Farlops Industries

So I just read the PBS is in a decline now that cable has stolen away some it’s audience with high quality, yet ad supported content–A&E, AMC, the History Channel, etc. Also I’ve read a good summary about how some cable content providers are preventing DVRs from skipping ads. So despite all this new technology, the really revolutionary idea, ad-free subscription content, may never actually work.

So much for the Internet liberating us. Sigh. Can’t anyone make this business model work?

• Macromedia claims that Flash objects are now fully accessible but, there are still legions of web designers that need to learn how to design code that is accessible from the start.
• There’s money in thinking about computer security and recovering data from obsolete computers.
• Just from sheer weight of numbers, China has become the second most Internet connected country on the planet. Meanwhile African ISPs are getting fleeced by the big telecommunications companies of the post-industrial world.
• Tessellation is the act of tiling a plane. The artist M.C. Escher built a career out it. Makoto Nakamura made some really beautiful animations based on tessellation.
• W.Bradford Paley created a tool that searches for hidden patterns in text. I wonder if this tool might be useful when applied to Web search engines?
• As has been oft repeated on this site, advertising on the Internet continues to worsen as companies search for profit.

• There is serious academic study of legacy code accumulation, mission creep and feature bloat in the halls of computer science.
• Some claim that Google’s refusal to play by basic marketing rules may hurt it in the long run. I think this remains to be seen. I would argue that Google’s unconventional behavior is part of it’s success.
• As if pop-ups aren’t bad enough, now some marketing weasels are using JavaScript to install software without prompting the user at all. All the more reason to simply turn JavaScript off or at least use the latest version of Internet Junkbuster.
• On another hand, the Folsom anti-spam tool works by collaboratively filtering junk e-mail in a peer-to-peer network of mail servers.

• The Business benefits of accessible web design.
• Okay, here is something that will be even more distracting to motorists than mobile phones!