Ponoko visits Art Center

A tired but good-humored Derek Elley (on the right), co-founder of ponoko.com, dropped by briefly at Art Center today in between his 12-hour flight from New Zealand and a meeting in Palm Springs. I asked him if he had a good flight and he looked at me like I was nuts - and I realized that "good" and "12 hour flight" don't belong in the same sentence.

In the photo, Derek is visiting with David Cawley, manager of our digital fabrication shop. We had fun showing Derek around and letting him see what our students are capable of creating.

If you haven't had a chance to check out ponoko.com, take a look - it's a very cool concept!

Google celebrates Lego's 50th anniversary

Wow, I'm older than Lego! But not by much :)

Lights. Camera. Oops!

I've been struggling to come up with the right words to respond to the report at the MPAA grossly overstated the impact of college campuses on movie piracy due to a "data entry error". A data entry error? Too bizarre.

The MPAA and RIAA have been incredibly focused on trying to control the exchange of copyrighted information on campuses. As best as I can understand their thinking, this stems from a belief that campuses are the leaders in bandwidth, and because of their perception that this is where students learn to swap materials online. Both these assumptions are now just wrong. There's a million times more bandwidth out there going into homes than there is on college campuses, and by the time students get to our campuses, they've been swapping online for years.

I do have sympathy for content creators who are watching the monetary value of their intellectual property erode. And it's not easy to know how to manage what comes next - I heard the erudite and entertaining Jack Valenti a couple of years before his death opine that "Yes, we know we need a new business model, but it's hard to come up with one that competes with 'FREE'." But this latest incident just seems to highlight the ineptitude and general ineffectiveness of the MPAA. A data entry error? Give me a break.

Good Morning Pasadena!

The reflection on my office window this morning, captured by my iPhone camera.

MacWorld: One Thing I Didn't See

I know there wasn't enough time between CES and MacWorld to expect much of a response to the apparent end of the format war, but you had to search hard at MacWorld to find any mention of Blu-ray. It may be that Sony won the next-gen disk contest only to find out that physical media is on an inevitable downslope and nobody really cares. First of all, unless you have a very big screen, say bigger than 42", a DVD played on an "up-resing" player like you can get for $99 at Costco looks really, really good. Second, you can rent or buy 720p high def images from iTunes and others, and very few people are going to notice the difference between 720p and 1080p images. The kind of people who care about the difference betwen 720p and 1080p are the kind of people who bought ... BetaMax players because they were better than VHS. And we know how that turned out. The kind of people who buy Blu-ray players are the kind of people who bought ... videodiscs! And how many videodisc players are there around now? For most of us, good enough is good enough. Consequently, nearly zero interest in the Mac community in producing Blu-ray disks. It's all about putting content online.