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The Mouse Song

alex — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:51:00 PST

3n0m15:infernoprison:via nynerd.com ahahah

(author unknown) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:07:14 PDT

ahahah

11/09/09 PHD comic: 'Brain saver'

(author unknown) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:51 PST

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com

title: "Brain saver" - originally published 11/9/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Martes

Mauro — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:14:33 PST

11.10.2009

(author unknown) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:00:00 PST

http://1.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksiag9NH2t1qzp1zzo1_500.jpg

(author unknown) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:38:35 PST

Google Dashboard Provides a Top-Down Look at Your Google Use [Google]

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:46:05 PST

Shared by slack
Genial!

Ever wanted to take a step back and look at all the Google apps and data you're hooked into? Google's offering that top-down view with Google Dashboard, a central clearinghouse for app settings, privacy information, and use statistics.

The main value to the average user at the Dashboard, reachable at google.com/dashboard when signed into a Google account, is a peek at all the services you use, the data Google's acquired from you, and quick links to each app's settings. You also get direct links to your Google calendars, your most recent Gmail messages and Google Docs documents, and secondary settings, like changing your personal information in apps that use that data. Those with privacy concerns also get quick links to the policies of every app they're using.

Here's how Google explains their Dashboard in animated video form:

What features would you want to see added to a Google Dashboard? Personally, I'd like to see a single, secure place to suspend or recover passwords from certain accounts, assuming you could log in with stronger-than-normal verification.

Transparency, choice and control - now complete with a Dashboard! [Official Google Blog]

Are You a Cognitive Miser?

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:43:46 PST

Shared by slack
Yo he fallado a la primera XD

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

A) Yes.

B) No.

C) Cannot be determined.

This is from this month’s Scientific American — article unfortunately costs money. It’s about “dysrationalia,” which is what happens when people with nominally high IQ’s end up thinking irrationally. A phenomenon I’m sure we’ve all encountered, especially in certain corners of the blogosphere.

And the answer is the first option. But over 80 percent of people choose the third option. Here’s the solution: the puzzle doesn’t say whether Anne is married or not, but she either is or she isn’t. If Anne is married, she’s looking at George, so the answer is “yes”; if she’s unmarried, Jack is looking at her, so the answer is still “yes.” The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence.

Keepin’ it in the Family

Comixed — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:00:08 PST

Pictures by: dunno source Comic by: dunno source via Comix Builder

#1213903

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:38:12 PST

Today, I received a call saying that my son had been lying in school, and it had reached a point where he needed to be sent outside. I don't have a son. That kid is a good liar. MLIA.

Calatrava en V?

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:22:25 PST

Shared by slack
LOL!

Viendo el primer episodio de la serie de V (que por cierto, está interesante) me he percatado que los aliens tienen una fijación por los edificios de Santiago Calatrava. Esa es la única explicación para que en la “ciudad” alien salga esto:

(Click en la imagen para ampliarla)

¿Soy el único que ve 2 veces el hemisferic y otras 2 veces el museo pricipe felipe? No estoy loco ¿ verdad?

Posts relacionados:

Usos del limón Hay que ser animal (Click en la imagen para ampliarla)...
El SETI por fin recibe una señal Click en la imagen para ver el resto del comic...
WoW! El mundo de World of Warcraft está lleno de peligros…...

Useful aliases

slack — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:33:40 PST

alias top = htop

Htop is a top replacement, with colors, per-cpu load indicators, scrolling (specially horizontal scrolling so you can see the whole command line for each process), searching, a nicer interface to kill/renice processes, mouse support, and the ability to call strace/ltrace/lsof easily on the process you want.

alias info = pinfo
alias man  = pinfo -m

Pinfo is a lynx-style info and man browser. The main reason to use this, IMHO, is that GNU Info simply sucks as a browser. I’m not so sure about replacing man, as I’m confortable with less-style keybindings, but the ability to follow links to related manpages is a great feature :D

Both are included in all popular distros, so installation is only a matter of looking for the packages in the distro repositories.

Introducing Slashedit.com

(author unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:57:48 PST

Shared by slack
Interesante proyecto :D

What’s the big deal? Wikipedia have years with editable content!

