Category: technology
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Breaking Past the Uncanny Valley
The company who produce the animation for Grand Theft Auto, Image Metrics, claim to have create photo-realistic animations that break through the ‘uncanny valley‘ barrier. The Times is a believer, giving us a sample video and stating that IM’s lifelike animation heralds a new era for computer games. “Ninety per cent of the work is…
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First Song Downloads. Now Organic Chemistry
The rise of university textbook piracy: the scourge of the textbook publisher, a blessing for students. All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere. Compared with…
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Social Engineering 101
Kevin Mitnick and Emmanuel Goldstein are undoubtedly the most widely known names in the black hat community*. In a series of videos from CNET News, they describe and demonstrate social engineering techniques. On the same subject, this video demonstrating how easy it is to social engineer you way into clubs by pretending you’re the DJ…
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Code: Quantity vs. Quality
Coding Horror on coding quantity vs. quality. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories. […] Stop theorizing. Write…
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The Shutdown of MathWorld and the Fall of Publishing
MathWorld—a division of Wolfram Research, the creators of Mathematica—was temporarily shutdown in late 2000 due to a copyright dispute over a book based on the website. Eric Weisstein’s commentary on the shutdown reveals a lot not just about being on the receiving side of an unfounded lawsuit, but also about publishing and its apparent change…
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Facebook + Google = FriendRank
News of Google’s newest advertising venture: In its just-published patent application for Network Node Ad Targeting, Google hatches plans for identifying the most influential of a circle of friends and providing this ‘influencer’ with ‘financial incentives from advertisers in exchange for permission to display advertisements on the member’s [social network] profile’. Doing so will ‘provide…
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Usability Tips for Your Website/Blog
Tom of I’d Rather Be Writing—the ‘technical communication’ blog—has just written-up twenty usability tips for your blog. I’ve been doing research on what distinguishes good blogs from poor ones, especially by reading “lessons learned” posts by bloggers. I’ve come up with 20 principles I think are worthwhile. Encourage comments Include an About page Keep posts…
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Whip Your MP3 Library into Shape
10 years ago I made the decision to shy away from using ID3 tags with my MP3s; at the time they were new, cumbersome, and not really that useful if you already implemented good file-naming conventions. Then my library grew. A year ago I realised that my archaic way of thinking was getting in the…
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Startup Ideas Y Combinator Would Like to Fund
A list of startup ideas Y Combinator would like to fund: A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom Simplified browsing More variants of CRM Web Office apps Online learning Tools for measurement A form of search that depends on design New payment methods A web-based Excel/database hybrid A buffer against…