Ha, there’s the first sale. I’d been thinking for a while that the real importance of Warren Buffett’s investment in Level3 was that they’d have a war chest for buying other telecoms. Genuity just announced that Level3 was buying its assets. This isn’t any kind of a surprise, but keep betting on Level3 to come out of the telecom crunch in good shape.
Albeit I’m not much of an action figure guy, these Stikfas things are pretty darned cool. They’re basically stripped down articulated action figures, that come unassembled. You snap ‘em together and if such is your wont, you customize ‘em (original). My fearless prediction: these are going to sell like hotcakes, particularly because they’ll tap into that need for customization I’ve talked about before. Reskinning your action figures? Sure, that’s cool.
This disaster is why I wouldn’t ever work at a hospital. I get sufficiently stressed worrying about my company losing money. Losing lives — no. I respect hospital sysadmins immensely. It’s not a very technical article, but still interesting. The point about the importance of the network in disaster recovery planning is essential. slashdot claims the problem was due to a spanning tree fault, although this more technical article (original) seems to indicate a congestion problem. Hard to say.
The author of the infamous “ The Eye of Argon” has been found. Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smoldering soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones. ...
Nortec Collective looks just amazingly cool. Traditional Mexican music, some of which is itself an appropriation of German polka styling, filtered through electronica sensibilities? With wrestling? Check ‘em out on your favorite music-swapping network today, cause they love that. There’s also a record label. Neat.
It really pleases me to see the WWE TV writers working on the WWE’s press releases. That’s just a hugely impressive document. It starts out pretty sane, discussing some WWF strongarm tactics, but around about the third paragraph it takes a sharp left into a very odd place. “The demand was contained in a letter sent by a Mr. Michael Rogers, an English Barrister who has resided in Switzerland for 30 years and who holds no Swiss license to practice law. Rogers is held out to be the Fund’s ‘Legal Advisor.’” ...
The International Children’s Digital Library is a pretty cheering concept. I bet it gets more traffic from adults than children, though. Um, by which I mean adults who want to read the books themselves. Current computer screens are not the best technology for reading books to kids.
Jeremy Bowers writes on the hidden dangers (original) of Bayesian spam filters. Core of the argument: spammers can use any possible filter mechanism to fine tune their spam, and since the Bayesian filter is the best we have, once it fails we’re doomed. However, if you’re trying to sell me something, you have to either a) market it in the body of the message, or b) give me a URL to look at. Here’s the simple algorithm for filtering spam with URLs in it: if the sender is in my address book, let it through. Otherwise, mark it as possible spam. Jeremy neglects to consider the possibility of personalized filters which by their nature can’t be duplicated by spammers, since they rely on information that only I have. ...
Bring me the brains of Baader-Meinhof (original). They’ve gotta just be misplaced; what would someone do with them? But man, it prompts weird imaginings.
This (original) is much closer to what I want than Microsoft’s Tablet PC. Not quite there, cause I still want the keyboard, but pretty close. There’s nothing really aweinspiring about the technology; it’s just X Windows for Microsoft. Still pretty sexy. There’s actually no reason Apple couldn’t do something like this for the Mac, although they’d need to provide remote display capabilities in Aqua. Still, why not? PDF might be a little heavyweight for transmission over WiFi, I suppose. ...