4/24/2004 08:11:54 PM
I just spoke with David. He is alive,
but his hand is giving out. He has
13 pages penciled. Only 15 hours to go.
4/24/2004 07:49:50 PM
Relationship Discovery and Representation in Social Software: a four cell matrix
@many2many
4/24/2004 06:47:40 PM
Rich to Get Richer if Google Goes Public
Tiger Woods has his small stake. So do Shaquille O'Neal, Henry A. Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All can be counted among that small club of people lucky enough to own a sliver of Google, one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and what could be the hottest deal on Wall Street this year.
...The list of institutions that stand to make a small fortune from Google includes two of its potential rivals, America Online, now part of Time Warner, and Yahoo.
"People made fun of Yahoo for its licensing deal," said an executive at a search-related start-up company that is a partner with Yahoo and Google, who insisted on anonymity to avoid spoiling his relationships. "They helped to create a big competitor. But this deal that hurts them strategically will make the company a lot of money."
Yahoo invested $10 million several years ago, when Google was the search engine powering Yahoo's operations on its Web portal. Yahoo owns a small stake, a person who has seen the terms of the deal said.
Under a different deal struck in 2002, America Online has the right to buy nearly two million shares of Google for roughly $22 million, according to Time Warner.
A list of the others who stand to be enriched should Google go public seems to prove that the rich get richer. It reads like a "Who's Who" of Silicon Valley insiders, including Frank P. Quattrone, the former investment banker now on trial in Manhattan on charges of obstruction of justice and witness tampering.
It includes some of Silicon Valley's greatest entrepreneurial successes, including Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape; Pierre M. Omidyar, a founder of eBay; Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster; and Bill Joy, the software innovator who recently left Sun Microsystems.
...Stanford, one of the country's richest universities, also stands to add considerably to its bottom line. Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, who met in 1995 at a party for incoming computer science graduate students, worked together on a university-funded data-mining project. During that collaboration, the pair invented the search technology that would eventually be Google's core technology.
"The university owns the technology," said Katharine Ku, the director of Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing. "We license it to Google, which back then was just these two kids. They pay Stanford royalties annually. We also took a bit of stock in the deal."
Under the terms of that deal, the royalties are evenly split three ways among Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, the computer science department and the university's engineering school. That deal was struck in 1996.
..."There's been no almost no dilution of financing. The founders did a first round, they basically did a deal with the C.E.O., there's the deal with Yahoo, and that's it."
Andrew Anker, an entrepreneur and former venture capitalist, said: "This is the deal of the century as far as I'm concerned. No matter how you cut it, this will make a lot of people very happy."
4/24/2004 06:44:06 PM
Ball, the makers of Monster, have joined forces with Lost Enterprises to create Lost Energy Drink. It has too much sugar for me. Really, it is the branding that caught my attention.
4/24/2004 12:43:57 PM
Operation Kickback
...according to experts monitoring the situation... almost 20 percent of the billions of American taxpayers dollars being spent to rebuild Iraq is being lost to corruption.
Meanwhile, the report also documents the failure of the US government to effectively oversee expenditures in a reconstruction effort that the reports say costs 10 times more per capita than the Marshall Plan (the US-led effort to rebuild Germany after WWII).
4/23/2004 02:13:09 PM
at my current rate i will have filled my Gmail account limit (1 Gig) in about 22 months.
one more reason for number 1 from Things I Want From Gmail.
4/23/2004 01:29:43 PM
I really like Google News. It makes a deep diversity of sources accessible to us normal folks. Whether you agree with it or not it is amazing that something like this would be on the Google News front page: Again, Why George W. Bush Must be Tried as a War Criminal -The Tehran Times. A generation ago this would have been nearly treasonous. Today it is delightfully and transformatively subversive.
Subversion without direct intention. That is one of the second-order effects of hyper-literacy and the tools that enable it.
In a September 23, 2003 speech to the United Nations, President Bush noted that both the UN Charter and American founding documents "recognize a moral law that stands above men and nations, which must be defended and enforced by men and nations." Following World War II, just such action was taken at the Nuremberg trials and American, British, French and Soviet jurists established Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter, which legally defines "Crimes Against Peace."
To commit a crime against peace, one must engage in "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war." Bush is guilty on all these counts....
Bush, supported by the mainstream corporate media, has hidden behind the semantics of "pre-emption." Under international law, a pre-emptive strike is allowed when a nation is preparing for an imminent attack. Bush would be hard pressed before any tribunal, short of a Texas kangaroo court, to establish that the Iraqi military was an imminent threat to the U.S. Iraq was a defeated, heavily impoverished nation, under economic sanctions and restricted by U.S.-enforced no-fly zones in both its north and south....
The so-called "Bush doctrine" is in reality an echo of the illegal Nazi doctrine of "preventive" war, which asserted that any country that may pose a future non-specific threat can be attacked and occupied. This is not "higher moral law," rather it is a repugnant Nazi doctrine last heard when Germany attacked Poland prior to World War II. Add to the mounting evidence against Bush's criminality the fact that his key advisors are the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who have been publicly waging a campaign to attack Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. A quick visit to the Project for a New American Century website (www.newamericancentury.org) establishes their blatant disregard for both the UN Charter and Nuremberg principles.
