PC World is running an interesting graph — it shows the average retail price of a digital camera from 1998 to today. (Actually, it even projects a bit.)

What’s interesting is that price. Today, the average cost is about $2157.

Wow. That means that there’s a huge demand for high-end cameras either from professionals or “prosumers” — one that’s counterbalancing the millions of $400 and $500 units most people seem to be buying. (”Most people” is wrong, but “seem” seems to be right. Clearly the market is for the expensive ones.)

This may be the clearest indicator yet that film’s day is very much numbered.

Why is it that movie reviewers find it necessary to give away large portions of the plot in their reviews. It’s an awful trend, and one that has me skipping them for fear of ruining a movie I want to see.

The 1996 Mel Gibson/Gary Sinise movie Ransom is a great example. (And an old one, so I can avoid spoilers here.)

Knowing I wanted to see it, I avoided watching trailers or reading reviews. So I was gratified to be the only person in the theatre to be surprised when Sinise’s character (a cop) turns out to be the bad guy.

Obviously the director wanted it to be a surprise — it’s carefully hidden until the Big Revelation. Unfortunately, thanks to the likes or Roger Ebert, there was no big revelation for most folks.

See, in his review of Ransom, Ebert wrote:

Ebert is dead wrong. He assumes that because the kidnappers’ identities aren’t hidden until the last five minutes, “the movie makes little mystery” about them. And so he helped cheat a lot of people out of a nifty surprise.

That’s just giving away one big plot point. Ebert, like many reviewers, often feel the need to give away huge chunks of it.

Warning: Spoilers for Gothika ahead!

Warning: Spoilers for Gothika ahead!

Warning: Spoilers for Gothika ahead!

In his review of Gothika, Ebert gives us this:

Heck, there’s no reason to watch the first half hour! Now when (if) you go to see Gothika, you know what’s going to happen when Miranda takes the detour, you know where she’s going to wake up, you know she’s been accused of murder…

That’s bad reviewing. It’s the mark of a writer of limited creativity, who has to resort to rattling off the plot in order to give us an opinion of the flick.

In today’s Columbus Dispatch we have a review of Timeline.

Warning: Spoilers for Timeline ahead!

Warning: Spoilers for Timeline ahead!

Warning: Spoilers for Timeline ahead!

Reviewer Barbara Zuck gives us this:

Well then. Thanks for ruining all those potential surprises.

It’s not just the reviewers. Plenty of people have already complained about trailers — how they tend to be three-minute versions of the film that leave very little plot to the imagination. (Yesterday I saw a trailer for Denzel Washington’s upcoming Man on Fire. Now I don’t need to see anything but the last 15 minutes.)

Maybe reviewers think it’s all about the acting or the effects — that plot is just a thin thing holding it together. For some movies that may be true. But for most it’s the plot that’s fun, it’s the plot that holds surprises. Good reviewers don’t have to tell us “he watches so-and-so get killed” or “such-and-such turns out to be…” Good writers can give vague hints while still discussing the ups and downs. They can tell us whether it works or not without pulling back the curtain.

I just wish they would.

Think that toy stores and manufacturers have at least the basics down? Think again.

Toys “R” Us is recalling 50,000 packages of sidewalk chalk because it contains high levels of lead.

Lead. You know, the stuff they warned your parents about in 1973.

Not only are Diebold voting machines suspect, now it seems
the company’s ATMs are getting hit with worms. It’s the first case of an ATM being infected with a computer worm/virus/trojan. Lucky it wasn’t a particularly malicious one.

1-800-201-7575

(Thanks to Chatterbox)

I’ll write more about RFID tags soon, but for now, here’s a story from Wired that should give you the creeps.

RFID tags are slowly being adapted by manufactuers to track products. They’re tiny transmitters that are cheap enough to put on (or in) every item — every razor, every jar of applesauce, every CD. Marketers love them because you can see who’s doing what with your product. (Like I said, more to come on the ups and downs.)

But now comes Applied Digital Solutions, which wants to convince people to have an RFID tag put under their skin. So no matter where you went, you could be tracked. Stores would know who you were when you walked in. The police would know if you walked down a certain street.

Yikes.

John Dvorak wrote an anti-blog column in the Nov. 19 PC Magazine. He wasn’t saying blogs were bad, just that personal, grass roots blogs were being forced into second-rate status by blogs produced by Big Media. In other words, blogs were quickly losing their power as independent voices.

Further, Dvorak said that blogs were largely being abandoned; people started them, then stopped. So the number of independent blogs is shrinking

Of course, the blogging community was Not Happy. Some folks attacked Dvorak himself (the usual he’s-thinks-he-knows-it-all stuff), others jumped to the conclusion that he was anti-blog (as opposed to his simply commenting on why blogs were losing their influence), and others tried to refute him — pointing out that according to Technorati (a site that acts as sort of a blogging clearinghouse) the blog rolls are increasing:

I see a different problem with Dvorak’s piece. He assumes the strength of blogging is strictly in bloggers’ independence. Goliath loses power when lots of David’s are reporting the news. As the Davids — the bloggers — stop doing what their doing, Big Media’s gets to control yet another information outlet.

But blogs’ independent voices are only one of their strengths. The power of blogging is in the aggregate — it’s in having a lot of small voices that combine to form something larger.

As I wrote a bit ago, blogs link to other blogs link to still more blogs. This creates a web of connections between them. And it doesn’t matter if a blog only has a few of those connections. Dvorak writes abut a Perseus Development Corp. white paper on blogging, “[M]ost blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs.”

