Alternative travel: Gridskipper - How to go on an urban safari if your're not an SUV driver. Hard and edgy travel guide for people who prefer alcohol to bucolic.
Alternative software: Lifehacker - Wonkette meets Gizmodo, hackette driven guide to stringing together all those useful software bits and bobs into something more useful - softly softly approach to give late adopters the early adopter scoop.
PFK Fish News | Deep sea fish in hoax tsunami email
"An email containing photographs of bizarre-looking deep sea fish reportedly washed up on Thailand's Phuket beach after the tsunami actually contains images of fish collected during a study undertaken in 2003."
Nonetheless the fish are deeply weird and interesting, check them out.
On a day when the government is preaching the values of listening to the people are they listening to the people who know, when it comes to the environment?
There is an additional kind of democracy, the democracy of ideas, the principal by which superstition or ideology or agenda is avoided by considering evidence.
Current evidence points overwhelmingly to the notion that Global warming looks real, but the evidence is being ignored, like so many 'just a theory' stickers peppered out by brainwashed zealots.
Bryan Lawrence quotes Science magazine on climate change:
There were 982 peer reviewed papers indexed by ISI with keywords climate change in the last ten years, till 2003.
75% dealt with the immediate threat of climate change.
Of these, NONE refuted the idea that climate change is real.
[NB, I was under the impression that the term 'climate change', like 'death tax' instead of 'estate tax' was largely pushed by the Republican party to suit their own agenda. climate change sounds like a normal state of affairs, as if the potential extinction of humankind were like a rainshower.]
(Bryan's blog is the most interesting thing I've come accross in months, highly recommended).
Whatever your opinion of the war, lets hope today is as peaceful as possible in Iraq.
Continuing on my anti-CSS rant - 3 columns, with fixed-width left and right and a fluid center column, are ofter referred to as the 'holy grail'.
The problem is that this is an obsolete solution, when people increasingly have massive screens where any fluidity breaks the design if people auto-expand windows - which they do.
Mike Golding breaks the mold and argues the case very well for fixed width CSS layout: notestips.com :: The benefits of a fixed width design
Tables may suck, but CSS is no improvement. Yet web designers who have never used page layout tools for offline printing, or object based CAD software are still brainwashed by it.
I just came accross this classic: BlueRobot "Many a talented web designer has struggled with CSS-based centering. Though CSS vertical centering eludes us, two techniques for horizontal centering are BlueRobot approved. Take your pick"
First one: "Unfortunately, IE5/Win does not respond to this method - a shortcoming of that browser, not the technique" Fair enough, but then why recommend it (This is still one of the largest browser versions in use).
Second one:
#Content {
position:absolute;
left:50%;
width:500px;
margin-top:50px;
margin-left:-266px;
padding:15px;
border:1px dashed #333;
background-color:#eee;
}
All this to avoid 'align=center'.
What happens when you have a product that is designed for the masses but remains with the minority?
Nobody could ever figure out how to program a video recorder, but Tivo the king of DVRs fixed that - and so much more. Tivo created a really simple user experience, right down to the design of the remote. One click recording and wishlists and automated suggested recording.
Surely a DVR like this is must have at a time when people are shelling out 5 times what they used to for their TV experience just to hang a flat screen TV on the wall? And Tivo is not new, it predates plasma screens and DVDs, by all accounts, DVRs should be ubiquitous.
The problem can't just be that DVRs are a threat to traditional business models. MP3 players are now commonplace having first appeared well after.
I suspect that the main problem is the payment model. DVRs come into their own with cable or satellite, but you rent them. I suspect that when it comes down to it people don't like renting hardware at this price point and a DVR seems more like a piece of consumer electronics than a service.
I don't have to rent an iPod or a DVD player and ever if TV's are now so expensive that they require payment plans equivalent to a large car, perhaps there is a psychological difference between leasing and renting?
Would DVRs take off if I could walk into a store and buy a brand name version that doesn't require the skills of a syadmin and hook it up to my cable service with no monthly fee?
Om Malik on Broadband » We Like TiVo, Just Don't Want To Buy It
Officials at Catholic University are allowing Newt Gingrich to speak. Gingrich is a strong proponent of the death penalty, which is opposed by the Vatican. Actor-director, Stanley Tucci, on the other hand, was turned down because he supported family planning.
It constantly amazes me that many people who purport to be part of a religion centered around someone who faced the death penalty, have more compassion for semen than human beings facing the same punishment as the person they worship.
Gingrich Speech at CU Opposed (washingtonpost.com)
...of Austria? Reuters: "California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a citizen of both the United States and Austria, should be stripped of Austrian citizenship for allowing a convicted murderer to be executed, an Austrian politician says."
OK, for a perfect example of the absurdity of not looking before legaling:
Lawyer writes a blog about trademarks.