4/23/2004 06:45:12 AM
If David is dishonored in battle he has promised to commit Seppuku.
He is a creative madman.
4/23/2004 05:45:02 AM
VOIP For the Working Class
IDT plans to become the first company to offer home phone service through the same wireless technology customers at Starbucks or McDonald's use to tap the Internet
...It is aimed at customers who want cheap phone service but don't want to pay for a fast Internet connection to get it.
...IDT plans to offer the service in the working-class, ethnic neighborhoods where it sells the bulk of its prepaid calling cards, the main source of the company's sales. Most Wi-Fi marketing plans so far have catered to well-heeled business users, but the company said it is certain of demand for inexpensive phone plans.
IDT plans to set up microwave antennas in the Ironbound (neighborhood) to create what are known as "Wi-Fi" hot spots -- zones with wireless Internet access that can rival the speed of cable modems or digital subscriber lines. Customers within those zones will be able to rent a Wi-Fi-compatible phone for a few dollars a month, and not have to pay for incoming calls, IDT officials said.... outgoing calls are expected to be charged on a per-minute basis, at rates well below conventional toll calls.
4/22/2004 06:50:59 PM
In his book 'A Churchless Faith' Alan Jamieson found that most people who left churches retained their faith and even grew in it, in spite of or even because of their lack of conventional belonging. A lot of those who 'leave' churches are... leaving the local for the network. They are moving into a wider circle of connectedness, retaining some at least of their existing connections including, often, links back into the churches they have 'left'.
-Steve Collins, Network Church 3
4/22/2004 10:27:11 AM
Rules of Empire
1. When one militarily invades a territory one either decimates it or owns it.
Often one does both.
There are no other options,
save that not to invade,
which, should this be distasteful,
leaves one in the inevitably sticky spot
of post-conflict Imperial management.
If there is no adequate manner in which
to self-fund such work the cost in domestic
treasure exacted from the citizens of the
Empire joins with war's coin already spent
to breed discontent among the Empire's
families whose resources and children are
siphoned off, in ever more generous portions,
to a land far away to execute a mandate
that the local populous finds little in to laud.
Domestic industries are not immune to such
discontent as markets soften, production slows,
trade is stilted and investment becomes a more
tempered affair in those areas not directly
contributing to or benefiting from the invasion.
Beyond the terrible human tax that is levied for
and the temporary economic cost of
Imperial military action and post-conflict
management is the unenumerated effects of
lost trust, a negative influence index and the global
opportunity costs that accompany both.
When one militarily invades a territory one either decimates it or owns it.
There are no other options,
save that not to invade.
4/21/2004 06:20:53 PM
the witness to justice that makes meaning
with intention in the undirected everydayness of the
networked narratives in which we dwell.
bearing witness to such things
in the fissures of our present.
4/21/2004 04:46:40 PM
"According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don't transform it, we will transmit it."
- Al Gustafson
via Bob Carlton
4/21/2004 04:45:43 PM
Things I Want From Gmail:
1. Offline capabilities - I want to be able to backup the archive of my Gmail offline.
2. More Nuanced Filters - When I create a new Filter that takes action by assigning Labels to messages as they arrive I want the option to instruct Gmail to parse my active and archived conversations to tag the relevant messages according to the new Filter's parameters.
3. Attachments - The visual queues when you are uploading an attachment, particularly when it is a large attachment, are too ambiguous. A small, "Sending..." against a hovering red background in the upper right corner is not visible enough. When I first was attempting to test the attachment limit by sending a 17 Meg mp3 I did not even realize that the file was being uploaded to the server. I tried to send the message and was met with an alert box that said, "The document contains no data." In the end this file never made it up to the server, but Gmail never came back to tell me why. What is the limit on attachment size?
4. PDA Browser Access - I want to be able to search my email from my iPaq and Axim. I am sure other's will want the same for their Palm or Symbian device.
While I am on the topic of Gmail...
Why I like Gmail more than Hotmail:
1. External Links - Hotmail opens links embedded in emails in a browser that has a Hotmail frame across the top obscuring the URL for the page one is visiting. Firebird/fox right-click and "Show Only This Frame" takes care of this, but users of IE are not so lucky. No such problem with Gmail.
2. Time Context - Gmail has this amazingly simple feature that tells me how long a message has been in my possession. Every message has an indicator at the top right that says, "2 hours ago" or "5 days ago".... with Hotmail I not only get to do complicated math from the email headers to figure out such things... I also have to try to figure out what timezone each timestamp is from... and if the mailserver was configured such that the date is even meaningful.
3. Spell Check - See comments here.
4. Address Recognition - Nicknames are so turn of the millennium! Gmail uses an Intellisense-like capability to recognize an address you are typing and gives you a list of options. Hotmail... you get to remember arcane nicknames, manually type an entire address or open a cumbersome address book and select recipients. Ugh.
