Geek Stuff category archive

The new trend: Giving up Facebook for Lent.

Afterthought:

The most impressive Lenten observance I have ever seen was done regularly by my old co-worker, Jack.

A smoker of three decades, he would regularly give up cigarettes for Lent. It was not an attempt to quit. He started smoking again after Lent.

Anyone who has ever tried to quit will know how impressive that is.

On one level, this begs for snark, but, on a deeper level, it is somehow very sad.

Facebook is launching a system that allows users to report friends who they think may be contemplating suicide.

The feature is being run in conjunction with Samaritans, which said several people had used it during a test phase.

Facebook is, after all, nothing more a than website with a database. Many, including me, have found it to be a useful tool, but it’s still a tool.

Making visible the invisible:

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

March 6, 2011 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Geek Stuff | Bookmark this post

John Naughton has doubts about Apple’s dominance, via Itunes’s, in the on-line media sales world. A nugget:

Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino.

Read the whole thing.

Toys. All toys.

Andy Borowitz reports:

A new combatant entered the so-called tablet war today and it’s already getting a big thumbs-up from gadget aficionados: the Etch-a-Sketch 2.

The E2, as its called, looks very similar to its predecessor, but in the words of the company spokesman who unveiled it at the TED conference in Long Beach, “This is not your father’s Etch-a-Sketch.”

(snip)

“The Etch-a-Sketch 2 is more than just another tablet,” said Tracy Klugian, spokesman for Ohio Art, the manufacturer of the E2. “It is going to totally change the way you think about completely unnecessary devices.”

Details at the link.

Google deploys street-view tricycles.

Google’s Street View service has mostly been limited to places where cars mounted with cameras can drive. But now, Street View increasingly will include images of public and private sites ranging from selected hiking trails of the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve near Los Altos to Sea World Orlando to Kew Gardens in London.

Follow the link for pictures. The trike looks like a cross between a giant Big Wheel and the Seattle Space Needle.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, March 3.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Via Balloon Juice.

Bad news:

In a Super Bowl ad for the Chevrolet Cruze, a young man uses voice commands to check Facebook and grins when his OnStar communication system reads his date’s message: “Best first date ever.”

Good news (emphasis added).

It’s heartwarming to some, downright scary to others, who worry that in-car technology is too distracting. But mostly, it’s a work in progress. General Motors Co. is still testing the OnStar Facebook system, and it may never become a standard feature. No other manufacturers are offering a way to check Facebook with voice commands, either.

The article goes on to describe other research automobile manufacturers are doing to ensure that drivers don’t see us before they hit us.

Stu Bykofsky offers a typology of Facebook friends at Philly dot com. Follow the link for his comments on Facebook’s friend suggestions.

• Me, ME, ME!!: Braggers and self-promoters. I do some promoting myself, when I post a column that I think far-flung FFFs might enjoy. But I’m not running an Amway operation, selling mood rings, gold or vitamin supplements, like some FFFs.
• Bold Liars: “I’m taking Janice to Paris for the weekend,” Jim writes. I know him. He’ll be diving in Dumpsters on Moravian Street for dinner.
• Collectors: Overly competitive, they promiscuously sign up thousands of FFFs. (The greater the number, the higher the PQ – Pathetic Quotient.)
• Self-Impressed: “I’m going to lunch with my favorite judge.” “I just got back from the Super Bowl.” “I went to the ballet.” Not a word about what happened, just “I went, I did.”

Afterthought:

I’m torn. Can’t decide whether I belong in the first category of the last one.

Building a better Watson:

Via the San Jose Mercury-News, which reports

Relax, humans. Watson may have beat the most successful champions of “Jeopardy,” but it doesn’t mean machines are ready to take over the world.

Even Dan Gruhl, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose who worked on Watson — a four-year project that involved about 20 to 25 people throughout IBM’s eight research labs — says so. He points to the 55 sparring sessions that Watson took part in from November to January before the big showdown with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the game show’s most successful champions, this week. Watson — which IBM calls a DeepQA machine made up of custom algorithms, terabytes of storage and “many, many CPUs,” — won 71 percent of those mock games. Was Watson’s progress incremental, GMSV asked Gruhl in a phone interview Wednesday. “Oh, heck yeah,” he said.

Apparently, this is some kind of automated alert device:

The Palo Alto Police Department on Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate a mobile device that flooded the city’s emergency communications center with 566 calls over a five-hour period in January, according to a police official.

