snowdeal.org

“Total Recall works by tracking your browsing session in a file saved on your local hard drive. When you restart Mozilla after a browser crash (or even an operating system crash), the windows that were open before the crash will be displayed to you in a pulldown menu that will allow you to return to one or all of the pages you were viewing.”

“A generation ago the kind of students who entered science fairs were considered nerds — preternaturally bright kids whose ardent intellects, moire-patterned wardrobes and clueless social instincts put them outside the adolescent mainstream. Geeks still roam the halls of American high schools — and of Midwood, for that matter — but many of Midwood’s Intel kids move comfortably in the newly respectable mainstream, where being scientifically astute has a certain cachet. They inhabit an area of cultural endeavor that — coming a quarter-century after the birth of biotechnology and personal computers and, yes, the rise of Nasdaq — is now seen not only as intellectually precocious but also, suddenly, improbably, as positioned in a fast lane pointed toward wealth, creature comforts and the freedom to choose what to make of one’s life. ”

“The key to interacting with your geek is to learn to speak his or her language, she explains — defining personal improvements as “upgrades” and bad habits as “nonproductive feedback loops.” It’s simply a matter of using the right encouragement. Don’t tell him he needs to get some exercise and lose some weight; tell him that he will be better prepared for all-night Doom marathons if he is in better physical shape. It’s all about becoming more “efficient.””

“…many musicians have discovered, as the Grateful Dead did, that the best way to make money from music is to give it away. While scarcity may increase the value of physical goods, such as CD’s, the opposite applies to information. In a dematerialized information economy, there is an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value. If your work is good, allowing what you’ve done to self-replicate freely increases demand for what you haven’t done yet, whether by live performances or by charging online for the download of new work.

For these, and far more reasons than I can state here, I’m convinced that the traditional music business is finished. Napster and other environments like it will polish off the likes of BMG and Tower Records within five years.”

“…the Volvo S40 ad campaign’s use of the Minutemen’s “Love Dance” seems designed to impress only those who already have the record. Unlike other Minutemen songs, “Love Dance” — an instrumental ­- is lovely enough to pass for a jingle. The shock comes exclusively from the seeing it embedded in such a strange context. Aggressively independent (they recorded exclusively for Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST label), and unapologetically leftist (bassist Mike Watt does a wicked Castro impersonation), the band’s oeuvre consists largely of pointed anti-capitalist anthems: “Let the products sell themselves/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology” they sing elsewhere on the record from which “Love Dance” was plucked.”

“Imagine a network of a million hosts (a small subset of all webservers). Each of these is running a gnutella-based search-engine. On one of the servers is an interface to search the network for some information. The query is forwarded onto the overlay network, to say 10 nodes at each node, assuming some mechanism is in place to avoid loops. if the network is well interconnected, it will take about 5-6 hops to reach an edge of the cloud (probably a couple of times more to reach all the nodes). As
soon as the first nodes get the search-request, they send back results, say limited to the first 5-10 most significant hits. Each reply has a number of tuples consisting of (URLs, a description and an indication of how close the match is and a timestamp and probably some more), maybe 1-2 kB per reply. Say 10% of servers have a match, then 100000 hosts will at some point send back results.

I calculate, roughly a 100 MB of results will be arriving at the searching node within a few minutes, if it can process the dataflow.

This is only one search, both the searching nodes and the servers will have to deal with a lot of searches if you look at other search-engines as a comparison. ”

“…most importantly, it sucks bandwidth. I can easily see how network admins will want to outlaw this beast, if they can. For my evening of experimentation, I downloaded a total of 65 MBytes of files, while my total incoming consumed bandwidth was 365 MBytes, and my upstream bandwidth was 755 MBytes. Yes, really — all that, in a measly five hours.”