The Iron Yuppie

Yeah, this probably covers it for Seattle. (thanks Pirillo) To bad the jerk monorail people can't get themselves in gear.

There has been a realization that I've wanted to put into a post for a long time about the danger of the web that seems to be realized in this piece:

Come Dream With Me: Stirling Engines

The piece is a nice interview of a founder of a company who's building some technology about stirling engines. But it's just a work of fiction. The author discloses this at the top, but if you miss that disclaimer, for whatever reason, you could be under the impression that this was real. There's nothing wrong whatsoever with what the author did, but because the medium has yet to reach that level of distrust in our mind, it's very easy to overlook the disclaimer and move right into the piece. When we see something on the web, it FEELS real. Movies, television and books all feel the same as well, but, in those cases, at least there is some level of market dynamics that reduce the risk of just anyone posting something. The web does not have the same shackles and, as a result, every piece starts out with the same amount of "truth" to it, whether it's on CNN or Johnnyblogger.blogspot.com.

Interesting article on slashdot today about passwords

Too Many Passwords

The fact is that I think we're pretty much doomed for the near term and probably won't have anythnig decent for quite a while. The nearest I can figure is that we're going to have to carry around smartcards embedded in our driver's licenses that give us a unique extremely long randomly generated number as our password and is verified against a central authority. These chips will be inserted any time someone wants a password and then will require a simple pin. If it's stolen, you can log on anywhere and, before the thief ever has a chance to use it, the pin can be deactivated. It seems like that's the only way.

Simple math seems to support this. Today, assume everyone uses 10 character passwords:

94 (characters) ^10 = 5.38 × 10^19 different passwords

Not bad, and it'll take approximately a billion years if you try a million a second to figure it out. But in 18 months, it becomes 140 million years. Then 18 months later, it's 14 million. Then a million. You can see where this is going. And that's if you're not using any specialized hardware. Suffice it to say by 2020, no amount of complexity in your password is going to be enough.

The 'Comeback' isn't coming back (thanks Defamer)

What a shame. I'll admit that it was unbelievably painful to watch, yet it was just so brutal and unforgiving to the star, you had to love it (or, apparently, hate it, which the majority of people did). I'll miss it.

I'm staring at a little bit of corporate marketing right now.

Total Employees: 61,472
Total Developers: 8,000
Total Sales Force: 7,761

Jeeeeez. So basically 3/4 of the company neither produce the product to sell, or sell the product. The worst is that the people who put this thing together tout these figures like they are a good thing. Maybe it's me, but this seems 180 degrees from being a correctly staffed organization. It's times like this that I back Mini-MSFT.

You had best be talking like a pirate today on the International Talk Like a Pirate Day... here be a keyboard to help ye out (thanks Engadget).

My girlfriend forwarded me this hilarious video from the ACLU:

Ordering a Pizza in the New World Order

I've always been kind of surprised that Republicans (note I do not call them conservatives) are so against the ACLU. This seems like exactly the kind of thing Republicans claim they would like to prevent. The problem with the Republican platform on this is that they all think that as long as it's not them, it's ok to do all this profiling. What's that quote... we are all somebody else to somebody else. Just cause you're in the majority doesn't mean this won't apply to you.

One nice thing about being back in LA for a while is the pleasure of listening to Kevin & Bean. I love those guys, and I must admit I'm pretty surprised they're still on the air after at least 20 years. Anyhow, are you aware that this coming Monday is:

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

As I have discussed before, it is critical that we push the research and investments into the piratical sciences. I'm pleased to see this recognition of this important cause.

My God I had no idea how bad driving in LA had become. It's DISGUSTING. I passed two cars in less than 3 miles that had stalled in the middle of the 6 lane freeway... no accidents, no serious damage to speak of. You couldn't get over to the shoulder? You are a dick. It couldn't have been this bad when I lived here 15 years ago.

I've seen/held the new Nano this week for the first time.



It really is that small, that gorgeous and that cool. It is not possible to overstate how cool or how fast this will fly off the shelves. I still don't like the wheel on the front because it's still weird to try and manipulate it with one hand... I still prefer the Rio in that respect. But Apple has a home run on this one. More than a home run, a grand slam. Actually, it's like some kind of freaky grand slam that some how results in a 99 yard reception for a touchdown + a hat trick. I'd love to invest, but I feel like it's probably already so highly valued already. Note: this blog post may be used to say I told you so in three years when the stock has tripled.

Damn this is good...

anthropomorphized

I mean REALLY good.

