Frontier Elite Blog Channel

2558 news (2558 unread) in 31 channels

• Scripting News (568 unread)
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• Lessig Blog (118 unread)
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• ongoing by Tim Bray (229 unread)
• Innoblog (244 unread)
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• AC - New pages [en] (69 unread)
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• Wangjianshuo's blog (25 unread)

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  OSCON day 2: Prophet, your path out of the cloud

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 10:05am CST

  Some of you may know Jesse Vincent as the guy who hands out snarky t-shirts like last year's "My free software runs your business" shirt. But today I got to see Jesse's more serious side when I attended his "Prophet, your path out of the cloud" presentation. He started his session by outlining why cloud computing may not be the best idea and then went on to talk about his new distributed database called Prophet.

  Since I've been pondering hosting MusicBrainz' web services at EC2, I found his analogy of cloud computing as "digital sharecropping" quite apt. Wikipedia defines sharecropping as: "Sharecropping is a system of agriculture or agricultural production in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land (e.g., 50 percent of the crop)." History tells us that sharecropping didn't work out so well for the farmers and that a lot of the farmers were dependent on the landowners and heavily in debt to them.

Innoblog

• 

  You Don’t Know You’ll Like It Until You Try: Why Disruption Is So Hard to Predict

  Fetched: July 25th, 2008, 9:11am CST

  By Rebecca Waber

  Recently, I took a vacation to Europe with my little brother, a trip I was determined to keep inexpensive despite the weak dollar. This goal turned out to be particularly difficult in Stockholm, where a McDonald’s value meal will set you back $11. Because of the prices, I took a local friend’s suggestion and booked a private room in a youth hostel. Never having stayed in a hostel before, I was unsure about what this cheap alternative would be like.

  Actually, it turned out to be a great experience. It was a comfortable, perfectly “good-enough” place to sleep. I began to reflect upon what one gets from staying in a hotel.

  It occurred to me that I was perfectly happy without a maid’s “turn-down service” and a private bathroom, and that for a vacation like this, a traditional hotel overshot my needs. What’s more, I discovered that I valued the benefits along new dimensions of having access to a kitchen and being in a casual, friendly atmosphere.

  I think the important lesson here is that until I became aware of and experienced a hostel as a potential “European trip lodging solution,” I didn’t realize that I was overshot by hotels, and I didn’t realize that I valued the new ancillary benefits offered by hostels.

  I felt surprised and delighted to find a solution that was a better fit than I even knew existed, but I couldn’t have articulated this solution, or even the need for a new solution, beforehand. This is part of why it’s largely impossible to calculate the size of a market that doesn’t yet exist — it’s hard for an individual person to know, a priori, their precise requirements and desires when it comes to different aspects of performance.

  And yet after finding that a particular solution is a perfect fit, a person can retrospectively see where in the market spectrum they fall. This is why the task of uncovering the fundamental jobs-to-be-done in a given market context tends to require sophistication and multiple research approaches.

  Ultimately, my hostel experience makes me wonder what other, potentially disruptive solutions out there might be a better fit for me than the one I’m using, that I just haven’t experienced yet! Companies that are able to intuit what consumers value, but are unable to articulate, hold the keys to innovation success.

• 

  Disrupted in a Flash: The Up-Market March of a Web Technology

  Fetched: July 25th, 2008, 9:11am CST

  At some point during the past few years, Adobe’s Flash technology became one of the most often used formats to encode streaming video on the Internet. From its start as a niche animation tool in the mid-1990s to one of the top streaming video formats today, Flash has followed a decidedly disruptive path, taking market share away from all traditional streaming video format heavyweights.

  In the late 1990s, as Internet connections became capable of carrying streaming video content, a format battle arose. RealVideo, a purpose-built platform designed to handle the challenges of Internet streaming, quickly captured dominant share. Windows Media, despite the inclusion of its player within all Windows-based PCs, lagged far behind, slowed initially by poor video quality and streaming capabilities. Finally, despite offering the highest video quality, Apple’s Quicktime format lagged Windows Media’s share, suffering from a lack of promotion, the need to download and install a player application, and niche ownership of Macintosh computers.

  A few years prior to the format wars of 2000, San Francisco’s Macromedia acquired a vector-based animation package, FutureSplash, and rebranded it as its Flash product. Flash was easy for novice and experienced developers alike to use, and its applications and animations could also be easily compressed to a small, Internet-friendly file size. As Flash applications and animations began to pop up throughout an increasingly interactive Web, Microsoft agreed to bundle the Flash plug-in within Internet Explorer 5. By 2000, it was being distributed within all AOL, Netscape, and Microsoft web browsers. In 2002, it shipped within all releases of Windows XP for an installed base within 92 percent of all Internet-connected PCs.

  Initially, Flash was a format perfect for interactive applications and animations, but could not be used for the encoding of video. Over time, however, as the Flash platform evolved, it became capable of supporting increasing content frame rates. Soon, the line began to blur between animation and video. In 2002, after the release of new capabilities within Macromedia Flash MX and Flash Player 6, Flash’s broad installed base compelled developers to begin to use Flash as a format for encoding video. While its video quality lagged that of incumbent formats, Flash was “good enough” for some web video content, particularly in light of the fact that the majority of users could consume such video without needing to download and install a separate player application — a big plus.

  Over the last six years, and more recently under Adobe’s ownership, Flash adoption has grown dramatically. Today, television channels including CBS, NBC, CNN, and ESPN, along with user-generated content sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, and Yahoo Video, all encode their videos using Flash. CBS.com, for example, is also just one example of many sites streaming Flash video 720p HD. According to a report published in April 2008, Flash-powered online video websites are now responsible for substantially more than 91 percent of online video traffic. While RealNetworks' RealVideo, Microsoft Windows Media, and Apple Quicktime remain players in the world of online video, Flash has clearly taken the lead.

  Since its acquisition and re-launch by Macromedia in 1996, Flash has followed a classic disruptive trajectory through the world of streaming video. Its initial foothold, the world of web-based animation, provided a perfect niche for Flash to incubate. Bundled within all major web browsers, Flash then hitched a ride on a dynamite distribution mechanism, finding a home within 98.45 percent of all Internet-enabled PCs as of June 2008. Improvements to Flash technology, combined with its installed base, next enabled it to move up-market, tackling increasingly complex content until the line between animation and video was gone, along with the lead that had been enjoyed by the streaming video format incumbents.