Lawyer includes not for commercial use Creative Commons licence.
Lawyer notices that people can read his entire blog reformatted in Bloglines.
Reaction: lawyer goes batshit (new word stolen from Jeff) and sends cease and desist to Bloglines and posts about it.
Suggestion: perhaps not having syndicated full content RSS would have been simpler.
Scott Kiesling of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh analyses the word Dude
Full of such classics as:
"Next we turn to investigate how this term is used in contextualized interactions among college-aged men in 1993, and to view some examples of its use in interaction, to understand how these indexicalities are put to use. I’ll first outline where dude appears, and then the various functions it fulfills in interaction..."
Jeff Jarvis points to an LA times piece on the latest antics of the 'F*CCed':
"The FCC posted the complaints on its website. One person reported hearing an obscenity; one objected to the male anatomy on a representation of Greek sculpture; another thought a woman's breast had been revealed; and yet another claimed to have seen a couple making love."
PDF of Olympic complaints from FCC website - much more entertaining than the Olympics themseves.
The classical architecture of Capitol Hill may be similarly peni ridden and has anyone ever been to a sports event where there wasn't swearing?
Should all Christian religious programming should be censored - for containing an image of a naked man being tortured to death?
If the FCC is seriously going to waste time and money considering complaints from people who have clearly lost their marbles, then perhaps we should all start complaining about everything being broadcast, to drown out the background noise from the nutcases that the FCC takes seriously.
" Dear MR. Powell, Commmander in Chief, F**,
Since you are now operating in zero tollerance mode, please could you change your name to something that reminds me less of FUCK. I realize that you F*CCers are trying to do your job, but all my family are undergoing therapy at vast expense having been exposed to things that remind us of rude words and playing hide the sausage.
Sincerely
Condo Lisa"
It would be fun at least.
Since When Is Greece's Culture Obscene?
There is a lot of France bashing these days, on the basis that France is the most anti-US of its recent allies. The above poll shows that its the Germans, Russians, Turks and Mexicans that view the US in the most negative light, and that French attitudes to the US are pretty much the same as in the UK.
Naughtily referencing image here cos it is in an annoying popup.
This is where it was from, the rest is mostly yawn inducing usual stuff: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Global poll slams Bush leadership
Google News has been in 'Beta' for nearly two and a half years.
Several million beta testers a day for nearly a thousand days, i.e. more than a billion (non unique) beta testers.
That's quite some QA.
I wonder if this is a record?
Google launches news service - Computerworld
News search has one feature that is still lacking in search engines: sort by date. This is something which will eventually be a core requirement, and the search engines seem to be asleep at the wheel.
Most search engines sort by relevance, but for subjects which change rapidly such as technology, freshness is an important component of relevance.
Having just searched for some software on Google I realized that the top results were 4 years old and useless.
It is not technically difficult to create date ordering, but it is computationally expensive and requires comparisons as documents are crawled. There is, however, one area where searching by date is already there: weblog searching.
The model where content sites ping a server when there are updates soves the date problem cheaply and increases overall relevancy. The ping model is as different from the way search engines currently work, as push is to pull.
This is another compelling reason why the search engines will be caught off guard if they do not pay attention to weblog style publishing and ping servers, not just as an additional feature, but a component that is core to what they do.
The Internet Stock Blogoutlines the case that Yahoo is most likely to buy six apart, because "Yahoo! has no blogging platform".
Dave Pell pointed out an interesting idea, that when a large company makes an acquisition in a particular area, then it is difficult for them to acquire a competitor to it, since there would be internal resistance or operational complications from the existing team within the company. Consolidation tends to happen on the outside.
On that basis, Google has Blogger and Microsoft has Spaces. So maybe Yahoo would buy Sixapart? Perhaps, since Google have Picasa, Yahoo could also buy Flickr.
With Sixapart and Flickr, Yahoo would have added two formidable services to their arsenal.
Jeff Jarvis has a spot on post about using tags for information about people.
People tagging creates a marketplace by matching content against people's needs and interests. In the case of jobs - a tagged job requirement matched against a tagged resume.
As it happens I will be launching a new product soon that includes some of these elements. I want to eventually take tagging one step further and use it to create any type of metadata, allowing people to create tag/value pairs in their own namespace and create RSS modules on the fly.
The premise of this is that at the moment the name portion of the name/value pair in a tag is 'category' i.e. if you tag something as a 'resume' you are saying 'category=resume'.
What is interesting is when you allow people to invent their own 'name' portions of the tag. e.g. 'category=sushi_restaurant location=new_york'. That's what I'm working on.
People say that Hungarian is the language of the future, and it always will be. Similarly, you get the feeling that speech recognition is the technology of the future and always will be. Until recently the same was true of Internet telephony.