Instead of Wikipedia and other websites with editable content, in Slashedit you’re not just available to edit the content; i mean, you can edit the source code! Totally edition freedom.

Welcome to the Web 3.0 guys!

First of all, you need know a few html tags, you can type in your browser http://slashedit.com/anything/edit and you will be creating your http://slashedit.com/anything page. Wow, are you serious? Yeap, that’s it. No login, no email and password, no username, just slashedit.

So, Who owns this page?!

Me! And You! And anyone that see or edit this website.

Spread the word!

Press: Let’s make something that rulz everyone together:

Feel free to use the logo or banners in your website

A web project by Roman Cortes with a hand from Elias Sierra

CodeSOD: Slightly OverSQL'd

Alex Papadimoulis — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:00:00 PST

"A certain coworker of mine likes to do everything in SQL," Christoffer Hoel writes, "and I mean everything."

"Of course, since our management is non-technical, there's very little any of us can do aside from just toletarting the code. After all, his code runs about the same as ours... and that's all that matters, right?"

// Check if date is valid!
String allowed = "not allowed";

sql = "SELECT IF(DATE(?) <= DATE(?),'allowed','not allowed')";
stmt = con.prepareStatement(sql);
stmt.setString(1, firstDate);
stmt.setString(2, terminationDate);
rs = stmt.executeQuery();

while(rs.next()){
    allowed = rs.getString(1);
}
rs.close();
stmt.close();

if(!allowed.equalsIgnoreCase("allowed")){
    throw new Exception("Termination Date to early!");
}

Powers of Ten

Ray — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:46:20 PST

The #1 joke made against the NintendoDS i XL is that it’s way too big, so it was very important that we do the joke with a unique twist. Thankfully, Jon Watts helped lend me a hand with this idea while Tim was preoccupied. For those who have never seen “Powers of Ten” – here’s the link, which I highly recommend viewing.

Share!

Instrumentube: Play instruments on YouTube

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:03:00 PST

Want to rock out, but forget to bring your instrument? Then you might want to check out Instrumentube, a collection of YouTube-based instruments that you play by dragging the video time slider to match up to the correct note. I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to play music, but it is a pretty funny hack.

[Thanks, Jacob!]

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Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell

Michael Arrington — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:10:23 PDT

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.

Left alone, the system really will slide into a full blown disaster. The platforms (Facebook and MySpace) are in a position to regulate this, and even have rules prohibiting some scams. But those rules are routinely ignored by developers, and are rarely enforced by Facebook and MySpace.

There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves.

Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule? It was a surge in this kind of advertising. The money looks clean – it’s from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and others. But a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another.

And recent moves by Facebook to shut down application spam only make the problem worse in some way – game developers have to spend more money on advertisers to get users now that the viral channels are shut down. That means the games have to monetize even better. Which means more scams.

It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in.

There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” A few examples are below.

Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself:

An Industry In Denial

Yesterday I attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In the Q&A session of one panel I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla to explain the ethics of her business, and outlined my ecosystem of hell argument above. Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “shit, doubleshit, and bullshit” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points. A video of the exchange is below, care of Alexa Lee.

Offerpal now has a blog post up on the exchange, but they still don’t address the issues. They offer misdirection, denials and a shield of rules that are never actually enforced.

Sadly, most of the audience of game developers was on Offerpal’s side. Many of these developers see quick dollars with lead gen scams and they don’t really care about how users are affected.

In one session earlier in the day, IGG Cofounder Kevin Xu recommended that game developers “get users in the door to play free, then monetize the hell out of them once they’re hooked.” Sadly, it’s simply human nature to push the rules until they break. It’s time for Facebook and MySpace to protect their users from this stuff and make sure it stops.

p.s. – An interesting development. Offerpal defended their mobile survey scams on stage and in the blog post referenced above, saying there was no scam involved. But today those offers have quietly been pulled down from all the games I’ve checked. If there’s no scam, why remove them? At least some good is coming from my ongoing rants.

