| Everything that makes you unique could be included in an email attachment: when represented digitally, the human genome is about 800MB of data, but what distinguishes one human being from another can be extracted and compressed down to an easily emailed 4MB file.  | |
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Do You Buy Physical Media or Have You Gone Digital? Do you buy physical media or have you gone digital? In our house we have slowly built a library of Mickey Mouse purchases on iTunes for the little one. Will they be around when he grows up? What Happens to Your Movies If Amazon Goes Out of Business? When you purchase a movie from Amazon Instant Video, you're not buying it, exactly. It's more like renting indefinitely. This distinction matters if your notion of "buying" is that you pay for something once and then you get to keep that thing for as long as you want. Increasingly, in the world of digital goods, a purchasing transaction isn't that simple. There are two key differences between buying media in a physical format versus a digital one. First, there's the technical aspect: Maintaining long-term access to a file requires a hard copy of it—that means, for example, downloading a film, not just streaming from a third party's server. The second distinction is a bit more complicated, and it has to do with how the law has shaped digital rights in the past 15 years. It helps to think about the experience of a person giving up CDs and using iTunes for music purchases instead. "In the good old days, you purchased a CD, which meant that you owned the medium outright and had an authorized copy that you could do anything you liked with, subject to copyright," said Dan Hunter, the dean of Swinburne Law School. "For example, you could give it away to a friend, or resell it, or whatever. These days we live in a world where we generally license copyright content, like games and music. This means you're given a limited right to do things with the content—generally this is limited to playing it on a small number of devices—and you definitely can't resell the content or even give it away. You haven't really bought the song, you've bought a contract to play the thing for a while."
Physical medium is definitely so much better, I mean, it’s real, right? Except I don’t think you are going to have an easy time finding a punch card computer, 8 track or Betamax player. From Amazon, sure, but how long until nobody makes them? When’s the last time you saw a cassette tape deck or VCR unless you were visiting your parents? So you can probably get your hands on a player, but then what are you going to plug it into? The old cables won’t work on a modern TV. And then there’s the fact that most physical media has a shelf life and will only last so long even when handled with care. It will simply degrade over time until it is even unplayable in that device that nobody makes anymore. I’m slightly exaggerating here just to make a point. It’s very important to make good decisions when purchasing digital content — I will only buy content from iTunes because if anybody is likely to stick around for the long haul, it’s Apple. But physical media doesn’t mean permanent.
Previous Thoughts You Might Have Missed: | |
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Today's Tech Term
Rail Fence Cipher | |
| A Rail Fence Cipher (a.k.a. Zigzag Cipher) is a cipher where plain text can be written (encoded) in a ‘diagonal and downwards/upwards’ manner on successive ‘rails’ using paper and a pencil (or an electronic document if desired). An example of a Rail Fence Cipher that starts out as plain text (WE ARE DISCOVERED. FLEE AT ONCE) is: 
Which can be rewritten as: WECRL TEERD SOEEF EAOCA IVDEN Cipher example courtesy of Wikipedia. | |
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What We're Reading from Around the Web | |
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| In Word, the "Insert" key on the keyboard can be used to switch between Insert and Overtype modes. However, it can also be used as a shortcut key for inserting copied or cut content at the current cursor position. | |
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| Thanks to Apple’s new HomeKit home automation system and the versatility of Siri, the iOS digital assistant, you can now combine the two with HomeKit-enabled lights and control your home lighting with your voice. Read on as we demonstrate with Philips’ new HomeKit-enabled Hue system. | |
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| Microsoft made headlines when it stripped support for SafeDisc and SecuROM DRM from Windows 10 Recent security updates to Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 have also removed support for these DRM schemes from older versions of Windows. | |
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| Google’s finally done it. Android 6.0 Marshmallow includes a new, iOS-style permission system for new apps. You can also manually revoke permissions from any app — even ones designed for old versions of Android. | |
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| Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan protects system files and processes with a new feature named System Integrity Protection. SIP is a kernel-level feature that limits what the “root” account can do. | |
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| Almost anyone knows how to make a "hidden" folder in Windows, but then again almost anyone knows how to make explorer show hidden folders. Let’s take a look at how to make a folder so hidden, only you will know its there. | |
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| Apple’s HomeKit home control and automation system is largely plug, play, and enjoy but sometimes stubborn devices need a nudge to play nice. Read on as we show you how to reset both devices and the general HomeKit configuration. | |
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| Instead of using the cut and copy commands, "Ctrl + X" and "Ctrl + V", to move content, you can more quickly move text using fewer keystrokes. Any content, including text, graphics, and tables, can be moved using the "F2" key and the "Enter" key. | |
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| Much ado has been made in recent years about being able to deposit checks to your bank accounts using your phone’s camera. It works well and is super convenient, so if your bank’s app offers this feature you may want to try it out. | |
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| Disc images have become more useful than ever on modern PCs that often lack CD and DVD drives. Create ISO files and other types of disc images and you can “mount” them, accessing the virtual discs as if they were physical discs inserted into your computer. | |
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