Start up in Manhattan: the map
Startups cluster from Broadway to rand Central in midtown, down to SoHo.
November 25, 2011
November 23, 2011
Questions like 'What do we do next?' and 'Who needs to make a decision today?' are handled inefficiently now. It's why there are so many meetings in companies
Mr. Girouard said that Google Apps would introduce even more features with Google+ over the next few months. "We're headed to a place where all productivity is inherently social," he said. "Questions like 'What do we do next?' and 'Who needs to make a decision today?' are handled inefficiently now. It's why there are so many meetings in companies." Social networks in business, he said, could be faster, less formal and more efficient.
Social networking "is the next phase of what we're going to do in business," said Mr. Girouard.
-- David Girouard, who runs Google Apps for Business.
November 20, 2011
Beats: Dr Dre's fashion accessory for dofus
Beats have redefined the lowly headphone, as well as how much people are willing to pay for a pair of them. A typical pair of Beats sell for about $300 -- nearly 10 times the price of ear buds that come with iPods. And, despite these lean economic times, they are selling surprisingly fast.
Whether Beats are worth the money is open to debate. Reviews are mixed, but many people love them. The headphones are sleekly Apple-esque, which is no surprise, since they were created by a former designer at Apple. Beats also offer a celebrity vibe and a lot of boom-a-chick-a-boom bass.
So much bass, in fact, that some audio experts say that Beats distort the sound of the music.
"In terms of sound performance, they are among the worst you can buy," says Tyll Hertsens, editor in chief of InnerFidelity.com, a site for audiophiles. "They are absolutely, extraordinarily bad."
Time was, manufacturers marketed high-priced audio equipment by emphasizing technical merits like frequency response, optimum impedance, ambient noise attenuation and so on. The audience was mostly a small cadre of audiophiles tuned to the finer points of sound quality.
But, three years ago, Beats by Dr. Dre set out to change all that by appealing to more primal desires: good looks, celebrity and bone-rattling bass. Annual sales are approaching $500 million, and Beats have transformed headphones into a fashion accessory.
Continue reading "Beats: Dr Dre's fashion accessory for dofus" »
October 9, 2011
2011 is like 1984 ? The iOS case by Mike Daisey, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple's iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.
Apple's rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple's computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.
I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he'd never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, "It's a kind of magic."
Mr. Jobs's magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple's immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to "think different," in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.
It's a high bar, but Mr. Jobs always believed passionately in brutal honesty, and the truth is rarely kind. With his death, the serious work to do the things he has failed to do will fall to all of us: the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones who think they can change the world.
Mike Daisey is an author and performer. His latest monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," is scheduled to open at the Public Theater on Tuesday
June 12, 2011
business card is already close to extinct in places like tech conventions
Gina Trapani, founder of the influential blog Lifehacker, said the business card is already close to extinct in places like tech conventions. "I see people exchange Twitter handles, I see people scan each other's badges," and send one another quick e-mails from their phones, she said. "But I definitely don't see people handing out cards anymore."
An app for the business networking site LinkedIn.com makes it easier to share contacts in person using Bluetooth. Newer sites like Hashable.com, Contxts.com and About.me allow users to create and share virtual business cards.
Continue reading "business card is already close to extinct in places like tech conventions" »
June 1, 2011
Hany Farid, photography forensics
Hany Farid, a renowned expert in forensic photographic image analysis. (Farid was consulted by the Associated Press in debunking the fake Bin Laden death photos, and has also teamed up with Microsoft to develop anti-child-pornography software.) Using compression data and metadata from millions of photos, Farid and his colleagues at Dartmouth have developed a database that matches photos to the digital cameras that took them.
April 18, 2011
Javascript Nodes are to LAMP what LAMP was to HTML
I. 1991-1999: The HTML Age.
The HTML Age was about documents, true to Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of a "big, virtual documentation system in the sky." The web was dominated by static, hand-coded files, which web clients crudely formatted (with defaults that offend even the mildest of typographiles). Static documents were served to static clients.
II. 2000-2009: The LAMP Age.
The LAMP Age was about databases. Rather than documents, the dominant web stacks were LAMP or LAMP-like. Whether CGI, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or Django, the dominant pattern was populating an HTML template with database values. Content was dynamic server-side, but still static client-side.
III. 2010-??: The Javascript Age.
The Javascript age is about event streams. Modern web pages are not pages, they are event-driven applications through which information moves. The core content vessel of the web -- the document object model -- still exists, but not as HTML markup. The DOM is an in-memory, efficiently-encoded data structure generated by Javascript.
LAMP architectures are dead because few web applications want to ship full payloads of markup to the client in response to a small event; they want to update just a fragment of the DOM, using Javascript. AJAX achieved this, but when your server-side LAMP templates are 10% HTML and 90% Javascript, it's clear that you're doing it wrong.
