Pre-thinking Excess

A CAPITALIZED GROK:

Alas, there will be famine in the midst of all that plenty. There are some hundred million blogs, and the number is roughly doubling every year. The vast majority are unreadable. Several hundred billion e-mail messages are sent every day; most of it—current estimates run around 70%—is spam. There seems to be a Malthusian principle at work: information grows exponentially, but useful information grows only linearly. Noise will drown out signal. The moment that we, as a species, finally have the memory to store our every thought, etch our every experience into a digital medium, it will be hard to avoid slipping into a Borgesian nightmare where we are engulfed by our own mental refuse.

[link here]

Geek Groaner

An ASCII character walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What’s wrong?” The ASCII character says, “I have a parity error.” The bartender nods and says, “Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off.”

Rare XP TIP

How to transfer Windows XP to different hardware

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Skip the gobbledygook and show me how to do it

Hooked on hooks

When a separate utility isn't needed.

SKTimeStamp is a very simple shell extension which adds a new page to the Explorer properties dialog. On that new page, you can change the file/folder dates and times.

Online theft costs $1 trillion

Report

The threat of cybercrime is rising sharply, experts have warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

They called for a new system to tackle well-organised gangs of cybercriminals.

Online theft costs $1 trillion a year, the number of attacks is rising sharply and too many people do not know how to protect themselves, they said.

The internet was vulnerable, they said, but as it was now part of society's central nervous system, attacks could threaten whole economies.

The past year had seen “more vulnerabilities, more cybercrime, more malicious software than ever before”, more than had been seen in the past five years combined, one of the experts reported.

Google Monster

I smell a giant with too many Jacks on the beanstalk.

Google has introduced new features and removed a few. That's normal growth. There are 1000s of tech sites that watch these moves and millions of users that rush to adopt and adapt.

Yet core services are showing rare improvements. There's overall success from multi-year tweaking of algorithms to exclude scam and black-hat sites, but critics of the Page-Rank model are piling on in greater numbers. Even governments are becoming concerned. But that's another story.

What about Gmail, for example? These improvements are from the design shop. The UI is tweaked. Ingenious buttons, yes, but insensitivity to the moans in the broad market.

What about Reader? The engine's very workable API opens the door for adjunct services such as external widgets and scripts. The UI is not tweaked. Backyard script authors are rising.

What fly was on the wall at the tier management meeting that introduced Pages or wiped out Notebook?

I'm certain I'm watching Google's leadership lose its grip while teams of special talents crawl into decision making, hallway by hallway, tweet by tweet. Too bad. But interesting.

Google is rusting its way into a typical corporate monster. Those employees and contractors that can grab momentum are learning how to bring this-or-that upstairs. Rank and politics is determining go or no-go.

Users are taken for granted.