If you're a tester of Internet Explorer 7, keep this site on speed dial...

Switch Between Appearing To Be IE 6 and IE 7

I wish sites wouldn't try and outsmart me and just let me pass through. Just because you don't recognize it doesn't mean it won't work. That's one thing that Opera and Firefox always had right... unbelievably geeky though that feature is.

Man, Scoble even has ME excited. That's pretty hard. He certainly is playing the right level of tease. Ok, Scoble, but you have to follow up all this goodness with the reveal. After this, you better rewrite all these posts (or at least mention them) and wrap up all the super cool things you saw BEFORE the PDC to tell us what got you so excited.

This deal on the other hand is a marriage between two equally poweful yet bloated and complicated pieces of software. Oracle's strategy could not be more clear; they want to own (and get paid for) every business function that occurs above the Operating System. Whether it's managing emails, centralizing the portal information to sell, managing the customer relationship, tracking the sales process and reporting on it on the back end... they want to do it all. I wish the would concentrate a little more on the actual experiences though. Whether it's the the end user or the IT admin, the experience is just abysmal.

I still don't understand anything about two technologies... mobile phone carriers and plasma. This ever so slightly helps on the latter..

Myths of Plasma TVs (thanks Kirk Report)

Good God, this is going to be a big week. And it's only begun.

Let me start with Ebay buying Skype.

There are some that feel like Ebay has no business model, or is going nuts doing this (especially for that kinds of dough). There are others who think this is just a visionairy move by a company that's already had success and is trying to push that even further. I think I have to go further than Scoble in saying this is just an "enrich the marketplace" kind of deal. In fact, not even Ebay's talking points are extremely compelling... are the fact that people are going to be able to make free phone calls to close the deal really that compelling? Pay per call for demand generation? That's pretty novel, but I'd like to see it implemented.

Ebay appears to be one thing to me... a giant point-of-sale device. The largest the world has ever seen. Yes, there's a catalog function, but that's a distant second. People go on Ebay to put sell goods in an efficient way... they don't care if a billion people see it or one person sees it, as long as the person who is willing to pay the most the market will bear sees a product and is able to buy it in an efficient way.

Why else would there be so many companies that use Ebay as their primary (or sole) display, sales and redemption engine? Maybe if Internet search engines were a hundred times better at identifying and structuring items that were for sale from existing online stores, finding all the bargains out and sorting them in a fairly clean way and then providing a trusted and straightforward interface for both the seller and buyer to exchange wares, there wouldn't be a need for Ebay at all. People would just maintain their own stores and be done with it. But in 2005, the way to get your stuff listed in the way you want it to the largest audience to take it to the best marketplace, rather than putting up whatever you want and letting the marketplace come to you. In this case, it means YOU do the work to enter in the product names, identify the price, set the description and then ... *magic happens* ... it gets sold and you fulfill it.

Now, thinking about Ebay as a point-of-sale, Skype becomes a different story. Today, if Ebay wants to become the point of sale front for vending machines, car dealerships and all those millions of other things that have no decent point of sales systems today, the likely path seems to be to hook up with a thousand different cell phone carriers and use them as your local representation (namely the connection between the seller, the buyer and the money exchange). But that is clearly unnecessary, as those cell phone carriers could ALREADY handle the transaction. But what if you reduced the value of the cell phone infrastructure to just giving you Internet on the fly. You'd need a way to communicate back and forth (such as Skype or broadband), a verification mechanism (Ebay's selling system) and some sort of credit card processing infrastructure (such as Paypal).

I guess we'll see... maybe it's just a huge deal because Ebay sees the company growing to $200 M in revenue in 2006 and will have over a hundred million users. At that rate of growth, it could look like a cheap acquisition by 2010.

I think my tact and grace (or lack thereof) is world renown and I had this little experience recently to confirm I haven't improved at all. It's a shame really, as I have been trying to improve.

For a few weeks I was pretty intensely trying to understand the diamond earing market. I studied all the online stuff, people's ears, opinions... you name it. I'd like to think I learned quite a bit. Anyhow, I've definitely relaxed a bit since then, but just today I caught what seemed like a remarkably large pair of earings on a quite young looking woman sitting next to me at a conference. Since I my tact and grace are suspect (see above), I naturally, and exceedingly bluntly, asked her the following questions... unfortunately in the following order:

1. Are those earings real? Because they're very pretty.


2. Would you mind telling me how big they are?


3. Are they about 1.5 carats total weight? Cause they look really big!

She laughed that uncomfortable laugh indicating I wasn't HR violation out of line, but I had clearly broken the social contract. Why is it ok to ask about a car or a piece of art but not something that a person is wearing? Anyhow, my exceedingly strong sense of self-denial and self-centeredness took over and I moved on to other things, but if I see her again (she works in a parallel company to mine), I know she's going to give me the crook eye. She's got to wonder what the hell is going on in my melon. If she figures it out, I hope she'll pass it along.

