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Kovu's Wisdom of The Week:
"Owning an animal isn't a great capability... a throphy hunter owns his trophy animal. But coexisting and interacting with an animal is." - Kovu
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 | Help, my Periphery Dissolves! ;) |  |
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Author: Kovu | Date: Jan 08 2012, 22:14:38 CET
I've been starting this discussion on several German speaking forums this week, however, I think this is of interest for anyone, and I want to know your thoughts about it.
Anyway - how this came up recently - I began to think about why any external computer device I bought during the past five years was faulty, somehow. The most prominent example would be the Logitech Laser-Wheelmouse I bought 2 years ago. I got it for my desktop PC, for graphics and vector drawing work. The mouse was perfect, very precise and all. However, last November, when 'reactivating' my Desktop PC after a long time (I've been entirely working on my EeePC, for the whole year actually [funny, ey? I don't seem to need those towers anymore]) for some vector drawing, I figured out the mouse wheel sticks to my finger. It must be something with the flexibilizer in the synthetic rubber or lack of stabilizer that creates this phenomenon. I thought, how can this be, I almost never used this mouse. This mousewheel discomposes while I have computer mice that are older than 10 / 15 years, which remain working perfectly...
And it isn't the first time I discovered this. The oldest 2 game controllers of my PS3, and all controllers of my PS2 show the same problem on their joysticks.
What we're talking about here is planned obsolescence. It's not like one wouldn't know about it. The term isn't really new to me. But it takes some time to realize that, actually, everything we buy and use, is somehow designed for planned obsolescence, because industry wants us to buy new products instead of using the old one (even though the old one would still perfectly serve its purpose).
Whatever we buy, it really doesn't matter if it's cheap or expensive, if it's a watch, a car, a printer, ketchup, clothes, underwear... it's all designed to fail at some calculated point, normally after the warranty time line has passed. It's designed to fail, it's designed for 'trash', in order that we continuously buy new stuff. Most of economic growth bases on this.
Now, if you're lucky, you bought a product that really gets a mechanic malfunction after the planned time of usage. If not, you bought a product that actually can't be designed as malfunctional as the producer wants it to be. In that case they simply implant it a chip that defines after how many usages the device fails. Most prominently this happens with printers. Some have a chip that sends an error message after, say, 4000 prints and then blocks the printer. Normally, the user can't reset this chip, or at least mechanically solve the problem. The user is forced to send the printer to the service technician. However, in most cases the technician is more expensive than a new printer, and voilà, we bought a new printer (however, the clever ones search the internet for downloadable software allowing to reset said chip). Another attempt of planned obsolescence in printers is the consumption of ink in inkjets. They are programmed to increase the consumption of (often very expensive) ink print by print. This is waste of ink to produce growth.
Considering there's light bulbs that can last longer than 100 years CLICK HERE, why would 1000 hours be an optimum life expectancy?
What annoys me is that I feel highly manipulated. To be honest, how can we ever again buy products without thinking: 'they are cheating me'? Not only that. It's ecological nonsense. If we're forced to buy new products in short lifetime cycles, we also produce waste in short cycles. Toxic waste. And we waste considerable resources. And guess where our western waste is dumped: not in the western world. Our waste is dumped in underdeveloped countries, because the western world thinks it's too expensive to properly separate waste in our own countries.
Take part in the discussion on my forum!
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| Christmas 2011 | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: Dec 19 2011, 14:31:08 CET
 I wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year!
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| New 3D Images | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: Oct 15 2011, 21:01:54 CEST
 There's a lot of new 3D images I've been uploading recently, and some of them are really cool. The latest update provides you with shots from the 'Gondwana - das Praehistorium' exhibition in Schiffweiler (near Saarbrücken, Germany), as well as interesting new Landscape and 'Gran Turismo' shots:
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| New 3D Images | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: May 21 2011, 09:39:17 CEST
 I've constantly been updating the 3D anaglyphs section during the past few weeks. Along with some other random pictures, there's nice new shots of flowers, and some really cool paleontology ones I've taken in Aathal this week.
Enjoy!
