Newmark's Door

"50 Best Websites 2008"

As judged by Time magazine. Ten each in the categories "Advice & Facts", "Information & Gossip", "Handy Tools", "Fun & Games", and "Hobbies & Interests".

Just as dependable as death and taxes

Whenever AMD has a couple of bad quarters, they accuse Intel of antitrust violations (NY Times, last month).

Liebowitz v. OGS makes the Chronicle of Higher Education

The fine report by David Glenn is here. Note the ad hominem attack on Liebowitz:

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, Mr. Strumpf defends his work and suggests that Mr. Liebowitz's zeal stems from the fact that an academic center he directs, the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation, receives grants from the Recording Industry Association of America and other commercial interests. "One might ask why Professor Liebowitz has remained so engrossed with our study," he writes.

Or, maybe he's just upset that a 40+-page lead article in one of the profression's top journals has serious errors.

A reminder of an amazing fact

Popular Mechanics:

In 1980, IBM released the first 1 gigabyte hard drive. The storage device, which was larger than a coffin and weighed more than 500 pounds, held less data than a typical USB flash drive does today. The price tag: $40,000.

(About $105,000 in today's dollars.)

Current price: about $.20 per gigabyte.

And Seagate has just announced a 1.5 terabyte drive, "the largest jump in capacity in hard-drive history."

Bill Gates has left the building . . .

Engadget looks back at his "top ten greatest hits and misses".

And a cool updating of the famous 1978 Microsoft-11 picture.

Firefox trick

"How to stop websites from resizing your browser window in Firefox".

(Via John Palmer.)

Draft statement of Newmark's Second Law

"Any extremely successful company, any company that creates enormous, almost incalculable, social surplus, will be bitterly opposed by some people, and those people's opposition will end up with governmental action."

Case in point: Google. Here's the Boston Globe, reporting on people who are

. . .  developing strategies to push back against Google, dilute its growing dominance of the information sphere, and make it more publicly accountable.

"Publicly accountable": as Jerry Seinfeld might snap, "Oh yeah, I like that idea."

New Liebowitz paper available on file-sharing

This is my fourth post on Stan Liebowitz versus Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf , but the dispute is quite important and deserves wide examination. Stan's new paper is available at SSRN. Here's the abstract:

Through a stroke of luck, a referee report in the review process at the JPE has been positively identified as the Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf (O/S) response to my earlier comment. Regardless of the response's provenance, what counts is whether it solidly refuted my comment. This 'sequel' analyzes the O/S response. The O/S response only deals with four of the nine points discussed in my comment, leaving the five remaining critiques unchallenged. The conclusion of my review is that the O/S response fails as a defense of these four points and contains many of the same types of errors that marred their original paper. This sequel also discusses the history of this dispute including O/S' various reasons for not making their data available. Finally, this sequel provides full documentation on the JPE's decision not to publish the comment.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

This article has received plenty of Web-buzz, and I should have commented on it already, but . . .

Its thesis is as follows:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The thesis is supported by a handful of anecdotes--it used to be easy for him to immerse himself in a book or lengthy article, now it's not--one academic study, and some airy theorizing.

The culprit, as the title indicates, is the Net generally, and Google specifically.

Fortunately for the author, we here at the Door's Center for Study of Half-Baked Highbrow Theories for Why Life Stinks Now have examined his story, and we are pleased to offer two alternate hypotheses (below the fold).

Now THIS is marketing

Dell is supposedly offering "Windows Vista Bonus".

What is "Windows Vista Bonus"?

It is  Windows XP (with a Vista license so the buyer can upgrade "when ready".)

Google and the DOJ

As I've written before, Google's success, size, and visibility mean that it's just a matter of time before it attracts antitrust interest. Here's another indication that I will be right.

A little bit of Google's secret sauce

"The inner workings of Google just became a little less secret."

Does the Internet "end in 2012"?

These folks think it might.

I don't believe it, but I'm giving y'all a heads-up just in case.

(This New York Times article is less apocalyptic, but points in the same direction. One question: what has happened to all that dark fiber that used to be talked about?)

Good luck with this

"Dubbing itself  'pioneers of visual search technology', Vuestar Technologies said it owns the patent to the technology that enables 'Internet searching via visual images'.

"In sum, the company implied that any Web site that uses pictures and graphics to link to another site or Web page will need a license from Vuestar." 

Score another one for Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, a multi-talented fellow--and whose speech "The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming" is underappreciated--predicted in 1993 that the mass media were headed for extinction. Slate says he was, albeit a bit early, mostly right.

Help for Internet Explorer

If you use Internet Explorer to browse the Web, I recommend IE7Pro. (I've tried Firefox and Opera and I use them occasionally, but I still like IE.)