Lessig Blog

• 

  Dems unite on Network Neutrality

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 5:19am CST by Lessig

  Matt Stoller at OpenLeft has been collecting positions from Democratic candidates about network neutrality. As he reports today, every single Democratic challenger supports open access. Check out the table, including contributions (or for most, the lack of contributions) to the candidates from telecom companies. And bravo for the work to make this dimension of this election clear.

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  OSCON day 1: An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 2:28am CST

  The second session of the day that really appealed to me was "An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid". When I saw that Ben and Fitz of subversion fame were joined by other open source heavy weights, I was sold on this panel. In this panel each member presented one anti-pattern in open source project, where an anti-pattern is a negative pattern that projects should aim to avoid.

Scripting News

• 

  Comcast shut me down again

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 2:06am CST

  Oy. This is probably the end of the line for me and Comcast. About an hour before today's Obama speech, I was upstairs, with Slingplayer on the 2nd monitor, Audio HIjack Pro ready to record, when the net went down. I figured it was another outage, we had one here in Berkeley last week.
  
  So I posted a twit to comcastcares, saying we had another outage. The response said it wasn't an outage.
  
  Net-net, it's some kind of "security" thing, so says Frank Ellison, the comcastcares guy. I told him if this isn't a legitimate security issue, then please close my account, both Internet and TV (for which I now pay $183 per month). I have redundant service for both, with an AT&T DSL line and a DirecTV dish, I'm hardly watching any TV at all these days, other than MSNBC and a little CNN, and while their Internet sure is fast, if they keep taking it down and insisting that I grovel and listen to lectures to get it turned back on (or worse, who knows what they have planned for me this time) -- no thanks. I don't think groveling and being a valued customer go together.
  
  Ellison also volunteered that he liked me. My response was you're a company rep, you don't get to like or not like me.
  
  It's with a little bit of anger and frustration that I realize that Comcast paid $175 million to get Joseph Smarr to work on their network, and their answer to me is: 1. Pay $183 per month. 2. I should care whether they like me or not. 3. They'll shut me down when they want me to call. 4. They don't care if it's right before Obama's speech in Berlin or not. 5. Fcuk off Dave. (I threw #5 in there for attitude, they didn't literally tell me to fuck off, it's more in the body language.)
  
  Oh yeah, they paid $75 million for a bunch of newsletters today. I'll end this piece the way I began it. Oy.
  
  PS: Here's the writeup of the issue with Comcast in April.
  
  Update: Their issue isn't with the security on my net, it has to do with how much bandwidth I use. Can't work with them when their method of getting me on the phone is to shut off my service, without any warning. I told them to close the account. I'm no longer a Comcast customer. I'm sure they'll send me another bill, adding insult to injury.
  
  

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.

• 

  BANANA and Other Little Known Truths: The Fortune Brainstorm on Technology

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 2:02am CST

  I am returning from the Fortune Brainstorm on Technology at Half Moon Bay, California. The general mood was upbeat, with large and small companies reporting good customer demand and ambitious new product pipelines. The technology sector is now playing in so many more sectors, from energy and environment to health (nanotechnology) to Web 2.0 applications to consumer products; it does not rely on the success of enterprise computing.

  Here are a few of the most interesting observations from speakers:

  1) BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) has replaced NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)-Howard Morgan, IdeaLab, described local opposition to wind mills, solar mirrors and other alternative energy sources.

  2) Locate new global R&D centers near great universities- Sean Maloney, INTEL. You cannot count any longer on immigration of skilled talent to the West. You do better by having a R&D projects focused in one lab than trying to collaborate across borders.

  3) Cyber-genic Presidency-Paul Saffo, the futurist, predicts that Obama would offer a wholly different sort of consultation with his constituents via the Web.

  4) Cross Platform Marketing-Robert Scoble, Fast Company-When Scoble posts, he also Twitters about his subject and posts on FriendFeed. No wonder, given that 16,000 people follow him on FriendFeed and 30,000 on Twitter. While Scoble is interviewing an executive, he is even getting questions on Twitter from his readers for the interview so that he is listening in a unique manner. Verizon runs ads on Facebook to drive users to its Facebook page, replacing the bizarre ritual of brands asking teens to be their friends.

  5) Clients Fear Uncontrolled Editorial Environment-Andrew McLean, MediaEdge-There will be addressable audiences for television. There will be engagement collaboration, not interruptive marketing.

  6) It Is All About Creative- Dave Poltrack, CBS-The rate of fast forwarding on DVRs is four times higher on poor advertisements than for engaging ones. The line will blur between content and ads, which we’re seeing with the introduction of product placements in newscasts.

  7) Vision Networking—Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco--Communications, computing, content are merging. Video will no longer be passive. Good example is tele-presence, a new generation of virtual meeting service.

  8) Technology Accounts for 2% of Carbon Footprint-Jonathan Schwartz, SUN-PCs/printers are the largest part at 50% of total, followed by telecom at 33% and data centers the balance (note this is fastest growing segment, given cooling needs).

  9) Separation of Church and State-Cheryl Sandberg, Facebook-She suggested separating your work/volunteer and personal friends lists. Both are valid but should not overlap.

  10) Hunker Down for Seven Years—Andrew Braccia of Accel Partners-He said that his companies, shut out of the IPO market for now, are not green-lighting projects over $80 million. The entrepreneurs are reconciled to a longer time frame for monetization.

  11) Users Demand Aggregation-Peter Chernin, FOX-He said that his network decided to pair up with NBC to launch HULU because consumers wanted more content in a single place. He noted that traditional media has a long life as long as individual brands have #1 market position.

  12) Structured and Unstructured Influencers-Mike Mendenhall, CMO, HP (disclosure: an Edelman client)-It is no longer sufficient to place stories and buy ads in mainstream media. You need to reach out to the passionate consumers, employees and other stakeholders with views that add substance and texture to the conversation. As my friend Paul Bergevin of Intel said, there is a continuum from control to credibility; advertising is the controlled message, PR and social media provide the credibility.

  
  Living in New York City, surrounded by the doom and gloom of the financial services industry, it was a welcome tonic to go the Left Coast, where all things seem possible and even likely. The PR business will play an even more important role in earning tech companies the license to operate as the new product stream moves to confront the most pressing challenges of our society. The jobs of PR tech companies must morph from product publicity to policy development and third party advocacy, as new ground rules are created by government. I would appreciate your views as always.

