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Stupid Phishing TricksStupid Phishing TricksStupid Phishing Tricks 05/21/2004 01:00 PM http-equiv_at_excite.com (May 21 2004) This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Stupid Phishing TricksGrok Headline matches for Stupid Phishing TricksStupid Web TricksStupid Web Tricks 05/10/2004 07:16 AM CNET May 10 2004 11:05AM GMT Stupid Credit TricksStupid Credit Tricks 06/29/2004 03:33 PM Watch your wallet. It's not just the bad guys out to get you. Stupid Company TricksStupid Company Tricks 04/14/2005 08:52 AM The end of Disney's namesake magazine is just one of the many recent boneheaded moves by major corporations. Stupid Word TricksStupid Word Tricks 04/28/2004 11:45 AM A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. Stupid Laptop TricksStupid Laptop Tricks 04/10/2005 12:47 PM In advance response to those who would misread the title to this article, it's the tricks that are stupid, not the laptop! I just started a new job this week heading up the graphics department of a small printing company. I had become accustomed to having a laptop at my disposal at my old job — an aging 500MHz PowerBook G4 — so my new employer sweetened his offer to lure me to the new job with the promise of a spiffy new PowerBook. The new one runs at 1.5GHz, and while the speed difference is impressive and reason enough to not look back after the upgrade, some of the other features, like the automatic screen dimming, lighted keyboard, Combo drive, standard BlueTooth and AirPort, etc... are pretty cool too. One of the things the guy at the Mac shop mentioned when he was showing it to me was the "Sudden Motion Sensor" feature, which uses several sensors in the case to detect sudden changes in position, and will park the hard drive heads to keep them from crashing into the drive platters. I hope I'll never need that feature, and really didn't think much about it, but of course some people just aren't able to leave a feature like that alone. Amit Singh has figured out how to gather data generated by those sensors...
He's even built a couple of silly little apps that make use of the sensors.
Running StableWindow is the wierdest thing; a window's edges are just supposed to be aligned with the edges of the screen; seeing something other than that is just... wierd. But some of the... um... "practical" applications for this sound kinda fun. I catch no end of grief from my wife & kids about using body english when I'm playing FA-18 Hornet on the desktop machine at home; how cool would it be for those body movements to actually control the simulator! Then I could truthfully tell them that leaning in my chair actually does help! via AppleFritter. Stupid cell phone tricksStupid cell phone tricks 01/07/2005 02:35 AM For a project I’m working on we need to send text messages to mobile phones. We could buy or rent an SMS gateway, but most carriers in the US allow you to email a message to yourphonenumber@yourcarrier and it will appear as a text message on the phone. For example, my phone is currently with AT&T so you can send a short email to 9166002497 AT mobile.att.net and it will show up on my phone. The problem is figuring out what carrier the phone number is at so you can append the correct hostname to the email address. John Wehr pointed out Teleflip, a service that lets you send email to yourphonenumber@teleflip.com and have it delivered to the phone, regardless of carrier. That’s dandy, but I don’t want to rely on some free, third party service that might change or go away later. After spending some time looking for a way to determine the phone’s carrier, it hit me: I don’t really care what carrier they’re using. If I send the message to the incorrect carrier, it won’t get delivered to the wrong person because phone numbers are unique. It will just bounce. So if I wanted to send a message to 212-555-1212, I could just send a text message to 2125551212@mobile.att.net, 2125551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com, 2125551212@messaging.nextel.com and so on. Send to them all and ignore the bounces. Based on the bounces, you could even learn which carrier someone’s using and just send to that one in the future. It’s not terribly polite to send email that you know is going to bounce, but it’s not a huge load on the servers and you’d only do it once for each new number. Stupid Web Tricks: Dynamic contentStupid Web Tricks: Dynamic content 07/07/2004 11:06 AM CNET Jul 7 2004 3:17PM GMT Stupid Web tricks: Dynamic drop-down
|
| Two datapoints, perhaps historical. |
| First, Sun apparently decides that the revenue model to beat (since charging for hardware and software seem to be losing propositions) is selling services. Bill Snyder (from that last link): |
| Stripped of the marketing hype, Sun hopes to sell services, rather than simply pushing hardware and software at its customers, and have them pay as they use those services. |
| Second, Marc Canter's latest rap: Ho w to make money with digital lifestyle aggregators - Part I. Excerpts: |
| Aggregation is a killer app - that no one owns. It's public domain. Everyone benefits from it. So is integration as well... |
| To start to reap the benefits of digital lifestyle aggregation - you need to get smart about architecting systems that rely upon XML, open standards and web services. |