IE crashed a bunch on my machine. I reinstalled and updated it, and reinstalled Flash, which seemed to be causing most of the problems, and I have had fewer problems.

But I still get the occasional crash which, needless to say, is annoying when there are a bunch of tabs open. IE7Pro, among other features, gives IE a Firefox-like ability to restore your open tabs after a crash.

Three on Google

Paul Graham: "Why There Aren't More Googles".

Jim Stroud: "5 reasons to work for Google and 5 reasons to leave".

Digital Hobbit: "On Leaving Google".

I've heard this before

Nolan Bushnell says a new encryption chip will "absolutely stop piracy of [PC] gameplay."

I wouldn't bet a plugged nickel on that.

Universal Music goes crazy

"This saga is why Big 5 Music Label executives are among the most hated businessmen in America.  Last June, Universal Music Group sued to have a video clip of a 13-month old toddler dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” removed from YouTube. Universal argued that the author – the child’s mother, Stephanie Lenz – violated the copyright of the song, which plays in the background of the video.

"At first YouTube complied, but Lenz argued back, saying that the song was an obvious case of fair use. YouTube agreed and re-posted the song. This is when the story gets fun."

Universal should heed a gentleman quoted by the New York Times: "You subjugate these rebels [pirates] with the tools of free enterprise. Piracy is just another business model, and the pirates will lose and go away when you come up with a better model."

Cables

I wouldn't know, but his article claims "Gadgetry's Golden Rule" is "Buy the cheap cables".

SugarSync

I haven't tried this, but it sounds useful: "Synching Just Became a Cinch".

Thin is in

"Meet the laptop you'll use in 2015".

This to that

YouConvertIt: "Free Online Media File Conversion".

More Microsoft woes?

I've decided not to install SP3 on my home machine. My reason is simply that I'm quite happy with fully-updated SP2 and from what I understand, SP3 offers no significant--or even minor--advantages for my non-networked home machine.

But if I have any doubts, reading this will keep me from updating.

(I know it's only a handful of stories, and given the probably huge number of people who installed the update, it's no surprise at all that there are a few "horror stories". But still: given an approximately zero marginal benefit, any marginal cost at all dictates not installing.)

Oops, apparently more than a "handful". And still more.

Final note: if you've had the problem, or know somebody who has, the information on this blog seems to be helping people.

Phishing goes upscale

New York Times (4/16): "Larger Prey Are Targets of Phishing".

As Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues, "Hey, let's be careful out there."

"10 Ways the Internet (as we know it) will die"

#8 is "The lawyers get involved."

Uncertain about freeware--look here

I have found the information in "The 46 Best-Ever Freeware Utilities" useful. And, as it says, it's undated updated frequently.

(Reminder to link from reader and blogger Michael Greenspan.)

Recovering a hard drive

When you absolutely, positively have to recover data from a wrecked hard drive, you can try DriverSavers. This is a brief look at them. (Their price varies with the size of the job and the deadline. Minimum price: $1000.)

"Cool Websites and Tools (edition #120)"

Charts, logos, and more.

Prediction that Microsoft Vista will go quietly

TechRepublic columnist argues--I think persuasively--that Microsoft will ". . . use smoke and mirrors to conjure up an early release of Windows 7, the next edition of the world’s most widely-used operating system. Then they will quietly and unofficially allow IT departments to migrate straight from Windows XP to Windows 7."

He says this move would echo Microsoft's recovery from the Windows ME/Windows 2000 debacle, and would aggressively address their current problem.

He says it will be around the end of 2009.

As Tricky Dick would have said, "You won't have Vista to kick around any more."

"Tilton's Law"

Solve the first problem.

Software is the same. This stuff is hard enough to get right when things are working nominally, but once they go wrong we no longer have a system that even should work.

Challenges

Interesting: "The 14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century".

"Making the World a Billion Times Better"

Feeling a bit gloomy? Pessimistic? Believe all the junk that our Democratic friends are saying? Read Roy Kurzweil's predictions of what's coming. If he's even half right, it will be amazing.

(And if you think Kurzweil's scenario--in which solar power replaces the oil that is "running out"--is fantasy, guess again. Similar things have happened several times before. I strongly recommend a great little book by economists Charles Maurice and Charles Smithson, The Doomsday Myth.)

Note that Mr. Kurzweil cured his high cholesterol and his incipient diabetes. He's now taking 180 pills a day, trying to live long enough to see the marvelous future he predicts. You might also want to look at his "A Short Guide to a Long Life".

Old technologies

Interesting New York Times article, "Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking". In some instances, older technologies don't "die". Radio was supposed to kill records/tapes/CDs, TV was supposed to replace movies, and PCs were supposed to eliminate mainframes.

But things haven't worked out that way.

For the extra cautious . . .

"Are Your Sure Your EMail Isn't Being Hacked?"

