Ian Thomas, a contract employee of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) was fired recently — but that’s not a story.
He lost his job for putting some maps he’d made up on a public website — peculiar, but still no story.
However, the maps defined caribou calving grounds in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, public lands where some powerful interests want to extract oil — that’s the story.
(Shamelessly stolen from Ken Dawson’s Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.)
Yes, you too can take a high-end Silicon Graphics server and turn it into a beer cooler.
I’m very much a technology buff. I tend to be an early adopter of many new and promising products and services. It never ceases to amaze me how fast technology moves.
I have a friend who regularly travels to Japan. I’ve been waiting for her to pick me up an unrestricted DVD-RAM that can also play regular DVDs. (Because of US import restrictions forced into place by organizations that think they control content, they aren’t easily available in the USA, but they are available at every shop in Akihabara. Welcome to the global economy.)
Now I may have to hold off. This article in Byte talks about a new gadget, called FMD-ROM has the potential to store as much as a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) on a piece of cheap removable media. Let’s see, that would hold every bit of non-motion media content that I own, all of my databases for work, and probably make a pretty good dent in my video collection. Oh yeah, and it would hold a copy or two of every MP3 that ever passed through Napster. Hmmm.
I’m sure the late Mr. Ludlum could have told you a whole lot of ways to make it look like a heart attack.
Netscape 4 is dead. Here’s why.
So I’m driving back from the grocery store late last night. I’m stopped at a red light in the center of town, waiting for the trolley crossing gates to open. I notice that the La Mesa PD has pulled over a guy in a nice new Lexus.
He’s standing on the curb, in the rain, and the cops are giving him a field sobriety test, which he is very obviously failing. (Useful tip for drunk drivers: “I’m too drunk to walk, so I had to drive” is probably not a good excuse.)
A quite attractive but very wet woman, presumably the passenger, is standing next to the police car, apparently arguing with another cop. It appears she’s about two seconds away from wearing handcuffs herself, which will very definitely not match her ensemble.
As the trolley gates went up, and the light turned green, and I headed on my way, I burst out laughing as I noticed the license plate on the Lexus: CU NV ME.
For the hackers among us:
Clip2.com seems to be the current reference for all things Gnutella. They have links to the protocol spec, guides to variations, and an active developer discussion section. Have a look.
Here’s a link to one hacker’s discussion of how he implemented the Gnutella protocol.
And here’s a link to some Delphi source code to manage a Gnutella-protocol connection.
It looks like the end is near: Napster to Begin Blocking Copyrighted Songs
[T]he wildly popular online song swap service would begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted songs this weekend as part of its effort to conform with an injunction expected at any time[…]
That doesn’t appear to have happened yet. I, and 11,104 other users, are currently connected and sharing 2,125,697 files (9,034 gigs.) And yes, I’m downloading just as fast as my DSL line can pull stuff in.
My feeling is that music sharing will temporarily devolve into a feudal model, with “guilds” of people who have similar tastes in music, banding together in a less-public venue. These guilds will continue to exist, adding and changing members, until some unifying event occurs that makes the “servent” [server-client] technology work as well as Napster does/did.
Currently it looks like that unifying event will be based on the Gnutella protocol. So far today, two different friends have sent me two different programs that both operate on the Gnutella model. One of them, Bearshare, I’ve been playing with for a while, but I haven’t tried the new beta. The other is called iMesh, and I’d never even heard of it before.
All of these programs are quirky (and let’s face it: Napster is too) but if every computer is a servent, it’s going to be darn near impossible to shut down.
The end of Napster (as we know it) is probably imminent. But if the RIAA thinks they can shut down music sharing, they need to take a lesson from King Canute: the incoming tide will not obey you when you demand that it stop.
Here’s a weird anti-Amazon screed from MSNBC columnist Chris Byron. His entire complaint seems to be that Jeff Bezos and Amazon have burned through US$ 2.3 billion of investment and VC in four years [they have] and that their annualized growth rate will only increase by 13% this this year. [Byron’s estimate; Bezos is saying 20-30%, which does seem unlikely.]
Hello? What’s with this fruitcake?
In a year when dot-coms are dropping like flies, and even outfits with good business plans, like HomeGrocer, are falling off the ‘net, this guy thinks that Amazon is a failure because it hasn’t kept up its previous triple-digit annual growth rates?
I hate to break this to you, Chris, but growth rates that high are not sustainable even in a boom economy. Which we’re not having right now, in case you haven’t noticed. And welcome to the real world, where companies do lay off employees. What are other option is there? Close their doors? It doesn’t matter how much they grow, if they don’t translate some of that growth into profits.
Certainly I’m no Amazon cheerleader. Some of their business practices are despicable– their software patents and variable pricing, for example– but the company itself is a leader. They have defined the paradigm of online shopping, and Amazon is the yardstick by which all other online retailers are measured.