October 2010
“Jason X (2002) takes place in the future, where Jason has again been...”
– Wikipedia.
Happy Halloween!
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Things the WSJ Hates this Week →
Sandra Day O’Connor
The NAACP
People who are afraid of getting poisoned on Halloween
Big East football coaches
Remote controls with lots of buttons
How wine tastes when there’s a full moon
NFL analysts who won’t stop laughing
Uncommunicative spouses
Borrowing money from relatives
Young adult novels that aren’t violent and sexually explicit
In favor of this...
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Engadget Reviews, Caveats, Google TV →
Every paragraph discusses a feature then warns of its more awkward points, for example:
There’s an app store! Or rather, there will be next year…
Set-up is better than home theater PCs, but still requires 30 minutes, 5 cables, 12-15 menus, and four steps to adjust your overscan.
On one hand Google TV works with what you already own. On the other, it’s an incomplete solution....
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The Geocities Torrent →
1TB of animated GIFs and fan rings.
“All the AdWords in the world are not going to save you if no one’s looking for...”
– Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO, on the start-up’s initial advertising efforts. (Via VentureBeat)
“I’d like to be a crossword clue one day. I want to be in The New York Times’s...”
– Brian Wilson, Crossword Puzzle Enthusiast. (via oldtimefamilybaseball)
On the Nook Color →
Future case study for aspiring MBA’s:
If you’re launching a product that competes with two product categories, each dominated by separate companies with subsidized hardware and huge marketing budgets, refer to your product as a ‘hybrid’ rather than a ‘two-front war.’
Distract people from your incredibly slow, painful user experience by making it...
Using Amazon EC2 as a web proxy →
Survey: Do you watch Project Runway?
Respondent: Not unless I have a girlfriend at the time who is interested in it.
Companies that received bailout money giving... →
T.W. Farnam writes a killer lede:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was a fierce critic of the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler last year, saying he could not “ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure.” But GM doesn’t seem to hold a grudge.
The political action committee formed by the company, which is now largely owned by taxpayers, cut McConnell a $5,000...
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We're in the Awkward Teen Years of the Internet...
Streaming video is starting to act like grown-up media, but it’s voice still cracks:
Netflix Streaming is 20% of Internet traffic
Netflix goes down for several hours
In other news, Google still thinks the networks should give them their content for free.
Why Not Preinstalling Flash Matters
Two bits of news:
Apple is no longer bundling Macs with Flash installed
One-third of iPad owners have yet to download an app
Still think everybody will wrestle with an Adobe installer?
As an advertiser, you can bet we’ll be thinking twice when building any Flash engagement. With 10 million+ iOS devices and the upcoming wave of Macs shipping without Flash it would be foolish not to...
Google says its cars grabbed email and passwords →
Not a huge surprised. If they were sniffing WiFi they were bound to get unencrypted text. They real problem here is it took an outside regulator discovering this for Google to admit the mistake.
Networks in Rift With Google TV →
That was fast.
Network content is drying up already: ABC, CBS, and NBC are blocking streaming TV from their respective websites.
Beyond the networks making it clear that Google needs to figure out how people will pay for their shows, this move punishes GTV early adopters who find themselves without the ‘open’ content environment they imagined. That $300 price tag just got more...
Top AOL Editors Are Heading For The Exits →
If journalists are quitting, you know it’s a bad work environment.
The New York Times Has More Twitter Followers Than... →
Zynga is Attempting to Patent Virtual Currency in... →
Call me crazy, but aren’t casino chips essentially virtual currency? Or people using a magnetic card loaded with cash to play slots?
Next-Gen Mazda2 Will Return 70 MPG, Without An... →
Would take this over a Volt or Prius, anyday.
Daft Punk Join Phoenix at Madison Square Garden →
The Furor Over Google's $3.1 Billion Tax Haven →
Bloomberg has an eye-opening report Thursday about an elaborate tax haven saving Google $3.1 billion. The company uses subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda and, as a result, benefits from a stunningly low overseas tax rate of 2.4 percent. Considering the U.S. has a $1.4 trillion budget shortfall, havens like these threaten to tarnish Google’s “responsible corporate...
Pete Warden on Big Data Bottlenecks
Processing the data keeps getting easier and cheaper, but the job of transforming your source material into a usable form remains as hard as it’s ever been. As Hilary Mason put it, are we stuck using grep and awk?
A few days ago, I shot Pete a question, partially to confirm that the big data development problems I’ve been running into aren’t created by my bad dev habits. He...
AWS Free Usage Tier →
Amazon just announced a free tier for their web services. Starting in November, developers can run a free EC2 Micro Instance for 750 hours, use 5 GB of S3 storage, transfer 30 GB of data, and more.
Awesome stuff.
“Hey Hulu — you kind of suck.”
– blocking GoogleTV and Boxee users does suck
Life With Google TV: My First Day Review & Impressions (via fred-wilson)
Amazon should work with the FCC to develop a Kindle you don’t have to turn off during take offs and landings.
“An HIV vaccine will mostly cause hypochondriacs to rush to their local clinic...”
– A So-So HIV Vaccine May Be a Hard Sell | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. Miller-McCune.
A vaccine against HIV may not be too far away, but if researchers want people use it, it’d better be good. (via publicradiointernational)
To me, this is the least of our worries. This vax needs a huge...
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Japanese, Western Social Robots Mirror Cultural... →
People building social robots in the West and in Japan are interested in ending up with two very different types of machines, she explained. Western robots are engineered to more explicitly express emotion, while those from Japan are generally as expressive as the masks worn by actors in traditional Japanese Noh plays.
Doing things vs. fitting in.
WSJ: Facebook in Online Privacy Breach;... →
The WSJ rakes some muck.
But, this report is just hand wringing. Two big claims are pretty empty:
The WSJ makes a big deal that user ID numbers are shared, which allow companies access to said account’s name. Names are public in Facebook and IDs aren’t blocked. This task could be more easily done with web scraping (and is) than by paying app developers for it. More likely, user IDs...
Playing Hulu on Google TV is as easy as changing... →
Open, in this case, is a liability. Make it too flexible and the network content will dry up.
Say what you will about Jobs, but Apple gets people paid.
What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? →
The New York Times demonstrates white liberal link bait so well my interest trumps my snark.
The Giants beating the Phillies is like winning twice in one night.
Man Dressed As Grass Caught By Dog During Heist Of... →
Video/headline of the day. (Via the Awl)
“Why aren’t they making white iPhones? Apparently the manufacturers can’t get the...”
– John Biggs.
Quick, name one other company with this discipline.
Why Rebel Groups Love the Toyota Hilux →
“The Toyota Hilux is everywhere,” says Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and now a fellow of the Center for a New American Security. “It’s the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47. It’s ubiquitous to insurgent warfare. And actually, recently, also counterinsurgent warfare. It kicks the hell out of the Humvee.”
Next Lent I’m giving up headphones.
“Something that could be a real issue for Google TV is the lack of UI...”
– Engadget reviews Google TV. 