“I asked (the FCC) to open an investigation … on the problems this device was creating,” said Charles Cullen, technical services director for the Palo Alto Police Department. “And that’s where they have jurisdiction, because it’s a mobile device.”

The phantom calls started pouring into the city’s emergency communications center the night of Jan. 13 and continued into the early morning hours of Jan. 14. Cullen said it appears the device was in a Mercedes-Benz and is also likely responsible for flooding the California Highway Patrol’s Vallejo dispatch center with 2,225 calls over a roughly 21-hour period between Jan. 25 and 26.

In both cases, it comes out to over 100 calls per hour, indicating a redial after each disconnect.

The BBC reports some sensible comments. No doubt they will be lost in the rush to sell scary books and make scary headlines (emphasis added):

Bruce Schneier claims that emotive rhetoric around the term does not match the reality.

He warned that using sensational phrases such as “cyber armageddon” only inflames the situation.

Mr Schneier, who is chief security officer for BT, is due to address the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week

Speaking ahead of the event, he told BBC News that there was a power struggle going on, involving a “battle of metaphors”.

(snip)

His point of view was backed by Howard Schmidt, cyber security co-ordinator for the White House.

“We really need to define this word because words do matter,” said Mr Schmidt.

“Cyber war is a turbo metaphor that does not address the issues we are looking at like cyber espionage, cyber crime, identity theft, credit card fraud.“

The portion I put in bold illustrates part of the reason for the success of the “cyberwar” hype.

Unscrupulous persons do lots of different nasty things.

Nasty things done with computers have in common one thing: they are done on (gasp!) computers.

Many persons, even those adept at using individual computer applications, such as a web browser or an office suite, have no idea how a computer or a network does what it does. Therefore the hypesters can fool persons into thinking that the many nasty things are actually one nasty thing–“cyyyyyyyyyyybeeeeerwaaaaar”–because they are done on (gasp!) computers.

They can therefore write white papers, sell scary books, get interview gigs on telly vision, and, perhaps most significantly, get lucrative consultancy gigs writing more white papers, promoting more scary books, and appearing in more interviews on the telly vision.

I’m not saying there is no reason to worry. Both individual computer users and system admins should practice safe HEX.

But there’s no reason to predict cybergeddon.

I’m rooting for Watson.

Watson, by the way, runs Linux.

According to David Davidian, an IBM Senior System Architect, “Watson is a massively parallel system based on the IBM POWER7 750 in a standard rack mounted configuration.” It can run AIX, IBM’s house-brand Unix; IBM I; and Linux. To compete on Jeopardy Watson is running Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Watson is made up of ninety IBM POWER 750 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and 4 Terabytes of clustered storage. Davidian sontinued, “This is enclosed in ten racks including the servers, networking, shared disk system, and cluster controllers. These ninety POWER 750 servers have four POWER7 processors, each with eight cores. IBM Watson has a total of 2880 POWER7 cores.”

I haven’t visited the Huffington Post regularly for almost two years. I used to visit it almost daily, but it’s gotten too cluttered and OMG celebrities! a la Gawker and TMZ for me. About the only time I go there is when Bob Cesca has a new piece.

AOL’s purchase of HuffPo is likely the next step on HuffPo’s march to frivolous irrelevance, but, hey! frivolous irrelevance sells these days. It’s easier than thinking.*

With those thoughts, I commend to your attention this prediction for the fate of HuffingtonAOL.

________________

*Me, I try to be relevantly frivolous.

Dick Destiny gets real. A nugget:

DD, through wearing of the senior fellow hat at GlobalSecurity, received a query from a reporter at the biggest newspaper last week. Could I talk about Egypt and the Internet?

No, not really. I indicated I didn’t have interest in the story that Facebook and Twitter had been significant to the Egyptian uprising.

I did see that US-made M1 tanks were laying smoke screens and refraining from shelling and machine-gunning crowds.

Which doesn’t jive with the regular make-stuff-up things passed off by US media.

The internet is a public place.

Words have consequences.*

Mistakenly believing that a middle school classmate had caused the arrest of a friend, a quartet of Florida teenagers exchanged Facebook messages discussing the killing of the suspected “snitch,” according to police.

The students–three 14-year-olds and a 13-year-old–were arrested yesterday at school and charged with aggravated stalking, a felony.

_______________________

*Unless you are Republican or Fox News “personality.”

Good-bye, Mr. Chips:

A hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 400 billion virtual poker chips.

In court Ashley Mitchell admitted penetrating the systems of online gaming firm Zynga to steal the chips.

He laundered the haul via a series of Facebook accounts in a bid to escape being caught.