Category: internet

buy and destroy

internet media

the independent writes about MySpace, Murdoch and YouTube

He paid 0.6 Billion for the site. Then he started altering content secretly. At least thats what the article says. If that is true and should continue, then I am very very curious how long it would take for a competitor to come up with a different site.

Yes, there is the ‘power of default’, and how many kids do really care about this kind of cheating from Murdochs side? Interesting question. It will show much of “Web 2.0” will be left once the big money interests are done with it.

the chain of events;

1. Some service is what people want and becomes huge
2. Somebody arrives in a Learjet and drops billions
variation MySpace:
3. Corpogreed kicks in, and the the very asset that they bought for all that money evaporates
my desired outcome:
4. People show this kind of behaviour the finger. They go somewhere else, and the person
in (2.) bought a really expensive domain name. Like “broadcast.com”

We will see.
The article ends with the mentioning that Murdoch gave Jeremy Philips 1 Billion US$ for future acquisitions. He is 31 and head of News Corp internet strategy or something. Bubble Bubble Bubble.

firefox on the mac

internet

Firefox 1.5: nothing works better than with the 1.0 I had on my Mac. Nothing I would notice.
But things are less stable.

And suddenly pdf files only wanted to open with the ‘default’ Acrobat reader after a Firefox download.
Normal OS X associations were fine, nothing in the Firefox preference pane, nothing in the about:config
I downloaded the Rc Default Apps system extension and it did not have anything set to Adobe Acrapobat. FINALLY installing a program from 2003 called Misfox did the trick. There I found the connecting in question. Changing it, and then launching firefox again did indeed fixed it. Convoluted, too convoluted, if you ask me.

this page helped eventually.

push push push

internet media technology

CES breaks loose in Las Vegas, and a big and involuntarily sigh of relief escapes me:

“Finally some content for the internet”

Video! Great, from Google; Music from the lovely M&M combo via ‘Urage’.

It got kind of boring out here on the net. All those TV episodes
and music files to pay for is what was missing. Now I realize.

And if you have a Windows PC, then you can have not only Microsoft
and anybody in Russia with an IQ above 87 on your machine. No,
also Google can be part of the party on your hard drive now:

With the aptly named GooglePack comes GoogleUpdate which will
provide you update versions of anything that they think might be good
for you.

cringley is an idiot

google history internet

or maybe I am one.
Last November Robert X Cringley writes about a google project.
He claims that Google is planning to put 5,000 opteron CPUs and 2.5 Petabytes in a 20 or 40 foot container.

Back in November the story got attention, and now it bubbles back up again in the context of the “Google PC Walmart CES” buzzword cluster.

I wondered if the “Cringleytainer” would actually be feasible:

Those pieces would barely fit in a 40 foot container. Forget about air flowing around. Maybe it’s all water cooled?

Which leads to the ultimate flaw in Cringley’s concept:
5,000 CPUs @ 90 W and 30,000 disks @ 15 W would use 0.9 Megawatt. Let’s add 0.1 Megawatts for boards and powers supplies. Of course this would assume a couple of technology breakthroughs.
Ignoring the laws of thermo dynamics we have to add the same power to cool the thing: 2 Megawatts.

Googling around I found this power source for the Cringleytainer. Guestimating optistically again it would use a gallon of diesel every minute.

Of course Mr Cringley is not an idiot. Not more or less than anybody else. I am only certain that I am one,
since I had to spend so much time with me.

What strikes me is that such a story can float around without anybody doing the basic math. Or maybe people did and got ignored. It’s much more ‘news worthy’ to toss around crazy ideas involving google.

If I should be bored in mid March then I will try to inject the urban myth of a planned Apple Google merger into the world.

billions.

history internet

Awfully big number. A Thousand Million.

six point five: people on the planet

US dollars:

one: budget for the rebranding from AT&T to at&t. Ok, they change their font twoo.

two point five: budget for the rebranding from “Intel inside” to “leap ahead”

five point seven: what yahoo.com paid for broadcast.com. Never heard of it? That’s about right.
Nothing really came out of it for Yahoo. broacast.com’s last earnings: they lost 2.7 million dollars.
they paid with stock. Overvalued you might think: sure, but yhoo is back to 80% of the levels of those days.

hundret twenty two: what all google stock is worth today.

hundret billion neurons are having trouble making sense out of this.

is it safe?

Apple internet M$

If you buy a brand new windows machine then there are ten steps to keep it safe. Well, as brand new as those tips appear to be, even if you do so, you can get your Windows PC infected simply by visiting a website.
one of the many articles disscussing the matter
If you are so unlucky and use a Windows PC then you could have been infected by clicking on that lick. Of course the link above is legit. But do you trust me? How many links do you click on?

I have written this again and again: I use no firewall, I use no virus protection, I am in the internet 16 hours a day and leave my computer on 24/7. I jump on every wifi that I can find if I need to. I visit all sorts of websites. Really everything. My cookie list reads really disgusting, that’s for sure. Various reasons, not really what you think. Point being that I behave extremely ‘dangerous’ and never had a single problem. No spyware, no virus, nothing. My computer runs what I want. No a single bit more. Always have been.

I am not particularly lucky nor smart. It’s just that I don’t run Windows.

It’s one of these things that make you shake your head if you look at it in clear daylight: You can even buy ‘virus protection software’ for OS X. People are so used to think that Computers need some extra protection that they miss the point that the whole switch will get you out of the mess that grew around Microsoft Windows.

The other day somebody told me that it was funny to watch me becoming such a Mac zealot. I think it’s more a passion for the alternative, that is less fucked up. Apple sucks in many ways: I am writing this, with a Microsoft mouse attached to my PowerBook6,7 since the trackpad goes stale till the next reboot. I have open bugs with their ‘pro’ division, and they didn’t come up with a solution. At all. But getting a new computer and having to go through ten steps to make it somewhat secure? Clearly I have an easier life. Imagine you buy a car and then have to go and get brakes and seat belts and a lock for it from somewhere else.

this is all it takes

internet media

What the current Pirate Bay looks like. More than 800K registered users. One rack that makes the RIAA and MPAA cringe.

del.icio.us and blink

internet

In 1999 a company callled blink did social bookmarks.
It’s founder reflects what went wrong

Web 1.0 vs. 2.0: Same basic concept. 12 Millon VC money vs. 1 guy and a mysql server and tags.

iTunes and vilodex

internet media

update:

simply click on this link.
Works with Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X 10.4.3 and iTunes 6.0.1

Before I thought this was slick:

Again it is so easy:

1. Open iTunes
2. Select “Subcribe to Podcast …” from the “Advanced” menu. ( it really is simple)
3. copy paste:


http://www.vilodex.com/freshvideo.xml

into the window and hit “ok”

Now your computer will make sure that you always have all the latest vilodex videos.
Never have to wait for a download again.

Those videos could be downloaded to an iPod, but they don’t have to.
The files can be found under your home directory:

Music
iTunes
iTunes Music
Podcasts
vilodex

or you copy paste this into a terminal window:

open Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/Podcasts/vilodex/

to get a finder window.

make your own posters

internet marketing media

National Geographic had a nice idea.

HP or Canon or any color printer manufacturer should have done this a long time ago. Before yhey should have given you a DVD with lots and lots of images in super high resolution and a decent and fast way of browsing them. Gets you in the habbit of spreading that ink generously. But no, good ole NG had to come up with this one. And it might never dawn on Canon and Co what they are missing out on.

Beats me why HP has not signed deal with deviantart for instance.