Month: March 2007

McCain Pranked

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site. Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement: Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between 2 passionate females.

heh. such an easy target.

Mindmap standard?

Eric Blue has A Call To Action: The Need For A Common Mind Map File Format. He provides some very good reasons for such a format, in particular the ability to share mindmaps on the web. Before going any further, I should say I take sharing things on the web as meaning with deep, granular access to the data/content, not just placing an opaque blob file on a server. Before getting to the format, there’s an underlying problem that may be harder. There isn’t as yet a sharable model of what a mindmap is.

maybe one day. mindmaps have been a long time coming but are still nowhere

AOL Powerpoint paralysis

Ever wonder precisely why big companies such as AOL are so painfully sluggish? Here’s an insight from AOL. The company engaged a top-tier naming agency, evaluated 120 different options, tested the finalists with focus groups in Denver and Chicago, checked on the meaning in 16 languages — and the brand strategy group explained its process in a laughably belabored 20-slide presentation.

heh. i bet that company in sunnyvale is pretty much the same

Trailer Park Showdown

Sun, which has its Blackbox containerized data center out on tour, is suddenly facing some tough competition in the burgeoning trailer park computing market. Rackable Systems is rolling out a copycat product called Concentro that may just outdo the original. Besides sporting a most excellent name – if Flash Gordon had a computer, it would be called Concentro – Rackable’s portable data center comes in a 12m shipping container, making Sun’s 6m model look downright wimpy, and it can be packed with 9600 processing cores or 3.5 petabytes of storage. Best of all is the interior. Check it out:

another “cluster in a container”. see also, microsoft is stealing a page from the sun playbook.

Micropayments Pipe Dream

I think that Google needs to nurture the paid information ecology and find a way to support the creators in what they do. They don’t need to abandon the free ecology or even favor the paid over the free. But the world will be a richer place if more people are given several ways to fund the shoe leather it takes to create content.

oy, micropayments as a solution for the death of newspapers? what is this, the 90s?