Year: 2006

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amazon.de rentable dvd – missing titles…

Amazon.de started a service where you can rent DVDs. The idea is – similar to other existing online DVD rentals – that you pay about 10€ per month and can have one DVD at home all times. So, they send you a DVD, you keep it, sometimes you send it back, get the next one.

Now, cool: amazon, one of the biggest web shops has DVD rental. So I would expect that I can rent now all those nice DVDs they have in the shop. It would be perfect: in Kaiserslautern there is no specialised DVD rental service and we cannot get all the interesting movies (for example, the top 100 of IMDB cannot be retrieved in Kaiserslautern).
If amazon rented everything, it would improve something.

But no. Search for all the good titles – you can’t rent them.
A few examples:

  • Texas Chainsaw Massacer – DVD at amazon in three different versions, no rental
  • Hotel Rwanda – DVD at amazon shop, award winning movie. IMDB place 47. no rental
  • Shichinin no samurai – not at amazon.de at all (hm)
  • Animal House – one of the most successfull movies ever, part of american heritage, sold in amazon shop but no rental

This sucks. I only signed up there to get “Animal House” but they don’t rent it.

So what will happen? These online DVD rentals will steal income from local rentals, so expect that your local stores will close or get a more limited program. All online DVD rentals probably have the same blockbusting entertainment. I hope that someone points me to a good alternative online DVD rental, where I can get above DVDs.

Go support your local weirdo video rental, where you can meet fellow weirdos and can have interesting conversations.

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RDF/A Embedding RDF in HTML

A draft has been published of RDF/A.

This is a really simple way to embed RDF into html. Example:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Jo Lambda's Home Page</title>
    </head>
<body>
<p>
 Hello. This is <span property="foaf:name">Jo Lambda</span>'s
home page.
 <h2>Work</h2>
 If you want to contact me at work, you can
 either <a rel="foaf:mbox" href="mailto:jo.lambda@example.org">email
 me</a>, or call <span property="foaf:phone">+1 777 888 9999</span>.
 </p>
</body>
</html>

from W3C:
2006-03-14: The HTML Working Group and the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group jointly have published the First Public Working Draft of the RDF/A Primer 1.0. Produced by the groups’ RDF in XHTML Task Force, the draft is a companion to the XHTML 2.0 specification. This document introduces syntax for expressing RDF metadata within XHTML and explains the use of the XHTML metainformation modules. Read about the HTML Activity and the Semantic Web.

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trick your human friends

Old research, still funny. Dr Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Dr Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University created nice setups to trick humans, based on attention.

The setup they created is: tell somebody to watch this video of basketball players and to count, how often the white team has passed the ball.

the video:
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

At the end of the video,they ask: how often? And the (but don’t spoil this by telling it before): Did you notice the gorilla walking from right to left through the scene, banging on his chest?

An article on that.

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Auftragsforschung und Grundlagenforschung

Was macht das DFKI eigentlich? Wir sind ja etwa 300 Forscher, arbeiten an Forschungsprojekten, publizieren Papiere, generieren Ideen. Also eigentlich Grundlagenforschung und Angewandte Forschung die zu Spin-Offs und Produkten bei Partnern führt.

In einem Satz: Wir sind das DFKI und wir machen Auftragsforschung.

Auftragsforschung! Zuerst hier von Daniel Porta während der Mittagspause verwendet. Ein Wort das die richtigen Neuronen triggert, Endorphine für alle. Testen wir das Wort mal in verschiedenen Sätzen:

  • Auftragsforschung
  • Wir forschen, aber mit einem Auftrag
  • Gebt uns einen Auftrag zum Forschen