Here’s an interesting idea: Googolplex Theaters creates a virtual reality movie theater so that, effectively, everyone gets their own screen.
Of course, once you simulate a screen in VR, why stop there? You’ve already got 3-D in the display, and between the backlog of 3D movies and a decade or so of computer animation, there are a lot of possibilities.
It’s always something. Apparently WordPress.org has been dabbling in black-hat SEO, hosting thousands of keyword-based articles on their high–page-ranked site and placing hidden links to them on their home page. Way to go, guys. This makes the paranoia over remote images almost look reasonable. What’s next, putting ads in the next default template?
The free/open source software world is based primarily on trust. Based on comments I’ve read over the last couple of days, WordPress has lost a lot of it. They’ve even been (mostly) dropped from Google. A sensible precaution while things are sorted out, but it unfortunately means the first top-level listing on a Google search for “wordpress” is wordpress.com, which looks like a cybersquatter. Not exactly an improvement.
In a support thread Matt answered last week, he referred to it as an “experiment.” He’s on vacation right now, but someone has taken it upon themselves to remove the bogus articles from the site.
My thoughts: Continue reading
Here’s some surprising news: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s excellent comic book Girl Genius is moving from print to the web: Girl Genius Online. They plan to have new pages up three times a week, and release graphic novels once a year.
I’m of mixed feelings here. On one hand, I like being able to hold the comics in my hand, and this was a series I’ve been collecting as individual issues. Hardcovers and TPBs are often harder to find. On the other hand, the series was only nominally quarterly, often managing only three issues a year (or fewer). If they actually manage 3 a week, that’s the equivalent of six 30-page issues over the course of the next year. And it will be easier to introduce new people to the series. I can just point them to the website instead of lending an issue or telling them to hunt through their local comic stores.
(via the Studio Foglio newsletter)
The blog spammers must be getting desperate. The only other explanation I can think of is courtesy (keeping offensive language out of the posts), and I just can’t ascribe that motive to them.
The latest attack on this site consists of randomly-generated alphanumeric strings. Name? ah87fdfbqpo3q9483fhc. Email? ahsdhufs@q98hf4i4whfcia487f.com. URL? augfagfwi7832hr732rh8732fcfiuh.example.com. (I assume they have a wildcard DNS set up for random subdomains.) Content? Try something like “ads78shafi7 uigiutgw87n srgn743fnufc42.” (I’m typing my own gibberish, just in case the plan is to search for particular strings and see which sites have actually posted.)
The “advantage” of this approach is that there is no content to filter. No references to pills, poker or porn, no common phrases, not even empty generic statements like “I really like you’re site” and “Your an idiot” with links tossed in. It’s just a bunch of meaningless letters and numbers and a link. After all, the link is all the spammer needs, to get that coveted PageRank.
Oh, about that link? Easily identifiable. SURBL-style lists eat them for breakfast, and Spam Karma has been snacking on these all morning. *chomp*
A nice example of why spelling and grammar checkers (at least as they stand today) are not enough: In trust we Word. The article has more.
(Appropriately, it seems that WordPerfect’s grammar checker is considerably more effective than Word’s.)
This is a good one. Apprently in setting up their own anti-Groklaw site, SCO has grabbed PDFs of legal documents from Groklaw and Tuxrocks.com.
In a campaign focused on intellectual property rights, where SCO is the accuser…
Groklaw’s PJ has a good take on it: “I’m sure [Tuxrocks'] Frank would want to join me in thanking SCO for this wonderful endorsement of our websites.”
I noticed this SUV as I got on the freeway after work. We apparently kept pace with each other, because it was there on the off-ramp as well. It was then that I noticed something red on the back:
Yes, a plush Flash doll was jammed into the trailer hitch!
The MIT Media Lab has come up with Clocky, an alarm clock that rolls away and hides when you hit the snooze button.
(via CNET Extra)
What is it about two-digit version numbers?
Mac OS went up to 9, and now it’s Mac OS X. Everything since then has been numbered “under the hood.” You can find 10.3 in the fine print, but everywhere else it’s Mac OS X Panther.
Windows alternates between vintages and letters (Me, XP, etc.). Even then, they’re only up to 5.2 internally (Longhorn will technically be Windows NT 6.0).
Red Hat Linux got up to 9, then spun off into Fedora Core, starting over at 1.
Mandrake got as far as 10.1, and Conectiva to 10, and the merged system is moving to yearly vintages.
SuSE is about to hit 9.3, but Novell has been busy absorbing all the Linux companies they bought. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them release Novell Linux 1 instead of SuSE Linux 10.