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| Selling Our Lives to Google & Co. | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: May 15 2011, 20:52:18 CEST
You know what really annoys me these days? Well, it isn't like it's anything new to computing world, we've known of it for years, but... it's cloud computing. Internet based cloud computing (because I think it's a difference to have a private cloud in your own network), to be exact.
Sony's current Network Outage (after Hackers stole sensitive data of millions of Playstation, Qriocity and other users) perfectly demonstrates how cloud computing can't be safe. Its biggest problem is its often propagated advantage: centralized data. Hackers no longer need to break into your individually protected home network and computers, they simply take it where everything is stored: at the company's servers.
But that isn't the only problem I'm having with those services. What annoys me even more is how we sell our lives to companies, which will inevitably exploit our biggest good: everyone's privacy. What's the interest of big companies like Google or Facebook when providing us with free services? Nothing is for 'free' in todays world. Somehow we pay for it, and we pay for it with our privacy. Our privacy is exploited, our data, our behavior is collected... the data is either sold to third party companies, or simply used to personalize adverts. I know, this has happened before, otherwise Google wouldn't be what it is today, but, Google is taking the next step to make profit from our privacy: cloud based notebooks and cloud based music services...
Granted, it's practical if one doesn't have to synchronize music devices anymore, I see that, but - at what price will we use the service? It means that Google, and with that probably music industry too, gets control over our own music collection. Google wouldn't offer this service if it couldn't exploit it. I may be of the older generation of *.mp3-listeners, I know, but I simply like to actually get me a hardware copy of an artist's Album (on a CD) and to rip it down on *.mp3's for my own digital collection. I wouldn't ever buy *.mp3 tracks from a store. I don't want DRM on my own files. I don't want media players forcing me to use their directory structures. And I don't want Google to exploit my privacy up on my music collection.
Further, regarding Chromebooks, I don't see what's so great about processing and storing files in Google's cloud. Again, this will be exploited. Our copyrighted material will be exploited. Not to mention what happens when hackers break into Google's cloud where our files are stored. At PSN it was just some personal data and credit card data that has been stolen... but what will be stolen in Google's cloud? Half our lives... our text, our images, our friends information, our contacts, our bookmarks, our e-mails... all with just one attack.
There's good reason to be frightened of this technology... and it shouldn't be supported, no matter what advantages companies promise to come with these services.
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| Sony finally agrees: they've been hacked. | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: Apr 28 2011, 18:19:48 CEST
While Sony remained quiet about the reason for the PSN and Qriocity Network outages for about an entire week now, we've guessed right: Sony has been hacked. What else would explain them shutting down their network from the 20th of April until today anyways?
According to a status information they've finally sent by e-mail, personal as well as credit card information have been stolen between April 17 and 19. While personal data wasn't encrypted, Sony claims the credit card table to be encrypted. However, this hardly avoids that those who are interested in this information are trying to get past the encryption.
What's really annoying - Sony didn't inform its customers about this for an entire week.
I'm more and more asking myself how clever the growing 'cloud-computing' mentality is. This time it was personal and credit card information that has been stolen. However, when processing and storing all our files via servers, it's half our life an internet thief is able to take with just one attack on a server.
kotaku.com
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| Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 | |
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Author: Kovu | Date: Mar 27 2011, 11:53:53 CEST
 Some weeks ago, after recommendation from a 3D photography friend, I got my own Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 camera, a nice stereo photography toy:
http://www.fujifilm.com/products/3d/camera/finepix_real3dw3/
It has an integrated 3D display to view images without 3D glasses and has, next to automatic synchronous shooting modes, manual shooting modes - which perfectly allow you to adapt your images to the given circumstances.
For their older 3D cameras, Fuji created a 3D photo frame as well (again, for viewing images without glasses):
http://www.fujifilm.com/products/3d/viewer/finepix_real3dv1/
Sadly, I've been told the display is out of production. No matter what I tried, I was unable to order it from Swiss or European stores. Luckily, I managed to order it from a Japanese electronics store via eBay.
The thing is really cool... I've uploaded some of my latest red/cyan anaglyphs, all shots taken with the Finepix Real 3D, which demonstrate the capabilities of the camera... it's no problem to take pictures of small watch parts, such as an ancre.
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KLog Archive
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