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http://xkcd.com/369/

http://mrcopilot.blogspot.com/2008/01/died-in-blogging-accident.html

Content may be king but in this world, that content is user supplied and nearly anonymous. In order to make money off of content, you either have to be in the distribution side or form a cult of personality. In other words, build brand. In viral fashion, I have blogged on this.

Google have hired Codeweavers to develop improvements for Wine specifically to enhance the performance of Photoshop.

They don't appear to be quite there yet with CS3 but all previous versions up to CS2 reportedly run well.

When asked (by himself) Fake Steve Jobs says If I owned Dell I'd shut the place down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Read this and tell me if you still think that.

The original illustrations by John Schoenherr when it was originally serialized in Analog are still, for me, the greatest visual realization of the Dune books. You can see some of them here: http://nebuh.blogspot.com/2007/08/illustrated-dune-part-1.html An animated Dune in the style of Schoenherr would be, IMO, would really bring something completely new to the Dune table.

Discussed more here: http://gregstechblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/bad-adobe.html Adobe shouldn't have been using the old API, Carbon. They should have switched to Cocoa when Mac OS X came out, over 7 years ago.

Although VHDL is a hardware description language, couldn't similar concepts be used to make a parallel centric computer programming language?

Excellent suggestion. This is precisely what the COSA software model is about. A pulsed neural network is my preferred metaphor for an ideal model of parallel computing. Intel and the others are on the verge of losing billions of dollars because they are already deeply committed to the hard to program multithreading model, a complete failure even after decades of research. To find out why multithreading is not part of the future of parallel programming, read Nightmare on Core Street.

visit
http://srohit.blogspot.com/

for all the latest updates, goals and highlights about arsenal football club

Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.

The Army is certainly a lot smarter than the general population.

How about doing a Google Android app? Cheap GPS enabled phones should soon be available, and there's still time to enter the developer challenge

Obama is a long-legged Mac daddy.

Never forget that.

http://a-place-apart.blogspot.com/2008/03/obama-is-long-legged-mac-daddy.html

The plasma view can get out of sight if you simply drag the grippie and shrink it to 0.
Yes, the central view sucks. No, I'm not convinced we've seen the complete potential of it yet.
Yes, Amarok 2 lacks basic visual appeal. I believe that once there's a dot-oh release, the devs will grow out of playing with their toys, and are going to revert to a more standard visual theme, ditching most use of SVGs in the process.
Re gimped playlist: putting a thousand songs in your playlist because you want to listen to random music is not a targeted usecase. Use dynamic playlists.
Re roundey Qt themes: try Skulpture and Plastique.
Re kickoff: it's undergone usability studies by Novell. But yes, people have been whining about it from day one, so once the ad-hoc experiments Raptor and Lancelot get usable, the devs might just be shouted into changing the default.
Re plasmoids under windows: check this out. http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/07/plasma-and-mac-dashboard.html
Re lickable shininess: there's a shitload of work going on under the surface. A lot of it is visible in commit digests, a whole lot more goes unnoticed.

Hacking Yahoo Music - here

No, you're mixing together two different arguments.

The FERPA argument is: "The records are not discoverable under FERPA; the issuance of the subpoena was contrary to law. Period." The same point is made by the Oregon Attorney General in Arista v. Does 1-17.

The additional arguments for sanctions, which are separate and distinct from the FERPA argument, are that (a) the case is brought for improper purposes (publicity, intimidation, and discovery) and (b) the deliberate misjoinder flaunts the court rules and numerous court orders.

The discovery issue under (a) is that it's never proper to bring a lawsuit in federal court for the purpose of obtaining discovery. The "John Doe" cases are definitely brought for that purpose, because they are immediately dropped after the RIAA gets the information it was looking for. I.e., it is a pre-action discovery proceeding [which is not authorized under the Federal Rules] masquerading as a copyright infringement proceeding. It is immaterial to the latter argument whether the discovery is or is not barred by FERPA.

IANAL so don't mind me if I'm incorrect here, but in that case the ruling magistrate judge suggested Rule 11 sanctions. Stating In my view, the Court would be well within its power to direct the Plaintiffs to show cause why they have not violated Rule 11(b) with their allegations respecting joinder. This judge's complaint is the last point of the motion that the legal aid is filing, but if even the judge has problems with what the MAFIAA is doing here I see the defendants winning most, if not all of the points of this motion.

