Category: observations

Amazon.com–Earth’s Biggest Selection

So the Gold Box is now holding 15 items, all as unappealing as the five we started with. I see the Gold Box as the moral equivalent of the impulse items at the checkout: a $1,300 film scanner is not an impulse buy. The prices have to get a lot better before I can get excited about any of this stuff. I like the fact that on the Internet, you can change to be whoever you think your customers want you to be. The new shipping deal — free shipping on orders of $25 or more — is great. I just can’t see buying a film scanner (and having it shipped) or a cabinet door jig from Amazon. Perhaps I haven’t evolved: I still think of them as a books and music store.

But on the upside, my associates link has netted me $.43 so far. (Thanks, John.)

The Seattle Times: Lou cuts loose in M’s win

With little else to play for, Lou Piniella showed last night that pride and passion are still part of his game in the dying days of this long-gone pennant race.

Following his own call to win as many as possible, the Mariners’ manager went berserk when first-base umpire C.B. Bucknor blew a close third-out call on Ben Davis at first base that ended the ninth inning and cost Seattle a win in regulation.

A week or so back, Lou Piniella put on quite a show, protesting a blown call that cost his team the game. It provoked this response:

I’m certain Lou was provoked by the umpire. I’m certain he was and does get frustrated. I’m also certain that he, like all other concerned parents, would like his children to respond with a apology for less than “sportsman-like conduct,” rather than the excuse that he was provoked.

Another lesson you can draw is that a leader stands up for his guys, and if he loses his temper, so be it. Sports at that level is not a passionless exercise. It’s not like he took a bat to the umpire: he vented his energy on inanimate objects (though the first base bag flying into right field might not count as inanimate).

I sometimes wonder if Seattle isn’t too concerned about appearing emotional, rather than displaying a bit of passion and drive.

All the News Google Algorithms Say Is Fit to Print

Mr. Page said the origin of the service was a demonstration program written in January by a Google engineers that could identify similar articles on many Web pages. Yesterday, for example, Google’s site used this technology to offer users a choice of 1,897 articles on the siege of Yasir Arafat’s compound.

[ . . . ]

“Their front page is not too far off from what is on the Post site at the moment,” said Douglas B. Feaver, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com. “It’s a useful service, but it’s not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow.”

It’s one thing for the bright young new hires to consider you a milestone they will inevitably surpass, but when engineers can make it happen, it can’t be a great feeling.

A dystopian vision is coming into focus: the Machines pick our news for us, program our meals (for optimal nutrition), tell us what crops to plant and when, assemble our entertainment (perhaps even writing the books and composing the music). What do we do for them once they built and plugged in? Make a list of the jobs that are or could be placed under the control of a machine. Then remove humans from the scenario (like the highway or the airways) and we might be on our way to redundance.

Usage Statistics for blue.paulbeard.org – September 2002

5 of the top 20 search queries I get are for CNN’s RSS feed (which of course is not provided by CNN): it’s the number 1 query with 4 more appearances in the 11 – 20 spots.

I wonder how many people are starting to browse their news this way and linking to it from an aggregator, rather than the home page of a site? And how will news organizations respond? Will they generate weak RSS files to discourage this (leading more third parties to roll their own) or will they find a way to leverage this new entry point? It’s akin to the argument over deep linking, though the site provides the links. One scenario is that pages read per user may go up as people scan the feed before going to the site: usage, defined as casual browsing, may decline, in favor of more focused reading. Never will good headlines and solid lead paragraphs (‘nut grafs’, as I recall them) be so important.

Suspected Computer-Virus Author Arrested

T0rn, with a zero, was not as menacing as the Code Red, Sircam and Nimda worms and viruses, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to corporate computer networks last year. Linux-based software systems account for a small segment of the computing market.

So does this mean that more people should use Linux since there are fewer viruses that exploit or are we lucky so few people do because the effects might have been worse?

According to this page, t0rn is a rootkit installed by the Lion or Ramen virues and exploits 8.2, 8.2-P1, 8.2.2-Px, and all 8.2.3 beta versions of BIND

oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Physics for Game Developers

Colliding billiard balls. Missile trajectories. Cornering dynamics in speeding cars. By applying the laws of physics, you can realistically model nearly everything in games that bounces around, flies, rolls, slides, or isn’t sitting still, to create compelling, believable content for computer games, simulations, and animation. Physics for Game Developers serves as the starting point for enriching games with physics-based realism.

Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers

Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”

O’Reilly Network: Switcher Stories Follow Up [Sep. 17, 2002]

BSD is for people who love Unix.
Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.

IP: Norway dumps Microsoft

I found this article on the Interesting People mailing list’s archives: required reading if you want to know what’s really being talked about/acted upon.

Often the lynchpin is a standardised file format policy — so you can buy whatever you want, so long as it is 100 per cent Microsoft file format compatible, which is all but impossible as Microsoft changes its formats so often and for no real purpose other than to lock in customers.

Isn’t file compatibility the chief gripe most people have with trying to work with MSFT applications? Between locking non-Windows licensees out and locking its own customers in, there’s a lot to put up with.

Here’s a note on Tim O’Reilly’s weblog to the same effect: Forcing Microsoft to open the office file formats would have done more to encourage competition than just about anyone else. It would be nice to see users’ data belong to them again, with the power to switch to other applications if they so choose.

Users owning their data? What a radical concept. He has a link to a story at the Register on Sun’s XML/open standards initiative.

O’Reilly Network: More on MS Mac FUD [September 18, 2002]

An excerpt from one of a few emails Tim O’Reilly shared on his weblog.

. . . . you can basically sum up Microsoft’s position as “our software strategy is screwed, our vendors hate us, our developers aren’t buying in, and the Mac guys have gotten their act together again”.

Other notes: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1743 and http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1710