BREAKING: Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder General" with power to appoint militias, create laws - Boing Boing - http://www.boingboing.net/2009...
"How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?"
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
"Can anything break this cycle? No device I've seen so far could. Palm and RIM haven't a hope. The only credible contender is Android. But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search."
- ⓞnor
I also liked his bit about how a machine you could actually develop on would get the all the Apps. Just like Sun.
- j1m
Finally, instructions on how I can fix my Droid camera: "Though no official word has been given, users are reporting that an oily substance thinly coats the Droid camera and that if you take a cloth and wipe it down really good, you’ll start to get those magical green indications that your camera is focusing. Not to mention, pictures will turn out a little better. I know you lazy folks enjoy hands-off OTA updates to fix your every problem, but embrace the Amish lifestyle for once and use a physical piece of matter along with human labor to accomplish your goals. Once you do, tell us if you’ve noticed an improvement on your Droid camera?"
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
"You really have two options when choosing a prog band name. You can either go with something "simple but random", like Yes, Rush and Camel (may we suggest "Spinach", "Taco" or "Hat"?); or you can use a complex title if it is sufficiently outlandish. The second route is riskier, but the payoff is enormous if you nail it. Enthusiasts love to quote their favourite obscure bands, and the zanier the better. ("Oh, you haven't heard of Mr Bungle? Next you're going to tell me you aren't a fan of Van Der Graaf Generator.") Some suggestions to get you started: Interstellar Spinach The Epic Taco Project Hat Dimension"
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
"Lee Morgan, a leading (hard bop & modal jazz) trumpeter and composer, recorded prolifically from 1956...Morgan was murdered in the early hours of February 19, 1972, at Slugs', a jazz club in New York City's East Village where his band was performing. Following an altercation between sets, Morgan's live-in girlfriend (Helen More), shot him in the heart, killing him instantly. He was 33 years old."
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
'Other commenters support renaming the language "Issue 9," a reference both to the dispute thread and to Bell Labs' distributed operating system Plan 9, which was developed in part by Google Go creators Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. '
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
I love how an honest naming conflict becomes "evil" when applied to Google. And of course there's always the howls of "how could a search company fail to know about this?" -- yeah, "go" is a really easy name to search for unambiguously, and everyone at Google walks around with a copy of the web embedded in their brains. Sheesh.
- Joel Webber
I imagine the Reddit crowd will get this out of their system after a few weeks and turn their attention elsewhere.
- Matt Mastracci
@Joel, yes, well, I would say that in general the public discourse is dominated by the notion that, since "there are 2 sides to every story! [sic]" whenever any idea is before you, you can generate another valid idea by inverting it. Thus Google's "Don't Be Evil" slogan, which is sincere, idealistic, and, perhaps most important, catchy, is routinely inverted into "Google Is Evil" not...
more...
- j1m
"Comparing the aesthetics of the iPhone and the Droid is.. ludicrous, if not impossible. It’d be like having a heated argument over whether Angelina Jolie was more or less gorgeous than Halle Berry."
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
I can't believe I just found out about this movie. None of the people who worked on it are on my list of watched stars, and the title consists entirely of stopwords, so it's easy to miss.
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, and with Carole Lombard (her final film) -- the great director and star of the teens (in his case), 20s, and 30s. Stealing the show, her husband, in about 18 roles: Jack Benny, tv star of the 50s and 60s. As the romantic foil: Robert Stack, tv star of the 60s 70s and 80s. And oh, all that plot....
- j1m
Also, Inglorious Basterds makes more reference to this movie than any other movie I can remember.
- j1m
"Zynga used the Times to deflect the bad shit flying at them from Arrington....What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere "aggregators" and the "real journalism" gets done at places like the Times. Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers."
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
Meh. There's investigative journalism, and there's investigative journalism. As much as I respect Arrington for what he does, I don't see any blogger "beating the shit out of newspapers" when it comes to (like Eric said in his interview with Danny) doing investigative reporting while embedded in war-zones.
- Aaron D'Souza
Aaron, what was the last piece of insightful investigative reporting in a war zone you saw from the MSM? In theory newspapers can do all this great stuff; in reality they regurgitate PR lines and spin tactics. Meanwhile, bloggers are on the ground in places like Iran.
- ⓞnor
from Android
investigative reporting is almost entirely incompatible with being embedded. (which is itself absolutely not the same thing as "being on the ground", of course.)