From GE

Need an online whiteboard? GE provides one.

The coming standards war over IE8

The always-interesting Joel Spolsky writes about the continuing war between the "pragmatists" and the "idealists" at Microsoft:

The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”

On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!” 

The rule is, there are no rules

"How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong".

Two on spam

The "king of spam" is facing a 26-year prison sentence. Good! His punishment should be, each day for 20 years, he has to read 10,000 e-mails looking for one important message among the 9999 spams.

Let's hope they stop these folks, too: "40% of all spam comes from just one source".

A useful article . . .

. . . at least for a layperson like me: "How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques". 

More articles about Vista being a big mistake

"10 Things I Warned Microsoft About Windows Vista".

"Death Match: Windows Vista Versus XP".

"They Criticized Vista. And They Should Know". (The embarrasing e-mails story from the NY Times, 3/9.)

And, while not totally on point, food for thought: "50 Reasons to Switch from Microsoft Windows to Apple's Mac OS X".

Learn programming

"Learn Programming Online, For free: 75+ Open Courseware Collections From the Ivy League and Beyond".

PC exorcist

Interesting story about a man who needed help with his almost-new PC. Two points were of particular interest.

1. The problem apparently was connected with installing Symantic's Norton Anti-Virus. I've had problems on two consecutive new PCs installing Norton programs.

2. The tech who finally repaired the PC told the owner that he would have been much better off if he hadn't had Vista and had had XP instead. 

Vista cracked

At least as of last week, Microsoft Vista has apparently been successfully cracked.

Update: thanks to a comment by CPM (below), I now know that the article I'm linking to is dated 2007, not 2008. I apologize.

Best (Canadian) tech support story. Ever.

A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.

Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…

Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?

Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.

Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.

Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?

Caller: Yes, I sure do.

Agent: OK, now press Control-A.

Caller: I am, but nothing happens.

Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?

Caller: No, there’s no change at all.

Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.

Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?

Above-average PowerPoint tips

Featuring these two:

PowerPoint does best what it was first created to do: Charts and Graphs.

But PowerPoint is not synonymous with presenting or teaching, with visual aids or even with a computer projector. An effective presenter must be familiar with, as Aristotle put it 2500 years ago, “all the available means of persuasion.” (Rhetoric,  1355b, 25)

"The Billion Dollar Line of Javascript"

Supposedly, "A large number of users don’t understand the difference between a search engine and the Internet and are unaware of the difference between typing a url or search query in the address bar compared to the search box on Google."

Can this be true?

Coming soon: personal check scanning

"Soon you will be able to deposit checks by scanning them at home and sending them electronically to your bank. No need to visit a branch or even an ATM."

Country tech usage ranking

"The United States, Sweden and Japan topped a new ranking that measures how well countries use telecommunications technologies -- networks, cell phones and computers -- to boost their social and economic prosperity." 

Web resources for professors and students

"Software Essentials for the Modern Educator". Big list. Everything faculty need except for things to prepare lectures, write papers, and tolerate committee meetings.

"Free and Open Source Software". Another big list, and not just for education.

"Forget Excel: 14 Online Spreadsheet Applications".

"25 Awesome Beta Research Tools From Libraries Around the World".

"The Ultimate Student Resource List". Applications, tools, websites, advice, and research resources.

OttoBib. Automatic online bibliography generator--for books only--in MLA, APA, Chicago, and BibTeX styles.

NoteMesh. "NoteMesh is a free service that allows college students in the same classes to share notes with each other. It works by creating a wiki for individual classes that users can edit."

"100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World".

"The Best Free Alternatives to Nero CD/DVD Burner".

Moore's Law not dead yet

Robert X. Cringley argues that Moore's Law has at least another 15 years.

A million lines of code

How big is a million lines of code? Answers.

Let XP live!

This is unsurprising: there's now a movement to save XP.

U.S. falling behind the U.K.?

It's one thing for South Korea and Japan to have cheaper, more available high-speed Net access. But now the U.K. is poised to roll out 100 Mbps residential broadband.

Let's go, U.S.A. I want that.

Web/tech tools

Four Web/tech tools:

"Online Media Conversions".

"6 Online Tools for Text to Speech".

"Free PDF to Word Converter".

"Free startup and hijack analyzer".

Another bonus from the Net

Kinda obvious but still interesting: the Net is good for introverts.

How to Go Back to XP

I keep trying not to post more "Vista stinks" articles. But this one has some practical advice: "Life After Vista: Going Back to XP".

The new "prime time"

Guess what office workers are starting to do during lunch time.

What's the Drudge Report worth?

Applying three different methods, the estimate is $10 to $20 million.

Is the end coming for Moore's Law?

Once again, we hear that Moore's Law may soon be over. I don't believe it this time, either.