| So personalization and customization find their destiny intermixed with Integration and Aggregation. The only way to produce compelling enough experiences is by integrating a wide range of built-in constructs, combining that with agregated web servcies and content and topping it all off with unprecedented levels of control and customization. In one product or service. |
| All three of these tenets are tatooed on my forhead. |
| ---- |
| OK so wait. This post was supposed to be about 'making money' - and you're lost. Right? |
| Well think about it - you couldn't possibly (on your own) produce even half of the built-in constructs, features and capabilities we're saying digital lifestyle aggreation (DLAs) requires. That's where open source comes in. |
| By supporting and contributing to open source projects - portal vendors will actually be able to have their cake and eat it too - proprietary solutions, branded memes and viral uptake. Just give open source a try - define it to your own requirements and insights and help out the world while you're helping yourself. |
| I think he's saying "sell your environment," no? Not clear. |
| In anycase, it's not about selling. It's about renting. You rent your domain names, your Net access, your disposable hardware. Stop and think about that last one for a bit. Your personal data — the stuff on your laptop's hard drive — may change constantly, but it's your life in a box. And it moves every two or three years (if not more often) from one laptop or desktop or removable drive or remote host to another. What you pay for a new box almost amounts to a revolving charge, an annuity. Rent. |
| So you charge on a project basis to build stuff, then you rent out your space or your services. Oldest models in the world. |
| Welcome to the land of deflated but sustainable margins. Also the land of the finally grown-up computer business. (When it gets there, which it isn't yet.) |
| Look at it this way: It's the work, stupid. A new slogan I'm trying on for size. Serves in architecture, design, construction, and a pile of other fields from which the computer biz borrows its lingo. Why not here too? [D oc Searls] |
Marc's add-on.....
This is getting fun.
Having folks like Doc add their two cents to this is like collaboratively writing a business plan...
a) As usual I learn more from Doc by just listening. I don't necessarily see it as "sell your environment" as much as "give away compelling experiences - that if they're done right - will have PLENTY of good old fashioned advanced features that people will pay for. Only folks who appreciate and can gain value from software should have to pay for it. Every vendor has to figure out the seam between free and paid (as 6A just did.)
b) One thing about this rental angle that Doc adds in - is that you're also renting access to a community of others just like you - doing the same thing. That's what's cool about the AlwaysOn Network right now. There are otehrs blogging about teh same stuff and collectively we present a group voice. Lots of other examples of this sort of juju out there. Now there's one that tightly coupled to a social network -as well. Again putting things into context (which is what danah has been screaming for......)
c) Finally - Doc reminds us all that the REAL savings is not in less licesning fees, but in self support. How much IT money is spent on training, support, and migration? What if everyone could support each other? I mean - Oh My God! All this AND I get to be called a leader in the Open Source Widget business?
Why wouldn't portal jump on board? I just hope Terry Semel, Ruppert Murdoch and Richard Branson grok this. I think Barry Diller does.
Joi Ito calls Ray Bradbury's complaint about Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 stupid and compared it to a supposedly homophobic essay by Orson Scott Card.
Don't you hate it when your favorite writers do, write or say stupid things?
This reminds me of the horror of reading Orson Scott Card's homophobic essay, "Homose xual "Marriage" and Civilization".
The following is an edited version of my comment:
I think Bradbury's position is understandable and definitely not stupid. Don't you think the proper thing for Michael Moore to do was to ask? If Bradbury was pro-Bush, he wouldn't have wanted the title of his works being used for Michael Moore's movie. For him to just blatently use the title like that is just plain asinine.
As to your comment about Orson Scott Card being homophobic, I don't see what is wrong with being homophobic. If there is nothing stupid about being afraid of heights or spiders, why is being homophobic stupid?
Valentine's Day is upon us yet again, and husbands and boyfriends all over the country are trying to solve a fiendishly complex puzzle: what do we get our wives and girlfriends? If you're dating, are you dating long enough for roses? What if you're dating too long for roses? And what color? Should you get chocolates, because she's so sweet, or should you stay away from chocolates because she will freak about how it's going to make her fat?
The stakes are incredibly high. If we work out the Rube Goldberg machine that is the female psyche, we may just get that once-a-year blowjob . . . but if we fail to read the tea leaves correctly, we end up spending the evening alone in the bedroom with ESPN Classics while she watches Lifetime in the living room and talks on the phone with her bitter single friend who hates us.
Software Development Magazine wrote an article called "Inside the Stupid Fun Club" (registration
required).
The author, Alexandra Weber Morales, unexpectedly encountered the Sad Robot, broken down and crying for help on the streets of Oakland.
