sysrick.com

How to fire a sysadmin. And the installation piece. [Security weblog]

The top 13 little-known rules of beer drinking. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Software Council retreat I spent Fri .... Software Council retreat

I spent Friday at the Massachusetts Software and Internet Council's board retreat. I carefully took notes on the other guests' presentations and just as carefully left my notepad there. So, here are four highlights as I remember them, in no particular order.

1. Something David Boloker of IBM said in his clear and succinct talk on Web Services set off both John Landry (ex-Lotus CTO and now an investor and multi-board member) and Dan Bricklin who were both in the audience of about 25. Landry is enthusiastic about Web services as a way of integrating applications but thinks that the vision of applications roaming the Web, searching out services, and melding themselves into mega-meta-apps is overblown. In particular, he isn't convinced of the value of large, public UDDI directories that list all the available services of various apps. Boloker replied that he saw UDDI's value mainly within private application spaces; for example, within an automotive suppliers exchange, a UDDI directory of parts and app services might be helpful. Bricklin pointed to a consequence worse than the under-utilization of these directories. He's worried that the Web services protocols are being architected to serve such a wide range of possible-but-farfetched uses that they are getting freighted down with baggage for a trip no one will take; he pointed to SOAP in particular. I hadn't heard this concern before.

Landry, Michael Kinkead and Bricklin

2. Ted Dintersmith of Charles River Ventures, one of the most respected VCs around, gave a fascinating and sobering (= depressing) talk that looked at the previous investment cycles, showed how wildly out of skew the Net boom was, and predicted that it's going to take more time and pain to get the investment market back on track than most believe. I've lost the figures (of course) but he said that if you look at the number of companies funded by VCs in the past 6 years and remove the ones that have already had their "outcomes," happy or not, you're left with something like 10,000 companies, most of which are, inevitably, going to fail. (Due to stupidity, I may be off by an order of magnitude. Or possibly it was $10B in investment, not 10,000 companies. Or possibly he was referring to bowling scores. Numbers make my neurons go hinky.) Anyway, he figures we're only about a sixth of the way through the companies funded during the bubble that will fail in the next few years. Someone in the audience predicted, to general nodding of heads, that the next bubble to burst will be the pension funds that the limited partners are investing in the VCs. Ack.

3. John Benditt, who until recently was the editor of MIT's Technology Review, talked about how nanotechnology — in particular, carbon nanotubes — will be used within computers. He said that within 18-24 months, flat-panel TVs will be available at prices competitive with the normal tube-based models, with better quality picture, driven by nanotech. A sheet of carbon nanotubes will replace the electron gun, for they emit electrons when you run a current through them and can thus be used to excite the phosphorescent coating that produces the light that wastes our time. He said that companies such as Samsung are promising this, and that the technology will be applied to computer displays after TVs. Cool! He also said that if you place two layers of nanotubes perpendicular to one another, you can cause the tubes to align or not, thus providing an incredibly dense storage mechanism, eventually packing a terabit (ok, here comes some math: a terabit = 1/8 a terabyte = 128 gigabytes?) into a 1 cm square surface. And it is non-volatile, i.e., you can turn off the power and it retains its state. Finally, he said that companies are working on nanotube CPUs which would let Moore's law reign into the foreseeable future.

4. Landry talked about the importance of wireless, which he sees as the next leader in the 7 year technology cycle. He and Bricklin were at each other like cats in a sack over Bluetooth. Bricklin is all like "802.11 is going to kick Bluetooth's butt" and Landry is all like "Bluetooth works and is being built into devices" and Bricklin is all like "It's too expensive" and Landry goes "It's $4 per chip from TI" and Bricklin is all like "Your pits smell" and Landry goes "He who smelt it dealt it and besides Bluetooth can support up to 7 simultaneous connections" and then Dintersmith did a flying anvil at Benditt but missed and landed on a plate of cookies that dumped on Judith Hurwitz who put Dintersmith into a powerlock while Benditt did the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on him with his own PCMCIA card. And then I had to leave because my Mom was like honking the car outside for me.

But seriously, it was a great way to spend a day. I learned a lot.

---

BTW, Dan comments in his blog on a Pew study of how people actually use Broadband. [Spoiler ahead:] We don't use it the same way they use TV. We actually create and share content rather than simply viewing it.

Dan also has some excellent save-yourself-the-trip blog coverage of what used to be called PC Expo but now has been renamed to "PC-Cella" or "12:06pm" or"Pepsi Presents 12:06pm" or some damn thing.