Boy, these dishes sound, um, good or something.

1974 Weight Watcher Cards



I think this goes without saying that 30 years from now we're going to be looking at our equivalents of the "Rosy Perfection Salad" from today (most likely that nasty Coconut/Fusion crap) and become as nauseous as I am right now.

Absolutely great commentary on that site, btw.



Mmm... and now, bring on the snark.

We don't know who "Marcy" is, only that she thinks "enchilada" is wacky Mexican talk for "shit on a shingle."

Gold.

What Linux needs to succeed

Good night. This is one of my pet peeves about larger organizations trying to get enjoy the blogging movement. Putting up some random and attaching your name is no good... you'll just end up bringing down your creditability. ZDNet covered a story about a subject I was working on where the reporter did nothing but copy the quotes from a blog which actually covered the story. It seems that a news organization should actually do the work to identify the facts on its own rather than repeating what the active few people who actually decided to post about a story thought.

The complaint of the week comes from ZDNets blogs, courtesy of Paul Murphy.

At the moment my belief is that nothing, not even the best of the BSDs, gets close to Solaris for scalability, performance (at least on SPARC), and reliability. Similarly I don't see anyone close to catching MacOS X for desktop usability. In other words, I think that Unix is already there, and has been at least since Microsoft dropped Xenix in favor of MS-DOS.
Linux isn't the best at anything, but it's pretty good on a lot of things and far ahead of Microsoft's offerings on justabout everything. In fact my image of this is of three world class skiers who mostly finish in the same order: Solaris, BSD, Linux but almost always do so within fractional seconds of each other, with Microsoft skidding in an irrelevant fourth a minute or two later.

Sweet. Why? What about MSs offerings are so far behind Linux? What about Solaris and BSD are so good that deserve our attention? Disclaimer, I have used all of the OSs he mentions above and now work for MS.

I dont see it. And to make claims like that without backing seems arbitrary. He then goes on to say (and Ill paraphrase here) that the problem with Windows is that everyone knows how to use it and no one knows how to use Linux, which means that everyone who uses Windows should be demoted/fired and they should only hire people who use Linux. Because thats very sane.

Anyhow, I know that its just an opinion piece, but all it does is serve to annoy people and make me think less of ZDNet for letting Mr. Murphy post under their banner. One more pet peeve:

Last week's "insight Friday" piece, on the artificiality of the server - desktop distinction for Unix drew a long and well reasoned responsefrom a user signing himself (or herself) as "xtep." At the end xstep says:
I would like to hear more Linux users talking about what *nix's need to meet the needs of everyone?

Yeah, me to [sic].

Ack. How about even a MODICUM of editorial oversight? You know, enough to eliminate major grammar issues? Thanks.

Vint Cerf Leaves MCI for Google

I know I'm just cynical, but this really feels like a "publicity" hire. What is Mr. Cerf going to do... explain to the folks at Google how there is this wonderful thing called the Internets? Not that Mr. Cerf isn't ridiculously well qualified, but it's not like Google doesn't have some visionaries on staff already. I suppose you can never have too many smart people.

It is one thing that Google can offer that almost no other large software company can... the ability to work on something that will be very big and totally new. MS was able to offer this to Anders Hejlsberg back when they hired him to work on the DotNet framework and C#. If you were a visionary, why would you join MS now? To finish off bugs and ship a product that you basically had nothing to do with? Not very appealing.


D

I've been looking for something to help me train. Everytime I go out running, I always feel like I'm just thrashing about. I had a heart rate monitor which I used on the treadmill but, alas, that has failed me because 1) it's out of batteries and 2) it only measures heart rate, not how fast you should be running.

I'm currently debating between one of the following:

Garmin 301 (GPS, no footpod needed) - $325



Suunto t6 (footpod extra) - $449



Polar M61 (footpod extra, but very cool fabric heart electrodes) - $169



Nike Triax Elite (footpod included) - $360



I'm not particularly partial to anyone based on brand name, but I am leaning towards the REALLY expensive Suunto, only because it has the nice feature to really focus my workouts... to be as hard as is useful but no harder. Anyone tried any of these for coaching?