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  Announcing the Open Web Foundation

  Posted: July 25th, 2008, 1:40am CST

  

  Today at OSCON, we'd like to announce the creation of the Open Web Foundation, an organization that will help the creation and acceptance of Open Web. As the web grows there is an increasing need for interoperability between sites. As Tim recently wrote:

  I believe that we're collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows. That is, it will be an aggregate of best of breed tools produced by an army of independent actors, all playing by the same rules so that those tools work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

  To make sure that we working towards the same goal foundations (like OpenID) and specs (like OAuth) are created. Each time some of the same mistakes are made. The Open Web Foundation's goal it to provide a home for community created specs. with mentorship, resources and infrastructure. Hopefully this will help teams spend time on making the spec.

  The Open Web Foundation is being announced today, but we don't have all the answers. Join the conversation via the mailing list, our Q&A, or tonight's OSCON BOF and help us figure them out.

  Here are the slides from David Recordon's announcement this morning.

  Supporting The Open Web - OSCON 2008view presentation (tags: oscon)

  There are of course others posting on this. You can read more from Scott Kveton and Dawn Foster.

  Update: Here is the official announcement and David Recordon's post.

  Update 2: Joi Ito has now posted.

Scripting News

• 

  Inching toward federation

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 11:38pm CST

  I have a problem that a lot more people are having.
  
  I use three "micro-blogging" platforms.
  
  1. Twitter
  
  2. FriendFeed
  
  3. Identi.ca
  
  Each has strengths. FriendFeed can thread a discussion under each mini-post. It works better for me than the discussions on Twitter. Twitter is still where most of the people are, but -- well you know the rest. It's become unreliable. Leave it at that. And while Identi.ca has fewer of the people I care about, it's catching up, and its commitment to be open, and the fact that I can get Evan on the phone and he's easy to work with, well that makes me want to invest in it.
  
  So in my mind, as of July 2008, Twitter is waning, Identi.ca is rising and FriendFeed is useful.
  
  But using three systems presents a problem to which no one knows the solution. When I post on one of these systems, should the other two get the post too, and if so, how?
  
  Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.
  
  But this is temporary, it's not the last word in how this will work. Somewhere in here is nirvana, a system that makes sense, that makes it possible for people who base their work on one system to communicate effortlessly with people who base their work elsewhere. When we reach this nirvana, we will have the federated network of micro-blogging systems. To the extent that we're confused about this, and we are, is the extent that we're not ready yet to say what federation means in micro-blogging.
  
  
• 

  Losing followers on Twitter?

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 9:42pm CST

  I stopped keeping track of the number of people following me on Twitter, I know it was pretty high, but I also know it wasn't a true measure of how many people were paying attention to what I said there.
  
  Some of them, I assume, are people who tried Twitter and for some reason didn't become a regular user. I can tell beause when I post a pointer to a picture on Twitter, somewhere between 100 and 500 people click through. How many people are reading the stuff? I don't know, but it's less than the reported number would suggest.
  
  A new kind of outage started on Twitter last night, it started losing track of the connections between users. I haven't seen this quantified yet, just various posts that indicate there's some kind of problem. I'm sure as the days goes on we'll learn more about it. I started this blog post in part to try to gather information.
  
  

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  OSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 12:29pm CST

  Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me was Rabble and Kellan's "Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub" presentation.

Scripting News

• 

  TechJunk picking up steam

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 8:46am CST

  Tech.NewsJunk.Com was born on the 4th of July, just like the United States of America. I chose a holiday so the expectations wouldn't be too high, cause I knew at first it would be hard to find the kinds of stories I was looking for, news about products. Not interested in mergers or trends or personnel changes at tech companies. Just product news and reviews, that's all.
  
  http://tech.newsjunk.com/
  
  Well, it's starting to pick up. Maybe we're learning where to look.
  
  And the flow is up. It's not even remotely in the ballpark of TechMeme, but a link from Tech might get you 250 page reads. That's not bad. I'd take it.
  
  And now we have the JavaScript include, so if you want to include the latest links from TJ in your blog you can. Just add this bit of script into your page.
  
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tech.newsjunk.com/js/recent5.js">
  
  And if you know a good source of tech product news, please post a comment or send me an email. Thanks!
  
  PS: A frequently asked question is does the news have to come from a famous blog or blogger -- and the answer is an emphatic no way! I want to hear from real users, and when possible from the designer of the product. I care about what people think. Now, that said, it's okay if you write for a big publication too. There's just no bias against individual bloggers.
  
  

The Tom Peters Weblog

• 

  Event: McKesson

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 2:38am CST

  Tom is speaking for McKesson Provider Technologies at the 2008 Executive Leadership Summit in Colorado Springs at The Broadmoor. According to the McKesson website, they are "a healthcare IT company, dedicated to delivering comprehensive solutions with the power to make a difference in how you provide healthcare." If you went to the event, we'd like to hear from you. If you'd like to download the slides, the links are here:
  McKesson Provider Technologies, 2008 Executive Leadership Summit, Final Version
  McKesson Provider Technologies, 2008 Executive Leadership Summit, Long Version
  

  TrackBack (0) | Posted by Cathy Mosca | Comments?

Wangjianshuo's blog

• 

  Data Center "Sealed" During Olympic

  Posted: July 24th, 2008, 1:25am CST

  Many days ago, I received an email from Hotsales, since I have a personal home page space with Hotsales, who hosted their servers in China Telecom data center.

  The official order came from the above about the "sealing (or blocking) of all data centers". The order reads like this:
  

  Dear Customer,
  Greetings!
  According to regulations related to national Olympic logistics, the following "Network Blockage" will be implemented.
  China telecome: August 1, 2008 to August 25, 2008
  China Unicom: July 20, 2008 to August 25, 2008
  China mobile: July 20, 2008 to August 25, 2008

  Requirements:
  1. Customer staff are not allowed to enter data center.
  2. No equipments can be added or removed.
  3. If during the "network blockage", your website is hacked, or changed to anti-government content or has other security problems, the data center will cut off the network connection immediately, and inform the related people. Please cooperate with our further investigation. All servers shutdown must wait until the blockage period is over. During the period, it will not be resumed.

  Many IDC (data center) has required their client to close BBS, or anything people can post information, and ask for indemnity if their client fail to do it.

