WiReD 4.05 (May ’96), “Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe),” on Yahoo[!]:
Starting with the ad hoc categories she inherited from Yang and Filo, Srinivasan began slowly and deliberately steering Yahoo!’s ontology toward completeness. Mainly, it’s been a matter of adding new categories and reorganizing hierarchies as the Web evolves from containing only specialized, technical information [...]
No Google street view for West 44th St (and sometimes 45th St too), between 7th and 8th Aves, in Manhattan:
Viacom?
A new genre:
Street with a view.
NYT:
Google Maps hasn’t quite heard of Mountain House:
Ths sponsored link homegain.com links to findmeaforeclosure.com…
…which has the same registrant as tracyrealestate.com:
(Both sites’ “Community” links are blank.)
Repeat ad nauseam nationwide.
Rich Gold using Xeroc PARC’s ZombieBoard:
More images here.
WSJ publishes a commonsensical defense of “piracy” by Lessig, who bridles:
Sorry to disappoint, but my new book, Remix, is not “A Defense of Piracy,” whatever the Wall Street Journal’s headline writers may think.
Note to Larry:
“Piracy” is defined by the Content Cartels, not by WSJ headline writers—and, according to the CCs, you’re defending piracy. If you [...]
CJR:
Bob Owen, chief photographer of the San Antonio Express-News, notified the AP that the photos of two deceased soldiers, who died in Iraq on Sept. 14, were nearly identical. Upon examining the photos, Owens noticed that everything except for the soldier’s face, name, and rank was the same. The most glaring similarity, Owen told CJR, [...]
FT:
The programmers of Super Mario Galaxy will generate more profit this year than the average Goldman Sachs banker has ever managed. According to calculations by the Financial Times, the average employee at Japanese video games maker Nintendo is on track to earn more for their company this year than the average Goldman Sachs employee did [...]
FT:
United Airlines plunged yesterday after a false report that the carrier had returned to bankruptcy court surfaced on the internet. A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search yesterday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. [...] United [...]
…and now my dreams have come true!”
The NYT covers the hype about a new digital device, a letter-size grayscale screen, but omits key words such as “hard” or ”stiff” in lieu of the more flexible term “flexible.” Apparently unaware that the hardcopy NYT has been printed in color for over a decade (since 16 Oct [...]
Good news:
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:03:50 -0700
From: vim@duncan.cx
Subject: States throw out costly electronic voting machines
The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
What to do with this high-tech [...]
“Don’t be evil” is too passive and, above all, too simple. A minor mod like this…
Google may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Google must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Google must protect its [...]
Peter Van Dijck’s excellent 2003 “Themes and Metaphors in the Semantic Web Discussion.”
A gloss on it + an ASCII version (of some version) of it here.
Amy Chozick’s 1400-word “Too Fit to Be President?” (WSJ, 1 Aug ’08) is based on a Yahoo[“!”] message board thread, “Is Obama Too Skinny to Be President?” with a total of five messages (totaling 179 words); two of them (the first dated 15 July) are from Chozick herself (10k .zip of the Google-cached message board [...]
The Nexis search that DoJ White House liaisons ran on job candidates:
[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or [...]
Courtesy of FAS: Lazarus, Voorhees, Wells, and Worlton, “Computing at LASL [Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory] in the 1940s and 1950s,” LASL/USDoE, ’78 (2.1MB PDF).
The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:
In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology [...]
[Update: It seems that quite a few people thought that this was interesting because the HTML was hand-crafted by Karadzic the war criminal. No, it’s not “authentic” in that sense. For what it might actually be, see my comment here.]
[Update 2: paranoia.no has done some nice forensic work which suggests that the second site, psy-help-energy.com—which [...]
(Like lots of things, this news is a few weeks old.)
Indy software developers, meet the ISO:
The new standard, ISO 32000-1, Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7, is based on the PDF version 1.7 developed by Adobe. This International Standard supplies the essential information needed by developers of software that create [...]
On 29 Apr ’08, the Seattle Times ran a story about Microsoft’s “COFEE,” or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, a special-purpose USB device “that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies” the previous summer and, a day before the story ran, “described … to the 350 law-enforcement experts” at an MS-sponsored conf. According [...]
Amazing that it took this long:
MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
But it seems strange that it’d come from a hardware shop.
AP recently caused a stink when it announced that it plans to charge $7.50+ for the right to quote as few five words. Their “Licensing Agent for Reuse,” iCopyright, announced in a press release that “AP Deputy Director/Business Development Bruce Glover [said,] ‘iCopyright makes it easier to monitor copyright compliance and to identify pirated and [...]
In “Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?”, NYT’s David Pogue says his boilerplate response to poeple asking about PDF versions of his books reads:
Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and [...]
Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky”
Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game “Colossal Cave Adventure”, academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. “Adventure” was the first in a series of text-based games (“interactive [...]
googolplex.gz.gz.gz. Have fun. Be careful.