they still hog computer resources and are essentially non-interactive. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer?

The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but it is far from doing a good or full job of it.

The dictionary has been greatly improved in this edition. Actually, the Encarta 2007 comes equipped with five foreign language dictionaries and verb conjugating applications. Still, the atlas, English language dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Encarta are somewhat outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity.

But that's it. Encarta is a must-buy (especially if you have children). The Encarta is the best value for money around and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The amount and quality of content squeezed into a $50 package (before rebate) defies belief. I am a 45 years old adult but when I received my Encarta Premium 2007, I was once more a child in a land of wonders. How much is such an experience worth to you?

Microsoft Student 2008

Homework assignments are the bane of most students I know (not to mention their hard-pressed and nescient parents). This is mainly because of the tedious and mind-numbing chores of data mining and composition. Additionally, as knowledge multiplies every 5-10 years, few parents and teachers are able to keep up.

Enter Microsoft Student 2008: a productivity suite which includes English and foreign language dictionaries, thesaurus, quotations library, assignment templates, tutorials, graphing calculator software and a Web Companion. MS Student comes replete with the entire Encarta Premium 2008 encyclopedia and its dynamic atlas and provides online access to the feature-rich MSN Encarta Premium through October 2008.

The previous versions of Encarta included a host of homework tools. Two years ago, these have evolved into a separate product called Microsoft Student. Since then, it has been gainfully repackaged and very much enhanced. This year, for the first time, MS Student can be downloaded from the Web or purchased as a standalone, packaged product (DVD only).

Among the new or revamped features: free online access to MSN Encarta Premium, Step-by-Step Math Solutions calculator, Step-by-Step Math Textbook Solutions, Triangle Solver, Equations Library, tutorials, and foreign language help.

To augment the performance of MS Student 2008, Microsoft offers "Learning Essentials": preformatted report and presentation templates and tutorials designed for Microsoft Office XP and later. MS Student's templates are actually clever adaptations of the popular Office suite of products: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They help the student produce homework plans and schedules, science projects, book reports, presentations, research reports, charts, and analyses of problems in math, physics, and chemistry. Detailed step-by-step tutorials, Quick Starters, and pop-up toolbars (menus) guide the student along the way in a friendly, non-intrusive manner.

The Ace in MS Student's deck is Microsoft Math. It is a seemingly endless anthology of tools, tutorials and instruction sheets on how to grasp mathematical concepts and solve math problems, from the most basic (e.g., fractions) to mid-level difficulty (e.g., trigonometric functions). And if this is not enough, there's free access to HotMath, an online collection of math study aides and problem solvers.

The graphing calculator is a wonder. It has both 2-D and 3-D capabilities and makes use of the full screen. Aided by an extensive Equations Library, it does everything except cook: trigonometry, calculus, math, charting, geometry, physics, and chemistry. And everything in full color! Triangles get special treatment in the Triangle Solver. The most vexing trilateral relationships and rules are rendered simple through the use of enhanced graphics. The Equation Library, though, is disappointing. It holds only 100 equations and calculus is sorely neglected throughout.

MS Student provides a powerful English-Spanish-French-German-Italian dictionary. It helps the student to translate and conjugate verbs. The synergy between this product and the impressive foreign language capabilities of MS Word creates an effective language laboratory which allows the user to study the languages up to the point of completing assignments using specialized foreign-language templates.

For the student keen on the liberal arts and the humanities, Student 2008 provides detailed Book Summaries of almost 1000 classic works. Besides plot synopses, the student gets acquainted with the author's life, themes and characters in the tomes, and ideas for book reports.

Similar to the Encarta, MS Student's Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (such as a browser). Content from both the Encyclopedia and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference - as 80% of students have already done.

MS Student would do well to also integrate with desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Students will benefit from seamless access to content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.

Microsoft would do well to incorporate collaborative and Web publishing tools in this product. MS Student does not equip and empower the student to collaborate with teachers and classmates on class projects and to seamlessly publish his or her results and work on the Web. Future editions would do well to incorporate a NetMeeting-like module, a wiki interface, and an HTML editor.

All in all, MS Student 2008 is a great contribution to learning. Inevitably, it has a few flaws and glitches.

Start with the price. As productivity suites go, it is reasonably priced had its target population been adult professional users. But, at $50-100 (depending on the country), it is beyond the reach of most poor students and parents - its most immediate market niches.

MS Student 2008 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by MS Student 2008 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers.

Fully installed on the hard disk, MS Student 2008, like its predecessors, gobbles up a whopping 4 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 40-80 Gb hard disks. This makes MS Student less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops.

Finally, there is the question of personal creativity and originality. Luckily, MS Student does not spoon-feed its users. It does not substitute for thinking or for study. On the contrary, by providing structured stimuli, it encourages the student to express his or her ideas. It does not do the homework assignments for the student - it merely helps rid them of time-consuming and machine-like functions. And it opens up to both student and family the wonderful twin universes of knowledge: the Encarta and the Web.

Also Read:

The Six Sins of the Wikipedia

Microsoft's Encarta and MS Student 2007

The Britannica 2007 Opens to the Web

Old Reference Works Revived

The Encyclopedia Britannica 2006

Revolt of the Scholars

The Idea of Reference

The Future of the Book

The Kidnapping of Content

The Internet and the Library

Interview with Tom Panelas

The Future of Online Reference

Will Content Ever be Profitable?

The Disintermediation of Content

The Future of Electronic Publishing

Battle of the Titans - Encarta vs. the Britannica

Free Online Scholarship - Interview with Peter Suber

Microsoft Embraces the Web - Encarta and MS Student 2006

The Computer Sounds Like a Robot no More

arvinjoseph — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:16:36 +0000

I was experimenting on my computer when I bumped into the configuration of the Babylon dictionary. Then the 'voice' tab caught my attention. I did not know that there is a speak function in this dictionary, which I thought would be an advantage by my previous Encarta Dictionary. I must definitely acquire the habit of reading the readme files of programs.

Nevertheless, I clicked the tab. It contained the Say-it settings of the dictionary. You can choose the voice and adjust the speed of the pronunciation. I have two choices for the voice, one is called "Microsoft Anna-English (United States)" and the other one is the "TOSHIBA male adult (US)." I believe the latter is a preset of my laptop and the other one is Bill Gate's secretary.

The best part is that you can try how the high-tech voices say anything. I tried typing several words into the text box. The result is fantastic. Years ago, when you commanded the Microsoft helper to speak, the sound is very robotic that even the gay wizard helper cannot do anything about it. Right now, the voice is.. so human.

Of course the voices have limitations. I tried some Filipino words and the voice mispronounced it by just spelling out the word. But Microsoft Anna got my favor when she (or it) pronounced my name correctly while the Toshiba dude did not.

The improvement of features like this is sensational. It makes me wonder what the future releases will be. Maybe the next version of the voices can already kick local rapper Gloc 9's arse and his homies'.