I wouldn't want anybody straining themselves, so I'll do it for you.

The article itself does not have a distribution, but the blog linked to by the article does: Palamida blog complete with chart. There was a definite surge last year of GPL3 projects, followed a sharp decline in December. The number of add projects, however, has been slowly climbing for the first few months of 2008.

A while back I blogged on using tags and blogs as a standard mechanism for publication. Now the point of this is that while the patent act says published it doesn't specify the publication type it just says that the other people filing could have obtained the information from it and that others will have read it.

To me this is a classic case where the internet has over taken the current laws to give us a much cheaper and simpler way of doing this.

director of Google Research, "a large corpus of data can be much more valuable than an efficient algorithm" - Unreliable reference

The codename for the Kindle was "Fiona", as was the root password. That indicates that they were very much thinking of Diamond Age.

--Rob

Speaking of dice, the math blog "God Plays Dice" has an interesting post about this topic: http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2008/03/its-almost-baseball-season-again.html

In it, the author suggests that the odds of any (average) player in the history of baseball making a streak of at least 56 games to be 1 in 300, though he reaches this conclusion via an admittedly simple and straightforward biased-coin flipping analysis. Still, that's quite a bit different from the Times' statistical conclusion of over 50% odds of finding a streak of at least 53 games.

One of the last things "news" papers seem to be reporting is their personal bad news. This trend is definitely NOT news if a software engineer could point it out almost a year ago
anyone have a guess why NY Times dropped its "Select" subscription? I thought it could be turned into a decent on-line paper. Maybe stealing news comes as naturally to web users as stealing music and the Times just weren't making any sales at the measly $49 they charged.
Did everyone forget that reporters and writers need to be paid for what they do? Are we willing to just take press releases from our government officials as the whole story and forget about reporting as it once was done? [ok, that last one is a bit of a troll...we do have Judith Miller and her ilk in the print MSM]

BUAHAhhahaahaaha! (choke) hahahahaah!

I love it when folks who CANT DO BASIC MATH spout stuff like this.

Retard.

It is supposedly so good that it would be arousing to Nanotech fans. This does not imply sexual content of the article. This has been used in other forms such as geek porn.

Open arbitrary mime-typed content using a web service.

Screenshot of the latest Firefox branch:
http://fulldecent2.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-firefox-really-needs.html

I am not really in a position to validate anything he says, but Lubos Motl discusses LHC alarmists, and the validity of their various arguments, in this post...

http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/lhc-alarmists.html ... Sorry, just looking for somewhere to put this ;)

Ahaha. Whatever dude, Oregon beer rules.
Others agree:
http://beercast.blogspot.com/2007/11/2007-world-beer-awards.html
World's Best Stout/Porter
Obsidian Stout, Deschutes Brewery, Oregon

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6456904/Oregon-s-BridgePort-IPA-Prevails.html
Oregon's BridgePort IPA Prevails at the Australian International Beer Awards.

Needless to say I was a bit early on that prediction.

The reason is that all academic researchers jumped on the multithreading bandwagon as the basis for parallel computing. Unfortunately for them, they could never get it to work. They've been at it for over twenty years and they still can't make it work. Twenty years is an eternity in this business. You would think that after all this time, it would have occurred to at least one of those smart scientists that maybe, just maybe, multithreading is not the answer to parallel computing. Nope: they're still trying to fit that square peg into the round hole.

Both AMD and Intel have invested heavily into the multithreading model. Big mistake. Multiple billion dollar mistake. To find out why threads are not part of the future of parallel computing read Nightmare on Core Street. It's time for the computer industry to wake up and realize that the analytical engine is long gone. This is the 21st century. It's time to move on and change to a new model of computing.

I have recently been reading a series of articles here and here regarding the multi-core parallel programming problem. The guy seems like he could be a little out there on the edge, but his concept for the COSA project, and fine grain parallelism seem really attractive to me. I have been thinking about trying to implement a COSA virtual machine to try it out.

