When ad execs get stupid
Grok Headline matches for When ad execs get stupid
"You see? You see? Your stupid minds!
Stupid! Stupid!"
"You see? You see? Your stupid minds!
Stupid! Stupid!"
01/06/2004 03:19 AMJack Valenti says stupid things --
really, really stupid things
Jack Valenti says stupid things --
really, really stupid things
08/03/2004 07:46 PMTim Wu has rounded up some of the dumbest things that Jack Valenti
said -- and he's found some real howlers, things that make Jack's
infamous condemnation of the VCR ("the Boston Stranger of the American
film industry") look like a walk in the park.
On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
"[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and
fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners
of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong
and unfair."
On the dangers on media concentration, 1984 Op-Ed
"Will a democratic society allow just three corporate entities to
wield unprecedented dominion over television, the most decisive voice
in the land? There are now only three national networks .... There
will never be more than three national networks."
On the public domain, 1995
"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its
life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it
becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does
the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"
Link
(
Thanks, Patricio!)
It's the war, stupid
It's the war, stupid
05/27/2004 05:07 PMDoes CBS think we're that stupid?
Does CBS think we're that stupid?
02/10/2004 02:42 AMI'd like to someday live in a country where a quick nipple shown on
TV isn't the end of civilization, and that's not what irks me about
the halftime show tonight. What does get me about the Superbowl
halftime show is CBS insisting it was an accident,
calling it a "wardrobe malfunction."
It's funny, when you collect the evidence, I wonder if CBS really
thinks the public is stupid enough to believe it:
1. It was planned from the start.
2. There are snaps on
her outfit clearly visible, designed to be unsnapped. Most
garments are sewn together sans snaps and don't fall apart.
3. She's wearing a "nipple shield" to partially cover her breast. If it was
unplanned why on earth would she have this huge chunk of metal there?
Was it to skirt some FCC rule against an entirely naked breast?
4. Worst of all: She has a
single coming out which is coincidentally being rushed to the
airwaves based on the "overwhelming worldwide demand." Check the
timestamp on the bogus press release, it was posted before the game
was even over.
Is it all a big coincidence or is this how controversy is
manufactured to sell records these days?
Bio-stupid
Bio-stupid
08/02/2004 11:59 PMSalon Aug 3 2004 4:08AM GMT
It's the IQ, stupid
It's the IQ, stupid
08/27/2004 01:51 PM
"Innate intelligence has to do with capability and
ignorance to do with variables such as educational opportunity and
personal diligence. But the conundrum remains. Is intellect
important in presidents? If Americans can't solve the question
definitively in the matter of John Kerry and George Bush, we damn sure
ought to make an educated guess."
Ben Affleck's stupid Car
Ben Affleck's stupid Car
12/31/2003 11:59 PMBen Affleck taking their parking spaces .. More of Ben's expensive
car
tommee.net/ben
track this
site | 4 links
Stupid Banner Ads
Stupid Banner Ads
06/18/2004 03:56 PM
Stupid Internet
Ads. From Scary Crayon. SHOOT
TERRORIS
T WIN IPOD.
It’s the Libraries, Stupid
It’s the Libraries, Stupid
06/09/2004 11:39 PMVia Jeff Dillon,
some insightful words on programming in Java and
in the C#/.NET/Mono ecosystem. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Stupid PDF-only Policy
Stupid PDF-only Policy
01/28/2004 06:41 PMhe Consumer Federation of California just issued a
privacy report
that is full of useful information -- but it's available only as a
large PDF file, not in HTML or RTF or plain text.
Stupid Web Tricks
Stupid Web Tricks
05/10/2004 07:16 AMCNET May 10 2004 11:05AM GMT
Being Stupid and Homophobic
Being Stupid and Homophobic
06/21/2004 01:05 AM
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?
Stupid Fun Club
Stupid Fun Club
06/04/2004 01:14 AMSoftware Development Magazine: Inside the Stupid
Fun Club.
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]
Stupid rain
Stupid rain
05/24/2004 12:32 PMWhy is it everytime I make plans with someone, the goddamn weather
gets in the way?!?! Even my mother said...
stupid cupid
stupid cupid
02/12/2004 04:50 PMI occasionally contribute to this fantastic online magazine called
"The Cult of the One Eyed Cat." It's named after a real cat, who only
has one eye, who once gave me half a look that chills me to this day.
This month's issue is all about Valentine's Day, so I wrote a snarky
piece wherein I get frank about my true feelings for this annual
tradition.
Here's a little bit to get you started:
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.
You can read the rest of my story, and some other stories that are
much better than mine, at
The Cult of the One Eyed CatIts the War Economy, Stupid
Its the War Economy, Stupid
01/22/2004 02:11 AMSo Dean has lost Iowa, but he will get another chance to win that
state. Jeff points to exit polls and says: Kerry has strong support
among those who support the war. Ditto Edward and Gephardt. In short:
The war...
It's Your Stupid Boss
It's Your Stupid Boss
07/19/2004 03:18 PMDirect and Related Links for 'It’s Your
Stupid Boss'
“Refraining from opening e-mail attachments from unknown
senders is the number one way companies can stop the spread of viruses
and worms. But evidence from a survey by AT&T and the Economist
Intelligence Unit (EUI) shows that 78 per cent of top-level employees
surveyed, ranging from board members to CEOs and CIOs, plead guilty to
double-clicking on unknown files. Ironically, this ‘Network
Security: Managing the risk and opportunity’ survey, released
Thursday, also showed that 92…
It's the work, stupid
It's the work, stupid
06/02/2004 12:53 AMDoc chimes back.....
