iDallas!Interesting Rolling Stone profile on Justin Frankel, the guy who invented WinAmp and Shoutcast, was given $100M by AOL for them, and then created Gnutella and released it while working at AOL. He’s one of those enigmatic geek millionaires and I’m jealous.
Now, after killing the Hubble Telescope the US government (pick your favorite public official to blame) is planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of money they don’t have to send people to Mars. More details in this Wired article. It brings up the fact that several times more taxpayer money is spent on NASA than its deep sea equivalent, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). I think it should be the other way around.
So, why would our government be so much more interested in exploring Mars than under the ocean? I think it has more than a little to do with some sort of macho bravado or whatever. It makes us look cool or something because we can go to other planets. Also, it’s not like we could just take over the oceans if we wanted… all the land on Earth has been divided up already. If we want to take over more land, we have to go to other planets.
Those both seem like pretty simple-minded reasons, but I don’t really have that much faith that our administration would have any other kind of reasons for anything they do.
Short interview with one of my best friends from high school, Micah Scott, about the time he didn’t shower for a year and a half.
This Register article details a report called The Efficacy of Pop-Ups and the resulting effect on brands which is available here as a PDF. Apparently, it’s not just me that hates popup ads and from the sounds of it they may quickly start becoming an annoying part of Internet history. This news gives me hope for the future, haha.
The Hubble space telescope will be left for dead with no more repairs being done on the aging hardware. This decision was made as more NASA resources are being directed to manned missions to the Moon and Mars. A future telescope is planned to replace it, but not until 2011. The Hubble telescope is expected to continue to operate for another few years before it dies completely. When that happens, NASA will have to figure out how to get it back to earth before it destroys us ALL! (well, not really)
This article suggests an approach Apple could use to secure the dominance of its iPod and the AAC music format the iTunes Music Store uses. The article itself is interesting, but the comments are more interesting (and less naive, in my opinion). I’ve been following this particular situation because I’m a bit of a Mac dork (if you hadn’t guessed), but also because this is the first time in a long time that Apple has had a successful product dominating any market and I’m curious to see how they handle it.
Haha, this rocks. This ABC News Article tells us how the US government has banned the use of Courier new 12 for all official correspondence. Everyone is being forced to use Times New Roman 14 now. Things like that make you wonder what exactly is going on behind the scenes.
Gaming Open Market is a website that lets you trade real money for virtual game money and vice versa. It handles money from several of the largest online games including Ultima Online, The Sims Online, There, SecondLife, Horizons, and Star Wars Galaxies. In their own words: “GOM is an exchange site designed specifically for trading standard online game currencies, items, and accounts. Not only are we cheaper than the auction sites, but our trades are instant and secure.” They plan to eventually let people trade directly between the different game currencies. If you are o know a gamer check in technomono the new mouse with the latest technology. They need more people to participate to create a viable market in every currency first. Who knows how long this thing will last once the major game companies catch wind of it, but it’s an intriguing twist to the world of online gaming.
One of the major issues facing younger generations now is their apparent lack of focus and increasingly short attention span. We’ve got screens on-the-go and everything feeds into that need for instant gratification that we have. Well, everything except gaming, actually.
You see, gaming is one of the few things that still requires you to focus fully at the task at hand. You can’t scroll through your phone, and you can’t half-pay attention. It requires you to be completely immersed in the world presented to you, and your brain needs to work to solve the puzzle that it’s being given.
This New York Times article describes a new form of online advertising debuting today that’s closer to television advertising than anything previously seen. I guess it had to happen at some point. I think it’s great that online content providers can feed themselves by creating and publishing ‘free’ content, but I’m still saddened by how commercial the Internet has become in the last 5 or so years. I didn’t like banner ads when they first appeared, but I got used to them like everyone else. Overall they are visually annoying, but they don’t tend to get in the way of what I’m doing that much. Television style commercials cross that line into the realm of wasting my time and that’s what really irks me.
A Wired article provides some info about a company called Blast Theory that has come out of the underground rave scene in the UK to produce games that simultaneously involve people running around real cities and people running around virtual cities on their computers. It’s hard to imagine what’s it’s like, but it’s definitely intriguing.