my personal homepage
Fear of Google’s knowledge about our every purchase, every web click, every move in the physical world was trumped by the public’s craving for information about anything, anywhere. It was an uneasy truce with the devil: give them your innermost secrets, and you can find anything your heart desires.
That’s from a great essay comparing Google to Apple.
It’s not 1998. So if you design websites for a living, how about promoting yourself neatly and succinctly, like this or this, not like that. Why do so many web design outfits have such utterly cruddy web presences. If they can’t make it work for themselves, what hope is there for their clients?
I think of a number of ideas about new concepts, products and companies every day. The overwhelming majority of these ideas are terrible. However, occasionally I think of something worth developing further. My first step is to check to see if I got there too late. A couple of quick Google searches and normally I will have proved that there are indeed no new things under the sun.
This morning I thought: “What if, instead of donating your surplus computing capacity (idle processor time, storage or bandwidth) to a project like Seti@home, you could set a price for that capacity and trade it on a global marketplace? You could enter your input prices, which would mainly reflect your power/energy costs, and then the market would allocate computing tasks in an efficient manner.”
I followed it up further and I am far from the first person to have this idea, it seems.
I am not annoyed that I didn’t get there first – in retrospect, it’s an obvious idea. I would, however, have been annoyed if I had put time into this idea before realising that others were working on it. In this way, the internet saves me years of thinking time.
I am constantly amazed by the concept of Open Source software. Not because it’s free (in either sense) as a one-time download, but because it constantly gets better, typically at no extra charge.
My joy at living in a world where people who are better at technology than I am distribute to me the fruits of their superior knowledge and hard labour, continually, at no extra cost, is hard to describe.
I log into WordPress, and somebody just improved their plugin. I pick up an Android phone and it works better than it did yesterday. My browser just got better. My operating system just improved. My search engine gives me more options today.
To me, open source is the answer to that depressing feeling of taking something new and shiny, and having the bliss gradually wear off. Open source software is for future-orientated optimists. Okay, so my Android handset is not yet an iPhone, but one day it will be better.
I must not have being paying attention to The Economist‘s (excellent) business travel blog because only after reading this post did I shake off my complacent but long-held assumption that Gulliver was male.
Update: After now reading this post, I am assuming that there is more than one Gulliver, or that the name is assumed by any Economist correspondent with a business-travel story.
“You are not supposed to buy an illegal site,” he said. “This is out-of-the-box thinking.”
That’s Hans Pandeya of Global Gaming Factory, on the decision to purchase filesharing site The Pirate Bay for £4.3m, via BBC News.
Out of interest, this is the effect of a link from Marginal Revolution on your blog traffic. I’m not entirely sure why Tyler linked to me linking to Wehr in the World, linking to his own comments, but I guess it’s an example of economizing your PR. Trail, monitor, link.
In the inbox this morning:
FEDERAL RESERVE BANK
Important:
You’re getting this letter in connection with new directions issued by U.S. Treasury Department. The directions concern U.S. Federal Wire online payments.
A country-wide phishing attack began on May 6, 2009. It’s taking place hitherto. Therefore a great number of banks and credit unions is affected by this attack and quantity of illegal wire transfers has reached an extremely high level.
U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in common worked out a complex of immediate actions for the highest possible reduction of fraudulent operations. We regret to inform you that definite restrictions will be applied to all Federal Wire transfers from May 12 till May 25.
Here you can get more detailed information regarding the affected banks and U.S. Treasury Department restrictions:
http://[snipped].com/35945/FRB/phishing/Issue~73126/
Federal Reserve Bank System Administration
Do they think that using words like ‘hitherto’ makes them more credible?
…contrary to intuition and prior hypotheses, the use of search engines contributes to a more level playing field, in which new Web sites have a greater chance of being discovered and thus of acquiring links and popularity — as long as they are about specific topics that match the interests of users as expressed through their search queries.
That’s the egalitarian effect of search engines and it’s backed up by some pretty impressive research. Fittingly, I found it through a search engine.
