Ramblings & ephemera
From Sander Duivestein’s “Penny Thoughts on the Technium” (The Technium: 1 December 2009):
I‘m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not [...]
Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Jeff Bertolucci’s “Windows 7 Ads: Microsoft Tarts Up the Desktop” (PC World: 13 November 2009):
Microsoft has announced plans to peddle Windows 7 desktop space to advertisers, who’ll create Windows UI themes–customized backgrounds, audio clips, and other elements–that highlight their brand, Computerworld reports. In fact, some advertiser themes are already available in the Windows 7 [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
My book, Linux Phrasebook, which is still selling well & still just as useful today as when it came out in 2006 (& will be for another decade or two, given how consistent the Linux command line is), has been translated into Russian. You can find it at this Russian website, where I found out [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, personal, tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Cloud koan” (Rough Type: 1 October 2009):
Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.
Related posts
Which is better: products or services?
What successful startups need
Tim O’Reilly defines cloud computing
Paul Graham’s lessons for startups
Many layers of cloud computing, or just one?
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Darryl Taft’s “Enterprise Applications: 20 Things You Might Not Know About COBOL (as the Language Turns 50)” (eWeek: September 2009). http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/20-Things-You-Might-Not-Know-About-COBOL-As-the-Language-Turns-50-103943/?kc=EWKNLBOE09252009FEA1. Accessed 25 September 2009.
Five billion lines of new COBOL are developed every year.
More than 80 percent of all daily business transactions are processed in COBOL.
More than 70 percent of all worldwide business data [...]
Posted on September 25th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, security, technology | No Comments »
Image via CrunchBase
From Doc Searls’s “The Most Personal Device” (Linux Journal: 1 March 2009):
My friend Keith Hopper made an interesting observation recently. He said one of Apple’s roles in the world is finding categories where progress is logjammed, and opening things up by coming out with a single solution that takes care of everything, from [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Sivilized” (Rough Type: 27 June 2009):
Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the “Wilderness of Childhood” – the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth.
…
Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, language & literature, social software, technology | No Comments »
These come from a variety of sources; just Google the law to find out more about it.
Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)
The Peter Principle
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Source: Dr. Laurence J. Peter and [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, science, technology | No Comments »
From Operator No. 9’s “That decorating touch” (Interactive Week: 24 April 2000): 100:
Dan Sweeney, general manager of Intel’s Home Networking division, says that when the company showed consumer focus groups the AnyPoint Wireless home networking system …, people became very confused, because there wasn’t a visible antenna. The desktop version of the wireless adapter — [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, technology | No Comments »
From Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, & Shumeet Baluja’s “What’s Up CAPTCHA?: A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation” (Google: 20-24 April 2009):
There are several classes of images which can be successfully oriented by computers. Some objects, such as faces, cars, pedestrians, sky, grass etc.
…
Many images, however, are difficult for computers to orient. For example, indoor scenes [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, security, technology | No Comments »
From Steven Levy’s “OK, Mac, Make a Wish: Apple’s ‘computer for the rest of us’ is, insanely, 20” (Newsweek: 2 February 2004):
If that’s so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple’s recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great [...]
Posted on May 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Joel Snyder’s “Exchange: Should I stay or should I go?” (Network World: 9 March 2009):
There are many ways to buy Exchange, depending on how many users you need, but the short answer is that none of them cost less than about $75 per user and can run up to $140 per user for [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
Kissing
Interviewing for a new job without your boss’s knowledge
Visiting a therapist
Praying
Inspired by Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003).
Related posts
iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan
In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV
Tracking via cell phone is easy
The NSA and threats to privacy
Surveillance cameras that notice aberrations
Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Joel Hruska’s “The Beast unveiled: inside a Google server” (Ars Technica: 2 April 2009):
Each Google server is hooked to an independent 12V battery to keep the units running in the event of a power outage. Data centers themselves are built and housed in shipping containers (we’ve seen Sun pushing this trend as well), a [...]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Google lifts its skirts” (Rough Type: 2 April 2009):
I was particularly surprised to learn that Google rented all its data-center space until 2005, when it built its first center. That implies that The Dalles, Oregon, plant (shown in the photo above) was the company’s first official data smelter. Each of Google’s containers [...]
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Prince McLean’s “Pwn2Own contest winner: Macs are safer than Windows” (AppleInsider: 26 March 2009):
Once it did arrive, Vista introduced sophisticated new measures to make it more difficult for malicious crackers to inject code.
One is support for the CPU’s NX bit, which allows a process to mark certain areas of memory as “Non-eXecutable” so the [...]
Posted on March 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, technology | No Comments »
From danah boyd’s “Social Media is Here to Stay… Now What?” at the Microsoft Research Tech Fest, Redmond, Washington (danah: 26 February 2009):
At this stage, over 35% of American adults have a profile on a social network site.
Related posts
Why everyone wants a computer: socializing
The importance of network effects to social software
Socioeconomic analysis of MySpace & [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From The Economist’s “Primates on Facebook” (26 February 2009):
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Mark Gibbs’ “New Zealand gets insane copyright law” (Network World: 20 February 2009):
A law was recently passed in New Zealand that has created what many consider to be the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law. This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Remembering to forget” (Rough Type: 22 October 2008):
Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, politics, science, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
