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March 22, 2009

Best Read::Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More present than the present

: Image via Wikipedia

Read the whole thing, this is but half of it (but of course the good parts here)

Take the following passage from a series of lectures he gave, in California, in May of 1999 (collected in the book The Vital Illusion), in which he limns our era:

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.
Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.
Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.
Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.
Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex …
Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

If a clearer depiction of realtime exists, I have not come upon it in my inchworm meanderings.
The fact that Baudrillard could so clearly describe the twitterification phenomenon ten years before it became a phenomenon reveals that the phrase “new media,” when used to describe the exchange of digital messages over the Internet, is a coinage of the fabulist. What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them. <Emphasis Mine>
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: More present than the present.

March 22, 2009

What's Playing:Great Romantic

: Cover of Tunde

The youtube video of this song cannot be view in the Philippines damn youtube.
Great Romantic – Tunde
Hey, so you threw your heart right in
And it turned out less than perfect
A losing streak is starting in your mind
You let yourself believe the pain
Is never gonna be worth it
Don’t beat yourself up
Know that you were never wrong for wishful thinking
So you done lost the battle
Should we just cross out your name and let you sink
You got me feeling like the last surviving
Great romantic
But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around
You feel foolish cause love never turns out
Like you planned it
But stop believing and the world starts letting you down
So, you had to let it go
It clearly wasn’t working
A new love leaves you trembling
You hide behind the door
So unsure of what you used to know
So now you think you’re every move ten steps ahead
And you are frozen
Caught inside yourself
You’re drowning as the anger overflows
You got me feeling like the last surviving
Great romantic
But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around
You feel foolish cause love never turns out
Like you planned it
But stop believing and the world starts letting you down
You got me feeling like the last surviving
Great romantic
But stop dreaming and the world stops spinning around
You feel foolish cause love never turns out
Like you planned it
But stop believing and the world starts letting you down
So…
via Tunde – Great Romantic LYRICS.
UPDATE: Forgot to say that I learned about this song at a friend blog post.

March 20, 2009

rePost:35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek:The Peekaboo Paradox – washingtonpost.com

Except for the fact that he is at the top of his niche I think this is repeatable in many other context!

“I mean,” Vicki said, “what’s the hook?”
Now, the Great Zucchini was eating toilet paper.
“I mean, are you that desperate?” she asked.
On the floor in front of us, the kids — 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds — were convulsed in laughter. Literally. They were rolling on the carpeted floor, holding their tummies, mouths agape, little teeth jubilantly bared, squealing with abandon. In the vernacular of stand-up, the Great Zucchini was killing. Among his victims was Trey, who, as promised, had indeed been re-transitioned into his own party.
The show lasted 35 minutes, and when it was over, an initially skeptical Don Cox forked over a check without complaint. The fee was $300. It was the first of four shows the Great Zucchini would do that Saturday, each at the same price. The following day, there were four more. This was a typical weekend.
Do the math, if you can handle the results. This unmarried, 35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.
If you want to understand why the Great Zucchini has this kind of success, you need look no further than the stresses of suburban Washington parenting. The attendant brew of love, guilt and toddler-set social pressures puts an arguably unrealistic value on someone with the skills, and the willingness, to control and delight a roistering roomful of preschoolers for a blessed half-hour.
That’s the easy part. Here’s the hard part: There are dozens of professional children’s entertainers in the Washington area, but only one is as successful and intriguing, and as completely over-the-top preposterous, as the Great Zucchini. And if you want to know why that is — the hook, Vicki, the hook — it’s going to take some time.
via The Peekaboo Paradox – washingtonpost.com.

March 20, 2009

Why I Don't Use Safari::iTWire – Mac hacked in under 10 seconds at PWN2OWN

: Image via Wikipedia

from here:
Mac hacked in under 10 seconds at PWN2OWN E-mail
by by Davey Winder
So just how secure is your Apple computer now that Mac hacker supremo Charlie Miller has broken into a MacBook in less than 10 seconds?

The annual CanSecWest PWN2OWN competition is always guaranteed to grab a few headlines and spark off another OS Wars flame. Last year security researcher Charlie Miller managed to hack a Mac in a rather astonishing two minutes flat.
This year he pulled off the same feat to win the contest, the MacBook he hacked and a US $5000 prize. Well the same feat but a lot quicker: how does Mac hacked in under 10 seconds grab you as a headline?
Although full extent of what the hack entailed remain a little sketchy, with Miller refusing to reveal the vulnerability details at this time, it is known that both the MacBook and the version of
The reason for that lack of detail would appear to wrapped up in the fact that the cash prize also took the form of a payment from the competition sponsor,
Obviously the whole cracked in 10 seconds thing is worrying, but just how worried should you be if you are a Mac or Safari user? Truth be told, I am not convinced that this is as big a deal as it sounds.
Yes, any vulnerability needs investigating. But the under 10 seconds thing was only achieved because Miller simply provided a
Miller says that he provided the link, the judges clicked it and he then showed them he had full control of the MacBook concerned.
via

March 20, 2009

rePost:Is It?:Is the Waiting Room Necessary? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

: Image via CrunchBase

The problem is not waiting but actually not knowing how long the waiting would be. I think the doctor could actually try to implement gathering of patient statistics. I imagine that when you get appointments you already have a reason to go. The doctor could aggregate patient data on how long it takes per procedure and the variance with respect to each patient. This would help the doctor in estimating more accurately how feasible is the appointments for the day.
I agree with ML(17) and Saumya. I would like to add that if the waiting room was designed to have activities that were well suited to how long the average waiting time is. They need to make waiting rooms more activity centered rather than waiting/magazine reading centered!.