[Full disclosure: I "sampled" (= stole) the "Pepsi presents..." joke from the Simpsons.] [JOHO the Blog]

How to speak like a redneck. (Some Redneck) [FARK]

Political posters from the United States, Cuba and Viet Nam. Circa 1965-1975. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Soren Kierkegaard. "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." [Quotes of the Day] [Everything... Possible... Happens...]

Tim O'Reilly on the upcoming Open Source conference. Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly (heh) has written a hell of an editorial by way of introduction to the festivities at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source convention in San Diego (which I will have to miss this year, as I'll be taking some much-needed vacation time then in Toronto and tying up some loose ends). Tim talks about the current state-of-the-industry, the fallacies that led up to the great crash and the enduring truths that survived it. Most of all, he addresses the ongoing clash between free software/open source advocates and the proprietary software world, as epitomized by the most recent, rotten FUD from Microsoft and their sock-puppet analysts.

The willingness to make scurrilous accusations ("open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air-traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems") is symptomatic of the disregard for the truth afflicting corporate America these days. The willingness to harness misinformation as a tool of corporate strategy springs from the same corporate "me first at all costs" mentality that led us to the Enron debacle. Just as Enron thought it was appropriate business practice to manipulate the California energy markets to raise its profits, Microsoft seeks to influence public policy to raise the costs of software and prohibit government support for a low-cost alternative.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Sara!) [Boing Boing Blog]

posted by RobertLoch » June 28 6:20 AM | 18 comments. Create your own Monopoly GameSurely the perfect customised gift? You can change the name of the game, the theme, the name of the properties/stations, and also the rules. Apparently it uses a 'What You See Is What You Get Realtime Interface', which allows users to personalise the game completely to their requirements, and then print out and proof the new design. What I find most interesting about this product offering is that the whole process is completely automated. Once you've designed and ordered your customised game, it goes straight to print/production, and is then sent out to you. No human intervention is required. This appears to me to be pretty ground breaking stuff (well in the Toy World anyway), or am I just way behind the times? (via the Ecademy discussion list) [MetaFilter]

Hiker stranded in Andes mountains tries to call for help, but his prepaid minutes were used up. Situation seems dire until the phone company calls to ask if he wants more minutes. [FARK]

Fed up with everything? Read this. Author Alan Cohen says he didn't merely write "Why Your Life Sucks" for cube dwellers with career angst. He charted a "road map out of hell" for everyone who has "come to accept soul starvation as a way of life." Is he talking about you? [CNET News.com]

We don't live in 1984. Arguments by David Brin, many of which I have also come to. [Security weblog]

Detroit: One theatre for one million people. The NYT reports on Detroit's only first-run theatre. Detroit is the model of a doughnut city (empty core, thriving suburbs), a Jane Jacobs nightmare town, and there's something about a major urban center with only one movie-house that epitomizes doughtnut-ness.

"I don't know if companies are afraid to invest in the city," said John Jennings, 38, a fourth-grade teacher sent by children to refill a popcorn tub during "Scooby-Doo."

"Thankfully, these owners were brave enough to invest," Mr. Jennings continued. "A one million population city should have at least six theaters. I think that was the number before the riots. And we should have some minority-owned theaters."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Am I the only one getting turned off by all the politicians pushing "God" today? Geesh. You know, our pledge of allegience has only had "God" in it since 1955 and our paper money has only had "God" on it since 1957. The way Bush and the Congress reacted you'd think that there's a state-sponsored religion thing going on. I guess people who don't believe in the Great Turtle in the Sky are going to be outcast and forgotten. According to the MSNBC unscientific poll only about 25% of the American people agree with the decision yesterday to make the pledge of allegience unconstitutional. Heh. The masses are asses, what can I say? [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]

posted by sheauga » June 27 4:41 AM | 7 comments. Five stars for BEST NEWS SOURCES SITE: FWJC - floating wreckage - jettisoned cargo. Who says design can't be simple. Looks like just another little news blog? Look again. Neat little pulldown menus conceal 26,000 links to beautifully organized lists of news and reference sources. [MetaFilter]

Self on the Net: Actual Damn Research A .... Self on the Net: Actual Damn Research

An anonymous source has forwarded to me a pay-for-download article: "Can You See the Real Me? Activation and Expressoin of the 'True Self' on the Internet" in Journal of Social Issues (vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 33-48), by John A. Bargh, Katelyn Y.A. McKenna and Grainne M. Fitzimmons of NYU. It gives evidence that there's some reality to the self we present on the Net.