- Andrew C
I've never gotten much out of tech or science news from nytimes et al. and I'm glad that there are things sprouting up to fill those niches, but I'm a lot more likely to lend credence to stories coming from arstechnica or wired than techcrunch. He's right to rake nytimes over the coals for this specific case, but not to generalize to the entire industry and to every subject area.
- Ryan Moulton
Glad to see lots of long, thoughtful posts putting down Nick Carr's post about twitter.
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
"A further straw man is Carr’s complaint that social media is making “our humanity [...] leak[...] away”. It’s a meaningless statement, on a par with the anti-electricity rhetoric from the late 19th Century. Ethics are not tool-specific, they don’t change from technology to technology."
- j1m
"The copying machine has to be careful, but it also has to be fast" -- 3 billion base-pairs in 8 hours: 1000 machines working in parallel, a 12.5 msec/base pair. *That's* computation
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
The downside is that it required support from the conference organizers to set up.
- Ryan Moulton
Nailed it. We recently had an internal conference at Google, with many sessions going on at once. Almost immediately, and without real coordination, a number of people started "live waving" their notes. Even better, people would "pinch hit" these waves, so that when the first note taker went for coffee or to the restroom, someone was there to take over. It worked remarkably well.
- Joel Webber
@Ryan: I think the article was saying that the conference organizers *did* set up some waves. But this is definitely not a strict requirement. What we found was that while sometimes multiple note takers would start at the same time, they would get naturally coalesced fairly quickly once people started noticing the duplication. I suspect that in a larger group their *would* be multiple waves for a given session, probably one for each natural cluster in the social graph.
- Joel Webber
@Joel. That brings up another interesting question. How often is the social graph at a large conference a connected component. :) I guess at the least you could make your wave public and use twitter to advertise it to everyone else.
- Ryan Moulton
Very good points. re: connectedness and discovery... I think as Wave becomes more ubiquitous and people become more familiar and comfortable with it, there'll be a natural tendency to both search for and create public waves. Or, as was done at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, someone actually created a public master wave of sorts linking to the other waves about the conference. Didn't get mass adoption, but was useful and interesting nonetheless.
- Adam Lasnik
For most conference live-blogging, it would make sense just to add the Blog-bot to it, thus making it public, and let anyone write to it. But of course conference organizers do have lists of participants.
- j1m
"As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias — i.e., a preference for centrism — whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.)"
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
I wish I could like this more than once.
- EricaJoy
I'm pretty sure I just washed one of my phones. To whoever thought of manufacturing and purchasing in the front-loading washers that can't be opened after you start the wash (obviously a very bad idea, even without this demo): Uh, thanks.
Chance it was dead 2 minutes after I started the wash, when I discovered it was missing? Probably pretty low. Chance it will be dead after 40 minutes of this: unfortunately, maybe pretty high.
- j1m
Oh, ouch. Yes, I left in chap stick once, and a pen once. Fortunately long ago, so the angish has subsided. I think after the chap stick I pretty much threw away all the clothes in that wash, except jeans and socks.
- j1m
Somehow, it's actually less painful to throw your portable electronics down the toilet. There the loss is instantaneous, so it's not so excruciating.
- j1m
And we're back! When it came out I disassembled it and set it in front of a fan that's on for a few hours most days. Since the battery was in it, wet, for 45 minutes before I did this, I didn't have high hopes... but I just reassembled it, and it works fine! ftw.
- j1m
front loaders scare me. We were just watching one of the Pink Panther movies and there was a gag where he opened a front loader and the water spilled all over. I can't believe your phone works, wow, nice work!
- Laura Norvig
@Piaw, that would be so awesome, except my regular washer got my clothes 100% clean already. Should I be doing something to make my clothes dirtier?
- j1m
Yes, you should go hiking more. :-) Preferably multi-day hikes. :-)
- Piaw Na
But I had just come back from one of those, that's how I accidentally washed the phone.
- j1m
"Bulos Paul Zumot, 36, owner of the downtown Palo Alto smoking lounge Da Hookah Spot, was arrested on suspicion of homicide and arson in the death of 29-year-old real estate agent Jennifer Schipsi. Schipsi died on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009, in a house fire on the 900 block of Addison Avenue. Photo courtesy of the Palo Alto Police Department. ( Photo courtesy of the Palo Alto )"
- j1m
from Bookmarklet
I love the argument here -- "our scam is threatened by companies refusing to participate". By that logic, blocking 1-900 numbers and those to caribbean countries' pseudo-1-900 scam numbers should also be forbidden.
- Joel Webber
Yeah, everything about that position is very shady. More than that, the very notion that arbitrary pieces of software could be subject to FCC telephony rules is chilling.
- j1m