Geek news, reviews & more

Aug 23, 2009

Find out your digital persona: HERE

Aaron Zinman, who is of MIT's Media Lab, with the help of a few others, have created this project titled: Personas.

What's an Internet Persona?

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

And how does this site gather your info to determine your online persona?

Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

All that make sense? In simple terms it looks up your name, the more unique your name, the better, and it searches the context around sites or articles that somehow contain your name within them. If you have a generic name then you're going to get a mix of mostly other people's work and activity. The activity is then represented within categories, each color coded.

(Kind of hard to see but that green section in my persona bar says "illegal". Woah, wonder what I've been doing?!)

[Via TechCrunch]

Aug 23, 2009

Sunday

Aug232009

RIAA Thinks file sharing is worse than murder and 6 other crimes

Aug 23, 2009

News

File sharing is worse than murder. I am not lying. This is what we have not realized, that the penalty for file sharing is at least 2X greater than murder. This is seriously screwed up. Why is file sharing any different than stealing a cd, in fact it should be less than stealing a cd.

If you steal, you are taking the product. If you file share, you are making a copy, and leaving the original there; plus you aren't stealing the case, cover art, and disc. Just copying harmless files, to see if you like it, then buy the CD /DVD if you like it. That's what I do and that's what Jammie Thomas tried to do, who was fined $2 million for downloading 24 songs. WTF!

Instead, try another crime, because plenty of them have far lighter penalties than your sister downloading "Jonas brothers top 10" on Limewire. Who the hell would want that anyway...

1. Child abduction: the fine is only $25000

2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500

3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000

4. Burn a house down: The fine is just over $375,000

5. Stalk someone: The fine is $175,000

6. Start a dog-fighting ring: the fine is $50,000

7. Murder someone: The maximum penalty is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty that $2 million for downloading 24 songs.

Aug 23, 2009

News

Saturday

Aug222009

The top 10 Youtube Fail videos in history

Ahh, the life and times of Youtube. These people are a special group of people. They stand for what they believe in, and are not embarrassed to face the title of "Top 10 fails on Youtube". This list includes, a lovely Proposal gone wrong, a slide that is NSFW, a train that is more stuffed than a turkey on thanksgiving, a grape stomp gon horribly wrong and a man who uses his head for more than thinking. So enjoy, and pay your respect to these special men and women.

Aug 22, 2009

Humor,

Videos

Thursday

Aug202009

Do you want to Date my Avatar - The Guild

Aug 20, 2009

If you aren't aware of the Guild or Felicia Day then just leave right now. She's been a face to the nerdy, and a beacon of hope to who aren't quite normal. Yes, she'd make a fine wife... err...um...excuse me.

Check out the Guild on youtube or even on the Xbox marketplace. It's a funny show that would make any gamer proud. And as for their music video, it's so damn catchy and awesome there's no denying you won't eventually see it. I finally cracked and went ahead and bought the mp3 on iTunes. Support the Guild!

Buy the video or the mp3.

Aug 20, 2009

Thursday

Aug202009

What did Microsoft.com look like in 1999?

Aug 20, 2009

Check out Google, Yahoo, and Msn's 1999 duds here

Caught this on Digg the other day, thought it'd be worth sharing. Ever wonder what popular sites looked like back a decade ago? Well, Smashing App's has got you covered.

Amazon, Google, and Apple still seem to resemble their past selves, but other sites like Microsoft got full make overs. Makes me wonder what these same sites will look like in another ten years...

[Smashing App's via Digg]

Aug 20, 2009

Monday

Aug172009

Google's Chrome OS means what exactly?

Aug 17, 2009

I frequent ZenHabits.net often and model my life on a lot of the concepts that Leo Babuata writes about; minimilism, how to be happier with less mess, and how to view technology as a tool rather than your life. ZenHabits is very practical, as it teaches how to use technology, our bodies, and physical materials to make our lives easier and happier.

Leo, recently did a blog post about what he feels Googe's Chrome OS will mean to a company rival, like Microsoft, as well as what it can do for computing of the future. I thoroughly enjoyed his perspective and it made me rethink the way I see a desktop computer.

The Old Model
For years, the OS has used the desktop analogy, with folders and files, all stored in a big file cabinet (your hard drive). And applications such as Word have run from the hard drive.

What this has meant is that, in order to insure against computer crashes (which are eventually inevitable), you’ve had to back up your files to a remote disk (another drive, a CD-ROM, etc.). It also has meant a headache when it comes to accessing your files and programs from multiple computers — you have to save and sync files all the time, and buy and install multiple copies of applications.

It’s also meant a lot of headaches when it comes to filing and finding your files, and sharing them with other people (this had to be done using floppy disks/CDs, or more recently, email attachments).

Finally, operating systems, trying to do everything, have become bloated and slow, taking up a lot of your computer’s processing power, memory and storage.

The New Model
Google’s model is based on connectivity to the Internet, a model that was unthinkable a decade ago and has only been really viable in the last few years as almost everyone has high-speed connections and wi-fi or mobile access.

Google has moved applications, and increasingly, our files, to the web (or cloud). It started with Gmail’s success — a fast, powerful online email app that beats desktop email apps hands down. It expanded with a suite of simple web apps: Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Reader, Picasa for photos, eventually YouTube for video, Blogger for writing for the web, and more.

These apps are lightweight but powerful. They aren’t as feature rich as desktop apps, but here’s what many critics don’t understand: in today’s (and tomorrow’s) computing world, they don’t have to be.

-Leo Babuata

I believe that cloud computing IS the NEXT big step, as what we enjoy in the internet becomes fully immersed into our everyday offline lives; being always connecting with one another, rather than having to "log on", so to speak, to get to the information, or entertainment we want and need.

The question is, what can we expect from our operating systems? More hardware and more hard drive space? Or are we looking forward to a much more streamlined experience, with less digital doodad's, and more centralized information? And will Google be the new standard for the common internet user, with more work oriented computing: information production, programming, and video/picture editing be more for Windows/Apple owners?

Also, be sure to read the comments as well. A lot of interesting questions were thrown around: such as how many people have the access necessary to fully enjoy information on the cloud? And what about the effects of privacy and country restrictions put on sites like Youtube, Blogspot, and Twitter being partially, or fully, blocked?

[Via ZenHabits]

Aug 17, 2009

Sunday

Aug162009

Youtube has destroyed their homepage with new design.

Aug 16, 2009

Design,

Humor,