February 2, 2011
Smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically
The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized -- a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
The reporters came to think of Assange as smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous. At lunch one day in The Guardian's cafeteria, Assange recounted with an air of great conviction a story about the archive in Germany that contains the files of the former Communist secret police, the Stasi. This office, Assange asserted, was thoroughly infiltrated by former Stasi agents who were quietly destroying the documents they were entrusted with protecting. The Der Spiegel reporter in the group, John Goetz, who has reported extensively on the Stasi, listened in amazement. That's utter nonsense, he said. Some former Stasi personnel were hired as security guards in the office, but the records were well protected.
Continue reading "Smart and well educated, extremely adept technologically" »
November 30, 2010
Evil-site-scraper-update-and-reader-notice
Dan Duncan advocated the "don't get mad, get even" strategy for Yves' Naked Capitalism:
While you sort it out, always include several internal internal links to other posts. As long as you have internal links to your other work, then at least the scraped content will get you deep links to your back pages.
Other technological considerations: Instead of a simple HTAccess denial--ie simply denying access from the offending IP address-- do an HTAccess "re-write". By doing this, you don't block access...rather, you send the asshole "false" content of your choice. It could be a HUGE file of jibberish like "hy^&GBHBDFNLG#$&H%" ...or even better send them "The Best of DownSouth"! ["Please Yves of Naked Cap, we won't ever scrape your site again. Please, just-make-it-stop! We're begging you!"] [Of course, you are more than welcome to send them my commentary as well.]
Or, you could send the scraper into an infinite loop with something like this in HTAccess:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^123.123.123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/feed
Replace the IP address with that of the scraper and replace the feed URL with the feed from the scraper's site. That would actually be amusing. If you do this, please let us know what happens.
Here are some other good blacklist options from a helpful site:
perishablepress.com/press/2009/02/03/eight-ways-to-blacklist-with-apaches-mod_rewrite/
Also, beyond the Cease and Desist, you need to file DMCA Reports with the Search Engines.
www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/copyright-03.asp
And finally, since they are scraping to game Google go to Google:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html
June 3, 2010
NYT now recommending python scripts ?
Droopy: A Tiny Web Server That Makes Receiving Files a Snap
By SIMON MACKIE of GigaOm
Droopy is a mini web server that's designed to make it easy for you to receive files on your computer -- and is especially useful for those times when a less-than-tech-savvy client wants to send you a large file. Instead of them trying to send the file over IM or FTP, or using a service like Dropbox, just give them your Droopy address and they can upload the file using their browser; it will be saved directly onto your machine.
Droopy runs on Unix (Linux and Mac) and Windows machines. It's a Python script, but don't let that worry you. Although you will need to have Python installed and will have to use the command line,
May 31, 2010
Public option: healthcare for imprisoned criminals costs $40 per day in illness or health
California spends more than $40 a day per inmate for health care, including expenses for guards who accompany them on visits to outside doctors. NuPhysicia says that this cost is more than four times the rate in Texas and Georgia, and almost triple that of New Jersey, where telemedicine is used for mental health care and some medical specialties.
"Telemedicine makes total sense in prisons," says Christopher Kosseff, a senior vice president and head of correctional health care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "It's a wonderful way of providing ready access to specialty health care while maintaining public safety."
Georgia state prisons save an average of $500 in transportation costs and officers' pay each time a prisoner can be treated by telemedicine, says Dr. Edward Bailey, medical director of Georgia correctional health care.
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May 4, 2010
Joel on Software
March 28, 2010
data mining vs privacy
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person's identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
"Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete," said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission's privacy division. "You can find out who an individual is without it."
Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.
On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest -- bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be "de-anonymized" by statistically analyzing an individual's distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.
pair of researchers that cracked Netflix's anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.
By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.
March 15, 2010
New FCC Puts Performance Before Prudishness
The blueprint reflects the government's view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.
In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they're paying for data speeds as advertised.
"Once again, the F.C.C. is putting service providers on the spot," said Julien Blin, a telecommunications consultant at JBB Research.
Continue reading "New FCC Puts Performance Before Prudishness" »
November 26, 2009
Coat pockets vs shirt pockets as benchmarks
CAMERAS TACKLE LOW LIGHT From the beginning of digital-camera time, the rule was: if you want to take no-flash photos in low light, you'd better buy yourself one of those big, black, heavy S.L.R. cameras. Too often, the pocket cameras that make up 90 percent of camera sales produce blurry or grainy shots in low light.
This year, the camera companies finally abandoned their decade-long obsession with megapixels. Instead, several of them began working on things that really count -- like bigger sensors for better pictures.