Update: Two Companies That Said No To Social Media Scams

Update 2: How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession

Update 3: Scamville: Zynga Says 1/3 Of Revenue Comes From Lead Gen And Other Offers

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Low Resolution

Phillip Torrone — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:11:04 PST

Add this one to clever makeup-based Halloween costumes.. "Low Resolution"...

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

Improved arm mounted flame thrower

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:44:28 PST

Shared by slack
No sé para qué lo usaría, pero necesito uno de estos XD

[Everett] is at it again with Prometheus, an arm mounted flame thrower.This is the third generation of the project and makes some huge advances over the second generation we saw last year. We’d say he’s reached cinema/stage-performance quality with his design.

The self-contained system is completely arm mounted with a fuel reservoir mounting behind the elbow. The new version adds an adjustable flow valve actuated by a servo motor to regulate the flame size. An arc generator has been incorporated to replace the lighter from the last version. A microcontroller measures wrist angle and takes care of creating the arc and regulating the fuel supply.

Prometheus is small, controllable, and frightening. See a full demonstration as well as some video of the prototyping process after the break. Does this make you wonder how much burn cream [Evertt's] needed over the years?

Extended demonstration video.

Build log video.

Function as Beauty

(author unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:00:01 PST

Researchers tell us that we find other humans beautiful when those hotties appear as if they could produce healthy offspring. In other words, our minds translate the perception of species survival utility into the perception of beauty. I wonder if survival utility is the ONLY thing we find beautiful about our world, but we don't realize it.

If you're a guy, you know the joy of walking through a hardware store and seeing all of the well-made tools. To me, a good power drill looks like art. It's literally beautiful. And of course tools have survival utility. So far, my hypothesis holds.

Little kids are drawn to playing with toy trucks and toy bulldozers. Kids wouldn't describe those toys as beautiful, but those items must be visually attractive in their own way. Obviously construction equipment represents tools that are highly useful, and help humans survive. Even toddlers realize it.

Speaking of toddlers, adults find babies to be attractive almost automatically, without regard to what the little creatures look like. Clearly the adult response to babies has survival utility.

There are plenty of areas open for interpretation under this hypothesis. For example, a parking lot is arguably more useful than a forest, depending on the context, but the forest registers as being more beautiful. Perhaps that is because we're not that far evolved from hunters and gatherers, for whom a forest means survival and a parking lot means no food.

In general, scenery that has a lot of variety in color and shapes looks more beautiful than something with less variety. That makes sense from a survival standpoint too, since eating a variety of foods is healthier than eating just one type. And it would be easier to hide in an environment with more variety. Variety seems highly correlated with basic survival.

I thought a lot about beauty as function during the design of our new house. At every step, it seemed as if we had to choose between function and some "standard" sense of beauty. In time, I came to see this as a false choice. The most functional choices register as beauty when you put them all together.

The best example of that idea, which I have mentioned before, is the formal living room. In a traditional home, the formal living room is somewhere near the front door, and it has no function but to look beautiful. To me this sort of room always looks hideous no matter how well the drapes match the furniture, because the space has no utility. In my view, beauty is a garage with some extra space on one end for a ping pong table. I might be stretching the "survival" concept to include recreation, but there's no point in surviving if you're going to be unhappy.

Another example of beauty as function is the layout of our ground floor. It has a circular flow, so you can head down the hallway, turn right twice, and end up where you started. You can never be cornered. The feeling you get in the space is one of beauty, but it probably stems from some sort of survival instinct. And you get that feeling before the paint, baseboards, furniture, floors, or drapes are in place. The beauty seems to come directly from some primal sense of how the space flows. At least that's how it feels to me.

When you coordinate colors, for your outfit or your living space, you try to avoid introducing a color that doesn't match at least one other color that is already there. To do otherwise makes the outcome less beautiful. Here again, I think the survival instinct is informing our sense of beauty. As an early humanoid, I would think that any time a color appeared in your view that was inconsistent with the surroundings, that meant something was wrong, and perhaps dangerous.

That's my hypothesis: Beauty is nothing more than our recognition of functions that are related to current or past survival.

Okay, I'm sure other people have the same theory. But I'm the first one to write about it in The Dilbert Blog.