  My Two Cents

  OK. I feel that Olympic is really coming! Welcome! I am super excited.

  Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at July 24, 2008 1:25 AM
  Copyright: You are free to redistribute this work, as long as you keep this disclaimer and this link: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20080724_data_center_sealed_during_olympic.htm

Scripting News

• 

  Poster for Obama rally in Berlin

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 1:01pm CST

  
  
  

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  Perl on App Engine?

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:29pm CST

  I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Google App Engine, but I haven't had time to get up to speed in Python. Today at OSCON I met up with Brad Fitzpatrick, who told me he had permission from Google to talk about and work on a Perl on App Engine project. He makes it clear that,

  I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support. They're just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined.

  The plan is to harden Perl (one layer of defense in App Engine's hardened environment); implement Protocol Buffers and stubs of the backend services, so people can write App Engine applications on their local servers. There is more information at Brad's LiveJournal, as well as the the Perl-AppEngine project. Capturing the creative spirit here at OSCON, Brad and I hacked together a new module that emulates a protected environment, Sys::Protect (generally good idea for any web application).

Scripting News

• 

  Future-safe archives, again

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:13pm CST

  I was on a cleanup and backup binge today, and came across a folder on one of my disks entitled Trade Secrets in a place where it didn't belong. I did a search on my LAN and found it was my only copy, not just here, but on the net too.
  
  I had made a point of blogging about this folder in October 2006, that much showed up in Google, but the folder was on a machine that I shut down some months later, and it pointed to a folder on the new owner of the IP address's machine. There was no evidence of the files anywhere on the net.
  
  So I'm rescuing it again. Back shortly with more info.
  
  The links work again.
  
  http://secrets.podcatch.com/ is the folder.
  
  And http://secrets.podcatch.com/tradeSecrets.zip is the archive.
  
  But this highlights something. Even when you make an effort to make something permanently available, less than two years later, it's gone again.
  
  If we want the web that we're creating to last, we're going to have to be deliberate and systematic about it. It's not easy.
  
  

Innoblog

• 

  The creative destruction of a website

  Fetched: July 23rd, 2008, 8:34am CST

  I have to give credit to the folks at advertising agency Modernista! for dismantling the company’s existing website in favor a “site-less” approach. In this disruptive move they’ve done much more than simply save on site design.

  By foregoing the breadth of information available on a traditional site, they focus viewer attention on the company’s art and creativity. It’s a big win (and just plain cool).

  The company’s new homepage consists only of a small menu that floats over the viewer’s referring site or over the Modernista! entry on Wikipedia. Click on the “Print work” menu tab and you’re directed to the company’s work as presented on Flickr; click on “TV work” and up pops a You Tube page with videos of Modernista!-created ads.

  This new approach is different, budget and very simple. To many, it would be a leap down in terms of the traditional metrics that define good website design. The company’s “conventional” website was a resource-intensive, complex site that resembled a kooky (yes, I said it) haunted house. It was impressive yet overwhelming, flexing the firm’s creative muscle with more animation than most viewers could handle. The new site is perhaps less user-friendly for those expecting a traditional website structure, and offers less context for the depicted company work. The new format could also yield negative user-generated critiques of Modernista!’s work on the social media pages that serve as its website.

  The trade-off for these drawbacks? A cleaner site that demonstrates the firm’s creativity, confidence in letting its ads speak for themselves and comfort incorporating Web 2.0 platforms in its work. The site has generated more blog traffic and buzz in a wider range of forums than a traditional website with fancier features would have done, with this blog post as a case in point. Isn't that the goal of a website as a marketing tool? And the move isn’t one that other leading advertising agencies are likely motivated to follow. Voila! Disruption.

  But that’s just the web site. The real disruption will be if Modernista! applies a similar leap-down approach in developing client advertising campaigns that have worse performance on some traditional dimensions but are, perhaps, simpler and more affordable relative to conventional advertising.

Scripting News

• 

  How to for Time Machine?

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 6:32am CST

  I have a surplus of disk space, so I decided to give Time Machine a try.
  
  I have a 500GB disk that's empty. I designated it as the Time Machine disk.
  
  I have one external disk that I want to keep backed up. I don't care about the internal disk, but there doesn't seem to be a way to tell Time Machine not to back it up.
  
  The internal disk has 95GB of data on it.
  
  The external disk has 193GB. Its name is Ohio. This is the only disk I want backed up. I don't mind copying things onto it to be sure they're backed up.
  
  Yet Time Machine reports that there is 1.4 terabytes of data that it wants to back up.
  
  Of course it fails when it tries to do this. (Only 500GB on the backup disk.)
  
  The Help docs don't cover this circumstance, nor do any of the articles I have found on Google. What gives. Hasn't anyone had this problem yet? Where is it finding the 1.4TB of data to back up and how do I tell it not to bother.
  
  Here's a screen shot of the Options panel for Time Machine.
  
  Never mind. I didn't understand the UI. The + in the UI means exclude something from the backup. Dumb old Dave. I thought a plus would mean "add it." Why would I think that? (Sorry for the sarcasm.)
  
  
• 

  Vanity Fair covers The New Yorker

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:54am CST

  
  
  Click here for the story.
  
  

Will Price

• 

  Change Will Come

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:05am CST

Scripting News

• 

  Time for an EVDO sidegrade

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 1:38am CST

  One of the benefits of writing this blog is that when it's time to make a technology decision, I get advice from the best informed most opinionated and smartest people in the business -- you!
  
  Anyway, last year I got a Sprint EVDO card for my MacBook laptop. It was probably the wrong decision, I figured the card version would be faster, but then I wanted to use it with my new Asus EEE PC that of course just has USB.
  
  So the question is this...
  
  What should I get to replace the card?
  
  I want something that works with both Mac and Windows. USB-based. Reasonable price and performance, for the occasions that I'm out of range of wifi but want to connect to the net.
  
  Here are the products the 3GStore is recommending.
  
  1. Sierra Compass 597 USB Modem.
  
  2. Sprint Novatel U720 Rev A USB Refurbished Upgrade.
  
  3. Cradlepoint CTR500 Cellular Travel Router.
  
  I think they all look pretty interesting esp #3.
  
