...more recent posts
Ev (nice new design) has apparently done some research about click through rates for blog banner ads at weblogs.com. Seems that the average click through rate is around 0.6%. But check out the top 6 banners, which all get over 2% of the people who see them to click. Hmmmmm.
802.11b is a standard for wireless ethernet connections. Lucent calls it wavelan (although, did they just change the name?) and Apple calls it airport. Whatever the name, 802.11b allows you to set up short range wireless local area networks (LANs.) You plug one part (the base station) into your phone line (or DSL, or cable modem line) and the other part into your (portable) computer. Now you can move around your house, or out into the yard, and your computer will stay connected to the web by wirelessly talking with the base station. Cool. But even cooler is that you can set up multiple base stations, and if you have everything positioned correctly, your roaming portable computer will sense the different base stations as they come into range and automatically switch off (like cell phones - especially PCS phones - do when you are moving around.) So the question, then, is wouldn't it be cool if people (especially those living in densely populated urban areas) started blanketing certain regions with publically accessible 802.11b base stations. A free wireless internet could be built in the traditional decentralized grass roots way. Oh wait, people are already doing this.
Macworld Tokyo was yesterday (well, last night Eastern US time.) Pretty much as expected, but there are always a few surprises. New speed bumped and CD/RW sporting imacs (G3s at 400/500/600 mhz.) Apple missed the ball on CD/RW (they were pushing DVD/RAM for the last 2 years) but now that they have changed course they have easily made up for lost time. Big Cube price drops, with the entry level 450 G4 now dropped to $1250. And a huge price drop for the all singing all dancing Mac 22 inch Cinema Display. Now only ("only!") $2999 (from $3999.) This is actually pretty good, seeing as others have 18 inch flat panels (sgi) for $3200+. These prices should continue to drop fast as flat panel technology is rapidly improving. Maybe $1999 by Christmas?
And for gamers, and other tech spec freaks, the big, almost totally unexpected news, is that the new NVIDIA GeForce3 (previously known as the NV20) is going to be available for the Mac. This is huge news for Apple, as WinTel has always had a lead in the gaming market. But the GeForce3 is not only coming to the Mac, it's coming to the Mac before WinTel. Amazing. I wonder how Jobs cut that deal. Must be pretty hard to convince a manufacturer to support your platform when you have < 5% of the market. Anyway, this is going to take gaming to the next level. (Yes, I know that is meaningless hype-speak, but this will be the most advanced graphics card.) They had John Carmack on stage (master mind behind Quake, and all around programmer hero) and he was demoing a preview of the Doom3 engine running on MacOSX. He says that full cinematic 3d quality is now possible. All the 3d characters are rendered in Maya (!) which was also demonstrated running on OSX. I've never been into these games, but I am certainly interested in the state of the art, and I keep wondering when we're going to get to these 3d virtual worlds I started reading about in '89. We're still a way off, but clearly making progress. And the GeForce3 will at least give the battered Apple some bragging rights.
I mentioned ZZZ online before, but I think it's worth repeating. I've really been enjoying it. The guy who writes it is a total nut. Sort of a Popular Science on the web, except much better.
From slashdot: Microsoft has clarified their man Jim Allchin's rather insane comments that open source software threatens the "American way". They didn't mean that. They meant the Gnu Public License (GPL) threatens the American way. Maybe they are finally understanding. I can't wait to read Richard Stallmans comments.
This is doubly funny, becasue even on Slashdot (in the comments at least) Stallman is regularly attacked in just this way. "He's a communist!" "He wants to share everything!" "Did we mention he's a communist!" I just always thought these were little republican 13 year olds.
Yes, that's right Napster offered the music industry one billion dollars to allow their members unlimited swapping of works for five years. Slashdot. Cnet. FoxNews. I can't imagine they'll except that offer. Or any offer really.
Here's an unusually good space shuttle picture from this most recent launch.
New issue of Cryptogram. Good stuff on proposed hard-drive-embedded copy protection plans, a semantic attack by URL that I would probably have fallen for, and another good explanation on why he thinks electronic voting is a really bad idea.
Much better. I bought the O'Reilly Horse book ("Running Linux") yesterday, and that was just what I needed. I learned more about unix in one day of reading and poking around the command line than in my almost 2 years of just using a unix system (I mean remotely using somebody else's unix system.) Maybe it's not so hard.
I'm not getting much traction on the server project. Since I really know almost nothing, its hard to pick an approach route. I guess the point is that it doesn't really matter, just jump in, and eventually you'll figure out what the best way would have been to approach the problem. Or another way of saying this is: just pick one small thing and start there, then move on to another small thing, and eventually a bigger picture will emerge. I guess there has to be some wasted motion when you are trying to blindly find your way. But if that's the case, are those motions still wasted?
Actually this sort of thinking is the real problem. Stop writing and fire that beast up.