Archive: October 25, 2003

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Saturday,  10/25/03  09:52 PM

IEEE Intelligent Systems wonders What if intelligent computing were centered inside humans?  "For long-duration space missions, we may have to put intelligent technologies inside of us."  Fascinating stuff.

Bittorrent rocks.  That's just about all I can say.

PCMag describes a cool "laser printer"; the VersaLaser.  "The VersaLaser looks like an oversize printer without feed or output trays.  It accepts paper, wood, a variety of plastics, leather, some coated metals, and even stone and marble."  I've always wanted my specifications to be etched in stone :)

Joi Ito discovered a Japanese magazine about blogging.  Looks like the cover story compares TypePad to Blogger.  What're the Japanese characters for "Cool"?  Might be 涼雨 ?

Joel Spolsky thinks tokens are cool.  "With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large the files you want to send are, the token representing them will be very small - just a few KB.  Anyone you send a token to can then download the free Creo Token Redeemer software, and with one click redeem the token and download the files."  Sounds like Creo ends up running a file warehouse - an expensive proposition.  They need a P2P scheme like Bittorrent :)

Andrew Tridgell has been named Australia's smartest person.  Not only did he invent Samba, the open-source implementation of Windows networking, and rsync, the standard-issue network file synchronization software, but in his spare time he reverse-engineered the Tivo and was the first guy to hook one to a network.  Awesome.

Wired reports Google Raring to Go Public.  Interestingly, they appear to be considering a non-traditional online auction mechanism.  The valuation is rumored to be in the $15B range.  I know they're a good company, but that's a bit steep.

Mark Pilgrim details What's new in Mac OS X ("Panther").  It looks cool - I'm going to try this on my iMac tomorrow.

Tom Coates has First thoughts about Panther as well.  He doesn't seem impressed; "this one feels half-done - that it wasn't possible to get it any further down the line before launch date."  Stay tuned...

AlwaysOn notes the problems the magazine industry is facing.  "There was scant evidence that the best and the brightest in the publishing business know how to solve their problems.  They were excellent at identifying trouble spots and superb when it came to complaining about them.  Solutions?  Not many on display."  Remember when online magazines were going to take over?  And then after the Internet bubble burst, the magazines had a good laugh at online publishers' expense.  Who's laughing now?

CNet's Michael Kanellos with nine tech myths which won't happen.  #1 is "Apple will adopt Intel chips".  Yeah, that won't happen anytime soon.  #2 is "Microsoft will move to Canada".  Please.  I especially like the last two because they aren't obvious:

  • #8 - "Web sites tailor their content to suit advertisers".  Only in advertisers' dreams.  Web sites tailor their content to suit visitors, so advertisers have traffic.  Period.
  • #9 - "Marketers will be able to target consumers via their Web-surfing habits".  This is the holy grail of online advertising, and it has proved elusive.

 
 

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