Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Rupert Murdoch is going to take his ball and go home. In a recent interview, he informed all that he intends to eventually block Google and some other search engines from indexing his News Corp. sites and then start charging for content. Apparently, Murdoch has been taking a nap for the last some odd ten years. More ridiculous still, Murdoch seems to have a problem with fair use itself, making claims towards dismantling it. I think it would be a good psychology study to look at what number of billions of dollars actually makes a person completely lose their grasp on reality—it can’t just be one billion. Cory Doctorow’s analysis of the situation is dead on over at BoingBoing along with the best quote I’ve read in weeks:
“So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet…”
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
I’m going to do something I don’t often do on this blog and that is jump on the blogging band-wagon that is the discussion of the Google Chrome OS announced today. From MacWorld to the Washington Post, Google has clearly made an impact on the world with its announcement that it will be working on a new operating system that will largely be centralized around the web and Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. But one idea, that’s been fairly pervasive in the conversation: that file systems and other “onboard” applications might go away—seems to point to a new paradigm to computing, and it’s spawned a lot of metaphors in the discussion. It’s also wrong.
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Friday, October 24, 2008
I was testing out Inquisitor in Safari (which I highly recommend and which now available for Firefox and IE—you’ll never go back to regular seaches.) and I started out by typing a boring “Hello”. The results were boring: Hello Magazine at the top. Then I followed it with “kitty” (it’s my subconscious, don’t ask) and the updated results were not particularly interesting either, so I got a little intense and typed “inquisition.” It was probably primed in my memory from thinking about Inquisitor, but you gotta admit, “Hello kitty inquisition” is a pretty good search term. The result you ask? The Warhammer 40K, Hello Kitty Sisters of Battle brigade. If you never played big tabletop games as a kid, you may not want to know, but for those of us who were into the miniatures, this is downright hilarious. I would just love to see some ubergeek pwned by the Sisters of Battle. Pink tanks… oo-rah!
Monday, August 18, 2008
I’ve never had this particular problem with Google, but I bet if I keeping using it as much as I do, it won’t be long.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. [^1] A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor[^2] and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.
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