I heard Ann Coulter promoting her book on some yelling show quite a while ago and noticed the flimsiest argument I've ever heard. She said something to the effect of (and I don't have the exact quote I'm afraid) "What is different about a Liberal dissenting than someone who is helping the enemy." The concept is accurate; someone who dissents against the government and an actual traitor may both speak with a very similar message on a given issue. But they do a lot of other things the same as well! They both breathe oxygen, they both have nipples, they very likely like their ice cream cold and their coffee hot... is having a fondness for Macaroni and Cheese traitorous? It fails the most basic logic and statistics... correlation does not equal causality.

Not very recently (I'm slow to catch up on my blog reading, what can I say) some individuals in the media have called Cindy Sheehan a traitor for protesting against the war. My levels of disagreement with this assessment are many fold. First, treason = "Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country bywaging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies." Remind me again how sitting outside the President's ranch is "acting to aid [America's] enemies"? Second, if ANYONE could be considered supporting our country it would be one who had "the solemn pride that must be [hers] to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." Cindy Sheehan simply has more creditability to opine on what is worth sacrificing or not considering shes already paid a hefty fee. Third, the last time I checked, petitioning the government for a redress of our grievances was something this country was founded on... where did I see that? OH RIGHT, THE FIRST AMENDMENT:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

You know, I like to consider myself open to both sides of a given controversial issue, but some people's desire to tear down Mrs. Sheehan is just wrong. She's a person who has gotten a bit of a following. Does that make her wrong, evil or traitorous? Hardly. Disagreement is fine, but the slander is just uncalled for.

30 cheat sheets for geeky stuff

I always loved this stuff, even though this list seems pretty short. Cheat sheets are the tool of the programmer... at least until you have intellisense.

The blogsphere appears to be pretty active about Ballmer's desire to kill Google. Though he denies it, it certainly sounds like him. You'd think he'd control himself a bit better in front of someone who has already said that he's going to a competitor. Strong language but I'm not sure what the big deal is... as long as he OBEYS THE LAW.

But the real nastiness that appears to come out of the recent disclosure is this one seen in these two articles:

One:

It said Lee removed "Microsoft confidential" labels from a strategy document on China and sent it to Google while pursuing his new job. It also said Lee continued to attend China strategy meetings after he began talking with Google.

and

Two

Microsoft also cites an e-mail response Lee got from Google Vice President Omid Kordestani, in which the Google executive writes that "it was nice talking to you and learning about your insights into a successful approach to Google's operations in China."

Damn. If this is true, this is fucking bad. The guy sent confidential information to Google when he was employed at MS and begun effectively working for them. Again, if true, Dr. Lee should be drummed out of the business for a long time. Those at Google who knowingly accepted these documents should be fired... Why would Google even want to hire a guy this loose with business ethics? This is some straight-forward sleazy shit.

[Updated: Bad grammar]

This reminds me of LodeRunner, for some reason... really addictive and hard flash game. (Thanks MetaFilter)

[Updated: Sadly, I misspelled one of my favorite childhood games]

Via MetaFilter. Wow, this ISP is in downtown New Orleans. Suffice it to say if they can handle a category 4 storm, looting, lack of power and massive flooding, they can probably handle your data.

Kirk Report showed off a game called Guess-the-Google. The author presents a bunch of pictures and the user is encouraged to guess the keyword which spawned them. I remember seeing something like this at MS research, but I can't find it for the life of me.

A machine seems "smart" if you tell it to do something and it does it. The more arcane or odd that request is, the smarter you will think the machine is. But the nice thing about structured data and the Internet is that search engines receive billions of odd or arcane requests every day. All you have to do is figure out which the user thought were successful and you can just mine those results into the machine. That's exactly what a game like this provides. It's fun to play, but what you're really doing is typing the keywords that should return those pictures. Unless you're lying, which is possible for one person but practically impossible for thousands of people, when you see a bunch of orange pictures and you type orange first, the machine now knows that's what it should present when someone types orange. It's a nice way to take a lot of distributed knowledge and perceptions (namely in our heads) and record it in such a way that it's useful for a lot of other people.

People have started to voice opinions that the next generation of the web will be something big. Could be, but I doubt it. With all the mash-up apps that are out there, I think this cool site is the next generation of the web:

Last Minute Auctions via Marcus Zillman

Great site and all it does is take information which is already there and present it in a totally new and useful way. Really nice!