In a long overdue move, the SEC is suspending trading in stocks that are the subject of spam and dump schemes. Hopefully this will reduce the level of stock spam, and of course prevent some gullible people from getting fleeced. The SEC probably should have started doing this as soon as people started publishing studies showing that stock spam actually works.
Is it just me, or could I see Mark Frauenfelder being a regular guest on Colbert, featuring other cool projects from Make magazine? Great interview.
Today, Paul Boutin has a piece in Slate explaining how easy it is to back up your data using a Maxtor external hard drive. Here’s the case in favor of it: My solution: Maxtor’s OneTouch III Turbo Edition, which comes with a minimum of 1 terabyte—1,000 gigabytes—of storage. OK, it costs $500, but if you’ve got loads of videos and music you don’t want to lose, that amount is worth it. Maxtor has a reputation for reliable drives at reasonable, if not rock-bottom, prices. The thing certainly looks reassuring—it resembles a metal and plastic vault and has the heft of an oversize brick. ...
The incredibly hyped Red campaign (promoted on Oprah, and touted by Bono) is not raising enough money to even cover the costs of promoting the campaign. So why run such a campaign rather than just giving the money spent on promotion to AIDS-related charities? Because the real purpose is signaling. The companies involved are more interested in establishing themselves as being socially responsible. The celebrities involved are in on it for the same reason. And the consumers who buy these products would rather signal to the people that they meet that they’re caring souls than to actually use their money most efficiently to save lives. The charity is secondary. ...
Dale Dougherty at O’Reilly asked a number of Internet luminaries whether we’re winning the war on email spam, and if not, how we can win it. I wasn’t asked, probably because I’m not a luminary, but that’s OK, I’m going to give my opinion anyway. To me, there are two struggles against spam. One is the Internet-wide struggle. I think it is more or less lost. Email as we know it today is permanently and irreversibly polluted and the only way to fix it is to start over. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that most of the mail being exchanged is produced by spammers, and exists only to soak up bandwidth and hopefully be filtered out. ...
I was having lunch with a friend last week and he mentioned to me that 40% of Adobe’s new Lightroom product is written in Lua, which I had previously heard of because it’s the language used to write World of Warcraft addons. Lua is a scripting language that was designed to extend applications. It’s interesting to see it suddenly take off. Lightroom project founder Mark Hamburg explains why Adobe selected it: Lua has an appealing balance of simplicity and power. It’s small, fast, and easy to embed. It also has a very straightforward license associated with it. It’s very much like Scheme language I like—but without a syntax likely to make people go running for the hills. So there were a lot of things. ...
David Robinson at Freedom to Tinker makes a profound observation about what the EssJay affair that involved Wikipedia and The New Yorker teaches us. The professional fact checkers at The New Yorker were fooled just as completely by Ryan Jordan as the editors at Wikipedia were. His argument is that The New Yorker still provides value because people at least expect it to be correct, whereas they don’t have that expectation for Wikipedia. I’m not so sure. ...
It doesn’t matter which language you program in, this application of Curly’s law to software development is darn good advice.
Is it just me, or do people seem to think that if they can discredit Al Gore, the climate change discussion will go away?
LWN.net has a fascinating report on who’s contributing code to the Linux kernel. I was most interested in how much of the code is contributed by volunteers and how much was contributed by programmers paid to work on the Linux kernel. Here’s a breakdown: Either way, the results come out about the same: at least 65% of the code which went into 2.6.20 was created by people working for companies. If the entire “unknown” group turns out to be developers working on a volunteer basis - an unlikely result - then just over 1/3 of the 2.6.20 patch stream was written by volunteers. The real number will be lower, but it still shows that a significant portion of the code we run is written by developers who are donating their time. ...