Archive for interesting posts
Interesting posts, week 10!
September 14th, 2007 • interesting posts
Sounds pretty cool given Tim’s position on the publishing world.
A short little write-up on Lifehacker (let’s face it, they don’t “write” any more, it’s so sad. I miss the old LH where there was original and useful information) on how you should arrange your tons of power cords
These ringtones are combined with a CD single — a format that’s been pretty dead since 2000 (and was dead when I worked in a CD store 8 years ago) — and cost you $6 or $7. Why? Obviously it costs a lot of money to make their $0.03 CDs (or maybe they should stop paying terrible artists inflated salaries)
I just watched this show for the first time on Sunday night and I was fairly impressed. Miranda Cosgrove has well outgrown being “Evil Megan” on Drake & Josh where she began stealing the show once Nick made Josh drop about 100lbs and Drake’s the goofy brother whose role on the show is now unneeded (see Eric Matthews from Boy Meets World for one of the best examples of “obsoletion by stupidity” in sitcoms). The show iCarly uses a lot of predictable situations but their use of user generated media to flesh out portions of the show is its strongest point.
This is a good chuckle given some of the things MSFT says such as “Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software” (I cut off the last bit). Like Microsoft hasn’t done this in the last 7 years (Window ME and Vista, I’m talking about you), but at least Google acknowledges these products as beta and LABELS them as such. Seems Microsoft is really worried about the pressure the ol’ Goog is putting on them.
Shalini never fails to find really interesting science news but this is something else. That scary bacteria we’re all afraid of could actually protect our teeth!
It seems that Microsoft isn’t the only one trying to make swiss cheese out of Google’s Enterprise effort. This was a surprise given Zimbra’s just now getting their web apps off the ground with recent funding. Still no word from Zoho, but I suspect we’ll hear from them too as they’re Google’s only true online competitor for the comprehensive online office right now.
Why does it take someone like Google to spark real interest in this? If there were more charitable companies giving away money, I think we’d be closer to dumping our oil dependency.
Mr. Gonzalez can articulate this much better than I can.
This might be the last post like this for a bit, there’s just very little interesting news that I’m finding right now so this takes a lot longer than normal to do.
Interesting posts, part 9
September 7th, 2007 • interesting posts
I think some of these may be from last week but that’s OK, this week has been rather devoid of interesting news not about Apple’s new products.
Who really cares, why must this be a competition? Bloglines is a singular entity while Google Reader is a part of the Google Empire and frankly, is the better product for me. But this does not mean they’re in some RSS reader domination race, there’s hundreds of readers out there, some better some worse.
I know I certainly need more than 5 tips but these are an awesome start.
While I’m no longer a full time student, I would love to go for this scholarship opportunity because I think it’s pretty awesome to get that much money for writing about things you love.
Well, I’d definitely pay $15/mo for some cool tech gear, especially startup t-shirts since I need more of those!
First up, Google’s not totally entering, they’re just expanding Google Books quite a bit…for now. Amazon, on the other hand, is setting out to topple Sony’s ill-fated eReader (which looks nice but is ultimately useless, like most Sony wares) and might be just the company to do it. They’re going to be releasing a device that will most likely be wifi-enabled and connected directly to their books catalog for quick searching and purchasing. And using an e-Ink reader device will certainly sweeten the deal over Sony’s reader.
It’s a poignant flip side to TechCrunch’s gung-ho post.
They want to rebadge anti-net neutrality as something else, good luck with that. The Justice Department guys think that an ISP should charge you more if you use your connection more. Well, some people already do (users in the UK have download/upload limits, some US telcos do too) and last time I checked, people didn’t like getting charged extra to use an already absurdly expensive, moderately slow service. If an ISP is like USPS, why don’t our packets come back beaten up, late, and possibly wet? My packets getting beaten up and lost would be more appropriate than charging me more.
Obligatory Apple news:
And finally, there’s no link for this last bit of news that’s been “released” this week.