5. Advertising - Free services have to pay the bills and, long term, benefit the bottom line. Hotmail has an ever growing obsession with obtrusive ads. Gmail serves context-sensitive Ad Words in one area on the right. If they have no ad that fits with the context of your email you see none. Hotmail sends out ads at the bottom of each email you send. Gmail is 100% clean email.
6. Organization - Computer "folders" are a digital metaphor taken directly from the physical world. It is a cultural handle to help comprehension that we do not need anymore. Gmail has some folders, but they are not encouraging their users to create any. Instead Gmail users tag email messages with language that makes them easier to locate in the future. Even though it is as arcane as speaking in terms of "Horse Power" the cultural currency for the "folder" will be with us for some time. That not withstanding metadata is better. Gmail starts us down that path.
7. Granular Control - I can determine how many conversations (message threads) I want to have on each page. I have setup filters to apply labels to messages I receive from specific people or that use specific keywords. I can choose to use keyboard shortcuts like in a desktop app. I like control.
4/21/2004 02:12:23 PM
current mp3:
southFM::as.you.dream
I was reflecting for a moment today about the importance of the creative work that so many of my friends are priveleging amidst all of the mundane, rote, difficult things that are required just to live. Despite the opportunities to make more money, the discouragement that goes with disclosing your passions in such visible ways and the, seemingly inexhaustible, opportunity for distraction from those things that we christen of highest value many are persevering and creating lives and work of beauty and authenticity; critique and vision.
Thanks.
4/21/2004 10:06:40 AM
Mordechai Vanunu Release
Mordechai Vanunu walked free from prison today after spending 18 years in jail for revealing secrets that exposed Israel as one of the world's top nuclear powers and said he was "proud and happy" at his actions.
In a defiant address outside prison, the nuclear whistleblower said his treatment inside, which included 12 years in solitary confinement, had been "cruel and barbaric" but insisted that the security services "did not break me"....
via Jonny Baker
4/20/2004 06:37:02 PM
an urgent plea: don't be today's equivalent of the Christians who wrote this...
4/20/2004 06:04:15 PM
First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations.
So what else is new?
Gmail has many other special features that will become apparent as you use your account...
So I sent out my first Gmail today. My address is Dan.Hughes AT Gmail DOT com. I sent the message to myself at Hotmail. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to be delivered. I didn't know if this was due to the touch-and-go nature of any fledgling Internet service that is popular and overtaxed or the normal time it would take to scan the email for content queues to serve appropriate Ad Words at the bottom of the message. I had crafted my first message in a keyword loaded fashion:
this is a message about Lord of the Rings. also about Jesus Christ.
perhaps about Corn Flakes and hybrid cars as well.
Discontent with waiting for my first Gmail to be delivered I sent another message to my Integration Research account to do a controlled test. I moved to my other laptop that has Outlook on it and immediately received my first Gmail in my inbox--though it was the second one I had sent. Hotmail immediately became the suspect for the delayed delivery of my first Gmail. I checked the Bulk Mail folder and there it was. It could be that the Gmail domain is in the Hotmail spam filter (we are entering the next phase of the global Internet wars you know). If so users will have to declare individual addresses as safe when they recieve Gmail.
What was most interesting is that neither message had any Ad Words. Neither had anything other than the text I had written and the normal headers. I knew that Google was publicly wavering on their Ad Word plans, but I did not expect for them to pull out the functionality while they were still in soft-launch.
Here is my initial list of observations after my minimal use of Gmail.
What I Love:
Not having an address book.
Gmail uses something like intellisense to offer suggested email addresses that you have used in the past with each letter your type. Very cool.
Spell Check
Spell check on web-based email systems is a notoriously clunky feature. Gmail's spell checker is the most elegant and intuitive system I have used on the web. It comes close to the usefulness of recent editions of Word.
Labels
Creating a rudimentary, functional taxonomy by labeling emails with simple metadata is very useful.
Email as Conversations
Every email that you receive that can be tied back to prior emails is presented in a threaded conversation. Contextual email presentation is my favorite feature so far. One can minimize and maximize threads as one scans over, what could end up being, a significant conversational chain.
Trash
When you click on the Trash link the fist time you are presented with:
"No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!"
The list of innovative features goes on and on: snippets, keyboard shortcuts, user-defined filters...
I like what I see so far.
4/20/2004 07:53:35 AM
"The reason I love the church so much is because it is the only place men will sing."
-Rich Mullins
4/18/2004 10:41:23 AM
Tiny Loans Have Big Impact on Poor (notice the URL)
via sotto
"I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women," Mr. Khosla said. "I started crying." In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh in February ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. "They have sophisticated credit algorithms," he said. "Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?"
In India, microloans are usually disbursed to poor women whose total family assets are less than 20,000 rupees ($459) and whose monthly income is smaller than 350 rupees. Yet microfinance initiatives have a phenomenal repayment rate averaging more than 95 percent, better than the best commercial banks in the world. Many of the programs are highly profitable, Mr. Khosla said, adding that "microfinance is one of the most important economic phenomena in the world in the last 50 years."
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