Panasonic and Olympus teamed up to create the Micro Four Thirds format: coat-pocketable cameras that take near-S.L.R.-quality photos. Fujifilm and Sony released new shirt-pocket models whose redesigned sensors do exceptionally well in low light. And Canon's PowerShot S90 combines an unusually large sensor (for a little camera) and a remarkable lens to produce amazing low-light shots.
Still, even these cameras may someday seem laughably crude; already, high-end cameras like the Canon EOS 5D MKII actually "see" better in low light than you do. Trickle-down theory, do your thing.
Continue reading "Coat pockets vs shirt pockets as benchmarks" »
October 16, 2009
Dell Latitude Z has usefull features
The Dell Latitude Z's real magic lies elsewhere.
For example, most laptops require brute force and crunching noises before making their way into docking stations. But not the Latitude Z.
It glides onto a shiny, thin platform that fuels the laptop via an inductive charging mechanism much like you would find with a fancy toothbrush that recharges on a stand. The platform then uses wireless communications to link with a small, rectangular docking station that handles a connection to the office network and monitor.
So, the executive looking to impress can buy a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard and then plop the Latitude Z onto the platform, revealing a one-cord (power) wonder. `
But the most impressive feature on the Latitude Z may be the ability to check e-mail, calendar and contact information and to browse the Web via an instant-on software package.
The software fires up the moment you open the laptop and connects right to a wireless network without Windows.
(Under the hood, it's Linux running on top of an ARM chip on a mini-motherboard that provides this quick access feature. You're basically talking about most of the components needed to run an iPhone being hitched to a large battery. So, the computer can run in instant-on mode for days.)
October 15, 2009
Consumers buy more PCs than businesses
Consumers now buy more PCs than businesses do, and their wants and desires for better-looking devices have invaded the cubicle. The current breed of consumer has shown an ability to turn something like the Apple iPhone into an overnight sensation, then demand that companies embrace it. Google, meanwhile, uses its influential Web search and YouTube properties to introduce people to its e-mail, document and Web browser software, and Facebook now provides inspiration to business software makers.
For Google, winning over consumers is crucial to its strategy of infiltrating corporations and deflating Microsoft's core businesses. "We are the next generation," says Dave Girouard, the president of Google's business products division. "The big difference in technology here is the pace of innovation."
July 3, 2009
html playground
htmlplayground is an interactive demonstration of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the basic technology of web pages.
May 3, 2009
Economy of social media
Seesmic (a start-up led by Loïc Le Meur) is hardly alone. TweetDeck, a budding business of the London engineer Iain Dodsworth, has more than a million users and also blends together Facebook and Twitter feeds. The software sits on the desktop, endlessly churning out both banal and urgent dispatches from everyday life.
SocialScope, a program from Amit Kumar, a former Bear Stearns investment banking analyst, is tailored for BlackBerry phones and lets users check multiple social networks. Though it is only in beta mode, it is already a more full-featured window into the social network than Facebook's own software for the BlackBerry.
November 16, 2008
Google, know thyself
Google.com and www.google.com do not share certificates.
July 7, 2007
Digital Money Forum
Digital Money Forum keeps on top of electronic payments.
Example: ATM anniversary.
September 22, 2006
dabble
dabble is a uTube for databases.
Example Colbert.
more examples, more
July 2, 2006
Andy Kessler
Andy Kessler telcom investing.
Skype (SkypeOut), Vonage E.g.s, Philly WiFi battles Verizon
and Silicon Valley history.
Also in the NYT.
June 3, 2006
May 31, 2006
May 15, 2006
NumSum spreadsheets on the web
Spreadsheets put on the web by NumSum.
Like Flickr for accountants.
March 26, 2006
Sirius and XM at satellite guys
Satelite Radio: Sirius and XM discussion at satelliteguys.us.
March 13, 2006
droxy on Digital radio
Digital radio and Sirius at droxy.
January 23, 2006
findory turns two
December 22, 2005
Kimberly 'KC' Claffy
Kimberly 'KC' Claffy measures internet traffic.
December 21, 2005
Evan Williams / EvHead Odeo
Evan Williams, blogging and podcast (Odeo) pioneer.
December 8, 2005
RSS finds new
Rely on RSS, not new tags to find new content: undeniably geeky.
December 2, 2005
mathforge
mathforge mathematical computing.
Examples: .
U.S. hostility towards science -- Topic: General Science
By: aklemm (Fri, 28 Oct 05 at 09:23:35 PST)
Causality where none exists -- Topic: Economics
By: aklemm (Mon, 24 Oct 05 at 16:13:26 PST)
Takes up the FBR meme.
October 26, 2005
Dave Cross, data munger
Dave Cross, London based perl guy, has long been in my pingoshere.
Picks up on techs trends, not ASAP, but as they start crossing the
chasm. And summarizes them.
