Gadgetopia

Talk:John Kerry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Speaking of Wikipedia, there's a fascinating and somewhat acrimonious debate on the discussion page for the John Kerry entry. I normally wouldn't link to what may be just be a flame war, but it really gives you an idea of how hard it ...

Hacking John McCain: This is pretty funny. If you visit John McCain's MySpace page (as of 9am PST Tuesday morning), you will notice an interesting announcement from him. He's apparently reversed his position on gay marriage as well as revealed a bias towards attractive lesbians. Why would a presidential candidate ...

John Robb's Weblog: Having worked with Documentum, this is kinda funny. "Yuk. I spent some time on the Documentum site today to have a look at its eRoom software. What a mess." When I was in the middle of a selection process, Interwoven Documentum's biggest competitor told me ...

John Byrne VS Wikipedia: John Bryne is apparently a cartoonist of some kind (here's his Wikipedia page, which makes the post recursive). Anyway, he got uptight with Wikipedia the other day. [Bryne's page was ] originally an informative retrospective of his entire career, detailing not only the work he's done ...

Google Search: waffles: John Kerry got Google-bombed. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an excellent page on Google-bombing that reveals some bombs I didn't know had been dropped. I love this one. If you knew you were getting Google-bombed, couldn't you take some counter-measures? Say a bunch of people linked the term ...

KerryEdwards.com auction delayed: There once was a guy named "Kerry Edwards" who bought a vanity URL. He turned out even luckier than Moldova or Tuvalu. The fate of the KerryEdwards.com Web site is up in the air after the highest bidder for the potentially profitable domain name pulled out. Since ...

Senator John Kerry's Contact Form: Following Help Desks everywhere, Sentator (and presidential hopeful) John Kerry has shutdown his email address and is taking contacts through a Web-form only. It's apparently a ticket-based system to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. With email become more and more the chosen mode of ...

For the 2008 Race, Google Is a Crucial Constituency: Interesting article about how candidates are trying to sway to Google vote. LAST century, General Motors assembly plants were a regular stop on the itineraries of presidential candidates. This election cycle, Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., has become a favorite ...

John Deere, IRobot Team Up to Make Robot: In other news, trucker caps will soon become standard issue to our military forces. Burlington-based iRobot Corp. will adapt the artificial intelligence technology used in its Roomba vacuums and portable PackBot military robots for a two-seat John Deere utility vehicle similar to ...

Weblog Links: Part 1 The Impermanence of Permalinks: Some good thoughts about links in blogging, and how you get tied to both your domain name and your permalink structure. "This happened recently with a well-known weblogger, John Robb. When John left his old employer, Userland, his Userland-hosted weblog was ...

FM's Advertising Platform Launch!: FM has launched a somehwat insane ad buying platform to get ads on any of the FM-managed sites (of which we are one). This is something of a personal milestone for John Batelle. Nearly two years ago, while researching my book, I came up with an ...

Google Search: dean: The Wesley Clark crew bought the AdWord "dean" (for Howard Dean, his competition) over at Google. Via John Robb.

The Zombine Hunters: This article is scary. Crackers tried to get this company to pay $10,000 in protection money. The company refused, and it now costs them a half-million a year just to stay online. A brutal story. Michael Alculumbre's first communication from the extortionists arrived on a Thursday evening ...

Best Buy initiates a battle of the brands: Interesting. Best Buy wants to put its insignia on consumer electronics. The retailer has quietly begun selling a range of devices, including large-screen televisions, portable DVD players and desktop PCs, under a new in-house brand name, Insignia. Via John.

Hillary s ad: debate footage doctored to make Obama blacker: A bunch of bloggers are claiming that Hillary s camp took an image of Obama, darkened it, and squished it vertically, in an attempt to make Obama look..blacker. They present a bunch of Photoshop-ish evidence on this page, which is interesting. And ...

And this time it's more preposterous than ever. According to him, now that Apple is using Intel processors they will complete the transformation and totally drop OS X, replacing the OS in Apple machines with Windows. Yeah, right. Like the market needs yet another Windows machine. The last thing Apple ...

Here's an interesting tidbit I read tonight in John Batelle's "The Search." You know PageRank, the super-secret mojo that makes Google what it is? Google doesn't own it. Page and Brin came up with it at Stanford, so Stanford owns it. Google has an exclusive license to it. Until 2011. ...