We were shooting a couple of hidden camera reality TV "One Minute Movies" for NBC: one of a Sad Robot torn apart into pieces and pleading for help from passers by, and the other of a Robot Waiter taking orders, serving food and bantering for a tip in a barbecue restaurant.
I (Don Hopkins) developed the custom "robot brain" software for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, mostly in Python. It involved writing lots of high level Python code and XML data, and integrating all kinds of different software components together with SWIG, C++, ActiveX, Java, IRC, HTTP and WiFi. The robot features 3D facial animation, speech synthesis and recognition, conversational scripting, artificial intelligence, personality simulation, telerobotic remote control via wireless networking, with an interactive web interface for controling its behavior in real time.
For another Stupid Fun Club project, I also used Python to develop expressive synthetic speech authoring tools (audio speech “phonoscoping”, like visual animation “rotoscoping”), and talking toy simulations.
Python is ideally suited for brainstorming and prototyping new product ideas, as well as developing custom real-time robotic software for supporting creative Stupid Fun Club projects like reality TV production.
Eventually, Alexandra Weber Morales tracked down the person
responsible, Will Wright, at his private production company, the Stupid Fun Club. She asked
Will about the Sad Robot:
[I've added my own comments
like this.
-Don]
Uh, OK. So, what kinds of reactions did people have to Sad Robot?
Wright: A lot of people were talking directly to it. Most of the women who were walking alone just sped up like they were spooked by it. Most of the single men would stop and start stripping it for parts, ignoring that the robot was talking to them. And it was mostly the couples who would actually interact with it and try to help it. Some would have long conversations, pushing the buttons.
We had a whole sort of troubleshooting thing, and we wanted to see how far people would go to help it. It was sort of a Good Samaritan experiment.
She also asked about the software we developed to control the robot, simulate its personality, animate its face, and listen and talk with people.
Have you heard of an AI knowledge base called Cyc?
Wright: For the conversational side of it, we’re using something similar to Cyc—in fact, we were looking at Cyc. There’s so many different layers. First of all, there’s the voice recognition, which is getting much better but is still pretty limited. Then, once you have the voice, you go into the conversation engine, and then it’s doing something like Cyc or Alice or Eliza: trying to give an appropriate response to what your input was. One of the projects we’re working on here is this toy design where we have these toys that converse with each other via infrared text-to-speech.
There are all these different approaches to AI. Some of them are more brute force, like Cyc. There’s also artificial life, an attempt to evolve systems rather than build them from the ground up.
Where’s this work being done?
Wright: The Santa Fe Institute is one place. There’s genetic programming, or adaptive systems, to give computers a way to learn and get feedback. That looks like a more promising approach.
Back in the ’60s, when computers were first being used in business, everybody assumed we’d have artificial intelligence in 10 years. When 2001 came out, in 1967, and people came out of that movie saying, “I can’t believe that a computer will be able to play chess that well.” But they took the conversation with HAL for granted. In fact, it was the opposite: Chess turned out to be the easy part; natural conversation turned out to be the hard part. Within 20 years, we’re going to have machines like this that have full autonomy and pretty good conversational ability. We could build a stove that would have a long conversation with you. So the real interesting question for me now is, what’s going to happen when our world is surrounding us with intelligent machines? These are going to be the first aliens we meet.
Describe the software running this thing.
Wright: The conversational chatbot is Alice. It takes input and you give it a dictionary to define what it knows about.
[ALICE is written in Java, so Python talks to it through an IRC server running on the robot. We can connect to the same IRC channel over the wireless network, watch the messages going between ALICE and the brain, interject text to speak and think, switch moods, play facial animations, tweak the personality, execute commands, etc. Later I developed a more powerful web based " Homunculus" interface, for operating the robot in real time, with a web browser on a remote laptop or handheld.
-Don]Winter: That’s connected to Microsoft speech recognition, which is fantastic.
[I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't suck, but "fantastic" is a stretch.
-Don]Winter: And some simple AI, since Alice may or may not understand what you’re talking about.
[In other words, Alice is like the mad old aunt with Tourette's Syndrome you keep locked away in the attic. Alice is only used as a backstop, when the Python/XML/AI layer of the robot brain can't think of anything to say. But it's turned off when we don't want the robot to seem insane.
-Don]Winter: The most intelligent thing it ever did is we had an opera singer in here singing to the robot, but the robot didn’t like it. So she said, “maybe I should explain the story,” and after the singer finished, the robot paraphrased the whole thing back to her. It was about the most amazing thing we’d ever seen; we all just about started believing in robots at that moment.
