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Entries from December 2007

Settling a bet

December 20th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Rogers Cadenhead looks at Dave Winer’s long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz on whether blogs or the Times would reign supreme by 2007. The winner: none of the above. Wikipedia outranks them both.

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Apple and thinksecret.com settle

December 20th, 2007 · No Comments

The terms of the deal between Apple and ThinkSecret? Apple agrees not to sue and ThinkSecret agrees to close up shop. Ouch.

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Quote of the day

December 20th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Tyler Cowen on Ron Paul. I think this holds in general:

There’s what a politician believes, and how a politician believes. As I get older I put increasing weight on the latter.

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MooTools developer kicked off the team

December 20th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. A member of the MooTools development team made some intemperate remarks about some other JavaScript frameworks in a presentation, posted a video of the presentation to the project home page, and was kicked off the team. Here’s the upshot:

The apology here is not that Olmo gave his [...]

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Gamers are clever freaks

December 18th, 2007 · No Comments

World of Warcraft offers an arena system where players can create teams and fight other players. Participating in rated arena matches earns points that players can use to buy equipment that in turn makes them more formidable in the arena.

Teams that compete in an arena are assigned a rating of 1500 to start out, and [...]

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You call yourselves an opposition party?

December 17th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Note to Senators — you people make me sick. No guts, no principles.

The context of these comments is the vote today that granted immunity from prosecution to telecommunications companies that in all likelihood illegally threw their networks open for wiretapping, even before 9/11.

Ten Democrats and no Republicans stood up for the Constitution. 76 others voted [...]

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Really organized crime

December 14th, 2007 · 1 Comment

The Russian Business Network is a hosting company that specializes in offering services to online criminals. Need someplace to host your phishing site? Want some help setting up a shell company? These are your go to guys.

Washington Post Internet security reporter Brian Krebs published a story about RBN on Wednesday.

There’s also a blog [...]

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Amazon.com takes on the relational database

December 14th, 2007 · 7 Comments

Amazon has added a new company to their S3 and EC2 services called SimpleDB. Rather than providing a traditional relational database, they’ve created an object-oriented database that is supposed to be simpler to use. That’s probably not a bad idea, given the popularity of ORM libraries like Hibernate and ActiveRecord.

They’ve already created libraries for Java, [...]

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The one thing to look for in an interview

December 14th, 2007 · 5 Comments

Last week I asked what one question you could ask programmers to screen out viable candidates from poor candidates in a preliminary interview. I think that the one question you should keep in mind when interviewing programmers is, “What can I learn from this person?” If you get through an interview and can’t think [...]

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What’s a knol?

December 14th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Google is launching a new Web site aimed at individuals who want to publish articles on the Web. Google calls the articles knols, and based on the example, I’d say they’re most similar to Wikipedia articles. The difference is that the knols are closely associated with one author, whereas Wikipedia articles are all treated as [...]

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