Here's a page listing the top Wikipedia pages, ranked by number of edits. There are a lot of administrative pages in the list, but the top actual pages are: George W. Bush (the discussion page for this would be ranked fifth) Hurricane Katrina Jesus Adolf Hitler United States September 2005 ...

iD Software uber-programmer John Carmack hinted on Slashdot that Quake 3 may soon go open source. By the end of the year. There are still a lot of higher priority things, but it is coming soon. That would be a tremendous boon to a lot of folks trying to write ...

Interesting things are happening at UserLand. John Robb has left, and Dave Winer is hinting that big changes are coming. Two theories abound: (1) they will open source some or all (Frontier, Manila, Radio) of their products, or (2) they will be acquired. With Google's purchase of Blogger some months ...

Mamma Mia! Papa John s raking in the dough online: An entire article on CNN about the apparent explosion of ordering pizza on the Net. Dominos Pizza Inc., put its own twist on online ordering early this year by introducing a Pizza Tracker, which lets customers keep tabs on the progress ...

Australian John Martinkus was kidnapped in Baghdad on Saturday because his captors thought he was a CIA agent. The kidnappers googled him and found enough information on his homepage to convince them that he was who he said he was and he was freed. I smell a business opportunity here. ...

Sun exec sees opportunity in Chinese software shift: Sun is awfully happy with the recent developments in the Asian OS market. "John Gage, Sun's chief researcher, told Reuters a Chinese plan to develop operating systems using either local or alternative software like Linux spelt the end of dominance by rival ...

Google Photos Stir a Debate Over Privacy: Google s new Street View is making some people nervous. Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her ...

Linux, Open Source Remain Thorns in Microsoft's Side: Microsoft says Linux and open-source are its second-biggest concern. Microsoft's chief financial officer John Connors outlined the five largest risks and drivers to Microsoft's business going forward. ... 'The general economic environment is risk and driver number one, Linux and non-commercial software ...

Gates' Corbis sues Amazon over copyrights: Two of the richest men in the world are suing each other. Add this to our list of soap operas: "The suit contends the defendants, through Amazon's Web site, have been selling celebrity posters and photos that are illegal reproductions of photos copyrighted by ...

53 convicted for Internet crimes after government sweeps: I hope you all feel just a little bit safer. Operation Web Snare, which began June 1, wrapped up Thursday with several arrests at locations across the country. Justice Department officials said victims lost more than $215 million. They said there were ...

According to SlashDot, iD Software has announced that the source to Quake3 is about to be released. QuakeCon has just kicked off and at the end of the keynote speech, John Carmack made an announcement saying that the Quake 3 sourcecode will be released shortly. The Q3 engine blew away ...

The Mystery Blog: It's been revealed -- the mystery blog that was auctioned for somewhere in the $60K range. I have never heard of this blog. Not once. The blog is The Blog Herald, as several people at Blogaholics guessed (ultimately, John Evans won the contest, which included a free ...

MTAdSenseStats: John developed a plugin to display AdSense stats on your site, but from both his experience and mine you're gonna get an email from Google if you use it. After some gentle prodding I've decided to release MTAdSenseStats after all. Please read my previous entry to understand ...

Search wars hit desktop computers: This will be interesting. Microsoft has the infrastructure in place already their Indexing Service works in the background all day long. I've been able to do some great things with it in on ASP-based servers (good tutorial on it here, BTW). John Connors, Microsoft's ...

Apple should have used Intel chips, Sculley says Apple Computer Inc. should have adopted the Intel Corp. architecture when it had the chance, former chief John Sculley said Tuesday. [ ] In the late-1980s, when Apple was using Motorola Inc. 68000 series chips and considering its next step, Intel co-founder Andy ...

White House E-Mail System Becomes Less User-Friendly: This is a lot like the email system rolled out by Senator John Kerry a few months ago. "When Mr. Matzzie sent an e-mail protest against a Bush administration policy, the message was bounced back with an automated reply, saying he had to ...

The Pirillo Puzzle (Part I): Ever wonder the real reason Chris Pirillo left TechTV? He and John Dvorak are appearing on Unscrewed to promote their new book, and Pirillo says he'll talk about it. I don't spill every one of the beans, but I share enough of 'em to ...