There are many technologies that fail because they don't pass the 'good enough' test.
Having noticed that more and more friends are using Skype these days, it seems that VOIP passes the good enough test, for once the marketing blurb is right - it just works.
In fact, beyond that, two recent examples illustrate that it is now better than other means of telephony.
Example one: a friend's cellphone ran out of juice, he resorted to war driving to find an open wifi network to contact me, his web based email didn't work, couldn't get a good enough connection to Instant Message me, but VOIP worked just fine.
Example two: a friend called via VOIP from India yesterday. The VOIP worked just fine, better than an Indian landline at $3 a minute, and when calling a US cellphone, it was the cell carrier that dropped the call.
VOIP is not only much much cheaper, but it is better.
BBC: dentists find nail in skull.
OK - so that is pretty weird to start with, but -
"Doctors at the hospital said it was the second time a patient had failed to notice a nailgun had fired a nail into their heads."
!!!
Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine on a startup that works out of a coffee shop.
After a false start with 'hot desking' in the 90's freely available wifi, laptops and cellphones really do mean that in some case you can work anywhere. In this case, history has come full circle with some of the biggest institutions in the world, such as Lloyd's insurance, having been started in 18th century coffee houses.
Increasingly I am meeting people, that like myself would rather work out of a coffee shop than some anonymous cube hell that is the staple of most US work environments. I have a friend who is looking to buy a coffee house in San Francisco as space for his startup, whilst keeping it selling coffee to the public.
From an architectural standpoint I see this as the perfect rebellion. Unlike coffee houses, office space does not have to be designed to be attractive to hang out in and as such the vast majority of office space in America is a thoughtless committee designed waste of money devoid of any soul.
"A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered a Georgia school district to remove stickers challenging the theory of evolution from its textbooks on the grounds that they violated the U.S. Constitution."
The creationist/ID folks will be up in arms about this, however to defend their case they would have had to show that their agenda is not religious.
How many non-religious creationists are there.
None.
Slate: Send a Message to God - He has gone too far this time. By Heather Mac Donald
Heather argues for a boycott of God in the wake of the Tsunami, on the grounds that he gets credit for the good but none of the blame for the bad, despite being omnipotent.
“Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is fond of thanking God for keeping America safe since 9/11; Ashcroft never asks why, if God has fended off terrorist strikes since 9/11, he let the hijackers on the planes on the day itself… The Most Rev. Gabino Zavala from the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese rejects any suggestion that God forsook the tsunami victims, according to the Los Angeles Times, but he credits God with the subsequent charity: "You can see God in the people's response—how they're reaching out."
Richard Dawkins nailed the problem more accurately, pointing out that because the tsunami disaster could have been avoided by an early warning system, rather than prevention of the earthquake itself, if God is not responsible then he is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.
Of course, it is preposterous to believe that a god of love would do this thing, and there is a way that god can remain omnipotent and good - the Devil.
The above paradox disappears if the Tsunami and 911 were the work of the Devil and this in fact would have been the automatic conclusion until the 20th century. The problem is that more people now believe in the existence of God than the existence of the Devil. People don’t want mediaeval religion anymore, the one that says that you are most likely to burn forever in hell if you are rich, for example. More specifically, people are more likely to take God as being real and his work as literal, but the Devil and descriptions of him as being metaphorical.
In short, people tend to believe what is convenient for themselves, as witnessed by the fact that belief in the devil and hell declines rapidly the older you get (the closer you are to going to heaven or hell), but not the belief in God and heaven. Belief in God ironically tends to put oneself at the center of the universe.
[A national poll, conducted by Opinion Dynamics Corporation shows an 86 percent majority of adults between the ages of 18 to 34 believe in hell, but that drops to 68 percent for those over age 70]
The refusal to accept the existence of the bad, is the result of life being, for the large part, comfortable. The mediaeval world was undoubtedly more brutal for the most part than most parts of, say, Ohio, and the fact that most of our ideas of hell are based upon outdated, mediaeval depictions of it are testament to the fact that fire and brimstone are no longer fashionable for many religious Christians.
The problem with this sanitized, white bread, version of religion is that it chooses the bits of religion that are convenient in the short term. The ancients had it worked out, the devil, is a viable way out of the disaster paradox. By getting rid of the devil, the case for an omnipotent god is actually weakened.
If, on the other hand, you do indeed find the idea of the devil as a bit much - that the idea of people being tortured for ever and ever for such religious crimes as suicide, a cancer sufferer ending life prematurely to avoid torture in this life, is unacceptably cruel irony - then believing in a God that is either not omnipotent or allows millions of innocent people to die is conveniently sanitary day to day but a theological mess in times of disaster.
