This post is a little over the top, but at the bottom is a great collection of links to critical articles about social networking sites.

apophenia: venting my contempt for orkut

] When the internal architecture of a trained
] artificial neural network is gradually relaxed or
] destroyed, that network tends to spontaneously
] produce a succession of "impressions" from it's
] learned knowledge domain. I refer to this state
] as "dreaming." A dreaming net's output stream
] often holds a mixture of both straightforward and
] hybridized exemplars from its training set. If we
] allow a second neural network to watch for any
] useful concepts that emerge from the first, we
] form a so-called "Creativity Machine." Creativity
] machines may perform remarkable feats of
] invention and discovery, ranging from the composition of
] music to the prediction of totally new ultrahard
] materials.

A technical discussion of Creativity Machines

] Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than
] any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B
] CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the
] Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered
] substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new
] English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.
] Technically.
]
] Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination
] Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all
] those things, but he's really just "the man behind the
] curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer
] program called a Creativity Machine.

This is rather amazing. The article makes what must be tremendous programming projects sounds very simple. They guy actually has neural networks inventing technologies.

Computers that create patents

Shipping work overseas saves money that drops to the bottom line as profit.  Stock prices are today keyed to earnings-per-share as is, to a certain extent, executive compensation.  Now look at the average time that an institutional investor actually holds a given stock.  This can be measured in months, sometimes in weeks, but hardly ever in years.  So the investor timeline is short and the CEO timeline -- with average tenancies in those positions at less than five years -- is not much longer.  So offshoring works great for these two groups.  The stock goes up and along with it, the CEO's bonus and stock options.  By the time the long-term effects of this policy are felt, both the investors and the CEO are long gone.  And even if the CEO is still around, it is with a golden parachute negotiated long before that often pays him more to go away than he might have got to stay.

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

] Thomas Thurman has developed Joule, a nice application
] that tracks 'friend-of'? relationships over time on
] LiveJournal and displays a user's friendships over time
] in either tabular or graph format. Note that LiveJournal
] features an integrated aggregator; friendship there is
] roughly equivalent to subscription in the weblog world.

Many-to-Many: Visualizing Friendship Dynamics

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!

] Nokia will make an internal version of the Perl scripting
] language for Series 60 smartphones available to its
] developer community, Lee Epting, Nokia's VP of Developer
] Relations, tells us. Nokia acknowledges a demand for more
] developer options as Nokia's Symbian-based Series 60
] platform reaches mass market volumes.

This qualifies as "rad".

The Register | Nokia to release Perl for smartphones

w1ld wrote:
] ] I just want two simple things (in this case): Audio, and
] ] my LCD powered off after a timeout.
]
] Keep reading...this is good stuff! :)

The basic realities are as follows:

1. Open Source Software works. It produces more effective software over time because it is more efficient and allows for derivative innovation.

2. Free Software does not work. It does not work because programmers do not get paid. Programmers that are not getting paid do not have time to sweat the details. Sometimes things like Perl get produced by hackers, but these are the exceptions. The rule is that this does not work as a social model.

3. "Free Software" has been a mixed bag. In some cases people have been paid to produce stuff, and it has been good. This includes the Linux Kernel and Apache. These things are given away for free, and this is extremely useful in the systems space because you can grab things and innovate on them without having to shell out cash up front. People can build complex systems in their garage without having to have big budgets. On the other hand, people usually confuse "free software" with free software. Stuff that is consumer oriented doesn't get funded because consumers aren't paying for it.

4. Building an effective social system that has most of the benefits of OSS without the hindrances of unpaid programmers would really, really benefit humanity.

Ultimately, we need better fund raising for grant based open source software development. Not RESEARCH oriented software development, but OPERATIONAL software development. The grant process must be carefully managed so that it does not hinder innovation. Probably lots of competing systems with competing models. No government. Non-profit corps.

There are things that exist, but they are not professionally managed, or they are too political for their own good. We need something that does fund raising as effectively as the United Way. We need a professional organization that funds software in the public interest.

Would you give $50 a year to make linux better?

Could you get 1 million people to give $50 to make linux better? $50 million would fund about 600 to 700 well paid programmers for a year. You could do a hell of a lot with 600 to 700 well paid programmers. A hell of a lot.

RE: luke hates software - Introductory linux hate

] The company is expected to release on Thursday a new
] version of Services for Unix (SFU), a collection of tools
] that help Windows systems to work with installations
] based on the Unix operating system and its open-source
] derivative, Linux.
]
] Microsoft previously charged $99 per client or server to
] use SFU. But the new version, 3.5, will be free for any
] customer using a current Windows operating system.

I wouldn't say they are "taking on linux." They are just offering something that lets me mount an NFS partition on a windows box. This is needed mostly because NBT is overly complex and the Samba configuration files reflect this. Samba has two modes of configuration:

1. Really complex
2. Web based

NFS is neither complex nor web based. Thats why people prefer it. It would be easy to create a simplified interface to samba that has similar syntax to /etc/exports, but no... and hence this is needed.

Microsoft takes on Linux with free tools | CNET News.com

] Nizza Group, which last week
] announced that it had been issued a key internet naming
] patent, today
] announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the U.S.
] District Court for the
] Central District of California against Network Solutions,
] Inc. and
] Register.Com, Inc. for infringement of that patent.
]
] U.S. Patent No. 6,671,714, issued on December 30, 2003,
] covers the
] issuance of URL's and e-mail addresses to members of
] groups in the format of
] "member.group.tld" and "member@group.tld" such that the
] URL and e-mail address
] differ only in that in the URL the "@" of the e-mail
] address is replaced with
] a "." in the URL.

Thats it! There it is! That is the dumbest patent I've ever heard of! If this doesn't fit the legal definition of "obviousness" nothing does.

Network Solutions and Register.com Sued for Infringement of Domain Name Patent