The researchers begin with Carl Rogers' belief that people often feel that elements of who they are don't surface in face-to-face interactions. Their hypothesis is that the anonymity of Internet encounters enables those elements to surface. They then did a set of experiments that confirmed this. Further, "features of Internet interaction facilitate the projection onto the partner of idealized qualities." While this sounds to the naive (= me) like a Bad Thing, in fact:

...these are precisely those features that previous research has determined to be critical for the formation of close, intimate relations: Internet communication enables self-disclosure because of its relatively anonymous nature ... and it fosters idealization of the other in the absence of information to the contrary...

Note that this study looks at anonymous interactions, not at long-term relationships built up through email and weblogs.

Normally, I wouldn't pay much mind to this type of research, but since it confirms my prejudices, I'm suddenly all in favor of it. (You can find the abstract here.) [JOHO the Blog]

Thoughts About Beer.  "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  [Synergic Earth News]

Ha!  It was Ben Franklin who said it...  ;~) [jenett.radio]

Gillmor on corporate criminals. Dan Gillmor blasts the corporate crooks whose transgressions fill today's newscasts, greedy bastards who milked billions from their companies, betraying their shareholders. Dan thinks they're aberrant, and that their worst sin is making investors believe that there's no way for the little guy to win. I wonder how aberrant they are -- these aren't fly-by-night operators; the perps in these billion-dollar, economy-destroying felonies are seasoned CEOs and CFOs, people who come from the ranks of Big Five consulting firms and out of world-renowned B-schools. These crooks are the kinds of talking hairpieces that VCs like to parachute into startups to get them ready for IPO; they're the kinds of back-slapping cap-toothed glad-handers who know how to talk to the investment bankers. Some days, I believe that the only way to get to the top of a venture-funded or public company is to check your morals at the door.

Rational people are starting to assume something that isn't necessarily true. They're becoming convinced that the system is hopelessly, irrevocably rigged against everyday investors by a corrupt cadre of insiders in boardrooms and on Wall Street, willfully assisted by regulators and elected officials who are either corrupt themselves or simply blind.

None of this excuses the greed that turned many of those currently rational people into greedmongers themselves. Every financial bubble brings out the sharks, and the smaller fish tend to swim en masse into the killing zone.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Lord Buckley rides again!. The new biography of the Hip Messiah gives us a quintessentially American character worthy of a Mark Twain novel. [Salon.com]

Gleick's Faster: Ten Years Later.

Remember When We Had No E-mail?

"James Gleick, author of "What Just Happened," explains what he got right, and wrong, over the last ten years....

Question: In 1994 you wrote: "I have seen the future, and it's still in the future." Do you still feel that way about technology today? Or does it just always seem this way with technology?

Gleick: Something happened starting 10 years ago that was really exceptional. The speed of change of technology is different now. It's qualitatively different. It's disturbing. We can't always appreciate that because our memories are unreliable. Our attention spans seem to be shorter. We all feel this.

But something very much like it happened a century ago, when the world suddenly got electricity and telephones, and underwent a sudden and dramatic change in the size and topology of the globe. So, it's happened before.

Question: What are some of the ways that people forget how different things were just 10 years ago?

Gleick: It's still slightly surprising to people to remember that as recently as 1994 most people not only didn't have e-mail, but they didn't really know what e-mail was, and it didn't occur to them that they were ever going to have it.

I remember it all vividly, because I started an Internet company in the summer of 1993. And I remember talking to my friends about it, and people thought I was nuts.

I would talk to lawyers, and I would say: I think it's possible that in a while, maybe in a few decades, every law firm will be able to send e-mail, just as now they use the fax machine. And my lawyer friends would roll their eyes and humor me.

Every profession operates differently now, because the online world exists. Every profession, and it's still just getting started." [Salon]

I haven't kept up with Gleick's magazine essays but I really enjoyed Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, so I can't wait to read his latest book, What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier. Of course, that means I have to hope Audible is going to be able to make it available (fingers and toes crossed, candles lit). If you haven't read Faster, I highly recommend it. You won't feel so alone in your feeling of information overload, which is (of course), just another way of viewing the shifting of information.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Hole-y Matrimony. Krispy Kreme wedding cakes new rage. (Black & White) [FARK]

I'll Have A Double Mocha Cosmic Latte. I Can't Even Decide on a Color for the Bathroom

"The astronomers who discovered the color of the universe (and then changed their mind, like any good homeowner) have given the color a name: Cosmic Latte. Their colleagues helped pick. Here are their Top 10 choices.