One of the ways that you can overcome the 508 character limit for bookmarklets in IE 6 is to use a local bookmarklet stub that references a server side javascript file. See:Better Living Through Bookmarklets [JavaScript & DHTML Tutorials]
The problem is that IE's security model blocks document.write unless it writes into a new page, which is a problem if people have popup blockers.
Does anyone know of a workaround? (Sorry, I have comments blocked cos of spam, so email is the only option to reply).
Business Week on the New York Times:
"A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering."
That's a problem indeed, but nothing compared with local newspapers' loss of classifieds to Craigslist and the like.
I can't help but feel that there may be an opportunity for newspapers in premium, Zagat-like online directory businesses.
Joi Ito's Web: The Future of the New York Times
I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that my fiancé is adorable and that ‘Little Britain’ is hilarious – but I can’t ‘prove' it.
Edge's annual question asks what people believe in. 120 of the worlds most famous thinkers answer. Well worth a read.
Unfortunately, I suspect that answers to this question will be misconstrued as acknowledgement of religious belief. The question is misleading in this regard. If the question had been: 'What do you believe is true even though there is absolutely no evidence for it?' then this would indeed be a question of belief in the religious sense.
Rather like the creationist slight of hand against Darwinism, confusing use of the scientific term theory with the popular everyday use of the term which normally refers to a hypothesis, everyday use of the term belief is very different from religious belief.
Some people believe in a God or Gods despite the fact that there is and has never been any evidence of his or her or their existence or non-existence for that matter. This is different from believing that the sun will rise tomorrow.
Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition.
As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can't watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse.
Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar.
Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare:
"I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I'm only being given a temporary license, where's my rights as a consumer?"
The Shifted Librarian: DRM Locks Out Library Patrons?
Predictions for 2005:
1. Wikiyahoo - Tagging/Folksonomies become the tech talk of the town. Flickr gets acquired
2. Googlets - People cash out and leave Google, creating a startup frenzy in SF
3. An Englishman’s home is a castle in ruins - House prices eventually crash in the UK
4. ReVive la France - Sarkozy preps himself for a successful 2007 presidential bid in France
5. Boingboing blingbling - Gets acquired
6. Click here to drain our bank account - Click Spam worries affect Google’s share price
7. A Google dollars - A cluster of IPOs such as Kanoodle, to capitalize on Internet advertising hype
8. The ‘C’ word – Civil war in Iraq
9. Commitalism - People start to talk about Shanghai as eclipsing NY as the center of the world
10. iPhone - Apple compete with Sony and do a deal with a mobile related company such as Nokia
11. Sleepy in Seattle - Microsoft look vulnerable on three fronts as PC costs drop making their OS look relatively expensive, monoculture security issues cause enterprises to move to products such as Firefox, weblog style publishing encroaches into sacred Office territory
12. Microsix – Microsoft buy Six Apart – they should, but they prob. won’t
13. CD nonplayer - Restrictive DRM built into more and more consumer devices.
14. One person, one vote, one viable party - Blair reelected in UK
15. Bass, how low can you go - The dollar stabilizes temporarily
16. Enterprise software – What is it good for? Huh, absolutely nothing, pay me again
Ooh I like this, about time fact checking got a reality check.
Jason Kottke satirizes anal retentive blogger fact checking of big media, pointing out that almost anything can be deconstructed to look misleading.
60 Minutes wrong again! (kottke.org)
The Internet allows you to protest directly against unethical advertisers by clicking on ads you don't like.
Traditionally people have protested against hate media such as Michael Savage's radio show by encouraging people to boycott advertisers on the show. The problem is this is indirect. Without direct penalties, shows like Savage's actually rely on the 'all publicity is good publicity' phenomenon of having large audiences of people who listen just to be outraged. Advertisers gravitate towards low end brands where negative feelings against them are outweighed by the fact that some percentage of overall listeners will convert to buyers.
It occurred to me that the Internet allows you to do something much more direct, to penalize advertisers by clicking on text ads and not buying anything. This doesn't just lower revenues it actually costs the advertiser directly. The 'all publicity is good publicity' goes away.
One could go one step further and encourage people to gang together and click on certain ads in the manner of an ad busting flashmob.
For example, Steve Rhodes emailed me today to point out that Michael Savage:
"came back from his vacation early to rant on his show that not one penny should go to the tsunami victims. He also implied it might be punishment by god of Muslims along with men who went to Thailand to have sex with children." (Steve said he will post a transcript on his blog)
Now Amazon know that Michael Savage's book sold a reasonable number of copies, so they bid on the phrase 'Michael Savage' on Overture and link to his book.
If enough people were to search for Michael Savage on Yahoo, click on the Amazon ad and not buy anything then Amazon would soon drop the ad.
Of course, I would not encourage anyone to do this now.