Interesting posts, the OCHO!
August 31st, 2007 • interesting posts
Hopefully this one will get published on time and I don’t have any of those real life delays like…relaxation or something silly like that. Here’s the Ocho!
I know, I know, it’s CNN and it’s probably 95% utter garbage but it’s still worth a watch. Thanks for this, vjack!
I don’t hate Texas, I really don’t but I do have this growing mountain of reasons to never visit this backwards state. I’ll probably espouse on this one more in a separate post.
I know a lot of smart people in Australia and I have no idea how they can live in a country filled with such dolts. The government spent $84M AU on a web filter that was bypassed in less than an hour. Then they put a new one up that was bypassed just as quickly! WTF Australia, seriously. First the knobs at Telstra think they can control an entire country’s email by filtering out any useful ESP and now this. Do you guys still drive cars that are foot powered too?
Many of these are aesthetic changes made either by Greasemonkey or Stylish but some can be helpful such as Twittercal.
A giant communal spider web was found in Texas of all places. Chalk that up as another reason to never move there: insane spider webs.
I read this last night and could hardly contain my laughter. Why is it that so many fundamentalists and other uninvolved parents think their children know nothing of sexual acts or what curse words are? There’s more filth on FX’s Nip/Tuck than in the books quoted to be “lascivious”.
This is just beyond description.
Interesting posts, part siete
August 25th, 2007 • interesting posts
While I didn’t find a lot of interesting news this week however, I did find tidbits that made me say “Finally!”
I know this is making kids happier, especially our neighbor. I don’t know why school districts are so hell bent on getting kids out of bed and to school at 8AM — or earlier — because of bus scheduling. I don’t know about you but the time my job starts isn’t dependent on when my transportation can get me there. Hopefully more schools come to their senses and realizes kids hate getting up at 6AM to trudge to school.
SciVee is being pitched as the “YouTube for Science”. Hey whatever works to get people to look at the site. It’s a site chock full of science videos by scientists and it’s all very nice to use. Each video is typically linked to a paper about the subject matter written by the video’s author/producer. Very nice.
I don’t know when I’ll need to use one of these but I know I will need to so perhaps I should order two.
This is an unofficial site that scrapes images/videos from reddit.com however, it’s not actually produced by the Reddit crew. When will the guys behind Reddit learn that the people that made Reddit popular and got it to where it is hate most of the inane images and video posted on the site? We’ve been asking for that garbage to be filtered off into a subreddit but I guess with all the new Conde Nast money, they’re less worried about listening to users. This unofficial site is a nice step in the right direction but by the wrong guy.
A crafty Japanese player has figured out how to turn ordinary Super Mario levels into intricate Rube Goldberg machines. Most of the videos are pretty good however, there are obvious spots where the player is actually using the controller although, these videos are purported to be 100% completed without user intervention.
Maki offers up more helpful tips for generating weekend traffic with little effort. I know that social networking works great, especially from StumbleUpon (submitting anything not Apple/I-hate-Microsoft/Linux-Ubuntu/Bush sucks/etc it’s pointless to submit to Digg).
Something finally surpassed the Nintendo DS in overall sales, that hasn’t happened since the DS was released a few years ago. It’s great to see the Wii passing everything since it was such an underdog system and the overhyped — as usual — Sony product has failed to sell much of anything.
Interesting posts 6
August 20th, 2007 • interesting posts
This was supposed to have been published yesterday but I spent the whole day unplugged and at a local hookah bar.
Using advanced radar imagery, archaeologists are discovering more of this sprawling, ancient city.
A recently unearthed ancient forest in a Hungarian coal mine will give climatologists and scientist a glimpse into the climate of ancient Eurasia and the Earth as a whole. As much as this is a look into the past, it’s a race against time since the protective sand and coal are now gone and the trees will quickly erode
Congress withdrew the US in a global math and science exam that is used to measure our educational progress against those of other countries. This should come as no surprise to anyone that keeps tabs on the nation’s sad state of education. Whatever happened to Bush’s master plan of No Child Left Behind? Seems our whole country was just left behind.
