Posted on January 21, 2006 10:31 PM
This question about using dial-up security as a security measure has to be the crappiest Slashdot post ever. Despite the generation gap, Slashdot is better than that.
I know I'm late to the party on this one, but Audible's redesign sucks.
Orson Scott Card follows up his insightful piece about gay marriage with a thorough dismantling of evolution. (Note sarcasm in previous sentence.) As always, The Panda's Thumb has the medicine.
Posted on January 18, 2006 10:42 PM
This link has been both Dugg and Scobelized, so for the remaining thirteen people on the planet that haven't seen it, check out Tripod performing Make You Happy Tonight. Tripod used to do these Song-in-an-hour bits on the old morning show on Triple J that were classic. (It looks like a bunch of them are available under 2004 over here.)
Posted on January 18, 2006 01:18 AM
Zeldman is hilarious and spot on at the same time in his latest piece titled Web 3.0.
If Steven created the site with Perl and CGI and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.
But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O'Reilly will beg him to keynote.
Posted on January 17, 2006 04:34 PM
Despite being on the other side of the planet, the Sydney Morning Herald is one of my daily reads. They launched a new design recently which I really like - it's definitely one of the better meatspace newspaper websites out there. But they drop the ball by using a meta-refresh of five minutes. It drives me crazy. I can't imagine advertisers would be happy with it either.
If their RSS feeds weren't so skeletal I could do away with the site altogether, but sadly that's not the case.
I'll have to hunt for a GreaseMonkey solution to the problem...
Posted on January 17, 2006 12:33 PM
Jeremy points to a report at Search Engine Watch that compares the spam filters in Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and SpamCop. I am mostly an Outlook + SpamBayes guy, and have only recently started using Gmail in anger, and I gotta say, the filter performance is just not comparable. Given a clean archive and a few hundred pieces of spam, SpamBayes is near perfect, whereas Gmail is running at about 2 from 3, similar to the findings in the report.
It's big problem seems to be on the stock/investing type of spam. If it weren't for Gmail's excellent keyboard shortcuts it would be a deal breaker.
Posted on January 16, 2006 01:09 PM
If I were feeling a tad more Sam Harris-ish this morning I'd probably make a non-PC remark right about now. But I won't.
Posted on January 16, 2006 12:27 PM
In answer to John Battelle, I don't think I can buy into Brian's argument against Lessig on the Google Book Search case. Like Kelly vs Arriba, it seems clear to me that the snippets provided by Google as search results are in fact transformations of the original work that are not substitutable for the original work. Regardless of the fact that the scans are performed at a high dots-per-inch, or that the indexes cover the entirety of the text, when the snippets are presented to the user they are of lesser value precisely because they are snippets. By and large, the value of text is in the information it conveys, not in the clarity of the typeface in which it is presented, and when context is removed, as is the case with the snippets, the information provided by a particular piece of text is obscured, and the value is lessened.
BTW, I love the less-is-more deck that Lessig presents in his talk.
Update: From Brian's comment below it seems I misunderstood his gripe, which was with the internal copies that Google are making for processing.
