...more recent posts
I basically never want to see anyone go to jail, even people I intensely dislike, but it's hard to work up much sympathy over this one: spam king Alan Ralsky has been busted. The rumors, as one would expect in such a situation, are that the feds have him so badly he is going to rat out the entire global spam network. We'll see, but it's a curiously pleasant thing to think about. And it's not too hard to believe that spammers would immediately turn into rats when faced with even a small amount of jail time.
I'll bet the real numbers (which we will never know) are astounding. I wouldn't be surprised if the reality was something like: the top 20 spammers in the world account for 10 percent of the traffic on the internet. Yes, I just totally made those numbers up. But I'll bet it's something like that. Others will step in to fill any shoes that are sent to prison, for sure, but the sheer outrageousness of scope that the top guys are operating with will not come back if they sweep up all the big guys.
I'll wait for the spam huntress' take on it, but I'm cautiously hopeful.
From the geeks on the CentOS list, the butterfly effect: a mesmerizing java applet of a Lorenz Attractor.
The demonstration shows a graphical representation of the time variation of three variables X(t),Y(t) and Z(t), coupled by non-linear evolution equations.... This tiny difference in the initial conditions becomes amplified by the evolution, until the two trajectories evolve quite separately. The amplification is exponential, the difference grows very rapidly and after a surprisingly short time the two solutions behave quite differently. This is an illustration of the butterfly effect - the idea in meteorology that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.
Finally. How many years have I been talking about cell phone cameras replacing traditional point and shoot models? But the industry moves so slowly! It's been so frustrating. Like monitoring the pitch drop experiment.
Anyway, it looks like Nokia has finally done it. The N93 is packing a 3.2 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, mechanical shutter, auto-focus Vario-Tessar lens camera. It's not going to be as good as your brand new digitcam, but it's going to be good enough I think.
The transformer style swivel phone allows for configuration in a mini video camera mode, and can take decent vga quality video at 30 fps. And while Nokia has had photo uploading capabilities for a while (tied into their lifeblog system,) these new offerings come with flickr support baked in. Very cool.
Plus, this thing has "802.11b/g connectivity, a TV output capability, an FM radio, and EDGE data support in addition to the triband GSM and UMTS capabilities...." Nice. (Will an American carrier really ship it with 802.11 support? Color me still slightly skeptical.)
On the down side, it is pretty big. More photos are here. I don't mind it, but some people will be turned off by the somewhat clunky design. For them Nokia has the more traditional candy bar style N73 which sports the same great camera.
Of course it's not actually out yet. :-( Looks like some time in July. Not sure I can wait that long as my need for a new phone is rather desperate. If the treo 700p drops in May I will probably jump. But at least my *next* phone after that really is going to replace the digital camera that I don't have yet either (but that's another story.)
Good job Nokia.
Hey Mark, if you don't want to post NAB notes to your page, or that super old red.com camera thread, feel free to post them as comments here. I'd love to hear about anything interesting you see, or just reports on the general atmosphere. You know, you could do it in all your spare time. :-)
Songbird is an open source cross platform music player built on the Mozilla engine. They've got a blog. Still very early, so who knows if this will pan out. But if it does, and it's any good, this is the key piece I need for the second phase of my business plan. Of course so far I am not even up to phase one yet. Still, I'm excited about songbird and will be watching closely.
Dave Hyatt (one of the lead Apple Safari guys) has an interesting blog about how they are thinking ahead to how the web will handle future high DPI screen resolutions. This is something people who make websites - and especially websites where graphic elements are important - should also be starting to think about. Those 500 pixel wide images look fine on < 100 DPI displays, but are going to be way too small on a 600 DPI screen. Ordinary bloggers probably don't have to get worried or anything, but the tool makers need to start planning.
If you are curious to dig in yourself, start with Hyatt's second post which can act as an intro. Then his original, much longer post which outlines how Apple is starting to think about the options. And then Ars Technica's always enlightening John Siracusa steps back and looks at what this issue means on a larger OS wide scale.
Seagate leaks 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 details. Zoinks!
Thoughts on Nokia's plans to put webservers on their cellphones.
OMG:
More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.This applies to new Intel based Macs of course. I knew this was possible, but for a variety of long held reasons I didn't think it would happen officially (and I figured they'd thwart the unofficial mods enough that it wouldn't be attractive to the normal person.) But once again I was wrong. With a few misgivings I am very happy to see this move.
As elegant as it gets
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.
Run XP natively
Once you've completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That's the "alt" key for you longtime Windows users.) After starting up, your Mac runs Windows completely natively. Simply restart to come back to Mac.
I am finally on the home stretch building my new software. This has taken *way* longer than I expected. But I am fairly pleased with it. All features are now present, although there is a lot of tweaking and bug hunting still to go.
Ran across DabbleDB today. It looks very similar to what I am building. Not sure if that is a bummer or not. At the very least I wish I had gone much faster.