I kind of liked "Big Bang Buff" myself. Sounds maybe a bit too much like a porn star, though.

Sudden thought: has anyone filed a trademark yet on Cosmic Latte?" [Over the Edge]

I'll have to design the SLS portal around this color....

[The Shifted Librarian]

Chicken hypnotists beware: Shopkeeps may sell your bike.. [FARK]

Popular Science | All Eyes Are on You.

Tollbooths, ATMs, doctors' offices, online chat: You leave critical personal data behind wherever you go. Let's follow one American as he scatters his digital DNA.

A day in the life picture of the tracks we leave behind as we live our lives.

[Privacy Digest]

Blimps could replace satellites as providers of telephone and Internet services in 5 years. [FARK]

Friday hospital discharges "most dangerous". Patients sent home on a Friday - the most popular discharge day - are more likely to die soon afterwards [New Scientist]

CIncinnati airport shut down after aluminum bat passes through security. (cincypost.com) [FARK]

Smile. The mars happy face. Its so much cooler than that other face.. (Some Astronaut) [FARK]

Alligator on the loose in Cincinnati.. [FARK]

At Los Alamos, Two Visions of Supercomputing. Two powerful new computers are being shown off in northern New Mexico. While Q was designed to be as fast as possible, Green Destiny was built for efficiency. By George Johnson. [New York Times: Science]

funny Amazon rant 

[via Doc Searls Weblog]

A journalistic moment preserved 

In today's Independent, Charles Arthur reports on Shazam, a service in the U.K.:

In a bar a week ago, I witnessed what can be described as geek joy, when a mobile phone service worked. Not any service, though. This one identifies tunes when you can't. If you're in a bar and you hear something that you like, you dial a four-figure number (it's not public yet) on your mobile and hold it up to the speaker for 20 seconds. In 15 seconds, you'll get a text message that tells you the name of the song. Last week, those testing it found it identified different Ramones tracks (not easy) and Elvis doing cover versions. You would have to be a music obsessive to do it yourself.

Well, as it happens, I was there, at the excellent Garlic & Shots in Soho. What's more, I recorded the moment when Charles and I both became acquainted with the service.

Here's how it went down. First, Matt Jones held his cell phone up in the air at the bar, to sample the music for twenty seconds. Then it gave the result: a recent cover of an old Elvis tune. I knew the tune, but Shazam knew that and the band, and the album.

It was one of those whoa-fuck! moments, and I recorded it on pixels with my camcorder, which also shoots 1-Megapixel stills. That's Ben Hammersley reacting on the left, with Matt holding the phone. On the right is Matt handing the phone to Charles.

Here's Charles' take-away:

My suspicion is that Shazam is a great idea that fails to do what successful internet- or mobile-based products do: bring people together. Instead, it is driven by marketing people who overlook the reality of it.

I agree. But the raw technology is a blast, even if the marketing is all ballast.

[Doc Searls Weblog]

posted by grabbingsand » June 24 10:24 AM | 4 comments. you know, you're right... it really does look like my morning coffee.but wait just a minute, didn't we say it was more of a blue-green Tidy-Bowl kind of hue? now i am all confused. good thing i didn't go through with that "paint my house the color of space" idea... [MetaFilter]

posted by moz » June 24 8:54 AM | 0 comments. Cat and Girl"...are a metastatic cultural force with new adventures every monday." Read as the bespectacled Cat and bemused Girl live the examined life. And for God's sakes, it's the pepper! Take the pepper! (thanks to riotnrrd of memepool.) [MetaFilter]

posted by Ty Webb » June 23 11:33 AM | 5 comments. The next dominant species of planet earth.Prepare yourselves, humans: your days are numbered (I for one hail our new spider-goat overlords.) [MetaFilter]

posted by MiguelCardoso » June 23 8:52 PM | 31 comments. Start Me Up Or Shut Me Down: Is Music Compromised And Cheapened By Its Use In Commercials?The Doors' John Densmore, writing in The Nation about why he refuses to accept Apple's and other companies' generous offers to use his band's songs, certainly thinks so. Is this an admirable example of integrity; precious vanity or just downright jejune?[More inside] [MetaFilter]

posted by vacapinta » June 23 11:33 AM | 4 comments. The Inconstant Moonis dedicated to our nearest neighbor. Explore the moon with the Selenographica. Also, this Tuesday, Nova will re-broadcast To the Moon, the story of the the science and engineering behind mans trip to the moon. Its been 100 years since Melies' dream. Will the U.S. return? Or will someone else? [MetaFilter]

MS: Secure HW+DRM.

