Wednesday, 7 August 2002

Addiction to cash Wired.  The government says that the failure of Digital TV to deploy will result in an $18 b budgetary shortfall.  They cite a slow roll-out as the cause.  This begs the question:  why should all of this bandwidth be wasted on DTV at all?  Only a small segment of the US, uses broadcast signals at all.  Additionally, it's likely that the TV industry will claim poverty when it comes time to pay for the licenses.  So, let's cut our loses on this and make this open bandwidth. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Everyone was addicted to the gravy train of the booking income before it is received. Unfortunatly for a large number of governments around the world, the telco's and the broadcasters are sitting on dying business models. The ability of the government to be able to continue to extort this sort of money out of the public is dead. 6:43:13 PM

Logically speaking A Question. Binary is to boolean as Trinary is to ??? anyone? [weblog.masukomi.org] Trilithium. Seriously, my understanding is that binary logic is to boolean algebra, as trinary logic is to ternary algebra. Not that there was a George Tern or anything. 6:02:24 PM

The future is warping "Buy, Lie and Sell High". How investment banks sold the American economy down the river. [Salon.com] Very interesting read. Take home paragraphs: I think [the Internet bubble] was something that the financial markets or institutions liked. In my book, I quoted one industry insider as saying that the problem wasn't the bubble -- it was its aftermath. So there will be tremendous incentives to try to do the same thing again. No matter how much people are now wringing their hands and saying, "Oh, we have a hangover. We shouldn't have done that." The reality is that there are tremendous incentives to try to repeat it because it was so successful for them. The second thing is that it has created a huge crisis of confidence in the capital markets. That's the reason that the president and the Fed can't get this thing under control and why these bills that are being reconciled in Washington are not stopping the slide of the market. It's taken people a while to understand that the money they lost in the markets is not coming back. That many of those companies are gone for good -- and so is their money. They're only really beginning to understand that now, as you see people [who were retired] going back to work, et cetera. And I think [ordinary investors] now feel like the markets are a deck that's stacked against them. I suspect the financial markets are now ruined. No one in their right mind is going to trust stock markets with their retirement funds. Which means companies are going to have to find other ways of finding needed capital. Interesting. 5:52:45 PM

Odd DRAM More Memory on the Way. A new type of memory will be able to process up to 256 bits of information instead of the standard 32 bits. By Andy Patrizio. [Wired News] A DRAM chip with 4 built in 256bit risc CPUs. Now that could be seriously mind altering for numerical operations over large data sets. 5:32:59 PM

Odyssey 5 MIA Odyssey 5. Dave Hyatt likes Odyssey 5, and, if you wondered, I agree. Neat show. [markpasc.blog] Anyone know if this is coming to Aus? I tried to have a geek on the web for it, but everything seems to go to some website that is sniffing IPs and stopping me from looking. How stupid is that? I mean, these guys want to promote the show, such that other countries might buy the rights to screen it, right? FFS. 5:06:09 PM

Sorting out my Psyche list.sort() now faster and more stable. Jarno summarises Python’s new list.sort(). « In case you missed it, Tim Peters of core Python team has been re-implementing the sort() method for lists. The whole story is quite lengthy and details of the new algorithm are rather hairy, but here is the outline, which is a crude simplification of the issues, refer to the links if you ... [Zope Newbies] I think it is quite scary that I find discussions of sort algorithms stimulating. I'm sick, I tell ya. 4:59:05 PM

EBay Adoption Arc eBay Gains. WSJ's article provides a different angle to eBay's success: "For financially strapped Americans, eBay is a new way to raise emergency funds during a downturn that is costing many people their jobs and savaging stock portfolios. [E M E R G I C . o r g] The big thing here will be whether EBay withers after the economy turns around, or if it stays as part of the economy. Given the adoption arc of past market enabling technology revolutions, I doubt we will see a reduction in EBay usage. 4:39:54 PM

Evil A friend who shall remain nameless pointed me at a ultra light lappy worth drooling over. I am now considering ignoring said friend due to time lost oggling said lappy ... ;) 4:35:22 PM

RTFM Can't figure out how to get Eclipse and CVS working together? Read the fine manual. D'uh. 4:19:56 PM

Pet peeve of the Day Project managers who stick a number of days next to "Implementation" before "Analysis" has begun... 3:22:16 PM

CMS Mega Systems What are the goals of a CMS?. I've just published the latest article in my regular KM Column series: What are the goals of a CMS? [Column Two] [Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog] I thought with bowing out of working for the newspapers-who-want-to-be-web-sites I had seen the end of CMS systems. It would appear, however, that everyone around me is instantly interested in implementing CMS systems. Usually they start out as small hacks to allow someone a soapbox on the internet, then slowly morph into huge kludges... I wish they would architect slightly more extensible systems to start with. 2:20:50 PM

Moofies Last night, I went with the better half to see About a Boy. I must say, watching this after Dirty Deeds, Toni Collette is a master actress. She so rocks. 1:59:00 PM

I had to You are 82% geek OK. There is such a thing as too much geekness. I suspect you're spending far too much time with the boys or girls of the Internet. The closer your score is to 100%, the closer you are to going right out the other side and being a nerd. Geeks rule. Where geeks are socially-inept, nerds are socially incompetent. Not even geeks can take nerds. So let's be careful, huh? Watch a little TV, maybe listen to some popular radio, read a little Stephen King, anything to ensure you can communicate with the 99.44% of the population that isn't all that concerned with the minutia of whatever it is you happen to be geeky about. It's OK to be a geek, but go much further and you'll be a genuine bore. Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com 11:07:36 AM

Weird Spam Whacked out Spam. This is the Strangest piece of spam I have ever seen. It's so weird I can't describe it. It sounds very much like they're selling marajuana, except they arent, but, it... you just ahve to go read it for yourself... it's is realllly strange. [weblog.masukomi.org] That is truly whacked. Bet they were smoking their product ... 10:16:48 AM

BlogStreet Started playing with BlogStreet. Ergh. Somehow, my blog is already registered, but it's details aren't right. So, in continuing the theme, I registered Blogging Roller. What are friends for? ;) 9:56:45 AM

Security Required New Age Piracy. Is this new age piracy? Hijacked on PayPal. [via Mac Net Journal] [rebelutionary] Ouch. There has to be a better way. I mean, something as simple as x509 client certificates, for example. 9:36:58 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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