64.44.140.110 ->
218.7.13.215 ->
202.102.245.121 ->
61.145.119.11 ->
59.108.79.152 ->
213.60.194.35 -> cm194035.red.mundo-r.com
85.131.212.26 ->
202.163.75.29 ->
216.129.98.144 -> www2.pramati.com
Doing these posts is really sort of surreal for me. Its like if you could check your blood for all the germs that tried to make you sick, but didn’t quite make it.
I have been obsessed with watching Arrested Development on
Hulu. It’s totally awesome. Like really totally freaking awesome. The site is well designed, it has a ton of free content, and is super easy to use.
Now why I hate it. Either my connection at home is total garbage, or they purposefully limit bandwidth because I haven’t been able to watch a single thing on Hulu without the video sputtering to a halt at least 3 times during the course of a 24 minute episode. Now you may be thinking, thats silly, why would they do that Nick? and how the heck can you tell?
Well I can tell because the commercials NEVER sputter and NEVER have to buffer, like even if the video I’m watching is sputtering like crazy and i get to a commercial, the commercial loads fine. I suppose that’s the point though eh? The commercials are the most important part to Hulu, they make the CASH. The content is just the means to get people to the site.
Anyway, back to more Arrested Development.
Saw this on
slashdot this morning, looks like
Best Buy is selling some retail version of Hardy Heron. I was really curious as to how they were getting away with it so I did some looking around.
On Best Buy’s website they claim the software is distributed by a company called
ValuSoft, which is actually a division of
THQ. Whats particularly curious to me is that neither of these companies is affiliated with Canonical Ltd. the company that owns Ubuntu, or at least not that I can tell.
So I guess that means that ValuSoft must have licensed the Ubuntu name and the software for retail sales? Which doesn’t really make business sense to me. If I were Canonical I would have sold the stuff direct to Best Buy instead of licensing it out, but then again perhaps Canonical doesn’t have the capacity to distribute mass volumes of their software to the ol’ brick ‘n mortars. Nor the capacity to offer the support that probably comes with the $20 price tag of this box.
Anyone seen one of these boxes around in a Best Buy?
And not that surprising, considering
Getty Images is likely getting
their well-photographed asses handed to them undercut by crowdsource models like
iStockPhoto. Since Getty will be “hand-selecting”
Flickr photographers to represent, one would hope the quality of the stuff will rise above the usual mediocrity of Flickr’s user base and actually make
some great photographers at least some money.
Or Art Directors will continue to swipe CC images for free.
Yeah.
-
UPDATE:
It’s taken about five years, but FINALLY I am back in touch with all the people who I missed from my past. Elementary school friends, even! I used to sneak off campus for lunch in 8th grade and smoke cigarettes at BC’s house. She just found me on myspace last week. Yay social networking!
This is insane.
Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
While I recognize Viacom has a right to protect its copyright, this is absolutely insane and a total violation of every youtube users privacy. I watched a clip from a South Park episode on youtube once, does that mean that I’m going to get a DMCA notice? or sued? When will they learn???
Ah,
URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been
widely reported and almost
uniformly lamented, the
ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.
Shouldn’t we celebrate this? Shouldn’t we feel emancipated from the shackles of URL arcana, free to define a website address that really describes who we are, instead of some third-level compromise?
Well, yes. And no. As constricting as the old system was, it gave a familiar structure to website addresses, so much in fact that it had nearly reached social awareness saturation. URLs were expected to end in .com, so much in fact that if you simply type in “nike” into any modern browser it will take you to www.nike.com.
The new rules obliterate this familiarity, and add a second level of complexity to an already ridiculously technical way of reaching a site. Instead of just having to remember djdougpound, for example, since the .com is inferred, you’ll now have to remember dougpound.dj, or somesuch nonsense.
All of this is really moot, which brings me to the title of this post. The URL was already on its way to obsolescence. The rise of all-powerful Search has made remembering any web address a non-issue, and as the technologies become more intelligent, no one is going to care if your website is named awesome.com or awesome.brah. They’re just going to find it in Google anyway.
That said, I’m still going to go out and register ICANN.hascheeseburger.
While I didn’t agree or disagree with the author’s point that massive amounts of data will fossilize the scientific method as we know it, I did start thinking about the future of data and how it will change everything.
Most of the supporting articles talked about existing large databases that are helping people understand immensely complex systems and information. Stuff like a satellite that takes a picture of the entire night sky every three days, unimaginable data from the Large Hadron Collider, years of airline ticket prices, and even the projected agricultural supplies for countries. Some of this stuff has been around since the turn of the century with the others right around the corner. What’s cool about all of this is that we’ve been able to harness huge amounts of data back around same time I was deleting things because I ‘ran out’ of disk space. Back then you had to be able to afford storage to stop worrying about it. Now anyone can get access to more storage than they’ll ever need at almost no cost.
So in comes the Petabyte age. Unlimited data. Not only can we stop worrying about deleting anything ever again, we can now store everything. Literally. Collective human knowledge is growing within Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet daily. We can assume that everything man-made will eventually be cataloged and remembered somewhere. People are blogging and micro-blogging by the minute. They’re shooting videos and taking photos and putting all of this onto digital storage. This is happening now.
Babies being born this very second will have their entire lives digitally recorded once they’ve left the womb thanks to their eager parents. Once they’re old enough to master a language and access a computer, they’ll take over that roll themselves by Facebooking their preschool classmates and emailing around cellphone photos of their boogers and crayon art. None of that sounds too outlandish until you wonder what celebrities or politicians do in the future when their entire lives can be perused by complete strangers. Instantly. Privacy being irrelevant.
That’s all near future stuff though, what’s after that? We could archive every tree on the planet. Then each one of their leaves. Do all the animals while we’re at it. Tracking individual atoms starts to sound less like wizardry when you’re thinking on the infinite storage level. This being the level where things start to get really interesting.
Star Trek brought us science fiction like transporters that memorized our atoms and scattered and resorted them instantly. So in 20 years, or even 10, when every baby’s DNA is coded and their atomic makeup is on file somewhere, we can finally take a crack at thinking about teleportation. THAT’S the future, all of this data and our ability to discover crazy things from it. We’ll be solving problems we never even knew about. Then again, we’ll probably also generate a whole slew of new ones we can’t solve.
Like what happens if all that information starts getting permanently erased…
on July 16, 2008 at 11:29 AM