Is the Waiting Room Necessary?

By Daniel Hamermesh

I spent 40 minutes waiting to begin diagnostic tests preparatory to seeing my ophthalmologist. What a waste of my valuable time! And my calculations from data from the American Time Use Survey suggest that this is a standard problem: the average adult American spends four hours per year waiting for medical or dental care, with each wait averaging around 45 minutes.
Pricing this time out at even half the average wage rate, the cost amounts to about $5 billion per year. Seems like a lot, and very inefficient, but what is the alternative?
The only way that every medical provider could ensure no waiting would be for the provider to have downtime herself, in order to have unutilized resources, both of her time and the services of the capital stock used in the practice. I’m not sure what’s the right mix of provider and customer waiting; but as annoying as my waiting is, the current system may be economically efficient.
via Is the Waiting Room Necessary? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

March 20, 2009

Great Quote:Success:Quotes Uncovered: Did Emerson Define Success? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com

: Cover via Amazon

from freakonomics blog at nyt:

“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory is a benediction.”
via Quotes Uncovered: Did Emerson Define Success? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

March 19, 2009

GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA

: Image via Wikipedia

There was not a single class that I didn’t sleep on in college. The problem was I had this bad habit of sitting in the first or second row. If I had professors as easily offended as the one in this article , I would not have passed any of my subject! Hehe, good thing I had such wonderful professors!

Sleepy student barred from taking final exams
AIE BALAGTAS SEE, GMANews.TV 03/19/2009 | 11:24 PM
MANILA, Philippines – A second-year college student in Manila was barred from taking the final examinations by her professor after she was caught sleeping during a lecture, a television report said Thursday.
In his report on GMA News’ “24 Oras,” JP Soriano said Elizabeth Balitaan, a student of La Consolacion College, has admitted falling asleep while her Finance professor Ronald Pastrana was lecturing, but said it was due to a headache.
Balitaan said she tried talking to Pastrana but he refused to listen to her.
“Kinausap ko na po siya. Sinundan ko siya sa Dean’s Office tapos hindi niya ako pinansin. Tapos failed na daw po ako [kasi] parang nakakabastos daw ang ginawa ko,” Balitaan said.
[I tried talking to him but he won’t listen to me. He told me to consider myself failed for sleeping in the class.]
Balitaan was later allowed to take the exam by the school administration, the report said.
The incident however upset Balitaan’s mother, who went to see Pastrana to discuss the problem.
Pastrana, for his part, said he did not allow Balitaan to take the examination because she missed a lot in the lecture.
via GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.

March 19, 2009

rePost:Excellent Idea:Rosetta Disk

saw this at reddit! This is an excellent idea, hope they can come up with something like this for programs, there are a lot of virtual machines right now hope they could make one for every significant operating system or computer architecture that we still have access to right now, while a few of the original designers are still alive to help with the details!

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation‘s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
via Concept —.

March 19, 2009

rePost:Business and Snake's Oil Men:Linus' blog: SSD followup

I wrote this yesterday about my take on business and snake’s oil sales men and realize that sometimes they are not trying to fool you into a decision. It is sad but sometimes people don’t try to think things through and investigate the stuff they are trying to say. Here Linus Torvalds shows us why a lot of reviews cannot be trusted, and judging from the way he says this I believe he is even referring to some people who are said to be professional reviewers. Things like this used to make me sad, then I realized that when something becomes useless they tend to become irrelevant to people and they tend to be cast off, like a year old fad. The thing is we need to try to live more aware of things and try to always go beyond what is obvious and easy to get. Do not subscribe to labels and pre conceptions, exercise that which we have that makes us more than animals!

Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don’t matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don’t even give those numbers.
Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can’t avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.
via Linus’ blog: SSD followup.

March 19, 2009

Best Read: Why Pay For The Sins Of The Past:Stumbling and Mumbling: The legacy of slavery

One might ask: why should I pay for the sins of my countrymen’s ancestors? Simple. We are rich for the same reason Africans are poor. They are poor because they were born into a poor continent. We are rich because we were born into a rich one. I’m one of the richest 1% of people on the planet. This is not because I’m smart, or hard-working or charming. It’s because I was born in the right place. Any individual who thinks their wealth is the result of their own effort is just an idiot.
Of course, this argument has no weight whatsoever. But this is because empirical evidence and ethical considerations have no role in politics, except as thin veils for ego and self-interest.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: The legacy of slavery.