  
• 

  He'll make a cool president

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 1:25am CST

  
  
  
• 

  Credit where credit is due

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 1:01am CST

  It was very gratifying to see Twhirl support Identi.ca yesterday. They got some glowing press for it, but let's make sure a fair amount of the credit goes to the two companies that went for compatibility and helped create what's beginning to look like a standard -- the Twitter API.
  
  First, to Twitter for having the guts to put an API on Twitter, and making it open and clonable. And second, to the team it Identi.ca who made complete compatibility the goal, so much so that you just need to change the address in a client and everything "just works." My initial testing showed that they did attain that level of compatibility, and it was confirmed by the experiences of the developers.
  
  When people say they don't care about APIs, they miss the point that if developers do it the right way, as these guys did, then compatibility is not a competitive issue, users have choices, and products compete on virtue: performance, features and economics, not lock-in. It's the exception not the rule in the tech business that APIs and format compatibility is respected by the vendors, and it should be celebrated when it happens, as it did here.
  
  Bravo! Everybody who made this happen. Good show.
  
  
• 

  MacBook Touch coming soon!?!?

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:48am CST

  There's much speculation about a refresh on Apple's laptop line, a permanent thread in tech bloggerland, we've been waiting for it for a long time. Here's my bet. The MacBook Air was the leading edge of a new form factor at Apple, the low-end of a new lineup of super-thin laptops.
  
  In the next round you'll see one with two or three USB ports and a removable battery as well as a tablet version. Both will run the iPhone software at least as an option. The tablet might run it as its only option.
  
  Mike & Nik will have what they want but it won't cost $200.
  
  BTW, my guess is they extrapolated the same thing, and their challenge is a clever way of getting an I Told You So when Apple announces the tablet MacBook Touch™ in Sept.
  
  
• 

  We won in Iraq, a long time ago

  Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 12:14am CST

  I know this goes without saying, but it keeps coming up.
  
  Remember when our troops marched into Baghdad, took the place over, drove Saddam into a hole and arrested or killed the government. Then we disbanded their army.
  
  When you go to war that's what victory looks like.
  
  Then came the occupation. There is no such thing as winning an occupation. You either continue to occupy or withdraw. It's semantic nonsense to apply the verb "win" to the noun "occupation."
  
  Winning in war or sport is not vague or ill-defined. When the clock runs out in football the team that's ahead wins. When two runners are in a race the first to cross the finish line wins. When you fight a war, when you take the other guys' capital and disband their government and army, that's winning.
  
  As I said it goes without saying, but it keeps coming up in the news, this weird idea that there is such a thing as winning an occuption, when there isn't.
  
  Update: Cross-posted at Huffington.
  
  

Blog Maverick

• 

  My FCC Presentation on the Future of Digital Media

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 6:36pm CST by Mark Cuban

  Its hard to get much said in a 5 minute limit, but hopefully I made a few points that got people thinking.
  
  Thank you for allowing me to offer this presentation on the Future of Digital Media. Its great to be back in Pittsburgh. A city that continues to grow in its vibrance, entrepreneurial spirit and verve to continually reinvent itself. Im proud to have grown up here.
  
  The future of any technology can be defined by the economic opportunities it creates. One just look around Pittsburgh to see the explosion in the number of businesses built around advances in medical technology to see the importance of entrepreneurs focusing on new technology. The impact has been enormous.
  
  
  Which brings us to today. What are the opportunities in front of us to get excited about in the digital media field ?
  
  The first thing to understand is that digital media is not synonymous with the internet. There is a vast and growing world of digital media opportunities that exist outside the internet. Here are some examples:
  
  1. While the wonders of the internet often keep us glued to our screens and at home, they also contribute to our need to get away. One of the shortest term opportunities is out of home entertainment. One opportunity that will expand is the use and implementation of 3D entertainment. While its not unusual for movies to be produced in 3D, there is a market for other types of 3D entertainment that is ready to take off. The Dallas Mavericks did a live 3D broadcast of one of our games this past season that we broadcast to a local movie theater enabled with a 3D digital projector. It was a huge success, fans loved it, 3D glasses and all, and have asked for more. We have seen the same demand for other types of content as well. Fortunately, there are not any production trucks dedicated to 3D live programming, so we are looking at building one.
  
  From games to gaming to concerts to plays to specially developed events. 3D will be a mainstay of the future of digital media. Using entertainment as the starting point, the technology will advance, decline in price, and applications will be developed that will expand the use of 3D from entertainment to corporate to medical and personal and more. 3D is and will continue to be an exciting digital media application for a long time to come.
  
  In order to support future digital media applications such as 3D, the networks that will carry them will need to evolve. That evolution will lead to new and exciting digital media applications, but will require new protocols and a far greater integration into the fixed routers of existing networks.
  
  2. The second opportunity is with application specific networks. Unfortunately, the best networks cant be all things to all people and applications, which is exactly what the internet has to be. Not only does it have to be all things to all people, it has to be dumbed down to continue to be open for everyone and anyone. i believe we will see an expansion of networks that are optimized for specific protocols, performance guarantees and applications.
  The most obvious example of this is are satellite and digital cable networks. These networks are optimized for broadcast and on demand applications at as high a quality as their bandwidth can support. They also have become platforms for application development and are starting to see increasingly robust toolsets. Unlike the internet, which is best delivery effort, with no promises or guarantees, the networks which deliver our digital TV are optimized to be reliable to five 9s with near instantaneous delivery.
  
  These networks create unique opportunities for interactive applications, and for the delivery of content to mass audiences. There are open, or reasonably open standards such as Docsis 3.0/Tru 2Way that are now becoming available to any and all developers. I would strongly recommend that those of you who are looking at digital media applications to consider the opportunities available on these networks which already reach almost every home in the US.
  