Al Gore joins Kleiner Perkins to save the planet: Al Gore is joining Kleiner-Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm that was an early investor Google, Amazon, AOL, Netscape, etc. Kleiner-Perkins practically created Sand Hill Road. The recovering politician, environmental activist, and Nobel laureate is adding another title to his ...

Red Hat sews up Linux for hobbyists: We had talked before about Red Hat abandoning the consumer version of its product, but perhaps we jumped the gun. Red Hat will release the first version of its hobbyist edition of Linux on Thursday, a company executive said, as the software seller ...

Test bed helps the Internet evolve: The Internet has a dev environment, it turns out. "The project sponsored by Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., as well as many universities, is currently running on more than 160 machines at 65 sites worldwide. 'PlanetLab is a wonderful resource. Because it is in ...

Defense Dept. backs next-generation Net: This is a few days old... In a briefing Friday, John Stenbit, assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, said the Defense Department hopes to move to IPv6 by 2008. ...and we normally wouldn't play catch-up, but interestingly, Microsoft took this moment to ...

A while back we discussed geographically targeted ads and their use by the John Thune campaign for Senate. Well it appears that when you're not dealing directly with the company placing your ads, unfortunate things can happen. It seems Mr. Thune's ad appearred on a site with pictures of naked ...

British boss bans e-mail: This is a very interesting thought. "John Caudwell, CEO of High Street mobile retailer Phones 4U, announced Thursday that he'll ban all employees from using e-mail across the business. The reasoning behind the total ban is apparently to improve productivity by reducing the time Phones 4U ...

Media Bias and Technology Reporting: John Dvorak makes a flameworthy point: most all tech writers are Mac users. There's a conspiracy to promote Macs. This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers ...

This is an excellent article at InformationWeek about the blogging trend and how blogs can be useful inside a company for things like project and knowledge management. Interestingly, UserLand popped up again: "John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers ...

Companies get into weblog act: The article is so-so, but it includes this great paragraph on the value of blogs to knowledge management: Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste because nobody knows ...

Congress Shuts Pentagon Unit Over Privacy: The Total Information Awareness database project is dead. "The Pentagon spending plan for 2004 adopted by the Senate says that the office, the Information Awareness Office, which had been headed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, should be 'terminated immediately' while a few projects under ...

"Hey SCO, Sue Me": What's Next?: John Everitt sent this email to SCO. "I am a Linux user. I feel that SCO's tactics toward an operating system of my choice are unjust, ill founded and bizarre. I am willing to be sued because I am confident that SCO's tactics toward ...

Dusting Off the Archive for the Web: Sports Illustrated is following the lead of the New York TImes and putting everything they ever wrote all 53 year s worth on the Web for free. Their old content is a huge asset in terms of their abilityt to capture eyeballs ...

John Wiley & Sons, publisher of the infamous "For Dummies" tech books, is slated to release an unauthorized biography on Steve Jobs "iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business'' and The Steve is not liking it a bit. So in retaliation Apple ...

Dead Marine's kin plead for e-mail: The family of a soldier killed in Iraq wants access to his email account. Yahoo! has said no. "I want to be able to remember him in his words. I know he thought he was doing what he needed to do. I want to ...

The Australian Bible Society has just released the SMSBible, with all 31,173 verses of the Holy Word translated to phone-speak. Some examples: Genesis 1:1 In da Bginnin God cr8ed da heavens & da earth. Da earth waz barren, wit no 4m of life; it waz unda a roaring ocean cuvred ...

Payloads for RSS: A long time ago (in Internet time), there was a short-lived start-up called LoadTV. You installed the LoadTV viewer, subscribed to some channels which had content you wanted to see, and it downloaded full-motion video in the background all day long. The best part was that whatever ...

Some not too kind things have been said about John C. Dvorak around here, much of it well deserved. But I'm wondering if his assertion that Apple is steering towards Windows is so far off base. I stand by my disagreement with him on why he thinks it's a done ...

Just in time for Halloween, a scary story about how easy it is to buy buy credit information online. A reporter for the Boston Globe went to a an online service, and for the low, low price of $125 was able to buy personal financial information belonging to Massachusetts Governor ...

From the "It Was Only A Matter Of Time" department, some guy John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana is suing Apple because he says the iPod he bought is a hazard to his hearing. Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve ...