Also a fierce advocate for good customer service, with
emphasis on forthcoming non-deceitfulness over pampering.
And lefty local pantser.
Update 2006 Mar 01: Now on OnLamp.
October 10, 2005
infoproc / Stephen (Steve) Hsu
Infoproc (Steve) is a physicist interested in economic inference.
Example: exporting risk, Redmond visit.
October 8, 2005
New Kind of Music
An Experiment in A New Kind of Music: WolframTones.
Program and diagram your own ringtones, and more, systematically.
September 29, 2005
Blame Dick, but not for Indentity
ex-Hip, ex Active Perl guy Dick Hartd now chases marrying privacy
and convenience in a single sign on.
And he appreciates fine cars, travel, and wine.
An excellent presentation at O'Reilly's Open Source 2005.
September 26, 2005
Tech Dirt
techdirt is the thinking man's Slashdot. Better editing, thoughtful
exposition, all in the lead paragraph.
Previously: Alterslash is literally a better Slashdot.
September 15, 2005
HeyMath
The HeyMath platform includes an online repository of questions,
indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising
homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by
animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it
provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath, which has been
adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online
tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on
homework.
August 6, 2005
Dan Gillmor
Formerly one of the MSM popular press's better technology writers,
bayosphere's Dan Gillmor didn't stay solo for long.
August 2, 2005
43folders
43folders for power users and alpha geeks.
Today's tactical equivalent to Seven habits of highly effective people.
July 13, 2005
HTML Ampersand Character Codes ascii
July 10, 2005
Array manipulation: Perl Data Language (PDL) and piddles
To COMPACTLY store and SPEEDILY manipulate the large
N-dimensional data sets which are the bread and butter
of scientific computing. e.g. $a=$b+$c can add two
2048x2048 images in only a fraction of a second.
Perl Data Language (PDL), PDL::Impatient - PDL for the impatient
A PDL scalar variable (an instance of a particular class of
perl object, i.e. blessed thingie) is a piddle.
Mozbot, France's prettier Google
Search for stylized facts or for Coruscation at Mozbot, France's prettier Google.
July 2, 2005
V&V: Verification, Validation
Verification: testing against specifications.
Validation: testing against operating goals.
June 29, 2005
Mexoryl
Mexoryl SX is one of the few sure and stable UVA sun filters. It
provides long-lasting, effective protection due to the virtually
impervious nature of the molecule to the action of solar energy. In the
key field of sun-protection research, Mexoryl SX has been patented by
L'Oréal, and has been used in the Group's sunscreen formulations in
Europe since 1993. Research activities are underway to develop products
that can be introduced to the US market.
When they prescribe sunscreens to patients, dermatologists should
be aware both of the SPF and UVA protection ... that is the main
issue. Americans are probably the worst who are not protected
from the sun and particularly from UVA radiations.
-- André Rougier, Ph.D., Dermatology Times.
June 26, 2005
Google tutor
June 11, 2005
Tag Soup
Clay Shirky on tagsonomy: tags are cheap reader (not author/editor)
supplied metadata, having (at least) these characteristics:
1. It’s made by someone else
2. Its creation requires very few learned rules
3. It’s produced out of self-interest (Corrolary: it is guilt-free)
4. Its value grows with aggregation
5. It does not break when there is incomplete or degenerate data
And this is what’s special about tagging. Lots of people tag links on
del.icio.us.
June 10, 2005
Radar O'Reilly buzzes software
Radar O'Reilly buzzes social and open source software, with a
smattering of user empathy.
Another group blog.
June 9, 2005
Charlene Li / Forrester
May 28, 2005
Verity Stob
Humor columnist Verity Stob, of the former EXE magazine, has brought
her witty, merciless view of software development to Dr. Dobb's Online.
May 22, 2005
dan bricklin
Dan Bricklin: a graybeard of personal computing annotates
conferences and ponders Open Source.
May 20, 2005
Ask Bjoern Hansen
Ask Bjoern Hansen and his notes.
Perl coverage and recent detailed reviews of Mac OS Tiger qualifies
him for my alpha geek blogroll.
May 9, 2005
May 7, 2005
google personal seach history
Google Blog-o-scoped reviews Google's new search history retention
and recall.
May 6, 2005
Ben Hammersley
Ben Hammersley, web-centric technology coverage, presentented with
excellent minimalist page layout.
May 4, 2005
Jon Udell
Jon Udell offers pragmatic computer technology reviews with
can-do examples. A favourite writer since Byte magazine.
At O'Reilly, InforWorld index.
Example recorded actual product demos like this Oxygen XML
editor kill vapourware angst of Dan Bricklin's slideshows.
October 15, 2004
cat slashdot | grep alterslash
alterslash is the thinking man's Slashdot dump.