  That said, while platforming on an advanced media network is enticing, there are risks here. The consolidation of ownership among video distributors , who own both the networks and content could create roadblocks of discrimination towards their own products, or for the products of major media corporations with considerable market clout. These could preclude small programmers and entrepreneurs. Which is why HDNet is supportive of a shot clock to resolve these conflicts and to encourage those here to consider applying these same conflict resolution elements to not just content, but to software developments as well. However, even with these risks, as an entrepreneur, I think application development on proven digital media networks is a great opportunity for myself and others
  
  There is one last point I would like to make in my allotted time. The one area of digital media that will create the greatest opportunity for entrepreneurs is the ability to develop and or control applications on fixed routers on internet connected networks. As those who want to see better performance of digital media, particularly live streaming over the internet will realize, best performance will come from utilizing application specific protocols such as multicast. This will create significant demand that will quickly and easily outstrip providers ability to support the demand. This will have the affect of putting ISPs in the role of gatekeeper for determining who gets the ability to broadcast over the internet vs who has to deliver content on a one to one, unicast basis. At some point in time, someone will realize that the holy grail of distribution of digital media over the internet will come from partnering with the many ISPs to enable multicasting and its related protocols, and to peer them as an unwired network. It wont be cheap, fast or easy, but it would be a game changer.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
  

ongoing by Tim Bray

• 

  On Keyboards

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 5:00pm CST by Tim Bray

  There’s a design flaw in Apple’s current lineup of Mac keyboards; easily fixed though. Obviously, someone like me has a long history and an intense relationship with keyboards.

  The Flaw

  Right now, Apple sells two keyboards: larger/wired and smaller/Bluetooth. The larger one includes the useful cluster with arrow keys, page up/down, home/end, “fn”, and the real “delete” key. The “control” key is large, at the lower left, and by some physical-mechanical equivalent of Fitt’s Law, is real easy to get to.

  It also includes the entirely-useless numeric keypad. All this occupies quite a bit of real-estate.

  The smaller one (really a lot smaller) squeezes tiny arrow keys into a corner, has an ultra-miniature “control” key, gives “fn” the prized bottom-left-corner position, and entirely omits those other useful keys.

  There are several design flaws here. First, people who need an extra numeric keypad really need it, but there’s a huge number of us for whom they’re a waste of precious desktop space. Second, the idea that whether or not you need certain keys is related to whether you want to connect with a wire or not seems spurious. Third, the notion that any outboard keyboard should omit page up/down, home/end, delete, and so on, is just wrong.

  So, I want keyboards that can be ordered in either USB and Bluetooth, and either with or without the numeric cluster, but always have the first outboard cluster.

  In exchange for this valuable advice to Apple, I’ll expect a nice juicy reward in the mail ASAP. Just like they showered me with gold for detecting and diagnosing the previously-broken list-selection code in Mail.app; well, I had to split the reward with John Gruber.

  Is It a Good Keyboard?

  The current line-up of Apple keyboards isn’t good, it is (the sizing flaw aside) great. The feel is both sensitive and rock-solid and I think I’m typing faster than any time in the last twenty years or so.

  Which means I get to do an old-fart keyboard digression.

  History

  Geeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a rough consensus that the original IBM PC’s clackety high-travel product has never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is right, the latest Apples may be better.

  But that consensus is wrong anyhow, the IBM PC keyboards might not have been surpassed since, but they never had quite the feel of the old IBM Selectric typewriters.

  I remember in particular when I was working on my college newspaper; our single most valuable asset was an IBM “Justifying Selectric”; you’d bang text into it and it’d buffer it up, a line at a time; when you got to the end of a line it would justify it, let you approve it, and typeset it, justified in a proportional font, onto the galleys.

  It was fantastically expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars; this in the early Seventies. Of course, as well as all that magic it was a general-purpose ultra-high-end typewriter and when I needed to crank some work out and got into the flow I could make that thing produce a steady dull roar, running north of 110 words per minute. Like high-precision silk under the fingertips.

  I remember one time when it broke and the IBM tech came by, I hung around because I wanted to see how it worked. When he took the cover off I was flabbergasted; the complexity inside was just mind-bending. There were hundreds (at least) of moving parts, some the apparent thickness of a human hair. How the thing ever worked, and how on earth he could repair it when broken, escapes me. It remains the most visually-complex artifact I have ever seen.

Scripting News

• 

  VPs coming soon

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 6:29am CST

  Friends close to both campaigns say the announcements of the Republican and Democratic choices for vice-president are likely coming within the week. At that the announcements will be unusually late.
  
  No speculation on the choices from the sources, however -- I have a strong feeling that McCain will pick Romney. Seems like an obvious balance to McCain. Younger, but not too young. Tall and healthy, conservative. He might be smarter than McC, but not by too much.
  
  Obama will pick someone safe, not too famous, not flamboyant. Easy on the eyes and easy to forget.
  
  McCain, who is the full-hour guest on This Week on Sunday may choose that venue to make his announcement, opposite Obama who is the full-hour guest on Meet the Press.
  
  

Will Price

• 

  SWAT Summit

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 5:41am CST

  Last week's SWAT Summit in SF brought together leading players in the social media, brand, and agency worlds. Widgetbox participated on the Social Advertising Case Studies Panel.
  
  First, thanks to Cassie Phillipps and the rest of the gang at Room Full of People for putting on a great show and for including us in the conversation.
  
  While the conference centered on how brands and agencies can best harness the power of the social web, the panel focused on specific campaigns and their results. The audience, like many people I speak with, wanted to understand what advertisers can do to leverage social networks and widgets to connect with their audience.
  
  The other panelists were imeem, Votigo, and BeAffinitive.
  
  Widgetbox presented a case study on a cost-per-install campaign that we ran with a music video provider. The results, as you can see by watching the embedded slide show, were powerful. With an 11-day campaign, the widget enjoyed a 50,000% increase in hits, a 110,000% increase in uniques, and a 8,800% increase in subscriptions. The best news is AFTER the campaign finished, hits continue to grow and the widget is enjoying steady organic adoption and distribution.
  
  If you are interested in running a campaign with Widgetbox, please let me know...will.price at widgetbox.com
  
  Widgetbox SWAT Summit Case Studyview presentation (tags: cpi widgetbox)
• 

  Mongol, A Movie To See

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 5:15am CST

  In July 2005, I read and reviewed on this blog Jack Weatherford's wonderful book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
  
  Jack Weatherford outlines Khan's amazing life story and rise from outcast/orphaned Mongol nomad to ruler of the world's largest ever empire. The book serves as a major rehabilitation of Khan's legacy and transforms the traditional view of Genghis Khan from brutal tyrant to transformative ruler who spread the rise of free trade, religious freedom, science, standards, paper currency, postal services and communications, and national identities in lieu of tribalism, religious persecution, and autarky.
  
  Khan's genius lies in his ability to transcend his circumstances and envision completely novel means of organizing armies, ruling empires, and structuring society (merit vs hereditary and tribal). An Indian friend of mine and admirer of Khan's describes him as being "self-born," a force in history with no precedent and a man of ideas and achievement completely non-linear to his context and roots. I really love that concept.
  