Twelve readers is plenty. The power of blogs is in the spiderweb effect: something that touches one part of the web is felt throughout it. Imagine that something happens in one part of the ‘blogosphere’ and a blogger writes about it. His twelve readers see it and two of them blog about it. And two readers from each of their blogs also write about it.

And so on. Word spreads. Secrets are hard to keep. One voice is quickly multiplied by word of Net. That’s the power of blogs. It’s not about how many readers an indivudal has, it’s about the power of the blogosphere (gosh, I hate that word) to spread information with or without Big Media.

According to Dan Gillmor’s eJournal, Congressman Dennis Kucinich has an e-voting page on his Web site that includes some of the Diebold memos, as well as links to other information, including for example the study I posted on problems with e-voting machines.

And he’s from Ohio. :)

I only wish this guy was able to carry out his threat. Maybe then spammers would get a little worried.

Neutralize?

Oooh, now I’m big time.

First, we finally went wireless. Sort of. We have this older Gateway laptop that’s perfect for Web browsing and reading e-mail when we don’t want to go into the basement office. It sits on the kitchen table (that’s where the Ethernet connection is on the first floor). Of course that’s annoying when we want to, say, eat. (The house is completely wired for Ethernet — basement, all the bedrooms, but not the first floor. Grr.)

I picked up a Linksys 802.11b access point and PC Card adapter on the cheap — less than $120 for the pair. The reason is simple: 802.11g stuff is much, much faster, so people aren’t buying the slower 802.11b equipment. Prices drop. But folks don’t do the math — the 802.11b stuff does about 11 Mbps. Our home’s cable connection is only about 1 Mbps, so a faster internal network doesn’t do a thing. That is, 802.11b is more than enough for any home user.

Now we can unplug the laptop and I can get the Giants’ stats during the game without moving from the sofa. Not that I want to see the Giants’ stats…

The other tech news is that I finally became a Web reseller. I own so many domains (starting with kantor.com and whizkid.com) that getting a “reseller” account made more sense. All it means is that I get a huge amount of storage space and bandwidth to divide among my sites. Because some of them (like PenguinBooks.com) are only one page, I only have to devote a little space to them and thus have more space for sites like this one.

The other benefit is that I can buy all the domains I want and only have to pay to register them ($11 per year or less); Web hosting is “free” for all intents and purposes. And if a friend wants to create a simple site, I can do it for nothin’. Neat.

Couldn’t resist a bad and overused pun.

Comes now FrogPad, a Houston-based company that’s now selling a 20-key keyboard. The idea is that users of PDAs and other small devices will find this a lot easier to use than thumb keyboards, handwriting “recognition,” or on-screen keyboards.

Uh-huh.

According to the company, “The key layout is optimized both around the most frequently used keys and around the strongest fingers of the hand.”

In other words, it’s an entirely different keyboard layout you have to learn. But it’s optimized! Feh. So’s the Dvorak keyboard, but you don’t see people flocking to them. (Yes, yes, there are dozens of happy Dvorak users out there.)

The FrogPad folks are falling into a tired old trap: The idea that something “better” will attract users from something familiar. It won’t, and this little product won’t go anywhere. Watch.

According to Reason Online, “A joint report, released this summer, by researchers at Rice and Johns Hopkins universities, found that the system developed by e-voting manufacturer Diebold “is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.”

You can download that report here (PDF).

Don’t want to bother? Here’s the important part, from the conclusion:

Is it time to worry now?

I wrote a bunch about the problems with electronic voting machines, and now there’s yet another one, as reported on Rant+Rave.

In a nutshell, some California counties show apparently impossible results for the recall vote.

They show that in Alameda, Kern, and Plumas counties, zero voters didn’t vote on the recall question. Zero. In every other county, at least a few people — from around nine percent to half a percent — skipped the recall question.

But the Diebold machines used in these three counties showed 100% participation.

Suuuuuuuuuuure.

As Argyriou put it on Rant+Rave, “It’s not believable that all 422,269 votes in Alameda County actually voted on the recall, unless the machine forced them to. The zero results with the Diebold systems suggest something more sinister: the Diebold machines discarded the votes of anyone who didn’t vote in the recall, or assumed votes for them.”

This is creepy stuff. And, as I wrote, there’s no way to tell if there’s a software problem, tampering, or what.

(Keep in mind that there are two problems with these machines. One is the overall question about whether or not we can trust the technology. The other is specific to Diebold, whose machines are coming under fire — in part thanks to the company’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer in August that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”)

More on this, I’m sure.

The new one is “spim,” and it refers to junk instant messages. So says the Washington Post.

Or maybe nightmare. Thanks to kuro5hin, I found this link to a 1997 story in the Miami New Times by Lynda Edwards called “Myths Over Miami.”

It talks about how homeless children in Miami have developed their own mythos — their own gods and demons and mythology.

The must-quote excerpt:

Absolutely incredible reading. You wonder if anyone has or will collect the stories in one place.

The BBC is reporting that Americans are getting their kids’ names from odd places.

(Celica?)

From now on, maybe we’ll call Sam “McNugget.”

(Thanks to Boing Boing!)

The Old Gray Lady can’t catch a break. Now, it seems, it’s entertainment writer (sorry — “Hollywood correspondent”) Bernard Weinraub who stole some of his material.

There’s even an MSN group dedicated to hacking the Ritz disposable camera. There are photos, schematics, and chip details there.