Archive for June 2003

Bill Gates on Spam

CNET on PlanetLab

Matrix Reloaded Flash Mob in Osaka

Rotten Tomatoes: Matrix Reloaded in Japan

The Internet under surveillance

Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?

Wired News: Orrin Hatch: Software Pirate?
«
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.

But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.

»

[see also]

More backup brains

Mike at
Techdirt
cites a bunch of other wearable brain/memory assisters at Microsoft, HP, Accenture, and of course DARPA. Today’s novelty is

DejaView’s Camwear 100
with on-demand storage of the prior 30 seconds of head-mounted video.

Service Calls & Memex

Lawrence Lessig:

  • CIO Insight: Service Calls:

    If there were a Nobel Prize awarded for business innovation, I’d nominate the person who first thought of giving customers at convenience stores their purchases for free if the cashier didn’t offer a receipt. Convenience stores are famously vulnerable to rogue cashiers who don’t record sales. By drafting customers to police cashiers, convenience stores get an inexpensive but effective surveillance system.

  • Lessig Blog:
    the freedom to tape?

    But I wonder: When you get a recording while on hold that says, “Calls may be monitored to assure quality assurance,” doesn’t the passive voice already authorize you, the customer, to tape as well?

Another application and implication of the Memex. Remember
Ed Felten’s article.

Fear the Penguin

Naval Ravikant (VentureBlog): The New Platforms:

One of the nice things about being in the venture business is that one gets a large number of data points on what the innovative Independent Software Vendors are up to. In particular, it’s interesting to watch what platforms they are developing on, as it is a leading indicator of which one the next killer app might pop up on. Circa 1995, if you were writing mass-market software, you were writing for Windows (client) or Unix (server). Circa 1998, if you were writing software, the server side was Solaris / Unix and the client side was the web browser.

Today, most of the innovative apps are breaking out on many different platforms…


Predictions – Most killer apps will emerge first via web-based GUIs (client side) unless they involve 3D graphics or heavy filesharing, in which case they’re Win32 apps. Server-side killer apps will more easily emerge on Linux than on Windows. Some of the more interesting consumer-facing server apps are emerging just as quickly on Linux as on Windows (PVRs, online photo albums, music jukeboxes).
Fear the Penguin
, indeed.

Writing Faster Managed Code: Know What Things Cost

Spam Wars

MIT Technology Review:
Spam Wars