  Now, Sergei Bodrov brings us his brilliant epic, Mongol. The move brings to life the steppes, the man, and the incredible rise from obscurity that marked Khan's early life. It is a movie to get lost in and one that you wish would keep going. The good news....Mongol is the first of three and I cannot wait for the sequel.
  
  
  
  

Scripting News

• 

  April Fool in July?

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 4:51am CST

  I don't know about those guys over at TechCrunch, they always get me with their April Fools jokes. Now here comes this piece that announces they're getting into the hardware business! Could it be for real? I don't know!!
  
  I'm reminded of this post by Mike this weekend where he reviewed a service by the former editors of Uncov, and said, quite accurately that you always understimate how hard something is when you look in from the outside. Making something easy to use is a lot more work than making soemthing that's not, although to the non-engineer this seems counter-intuitive.
  
  Now, Nik is an engineer, so I don't want to be appearing to talk down to him, cause that wouldn't be appropriate. But this does either seem completely utterly unrealistic or a damned good off-season April Fool joke.
  
  PS: This post suggests that it's serious. In which case it's a good thing -- thinking big is how you get big things done. Best of luck. I'll buy one for $200 for sure. Maybe even more.
  
  
• 

  Catching up with the Junks

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 4:20am CST

  A couple of minor updates from the Land of Junks.
  
  1. NewsJunk and TechJunk are now available on identi.ca, thanks to its new wonderful API.
  
  2. Both feeds are available in OPML as well, for applications that like OPML.
  
  

Lessig Blog

• 

  one step until brilliant: ScreenFlow

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 3:46am CST by Lessig

  So readers of this blather will know that I've long struggled to find useful software for capturing and making available presentations I make, and that I've whined often about the flaws in everything that's out there. (See, e.g. this.) I prepare my presentations in Keynote which (alone) provides the key functionality critical to how I present -- good preview of the next slide, almost perfect ability to integrate other media, almost never forgetting links to existing media). I was therefore very happy when Keynote promised the ability to sync narration to a presentation. That happiness was short-lived, however, because except for short, media-bare presentations, I have never found the syncing function actually keeps synchronization. (Like selling a spreadsheet that can't multiply). ProfCast was a hopeful bet, but it has never thought it necessary to enable the capturing of transitions, or media. And so for those of us who obsess about making that stuff useful (maybe uselessly, of course), ProfCast simply won't work. SnapZPro was an almost perfect alternative, though for reasons similar to the complaint below, it is hard to use it when trying to capture an actual presentation (again, you've got to set up the screen capturing settings just before you record, which is awkward and awful when you're trying to launch a real presentation.) But I'm now very hopeful utopia has been found. ScreenFlow is an elegant and powerful program that captures a presentation and synchronizes it flawlessly. It even has post-production editing built in. And while I've hit some flakiness with long presentations (I'm a lawyer, what do you expect?) with media (genuine flakiness -- weird screen colors, apparent freezes for minutes at a time), almost always it has recovered and allowed me to save the sync. One extremely frustrating feature/bug with the program as it exists now is no simple way to link the launch of the program to the launch of a presentation. My flow is to get to a stage, and begin a presentation immediately. But ScreenFlow imagines I'll get to the stage, set the record preferences to capture the second screen (you can't set that preference until it actually sees the second screen), then launch the record, and then launch the presentation, and then when you're finished, exit the presentation and stop the recording. Twice now I've lost the recording because I've had to close the screen after the presentation and then when I tried to open it again, nothing was there. And even when it has worked, the steps to fire this up every time have been a huge hassle. Simplest and most obvious changes to make this almost perfect bit of heaven perfect: (1) Let me tell you in advance what you should be capturing, trusting you'll see it when I start. (2) Give me a simple way to link the launch of the recording to the start of the presentation, and same with the end. (3) Give me a simple way to get to the scratch file if there's a failure. Given the almost perfection of the system so far, I'm optimistic someone will get this right soon.

Tom Davenport

• 

  Can "The New New Thing" Be Something Old?

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 2:45am CST

  I read a little piece in the New York Times yesterday that postcards are staging a comeback, at least in the UK. 135 million were sent last year to British households—30% more than in 2003. The Times suggests that the rise in postcards is a sign of a “yearning for tangibility.” Postcards are clearly more tangible than emails, and they fill up our mailboxes nicely without requiring a lot of verbiage. Jay Dittman, a smart fellow from Hallmark, told me recently that their paper greeting card business is also holding up pretty well.

  That got me to wondering whether we would see other yearnings for the past, and whether the next big thing in business can ever involve the past. There seems to be a slight rise in wishing for a less digital past; and several articles and books on that topic, including Nick Carr’s piece in The Atlantic (about which I blogged a few weeks ago), and Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted, are pretty popular. I wonder how far it will go.

  What else (besides postcards) might come back? Non-working vacations are a possibility. Those organizations (such as IBM) that admirably allowed employees to simply take as much time away from their jobs as they needed are finding that employees often don’t take enough time, or spend all their vacation time working. There’s another Times article on this from last summer.

  Another example of a possible return to the past involves re-regulation. The secular trend—particularly in the U.S., but to some degree globally as well—has been to remove regulation from many economic sectors. The result in the airline industry has been lots more passengers and lower fares, but (in case you hadn’t noticed) really crappy service. In electrical energy, deregulation seems to have led to electricity shortages (in California) and higher prices (at least in Texas). In consumer finance, deregulation is at least partly to blame for the current credit crisis. People are beginning to talk about whether we need more regulation in each of these sectors. I am hardly an expert on the economics of regulation, but it seems that it might stage a comeback, particularly if we elect Barack Obama as President.

  We also might see a return to some of the management practices of yesteryear. Every once in a while I think that I should have been born when my parents were, so I’d have a lifelong career with a single company, and that company would treat me in a paternalistic fashion and give me a nice pension (though I would probably find that very boring). But there are still companies that treat their employees quite well in almost a 1950s-like fashion (Toyota, SAS, Google, Wegmans, etc.), and they all tend to perform very well. Maybe treating your employees well is simply timeless.

  I don’t think we’ve ever seen a broad retreat from electronic behaviors, so I doubt that will be in the cards—postcards in the UK being an exception, perhaps. But other business ideas are more cyclical or even timeless, and I expect we will see some of them. What do you think? Is everything old new again?
  