I have also been thinking about trying to implement the COSA hardware in an FPGA, but that seems like a much harder project

Unfortunately for those who need their fix of Photoshop UI, gimpshop hasn't been maintained for a long time. If you have specific ideas how to improve GIMP's UI (other than "do it like PS"), I'm sure the guys at the GIMP UI brainstorm would like to hear about it.

the whole solar system would not collapse. Earth would become a 9mm diameter black hole, still orbited by the moon, ISS, and other existing satellites. according to here anyway: http://teamwak.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-destroy-earth-part-3.html

Apple thinks it owns hardware that it has already sold to someone else. This has already been established.
http://ipodminusitunes.blogspot.com/2007/09/weve-won.html

I wonder what the guys living under the ice look like? http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

Vista is soooo secure that even the owner has trouble accessing the OS! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

The Supreme Court just ruled that U.S. states can now pretty much ignore international law at will.

The Supreme Court ruled that compliance by a state court with the international legal obligation in this case requires specific enabling action of a legislature (state or Federal), rather than executive orders from the President or the IJC.

Traditional Notions puts it best when he says: For those concerned with constitutional overstepping of the President and/or the judiciary, this is a superb result.

Oh... for a moment, I thought this was about Edison Chen and his video and photo recordings.

For more info on the phonautogragh see http:http://www.talkingmachine.org/phonautograph.html

OK, sure the guy "recorded" sound, he apparently was very upset that Edison beat him to the patent office and generally received all the glory. Somehow though, I think recording 10 seconds on 2 sheets of paper would make an LP sized recording equivalent to an encyclopedia and thus slightly impractical.
http://mrcopilot.blogspot.com/2008/03/ancient-audio-and-phonautograph.html

If you can't support it don't sell it!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497516&cid=22848256

I wouldn't be surprised if Bit Torrent and there partners threatened ComCast, maybe with a boycott or civil action.

I now predict that Bit Torrent or it descendant will obsolete BlueRay and Cable for recorded video content distribution, Even 1080i HD

Now not to tangent too much:

In the short term BlueRay will clearly kill off DVD, DVD-R, and HD-DVD had already just died.

I just talked yesterday with the only BlueRay disk manufacturer in the US.
  They were talking about 500GB disks, so I think will be a long time before Bit Torrent will be able to compete with that. (Especially when spray on 4K Digital Cinema video walls come out in 20 years.. )

500GB BlueRay-R when it arrives sounds like a great media to back up my Torrent downloaded pirated movie collection.
  But seriously how the heck can I back up 1TB Sata drives?

Now for the Wacky Idea: first run movies on Bit Torrent.

    I have the rights to make a movie based on a famous SciFi writer short story who just passed away at age 90.
      Can not share his name, but you can easily guess this one.

      After 3 years of rejections from Hollywood, I was thinking that maybe we can fund the movie with donations and grants and release the movie freely (GPL style) over Bit Torrent and BlueRay and then see what it will take to get it played in theaters. I really think it would be so cool and set a whole new model for film production, copyleft movies. Am I a nut job or is this just crazy enough to work?

  If you have any thoughts on that hit me up on http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2008/03/now-for-wacky-idea-first-run-movies-on.html I tried posting this as a Ask SlashDot article but was rejected for some reason.

I have another blog post here.
http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/2008/03/copyleft-movies-can-it-be-done.html

If you can't support it don't sell it!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497516&cid=22848256

I wouldn't be surprised if Bit Torrent and there partners threatened ComCast, maybe with a boycott or civil action.

I now predict that Bit Torrent or it descendant will obsolete BlueRay and Cable for recorded video content distribution, Even 1080i HD

Now not to tangent too much:

In the short term BlueRay will clearly kill off DVD, DVD-R, and HD-DVD had already just died.

I just talked yesterday with the only BlueRay disk manufacturer in the US.
  They were talking about 500GB disks, so I think will be a long time before Bit Torrent will be able to compete with that. (Especially when spray on 4K Digital Cinema video walls come out in 20 years.. )

500GB BlueRay-R when it arrives sounds like a great media to back up my Torrent downloaded pirated movie collection.
  But seriously how the heck can I back up 1TB Sata drives?

Now for the Wacky Idea: first run movies on Bit Torrent.