The iPhone as agent of change, and the true leader for "change"

Interesting article on how the iPhone has upset the cellphone industry. An example of Newmark's draft definition of "entry barrier": An entry barrier is something that someone with a good idea, some guts, and a bit of money can destroy.

Nicely complemented by this Mark Steyn piece. You've already heard that this year's election is all about "change". Mr. Steyn examines what the true agent of change is. Hint: it starts with "cap" and ends with "ism".

Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government "change" just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who formerly resided in Massachusetts.

Microsoft has been better

"The Trouble With Microsoft". A recounting of some of Microsoft's recent mistakes.

In the end, we have to ask ourselves. Did Microsoft release Vista only to show us what an excellent example of software craftsmanship Windows XP is?

End of the best of 2007

Last--for me--of the "Best of 2007" lists:

"The 70 Best Lifehacks of 2007".

"Top Web Apps & Sites of 2007".

"Best of What's New '07" (Popular Science), including an "infinitely geared bike".

Computer Science texts and "all questions answered"

"Classical Computer Science Texts". Several dozen, all online, free.

I was intrigued by the title of a Donald Knuth piece, "All Questions Answered". Here's the opening:

In every class that I taught at Stanford, the last day was devoted to “all questions answered”. The students didn’t have to come to class if they didn’t want to, but if they did, they could ask any question on any subject except religion or politics or the final exam. I got the idea from Richard Feynman, who did the same thing in his classes at Caltech, and it was always interesting to see what the students really wanted to know.

Interesting. I've actually tried a small-scale version of this. On a few occasions when I've been really tired and I note the students look tired, too, I've started class by asking "So, what do you want to talk about today?"

The result is usually stunned silence, even after I repeat the question and add that I really am willing to consider other topics for ten or fifteen minutes or so.

But one time I got some interesting questions.

I haven't used either of these devices, but they sound interesting.

The Fly Fusion is a writing device which--when used with special paper--will supposedly let you digitize handwritten notes.

The Livescribe smartpen supposedly "syncs audio with whatever you write".

The main thing I want my student readers to know, however, is you should take good notes of some kind. (But for my undergraduates, this advice seems to fall on deaf ears.)

"New Nanowire Battery Holds 10 Times The Charge Of Existing Ones". Sounds like excellent news.

(Link via my former student, Jenny Coston.)

This is funny: a Windows error "may rip time-space continuum, destroy reality".

What we in economics call an identification question: is it good news or bad news that the Microsoft Vista piracy rate is half of XP's?

"10 Hot Computer Driven Careers".

Envrionmental simulation developer?

We knew it: "Yes, Google Is Trying To Take Over the World".

P2P file sharing continues to suck down increasing amounts of bandwidth.

On the off chance that some of my readers may once have used an Atari ST, here's a bit of interesting news: there's now a quite-good ST emulator, called Steem, for Windows and Linux.

"53 essential freeware programs that can take care of the majority of your computing needs".

"Amazing XP Tools to Arm your PC from Hackers".

". . . an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes."

Good for at least one grin or two.

Several people, including my wife, have reported that Gmail does a wonderful job in screening out spam. I even read somewhere of a person who forwards all his e-mail to a Gmail address and then forwards it again to the e-mail package he wants to use, just because Gmail is so effective at stopping spam.

Here's a graph and short article that claims Gmail is letting less than 1% of spam through.

So I'm typing merrily along in Microsoft Word the other day when suddenly a huge e-mail toolbar appears on the page.

I don't want it there.

I try various things in "Customize" and "Options", but I can't get rid of the damn thing.

Then I remember that the Net + Google = Wonderfulness. And so it was: "Microsoft Word: Removing the E-Mail Toolbar".

"A Choice List of Productive Free Windows Applications". I've used Audacity and liked it, and a couple of the others look interesting.

The U.K.'s Guardian declares on 10/21 that  "a perfect Storm is gathering": the Storm worm has the potential to "wreak havoc" on the Net.

PC World, also on 10/21, writes that the Storm worm is now "just a squall" and that its "days may be numbered".

And people knock economists because we "can't agree"?!

The Wall Street Journal's distinguished columnist, Walter S. Mossberg, is among the latest to slap Microsoft Vista:

. . . Vista has proved to be a disappointment, even though Microsoft says it's selling like hotcakes. Based on my own experience and on reports from readers, it's clear that many Vista PCs start up more slowly than new PCs running its predecessor, Windows XP, or than even well-worn Macs. And there is still a significant compatibility problem: Too many software and hardware products still don't run, or don't run properly, with Vista.

Mr. Mossberg crosses his fingers, though, and concludes:

Buying XP will likely result in fewer frustrations in the short run. But buying Vista may be the better choice for the long run. Over time, more and more products will be released that are tailored to the new system.

Holman J