Microsoft came out and admitted yesterday that portions of the source code for Windows NT and Windows 2000 had been made available on the Internet. They're not sure just yet who is at fault source code is made available to third-party vendors for development purposes, but those developers are ...

According to a Radar Online article, Justin Long, the guy who played the Mac in Apple's hilarious (but infuriating to some) "Get a Mac" commercials, is done. When the next round of commercials is filmed, John Hodgman will still be the PC guy, but there will be someone else to ...

Net-based 911 fight puts lives on line: This is a pretty scary consequence of VoIP services. Yes, geeks now about it in advance, but as this story demonstrates the average user doesn't. We talked about this last year, but this story really pounds the point home. Seventeen-year-old Joyce ...

Growing up, we would always hear just how easy we had it over our parents and grandparents. We rode the school bus, they walked 5 miles, up hill, both ways, through waist deep snow in the summer. We watched cartoons on a color TV, they listened to The Lone Ranger ...

SlashDot points us to a fascinating article on how Swedish engineer Boris Smeds saved the Huygens Probe from certain failure during its upcoming landing early next year. [...] it was quite a shock when Boris Smeds, a graying, Swedish, 26-year ESA veteran [see photo, "Unsung Hero"], who normally specializes in ...

A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank : The guy who wrote the false entry in Wikipedia that led to the big brouhaha last week has come forward. He was slowly being cornered by someone, and knew it was just a matter of time before he was found: Using ...

WriteTheWeb - What is a k-log?: John Robb is one of the founders of UserLand (I still think I'm missing out). This is an article from last year where he discusses "K-logs" essentially the use of blogs for knowledge management: "...K-Log features like subscriptions let you as an employee ...

I just watched "Swordfish" on TBS. Hugh Jackman is the world's greatest hacker, hired by John Travolta to steal $9.5 billion to finance a terror campaign against...terrorists. Or something. As hacker movies go, it's pretty hopeless. It contains the most unrealistic hack attempt on film: a 60-second crack of the ...

Casual computer games go upscale: An interesting look at the evolution of "casual" games. This is an interesting market niche -- it's vaguely defined as simple, cheap, lightweight, downloadable games that appeal to people not normally into the hardcore gaming experience. But, as the article states, they're getting more and ...

I first saw a post about this a while back at Neatorama, my first thought was the closing scene in the ancient movie The Red Balloon , where the kid floats away at the end hanging from a bunch of balloons. John Ninomiya, who runs the www.clusterballoon.org website, says that same ...

The Great Library of Amazonia: Here's a fantastic article about multiple efforts to catalog all of humankind's published knowledge, from Amazon's Search Inside the Book to Project Gutenberg to the Internet Archive. This stuff gives me goosebumps. The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've ...

The Secret Of Their NFL Success: 60 Minutes had a great segment tonight about NFL coaches and the role they play in their team's success. Apparently computers are playing an huge role in NFL team strategy. They showed John Fox, coach of the Carolina Panthers, in front of his machine. ...

I saw Casino Royale for the third or fourth time tonight. What a great, great film. I'm an old school Bond fan, and I'll state without qualification that if I had to pick one Bond film to take to a desert island with me, it'd be Casino Royale. But it's ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

Let me play industry analyst for a second and explain why I think computer manufacturers are in deep kimshee: Hardware has vastly out-paced software. Besides gaming, there's no compelling reason to upgrade your computer. I'm still running on a 1GHz/384MB machine I had built for me two years ago. I ...

I ve been doing some reading lately on Design Patterns. I find myself trying to relate the examples to Web applications. One of the interesting ones is the State Pattern. This says that an application is really just a collection of states, or situations the application might find itself in. Some ...

A friend and I are looking at a bunch of different content management systems for a church Web site. We've been discussing the merits of the various approaches, and looking at some open source offerings like Mambo, Typo3, and eZ publish. During this, I've struck upon a concept that I ...

Making Web 2.0 Work For You, Inside and Out The day started with a keynote from a guy from Human Factors International, which is a somewhat legendary usability firm. His talk was dense, but fascinating, so I ll have to dig through the slides later. It was a discussion about ...

Here's a high correlation: computer geeks and role-playing and war game players. If you're a programming or hardware geek, there's a good chance you've played Dungeons and Dragons, Axis and Allies, or Magic: The Gathering. There's no scientific basis for this it's all empirical but I know the ...