[What's really interesting is abusing the speech recognizer, by putting the robot brain into a mode where it listens to itself (and anyone else) talk! It's like the mutating telephone gossip game, or the news media echo chamber: The robot repeats what it thinks it heard itself say, which it then mis-recognizes and distorts again and again, in a feedback loop of quasi-coherent rhyming speech! Any words you interject get mixed in and distorted in the speech recognition/synthesis feedback loop. It naturally finds and converges on extremely strange attractors in the recognizer's hidden markov models of the English language, chanting and mutating gramatically plausible but semantically ridiculous phrases, in response to whatever it thinks it hears. When properly configured, the robot can actually compose live performances of original surrealistic beat robopoetry, responding to the audience in real time! Stanislaw Lem calls that "Bitic Literature".
-Don]Winter: When we take these in public, it seems like the people who are less technical savvy are the ones who interact with it, whereas the people with technical backgrounds are standing there reverse-engineering it.
Are you following what MIT has done with humanoid robots such as Kismet?
Wright: There are lots of research labs around the country building these types of robots, but they never take them out into the public. We drive them into a laundromat or a restaurant and see what the response is.
When we filmed Sad Robot, we also filmed a scene in a restaurant with a robot waiter. It was interesting how many people totally bought it. Usually within three or four minutes, they were completely normal about it. People kind of expect that there will be robots in the future; it’s just a matter of when.
[The Sad Robot: A pitiful broken down female robot is crying for help, bent out of shape and fallen on its side with a mangled tractor tread, next to a stinky garbage dumpster, begging reluctant passers by to turn it upright, describe its condition, press its big red reset button, adjust its controls, step away before it explodes, and call a mysterious professor on their cell phone.
The Robot Waiter: An earnest robot waiter, just trying to do its job taking orders, delivering food to tables, telling jokes and bantering for tips, and collecting dirty dishes. Afterwards submits itself to a Robot Waiter Performance Evaluation Survey, and begs the human to give it good marks, otherwise it might lose its job.
-Don]Robot: If you could have any kind of robot, what would it be? The goal is elimination of crime, combined with rehabilitation of criminals … Yes, it seems very long to me, too.
What do you use for automated testing?
Wright: Our own suites. Most of our stuff is in C++, but we have a proprietary visual scripting language I designed, called Edith, for the behavioral code for the Sims. It’s totally geared to AI and the Sims.
[The robot software is written in C++, Python and XML. Edith is used to program simulated personalities, but for simulated people instead of real robots. Edith is the tool for programming The Sims, for scripting the artificial intelligence of the characters and objects. The Sims visual programming language itself is called SimAntics. Edith is Maxis's official tool for programming SimAntics code, while iffpencil2 is another third party SimAntics programming tool, developed outside of Maxis.
-Don]Winter: I think it’s time for the Christmas robot.
Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t know if we want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform with a circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic toy-store robot.]
Winter: No, you would die. You’d better take cover.
[The interview ends.]
The snowman quickly demolishes the toy, shooting debris throughout the warehouse. With Winter’s encouragement, I spend 10 minutes in a nonsensical conversation with the robot. He also shows me the Minute Movie that have been made for NBC—and they’re hilarious.
I leave this unconventional interview impressed with the way the Stupid Fun Club has turned a fascination with robots and toys into a lucrative and wholly entertaining enterprise. Meanwhile, the larger concerns about the technical strengths, limitations and implications of these semiautonomous machines go mostly unanswered. Wright and Winter seem firmly on the side of presentation, and somewhat unwilling to delve deeply into how their toys work—as if to say, “Where’s the fun in asking all these questions? Just talk to the robot.”
I'm certainly interested in delving deeply into how the robot brain works myself, but not everyone else is. So I used Python to develop a high-level XML based AI and wireless web remote control system, which enables creative writers and designers like Will Wright to script and control the robot behavior, and reconfigure it for different scenarios, without needing to deal with Python, C++ or the other software components that went into building it.
[Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron]I'm glad to see that "The Day After Tomorrow" -- a disaster movie about climate change -- is getting bad reviews. Much of science in this picture, by almost every account, is ludicrous. There's almost no doubt that we're heading toward serious global consequences due to our prolificacy in the use of energy and other things that affect climate, but stupid movies shouldn't be moving the discussion in either direction. And when otherwise reputable people and organizations like Al Gore and Moveon.org use the movie to leverage their own concerns, they don't enhance their own reputations. The notion that global warming could set off an ice age is not stupid, however idiotically and unrealistically the movie portrays such an event. Scientists have offered persuasive evidence that such a thing is at least thinkable. And there's widespread consensus among scientists about global warming itself. I'll probably watch this movie when it hits the cable channels. I won't imagine, however, that it's about much of anything serious.
tommee.net/ben
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Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.Link (via waxy)It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=39
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