Category digital

Kodak moment:

: when an industry belatedly waked up (“sleeps in,” their managers would call) it and realizes it’s too late. BJ notes the end of Kodachrome: 1, 2.

BSOD of the day

Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard Transocean Deepwater Horizon: For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.” “It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.” Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the [...]

Selling out your friends

Brad Brace of the 12hr isbn-jpeg project auctions off “2398 hi-res art file suitable for printing,” culled from 5000 Facebook friends. FB is not amused.

Journal of Journal Performance Studies

Nicholas Knouf’s official statement: I am very happy to announce the launching of the Journal of Journal Performance Studies. Journal of Journal Performance Studies (JJPS) is a series of three interrelated works that engage with academic publishing. The project consists of a Firefox extension, an online radio, and a journal. The JJPS Firefox Extension overlays [...]

From the annals of innovation

Mary Jo Foley of Redmond Mag: Some enterprise users built internal line-of-business applications around IE6 — and are now stuck with it. Others are planning to run Windows XP into the ground — or at least until 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for it. And because IE6 is what’s built into XP, that’s what [...]

Bar none

Apple, on discovering that “bars” are not just ephemeral but illusory: “We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.” Bars of a prison, bars of a dissolute life, bars of gold — an awful metaphor given not just new life but, as they like [...]

Google’s new motto

Don’t be accidentally on purpose evil. gOfficialblog: Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to [...]

Microsoft, the Detroit of Software 2

Computerworld: Hackers behind the rootkit responsible for crippling Windows machines after users installed a Microsoft security patch have updated their malware so that it no longer crashes systems, researchers confirmed today. See also: “FIRE, Detroit, GOP, Microsoft.”

When bad things happen to good robots

(irr)

WiiTF

Searching the Wii’s “Virtual Console” for “mari” — as in Mario — turns up one possible autocompletion that might explain why the Wii is so popular:

0 notes

5th Pillar‘s zero-rupee note (in Tamil, front and back:), intended as a means of protest for those too poor to pay a bribes: they’re supposed to hand this over rather than actual currency. This seems ill-conceived all around: a private protest likely to transform impersonal corruption into personal persecution (where shouting, say, at least can [...]

A Few wizards staying up late during a brief moment in time

(irr)

gMeta

Google Sandbox redirects to the page “unavailable.html,” which in turns gives a 404:

Early example of B1FFness

Courtesy of the early Clay Shirky. ( lloyd wood )

Everything old is new

Form art lives.

QOTD2

Paul Vixie: To underline our understanding of what DNS is, we must differentiate it from what it is not. The Internet economy rewards unlimited creativity in the monetization of human action, and fairly often this takes the form of some kind of intermediation. For DNS, monetized intermediation means lying. The innovators who bring us such [...]

Litigator as artist 2

WIN: Coverage: PC Mag, Ars Technica, CNET. See also: “Litigator as artist.”

QOTD

Grimmelmann: Your avatar’s arms are never going to be long enough to box with a game god whose software controls arm length. Or, as we used to put it: he who would snack with the Devil must needs use a long spork… ( jotwell | froomkin )

The Return of Martin Lukes?

One can only hope.

iProp

Calling Tim Powers. iPhone photos of a prop:

Flickr Pro, Flickr Con

Bernie Kerik’s Flickr photostream includes gems like Officer Kerik in ’93… …“plainclothes” (modulo the assault rifle) Kerik escorting Susan Rosenberg (ca. ’83?; SR playing ping pong here)… …authentic arrest scenes… …and, indeed, pretty much his entire rise and fall. Except for his mugshot: The kommissar disappears: (Left: Flickr, plemeljr, 8 Feb ’05 [detail]; right: m3t00, [...]

How and why Louis Zukofsky will vanish in a cloud of greasy black smoke, historically speaking

A meets IPR.

Futile style

(It’s tempting to ask why this lasts as long as it does, but to many that question would suggest that this is way too long; it may be so, but a better question is whyit lasts precisely as long as it does? Not a deep question — but this is a fine example of a [...]

There goes everybody

BBC reports: The Polish authorities in charge of Auschwitz have launched an official site for the former Nazi death camp on the social networking website Facebook. RT @auschwitz: “   ” (ts)

KEI FOIAs USTR ACTA NDAs

Expanded: Jamie Love at Knowledge Ecology International has forced the Office of the United States Trade Representative to cough up the names of people who know what the US is secretly negotiating in the proposed multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. They are: People who’ve signed an NDA in order to see ACTA’s “internet text”: Emery Simon [...]