A judge ruled that Novell still owns the copyrights that SCO claims to be under its control in the UNIX source code. This was discussed about 2 years ago but I’m guessing this is the final judgment in the case that we all saw coming. Similarly to Microsoft, SCO is claiming that it owns certain IP (intellectual property) in the UNIX code base but has yet to ever produce evidence of such and clings to its false claims. Funny, people stated the same thing when they sued IBM…and lost.
I find it hard to believe that any state above the Mason-Dixon actually has a written law against blasphemy and in a state whose past is riddled with rebellion.
Very insightful and reasonably smart questions with poignantly smart answers
PowerTOP is an Intel-backed application that aims to lower power consumption on Linux-based computers in order to consume less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint. I remember needing something like this a little over a year ago when I was running ion3 and bare minimums on a Linux install on my laptop and the battery still only lasted an average of 3 hours. With applications that consume little memory and CPU cycles, you’d think that you would squeeze out more battery life but you’d be wrong!
That’s it for this last week!
Interesting Posts, part 5
August 12th, 2007 • 3 comments interesting posts, web
Another week, another slew of interesting posts!
This is a 5 page article that dissects and discusses China’s past and present booming counterfeit economy and how it’s affecting both Eastern and Western technologies. It’s interesting to see how this affects Eastern technology companies such as LG or NEC when people are complaining that products they never made are terrible.
While Bergman made some definitely “out there” movies, no character was more prominent in his films than God, whether it was a “sane” Christian God or some perverse shape-shifting God, hellbent on raising psychological terror. BONUS: Read/WriteWeb poll states that most respondents notice no difference in search results when using personalized Google
I can mostly agree with what Mr. MacManus states however, the result set that the articles used is very skewed. How accurate can the results be when hardly any of us search for the same or similar things routinely in order to really train the search agent? If I only search for one query once, the search agent has very little data to go off of in order to really drill down personalized results for me.
I know, it’s over a week old but came out after the last installment of Interesting Posts but it’s still awesome. Even though Sega stopped making hardware years ago and gave up on the Dreamcast way too early, they’re supposedly pumping out some awesome games soon. Personal favorites from the list are ChuChu Rocket!, Nights: Journey of Dreams, Shenmue 1-3 (even though no one knew Shenmue 3 was even in production still!), Skies of Arcadia 2 (the original was so awesome), and Space Channel 3!
I can sympathize with most of this even though I’m not a problogger but I do work at home and most of the issues hit on really can affect you. Although, as a problogger, I figured they’d have better grammar
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OK, this isn’t technically an article anyone’s written but how can you deny the coolness of this stone? I think I watched the video three or four times before finally closing the browser. Something so simple and elegant yet so beautiful to watch.
Interesting posts this week, part 4
August 3rd, 2007 • interesting posts, web
Here are this week’s interesting posts, as judged so by me!
Read/WriteWeb has spent this week talking about ways Yahoo and their new CEO could fix themselves in just 100 days. They’ve touched on a ton of salient points this week but missed the most important one, in my opinion: support. I’ve never dealt with worst customer support in my entire life, from bottom to top it’s just atrocious.
Copyblogger provides a list of lists that are some of the best writing tips I’ve seen in a long time.
A British student is suing a porn distributor for stealing her picture and using it for their DVD cover and DVD label. They call her a liar and say that she was “asking for it” (actual quote!). I guess they didn’t realize that they stole the picture of an underage adolescent and could probably be heavily fined for using child-like images to promote pornography.
Grandfather performs ‘exorcism’, nearly pops a 3 year old’s head off (Extra details: Sky News, Azcentral.com, Fox News)
This must have been “perform an exorcism, win a free trip to jail” week. I have no idea where Christians get off on this. Where did they learn (or get told) that punching and choking are involved in exorcisms? This is what fundamentalism teaches you: nothing.