CSDiary at CMU

• 

  Strong Showing by Veloso, et al. at RoboCup 2008

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 1:45am CST by Peter Lee

  RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou, China, has just wrapped up, and once again Manuela Veloso and CMU have made a great showing.

  

  In the small-size robot competition, our defending champion team (both 2006 and 2007), CMDragons, took 2nd place. Manuela reports that the final against PlasmaZ from Thailand was a fantastic game, played extremely well by both teams to a final score of 4-2. The team was led by Stefan Zickler (CMU CS PhD student), along with two gifted sophomores, Gabe Levi and Philip Wasserman. Interestingly, the robots used by CMDragons were designed and built by Mike Licitra three years ago. The fact that these robots have remained competitive for so long is a testament to Mike’s superb robot-design work (and, of course, great software and planning algorithms).

  In the two-legged robot soccer category, CMU teamed up with Georgia Tech in the humanoid NAO league competition, forming team GTCMUnited’08. Here is a picture of the NAO robot, taken from the RoboCup web site:

  

  GTCMUnited’08 took 2nd place out of a field of about 15 teams. In the final against the Numanoids team from the University of Newcastle in Australia, the game ended with a 0-0 score. To break the tie, penalty shots were used. Both teams scored, but Numanoids scored in a shorter time and was thus given the win.

  A notable accomplishment of GTCMUnited was the remarkably short amount of time needed to develop the robots — just two months! Tucker Balch (GaTech) and Manuela Veloso (CMU) were the team advisors. Three members of the team traveled to China: Gaurav Gupta (MSc, GT), Misha Novitzky (MSc, GT), and Mike Phillips (junior, CMU). Other key members of the team included Sonia Chernova (CS PhD student), Brian Coltin (sophomore), Jinsu Liu (CMU visiting PhD student from USTC), Douglas Vail (CS, PhD 2008, and going to Google Pgh in a few days), and three other students from GaTech.

  Finally, in the NAO humanoid robot simulation competition, CMRoboKids — developed by Jinsu Liu and Manuela Veloso — took first place! The final game ended with a 1-1 score at the end of regulation, but then in the penalty-kick phase CMRoboKids won 2-0.

  While all of these competition results are great, what is most impressive is the tremendous growth of robot soccer all around the world. I’m sure that Manuela and the other pioneers could not have imagined how this competition would take off when all of this got started in the mid-1990’s. The international teams, in particular, have become extremely impressive, helping to push scientists and engineers everywhere to develop (and share!) new concepts and approaches in all areas of robotics research. These researchers have the dream to develop a robotic soccer team that can beat the best human team by the year 2050. Will they achieve their goal? While it may still seem far-fetched to some, watching today’s teams leaves one truly impressed with the sophistication and speed of play.

  Congratulations to all of the participants, and especially to Manuela and her teams!

O'Reilly Radar

• 

  The Last HOPE

  Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:24am CST

  I made the trek to a steamy hot NYC this weekend to attend one day of the three day Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There was too much going to adequately cover it here (or even take it all in), but a few things stood out. Steve Rambam's eye opening talk on the death of privacy for example. For a solid three hours in front of a standing room only crowd he weaved back and forth between the Orwellian theme of how our privacy is being ripped from us by everyone from Google to Choicepoint and the theme that seemed even creepier to him, self contribution. Over and over he expressed disbelief at how willingly we post our personal details everywhere from Twitter to Facebook while thanking us all the while for making his job as a private investigator that much easier. What the marketers and government don't actively take, we actively give. Naturally I twittered the whole thing. Cell phone tracking; artificial-intelligence-assisted reality mining; 3000 cameras per square mile in Manhattan; facial, activity, and even gait identification software; government outsourced investigative databases shielded from FOIA requests; UAV-based license plate scanners; beating anonymity by correlating multiple datasets; unanticipated database repurposing; and on and on... Finally I could twitter no more and left the venue hurriedly fashioning a tinfoil hat from a burger wrapper while consigning myself to doubling the dosage on my meds. I will say this though, there was something deliciously ironic about standing in a room chock full of hackers all listening at rapt attention to a three hour chillingly dystopic harangue on privacy loss while nearly every single one of them was wearing an RFID tag around their necks. Even better, the tag was tracking their every move around the venue and was linked to a comprehensive self-contributed profile. Moving beyond the privacy nightmare stuff, there was hardware hacking to be found everywhere at Last HOPE. Tables were covered with broken open electronic toys and electronic components and were surrounded by hackers with smoking soldering irons. Of the completed projects on display, one of my favorites was a something of a hybrid that projected a 3D image onto carefully placed strings.

Wangjianshuo's blog

• 

  Monday, Tuesday, ... Olympic

  Posted: July 21st, 2008, 10:23pm CST

  A normal Monday.

  In the morning, when I wanted to turn right onto the Xianan Road at my residential area gate, it is already full of cars, and for the first time, a policeman stood there helping to guide the traffic.

  This is due to the recent accident on the Jinxiu Road, where the metro construction or the Shanghai Expo Electricity Power Tunnel (who knows which project) caused the road to collaps. All the traffic to Jinxiu Road and Chengshan Road was detoured to the other side of the road, making it so hard for everyone. Roads are roads - they require maintainance and sometimes, collaps... :-(

  It is just three weeks before the Oympics in Beijing, and people are counting down for it. However, the recently, most of the news is about restriction, instead of celebration.

  In Shanghai, it is still OK. Just saw more policemen on the street, and the Shanghai Stadium Area was closed to public. Shanghai, as one of the co-host city for Olympic, does not have too much sign of the coming Games yet.

  The only major thing I observed was the traffic signs.

  On the elevated highway and expressways from the Pudong Airport to the Beijing 2008 Hotel - Huating Hotel, the big sign to Huating Hotel with "Beijing 2008" logo on top of the signs are along the away and are at all the key turning point. Besides the Huating Hotel, the Shanghai Railway Station, and the Pudong Airport are other two locations with similar signs everywhere.

  Other than that, what is the difference? Let me think - think hard, and we really don't have too many change so far.

  Today is Monday. Tomorrow is Tuesday.... Soon, the Olympic will come. It really will come.

  
  

  Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at July 21, 2008 10:23 PM
  Copyright: You are free to redistribute this work, as long as you keep this disclaimer and this link: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20080721_monday_tuesday_olympic.htm

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