    I have the rights to make a movie based on a famous SciFi writer short story who just passed away at age 90.
      Can not share his name, but you can easily guess this one.

      After 3 years of rejections from Hollywood, I was thinking that maybe we can fund the movie with donations and grants and release the movie freely (GPL style) over Bit Torrent and BlueRay and then see what it will take to get it played in theaters. I really think it would be so cool and set a whole new model for film production, copyleft movies. Am I a nut job or is this just crazy enough to work?

  If you have any thoughts on that hit me up on http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2008/03/now-for-wacky-idea-first-run-movies-on.html I tried posting this as a Ask SlashDot article but was rejected for some reason.

I have another blog post here.
http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/2008/03/copyleft-movies-can-it-be-done.html

Sure.
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/04/killing-of-derek-hale-death-by-police.html
http://nynerd.com/sgt-derek-j-hale-usmc-murdered-by-delaware-police/
http://www.rense.com/general76/del.htm
http://www.google.com/

That last one is a gold mine.

Some precedence supports the proposition that an information service can post terms of use that forbid or regulate bots.

The thing about children is that they don't have the same capabilities for rational thought as they will have when they're adults. They also don't have the same control over their emotions, especially when they are adolescents. You may tell your child how to be responsible around guns (though I'm not sure that I would classify your plan of "here's a gun, let's shoot small animals with it" as responsible). But that doesn't mean your child won't be persuaded by a playmate to take the gun out and let him play with it. It also doesn't guard against the possibility that your depressed adolescent daughter will take the gun and kill herself, or take it into school and kill her teachers or fellow students. And when she does that, you will have taught her to be a more effective shooter.

People should not own guns, period. But to put one in the hands of a child is obscene.

http://childrenwithguns.blogspot.com/

• Donnelly made more than $2.8 million in revenue from Glider
• Blizzard spends $970K fighting bots each year
• Blizzard claims Glider costs them $18 million in lost revenue per year

MDY has only one member, Michael Donnelly. Court documents reveal he made more than $2.8 million in revenue from selling Glider.

http://gameactivist.blogspot.com/2008/03/update-blizzard-vs-mdy.html

Another one: this time in India.

The best comparison would be S/MIME vs PGP. If you look at deployed base there is absolutely no question that S/MIME wins. We have over a billion email clients with embedded S/MIME support. But both are IETF standards and I was present when Burt Kaliski pitched handing S/MIME to Jeff Schiller, the Security area. Jeff was at the time probably the biggest PGP supporter, he was one of the main people who made the MIT distribution of PGP happen.

The popular perception is that the S/MIME and PGP camps are both at each other's throats. This is not the case at all. Neither product is exactly a deployment success in that virtually no email is secured with either. Jon Callas, CTO of PGP and I both worked on DKIM together. PGP Inc. makes an excellent S/MIME product. The perception that there is a division only hurts both standards. In my book I advocate that email clients implement at least PGP encryption so we can move forward to an interoperable message level confidentiality solution. There is not a big technical or even a market reason to do this, but there is a major political reason as PGP dominates in mindshare. We are going to make very sure that we do not have a similar schism when we move to the next generation technologies.

ODF vs OOXML is a very similar problem. The deployed base of applications is simply too great to make convergence on a single standard practical for this generation. It is only going to become practical when the market moves to the next generation.

The Microsoft Java namespace was entirely justified, Microsoft had bought into Java thinking that they could use it as their next generation programming language across the board. The only way to do that was to allow access to Windows APIs. Sun thought that Java was more than a programming language, it was a replacement platform that they had absolute control over and would sue anyone who tried to implement different ideas. The way I looked at it was 'OK Sun, you have an idea whose time might have come, but why should you get to control the entire future of the computing business on the basis of one idea'.

Standards are not about establishing a monoculture. The idea is to standardize what we agree on so that we can then innovate in areas that provide useful choices, i.e. benefits, for the customer and not in areas where it only causes problems.

ODF is not going to be the canonical archive format in perpetuity. It is rooted in the world of paper documents for a start.

Driverless cars... http://sugiero.blogspot.com/2007/12/video-driverless-car-at-top-gear-bmw.html/