I don’t expect the whole atrocious emo movement to be big in Sweden — they’re too busy being Satanists and burning down churches and churning out awesome black metal — but he’s recently run across it. I really feel sorry for Martin now. Given he found out about this movement from a magazine called Enthroned (epitomal Belgian black metal powerhouse), I’m surprised it has anything about emo in it at all!
Researchers claim this to be an amazing new discovery. Hasn’t this been known for, what, ever? Every brainy/nerdy/geeky/scholarly student in the last few hundred years has been a testament to this and it’s been common knowledge to everyone but these “researchers” apparently.
I smell a weekend project coming from this one.
Researchers have found Alexandria before it was Alexandria…in Alexandria’s bay by sheer luck.
CAPTION: Britnerine makes a surprise stealth attack on an unwitting crowd. (Thanks Mashable!)
Interesting posts, part 3
July 27th, 2007 • chatter, interesting posts, web
Digg dumps AdSense for some Microsoft love. This is an interesting business move by the web’s most loved/hated Mac fanboy Kevin Rose. Apparently Google just can’t deliver the goods — or monetization — that he wants. And in a double whammy decision Microsoft the AdeCEN advertising platform this week. Coincidence?
Jill from the University of Wisconsin reports that more teens and young adults know more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about current national news. I would have never had guessed, neither would anyone else over the age of 21. The current MTV generation is far more concerned with who’s sleeping with who, who’s doing what drug(s), or what the latest reggaeton song is than who the current Presidential candidates are. This is not by chance, it’s by design, partly due in fault to the popular media itself. Since I was younger, I noticed a slow trend on cable channels such as MTV where they were moving away from their core audience of music lovers and onto molding their key demographics into robots. More adolescents watch MTV and read gossip magazines/sites than they do their school textbooks and the major news outlets are now aiding this along by making the latest celebrity scandal “breaking news” rather than the gossip column fodder it was merely 10 years ago. I can walk into the Town Center Mall and approach any male or female between the ages of 10 and 24 and almost all of them will know more about pimped out cars, lascivious celebs and the latest fashion of the day than they will know about Charlie Crist, our state’s governor or what the FCAT really measures.
Astronauts are now gettin’ crunk before shuttle missions. I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term DUI.
Telstra, Australia’s biggest ISP, bans Facebook from corporate networks. For once, I say good for them. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been banned from offices — or had employees banned from it — because it’s a huge time sink hole. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are banned from our company’s network because everyone, from top to bottom, wastes half their day futzing about instead of working.
IPTV mogul Joost, started by the same guys behind Skype and KaZaA, boasts 1M beta users (I saw this analyzed on about 10 different sites, I couldn’t link them all) but how true are these numbers? They’re definitely gaming the analytics system by saying they have 1M user accounts signed up in a “private” beta but honestly, how many of those users continually use the service? My guess — I am not an analyst — is probably less than 10% and more than likely closer to 5%. This could be seen as a falsification of market penetration and user reach by simply going on the numbers alone and has bitten other social media networks before.
And in a last minute “out of left field” appearance, “secret” web sites such as 4chan and 7chan hoard the vast nameless hacker group called Anonymous. They do it for the “epic lulz” and this almost made me fall out of my chair with laughter. I troll 7chan regularly and this whole piece was definitely full of “lulz” and “win” and the tipster who went to the news channel is lambasted on Encyclopaedia Dramatica — which is fueled by the people he used to call “/b/rothas” — and is quite funny. I cannot fathom how slow of a news day it must have been for them to not only cover 4/7chan but to actually use the word “lulz” more than twice. It’s a fine piece of fear-mongering and extreme disinformation. (Most Anonymous, myself included, really do not care to hack your computer/MySpace/Facebook/Photobucket/email. We prefer lolcats (cat image macros), flaming furries and weeaboos, and an endless stream of memes to keep us occupied. Those profiled actually fit far more into /i/nvasion idiots and ra/i/ders than the typical fare of /b/tards (the appropriate name of those who frequent /b/).)