Topically, just after Ross Anderson's paper warning about potential control that trusted hardware would give censors, news have broken by Steven Levy at MSNBC about hardware-supported DRM that Microsoft plans to built-in into the new version of Windows.

The concept is rather ambivalent as it holds chances to resolve many problems but also to create some severe new ones. Or as David Farber puts it:

I was attracted to the TPCA effort due to its focus on providing security and privacy in a dynamic flexible way. It should be capable, among a lot of other uses, of supporting a Digital Rights Management (DRM) regime that can be used to both protect intellectual property and individual privacy and the individuals fair use of the IP.

As in any such technology it could be miss-used in the market place by devious suppliers of hardware and software. But for what it is worth I found a remarkable sensitivity and caution to the societal issues at all levels of the TPCA leading companies and the willingness to 'do things right'

[Security weblog]

Washington Post - Court Bars Student Suit Under U.S. Privacy Law. University Released Allegation of Crime

The Supreme Court yesterday barred students from using federal privacy law to sue schools that divulge their personal information.

The 7 to 2 decision protects public and private schools and universities from costly court judgments for breaking the law that requires them to keep educational records secret. It is a defeat for parents and privacy advocates who contend the law can be ignored with few consequences.

[Privacy Digest]

Gigantic airships aim to damp forest fires. An airship carrying just under one million litres of water could release an artificial rainstorm over wildfires [New Scientist]

Waste away Sunday with Wrath. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Times of India investigates US beer drinking. Includes really bad Guiness joke.. (Times of India) [FARK]

Shakespearian insults. (Insults.net) [FARK]

How to flex your rights during police encounters. (Some Guy) [FARK]

Work Daze. Those creative, romantic new-economy jobs? Welcome to the next boring profession. [New York Times: Technology]

Hilarious Douglas Adams works. (some genius) [FARK]

Fukui-san. It's the Iron Chef drinking game.. (Some Chef) [FARK]

An Oyster and a Way of Life, Both at Risk. Water demands from cities north of Florida are sucking up rivers that feed the states oyster beds, threatening their fragile ecosystem. By Rick Bragg. [New York Times: Science]

Lillian Hellman. "Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

'The Fourth Star': The Joy of Daniel Boulud's Cooking. Behind the scenes at Daniel, the celebrated restaurant in Manhattan, the food writer Leslie Brenner found a perfectionism so relentless that ordinary mortals might find it insane. By Thomas Mcnamee. [New York Times: Books]

Bushed!. George Bush, scholar of ancient Grecian! A White House staffer reveals that his boss has mastered George Eliot, Tocqueville, Aristotle and Wordsworth -- and if you believe that, you can kiss my Posterior Analytics. [Salon.com]

Blockbuster (supposedly) sez: Rewind your DVDs. Possibly apocryphal exchange between a Blockbuster customer and various tiers of Blockbuster management over the "Be kind -- please rewind" stickers on their DVD rental cases:

I emailed Blockbuster regarding the rewinding of DVDs, they told me that "Most DVD players have a "Rewind" button on it, what it does is spins the DVD the opposite direction from the direction the DVD spins during the play mode, so by spinning the DVD the opposite direction rewinds the DVD, it's similar to the rewind feature on a VCR."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Chris!) [Boing Boing Blog]

posted by anser » June 20 9:45 AM | 5 comments. An asteroid the size of a football fieldjust missed the Earth last Friday. Coming in fast out of the sun, where we ain't watching, it missed us by an astro-paltry 75,000 miles (a third the distance to the Moon). If it had hit, the impact would have been about 10 megatons -- not a planet-killer, but enough to spoil your picnic.

In related news, Attorney General Ashcroft arrested a box of moon rocks and the entire staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA for questioning. The director of the Office of Orbital Security was at a pro-am golf tournament in Fond du Lac, WI and unavailable for a statement. [MetaFilter]

No Comment Necessary.

"IBM's web site has a great Ease of Use poster called 'Simplifying Tasks'. Go to the page and read the text description of the product. Truly ironic. I wonder if it's intentional." [via Derek, via Camworld]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Picking the wireless access point for you. Paul Boutin has a great pick-of-the-litter review of 802.11b base-stations in the new Wired. It's hard to differentiate among the different access points and Paul does a good job of distinguishing among them. And on Paul's blog, Glenn "802.11b Networking News" Fleishman adds his two cents. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Space shuttle crew stuck in orbit, begging for coffee. Wants to go back to space station for some. Permission denied. [FARK]