Gadgetopia

SCO fires CEO Darl McBride, architect of litigation strategy : I wonder how this guy will ever get another job in IT.

In an SEC filing published today, SCO revealed that CEO Darl McBride has been terminated and is no longer with the company.

[…] McBride was the architect and public face of SCO’s misguided campaign against Linux. He claimed that the open source operating system infringed on SCO’s copyright and included a significant quantity of code stolen from UNIX System V.

Clue: Secrets & Spies Updates the Classic Boardgame : An updated version of the boardgame “Clue” uses your cell phone to send you text messages during game.

The text-messaging portion of the game is optional, and requires one cell phone. You text “SPY” to Hasbro’s servers, and then you’ll receive six texts during the course of the game which give additional instructions and add an element of chance. Players pass the cell phone along as they take their turns, and if the text arrives during your turn, you get to act on it. I played once with the texting (as recommended, to get used to the game itself) and then once without.

You have two years to play, apparently.

It states on the box that Hasbro will maintain the servers until the end of 2011, at which point it’s not clear whether the text-messaging portion will continue or not. I would guess it depends on the success of these games.

They’re made out of Meat, by Hugo and Nebula Winner Terry Bisson : Joe sent me this sci-fi short story, which I think is absolutely brilliant. It will take you three minutes to read it.

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.”

“Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?”

The Wikipedia page links to a page on “carbon chauvinism,” a term I had never heard before but have long-considered over the years.

Carbon chauvinism is a relatively new term meant to disparage the assumption that extraterrestrial life will resemble life on Earth.

No one cares about your garage band: This is an actual Wikipedia admin page helping administrator identify pages created to promote someone’s garage band.

Typical characteristics of garage band pages […]

Lack of capitalization: People making articles about their garage bands generally forget that capitalization of proper nouns is one of the underlying principles of the English language […]

Lack of any formatting whatsoever: As 99.9% of garage-band-page-creators have no prior experience with Wikipedia and its formatting system, garage band pages are often devoid of the markup present in standard pages.

[…] Use of the word “hardcore”: All garage bands, even if they are not “hardcore” seem to love to describe themselves as such.

They helpfully include a sample article as an example of what to look for and delete:

BRINGERS OF DARKNESS are revitalizing audiences with their raw energy live show and undeniable chemistry of brotherhood. They transcend a world that is locked in genre and commercialism; though they know they can’t do it alone, they are the seeds of a revolution.

Members: Tim kingsworth - guitarist born to rock, tim has written many of bringers of darkness’s best songs including “my love is like ten thousand arows”

Shayne tracy -vocals Stunning gutteral screams, as raw and wild as the songs

barett lee- bass player the best bass player in idaho is barett lee, his awesome riffs bring bringers of darkness’s songs together

wade wilson- drummer      played everyware, now the pumping heart of bringers of darkness beats 

It just gets funnier in the section entitled “How Do I Know if Anyone Cares About my Garage Band?”

Wikipedia enters a new chapter: Some interesting statistics about Wikipedia, found by data-mining performed by PARC.  Wikipedia is becoming more elitist, it seems.

[…] they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away.

[…] One of the measures the Parc team looked at was how often a user’s edit succeeds in sticking. “We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% – and that’s been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,” he says.

Meanwhile, for those who did not invest vast amounts of time in editing, the experience was very different. “For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the ‘onesies’ – people who only make one edit a month – their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate,” Chi explains.

The entire article is a really interesting look at how the site is changing.  The article discusses the eternal battle between two factions:

On one side stand the deletionists, whose motto is “Wikipedia is not a junkyard”; on the other, the inclusionists, who argue that “Wikipedia is not paper”.

Deletionists argue for a tightly controlled and well-written encyclopedia that provides valuable information on topics of widespread interest. Why should editors waste time on articles about fly-by-night celebrities or wilfully obscure topics? Inclusionists, on the other hand, believe that the more articles the site has, the better: if they are poorly referenced or badly written, they can be improved – and any article is better than nothing. After all, they say, there is no limit to the size of the site, and no limit to the information that people may want.

tr.im your URLs. tr.im is stopping their service.  After the end of the year, redirects through it will no longer work.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

Here are a couple pages I’ve really enjoyed in the field of cognitive science —

Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed page explains things like the “Sunk Cost Trap”:

You pre-ordered a non-refundable ticket to a basketball game. On the night of the game, you’re tired and there’s a blizzard raging outside. You regret the fact that you bought the ticket because, frankly, you would prefer to stay at home, light up your fireplace and comfortably watch the game on TV. What would you do?

Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases goes even further, with dozens and dozens of named biases – influences that make you think wrongly about something.  For instance:

Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. […]

Reminiscence bump — the effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods. […]

Lake Wobegon effect — the phenomenon that a supermajority of people report themselves as above average in desirable qualities

I thoroughly enjoyed reading both of those.

The Webcycle: If I had this, I would be Lance Armstrong.

It’s a handy way for internet addicts to get fit: the faster you pedal, the faster your internet goes. The fitness possibilities are wonderful.

It’s an exercise bike, with sensors on the pedals, connected to an Arduino and a laptop running Ubuntu with wondershaper.

There’s a video.

 Pwnie Award Winners: I didn’t even know this existed. There’s lots of hard-core technical awards in there, but this year’s big winner was Twitter, who won in the “Epic FAIL” category:

[…] this year Twitter learned the hard way that when your entire security rests in the cloud, it only takes one unused hotmail account and a bored teenager to get your entire business plan, all your employee’s personal information, and administrative access to your 55 million dollar web application. According to Twitter’s top secret internal documents (now published on Techcrunch) “Are we building a new Internet?!?” Well if they are, it’s one that needs more security.

Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet? Analyze That: Good roll-up of the current debate du-jour at Wikipedia.

psychologists […] are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish.

Building Rome in a Day: Making 3D models of famous cities from nothing but downloaded images on the Web.   Complete with video.

In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

Ramen Profitable: A good term to know.  Blend got ramen profitable after about a year.

Ramen profitability is […] a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000 a month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. Revenues of $3000 a month do not mean the company has succeeded, or even found a path to success. But the ramen profitable startup does share something with the one that’s profitable in the traditional way: they don’t need to raise money to survive.

Most expensive javascript ever?: Opera needed some new servers – lots of them, costing lots of money.  They got some test servers from a vendor, but the results were not good.

[…] one of the world’s biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn’t do their homework. When Opera’s sysadmin booted up the server to test their web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO.

Can you guess the line of Javascript?

The Printed Blog: I met this guy – Joshua Karp – in Chicago.  He has an interesting concept:

The Printed Blog is the world’s first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content.

What they do is get permission of blog owners, then reprint their posts in a glossy print publication which they hand out at train stations in major metros. So, it’s like blogging, but in reverse – what started on the Web, is now in print.

He was handing out copies at the conference, and it was very well-done.  Glossy, large-format, very high-end.  Great photography as well.

I talked to Joshua about the potential for Kindles and iPhones and laptops to compete with him for the commuter’s attention span.  He made a really great point; he said:

The Web is about exploration. Print is about consumption.

That’s fairly profound, and it echos what I’ve said before.  Consider this post from a couple years ago about reading print publications on the Net with one of those zooming readers:

[…] it’s tough to keep your attention on Web content, because the Web is ever-changing and it’s so easy to get distracted. Hyperlinks beckon you on to more content and you know that different…stuff, is just a bookmark click away.

What I found when reading content designed for print, was that I spent more time reading it. I would actually read an entire article, rather than just skim it, and I could actually be semi-contemplative about something, instead of rushing to finish so I could move onto the next thing. There was an unmistakable sense of peace about the entire process that I’ve just never gotten from Web content.

I still feel this way.  My Kindle is easier to read things on that the Web.  Paper is easier still.  It tends to shut off the explorer in you, and unleash the consumer.  This guy may have a point.

The Last Question — Isaac Asimov: I’m not much for science fiction, but something compelled me to read this story tonight.  Perhaps because it was short.  It will take you 15 minutes to read.

I realize Asimov was an atheist (or something close to it), but this strikes me as somewhat religious tale.  I guess it could be read different ways, which is perhaps the point.

“[…] All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever.”

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.

“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”

“That’s not forever.”

“All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?”

Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. “Twenty billion years isn’t forever.”

If the concept of entropy interests you, we had a great discussion a couple years ago about Perpetual Motion and the Religion of Physics.  I just noticed that someone mentioned this story (but forgot the exact title, apparently) in the comments.