Interesting posts this week…
July 22nd, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, interesting posts, web
Shalini talks about her recent debate with a creationist on male nipples and how (??) men evolved from women. I really fail to understand this argument completely.
Researchers have found possibly the most rapid in place evolution ever scientifically observed. I guess that sort of puts Creationists into a corner about how impossible it is to observe evolution.
TipMonkies gives up 9 easy to remember WordPress shortcuts for use during writing/editing. Extremely handy, I never even knew these existed and I’m a sucker for keyboard shortcuts!
Those wanting to kill some nosy web spiders can thank Perishable Press for writing up a very handy comprehensive mod_rewrite list for giving those spiders a handy 403.
Ebonmuse offers up a good argument against using religion as a basis for morality. Since us non-theists lack religion, people think we lack morality but we counter with the fact that they lack common sense.
Tim O’Reilly (yes, the same Tim O’Reilly who started O’Reilly Media, Inc.) discusses, with pure web data only, Ubuntu’s rise in popularity versus Red Hat, the most recognizable name in Linux distributions today. Simply by using web analytics as his metric, Tim definitely shows with ease how quickly Ubuntu is gaining ground as “the” Linux distribution of the masses.
I think I may have others open on my work PC but I’m not sure. These are definitely some of the more interesting posts I’ve seen this week, culled from my feed reader.
This week’s interesting tech news
July 13th, 2007 • 3 comments chatter, interesting posts, web
Still reeling from the iPhone explosion, I eagerly sought out more interesting tech news this week to satiate myself with.
Apple buys the CUPS printer framework. Since switching to a BSD core, CUPS has been at the heart of Apple’s “it just works” mantra although us Linux users (and BSD users as well) have enjoyed CUPS for ages. CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) has been around for a very long time and makes dubious use of the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol, basically printing over IP, like VoIP) standard that makes printing to decent printers dead simple. I made heavy use of this at my old job when I began to switch as many printers from their proprietary Canon/Toshiba protocols to IPP. This really made the 5 Mac users on campus extremely happy and made my job a helluva lot easier.
LaTeX squares off against Microsoft Office and easily trumps it in terms of proper typesetting. I haven’t used Office in well over a year because it’s a bloated piece of garbage but I always did hate the fact that certain fonts and typefaces just didn’t look “right” when typing certain works. Taraborelli shows how easily LaTeX can do everything Office does, and more, with very little effort. I’ve always stayed away from LaTeX and have used the likes of OpenOffice.org and Abiword for my word processing but I’m definitely tempted to give LaTeX a try now.
Shoperro and Viewpoints set to square off against Epinions and each other for user-generated reviews. It seems both are going to be rolling out for-pay revenue models but unless something has changed in the last 4-5 years, this may not last long since Epinion removed this feature long ago.
Google snatched up Postini after using their services for Gmail and other projects for a couple of years now. I’ve only got experience with Postini’s spam capabilities and it’s great and my company’s customers love it. From all the people that I know that have used Postini in the past have never had anything bad to say about it. This was the one acquisition lately that made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside because it’s something extremely immediately relevant to today’s world and Google decided to give them a few truckloads of cash to keep doing what they’re doing.
Inviteshare.com allows you to easily share invites you have for invite-only or closed beta sites. Right now, there are 37 sites you can give out invites for (it was 15 or so when I joined earlier today) and the process it extremely simple. The site also looks great, even in this day of web 2.0. The design is an intelligent 3 column fixed-width layout that presents all the information you need, right now, in the proper places. IS has been getting literally pounded for days now, with 500 Internal Server Errors popping up every few seconds and this is clearly due in no part to being on the front page of TechCruch. Having been public since July 7th, I believe the site has now easily passed the 2 million pageviews mark and is probably climbing close to 40,000+ uniques. Not bad for a simple service launched this week.