Digital codestyle aggregation <
STRONG>
| |
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. |
| |
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.
Stupid Movies
Stupid Movies
05/28/2004 09:35 AMI'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.
It's the Dividend, Stupid!
It's the Dividend, Stupid!
04/30/2004 10:50 AMWhere has the magic gone?
"Well that was stupid, guess they
shouldn't just do it."
"Well that was stupid, guess they
shouldn't just do it."
03/26/2005 12:44 PM
A Child's
View of the Army "....Like every other boy he was going
through the little green army men phase....Gabe is roughly five years
old and very articulate. Thus it should have come as little surprise
when he began having one army man in charge, and the rest start
building something.
"Sir, we're ready to build the rocket." "
: Five year old Gabe explains - via stacked creamers and table
bricabrac, at an IHOP breakfast - the ramifications of mindless
subservience to authority.
fat and stupid is no way to go through
life, son
fat and stupid is no way to go through
life, son
02/05/2005 09:02 PM
RIP, Dean Wormer All the stupid people. Where do they all
come from?
All the stupid people. Where do they all
come from?
11/03/2003 11:13 AMOpinion Campaign to Re-Educate the Public
It's the Customer, Stupid!
It's the Customer, Stupid!
06/05/2005 10:54 PMBest Buy expands in-store offerings for small-business customers.
It's The Standard, Stupid
It's The Standard, Stupid
02/19/2004 06:04 PMUltimately it's not about the player. It's about the music you put on
the player. By Christopher Breen (Macworld via MyAppleMenu)
Verizon Says Don't Be Stupid
Verizon Says Don't Be Stupid
05/27/2004 09:35 AMSometimes you have to wonder why companies bother to put out press
releases. We don't usually post press releases here, but some are
just so odd, they deserve to be called out. Verizon Wireless put out
a press release today that can best be described as telling people:
don't be
stupid while using your mobile phone. Basically, it's a list of
things that you shouldn't do while driving and talking on your mobile
phone ("Never take notes or write down phone numbers while driving!").
It's not as if someone is going to read this list, smack their head
and say "Aha! No wonder I keep getting into accidents!" Then, at the
end, they sneak in the real reason for this press release, first
saying: "Dropped calls and dead zones can be frustrating for drivers,"
which may be true, but doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest
of the press release. So, they quickly follow that up with the "oh,
and by the way..." part of the press release reminding people that
number portability is now in effect - so, if you must do stupid things
on your mobile phone while driving, you might as well do them as a
Verizon Wireless customer.
Stupid titles
Stupid titles
03/19/2003 10:27 PMI'm honestly worn out today. Apparently there is an assembily that
will be taking place at our school on Friday....
PREVIEW: It's the War, Stupid
PREVIEW: It's the War, Stupid
04/14/2004 06:22 AMLarry Miller's message to President Bush .. PREVIEW: It's the War,
Stupid ..
latest
weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=39
59&R=9DDC31DDD
track this
site | 5 links
It's the torrent, stupid
It's the torrent, stupid
12/22/2004 01:29 AM
Xeni Jardin:
Mark Pesce rants about
the recent shutdowns of BitTorrent supersites Suprnova.org and
TorrentBits.com.
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.
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.
Link (
via waxy)
It's the googleware, stupid!
It's the googleware, stupid!
11/11/2003 03:22 PMIt's never good to leave things hanging (nor, I suppose, is it that
great an idea to link to yourself) so I did the sensible
thing--empirical testing. Threw up a new image, mentioned it on IRC,
and a few folks went to look. No googlebot. Dowloaded Opera and
installed it, telling it that I was OK with google's adware/spyware
stuff. Threw up another image, and looked at it with the new install
of opera, which I then shut down and haven't fired up since. The
result? Five minutes and 38 seconds after my look at the image, here
comes googlebot!...
Stupid Finnish poetry
Stupid Finnish poetry
03/06/2004 02:03 AM
Teekkarin pääsiäinen:
tuokkonen oikealla
läppäri vasemmalla
Ilo on joskus
yksinkertaista
Apologies to my foreign readers. It would be worse in English,
trust me :-). I just had to put this one in the form of a tanka poem.
I have no explanation.
"They like Bush, and they are not stupid
- www.theage.com.au"
"They like Bush, and they are not stupid
- www.theage.com.au"
01/22/2004 02:49 AMDoes PowerPoint make us stupid?
Does PowerPoint make us stupid?
12/30/2003 07:37 PMPeter Norvig, 46, engineering director at Google Inc., is generally
credited with creating the first PowerPoint parody in 1999, when he
published an online ...
Stupid Phishing Tricks
Stupid Phishing Tricks
05/21/2004 01:00 PMhttp-equiv_at_excite.com (May 21 2004)
Stupid Credit Tricks
Stupid Credit Tricks
06/29/2004 03:33 PMWatch your wallet. It's not just the bad guys out to get you.
Stupid Company Tricks
Stupid Company Tricks
04/14/2005 08:52 AMThe end of Disney's namesake magazine is just one of the many recent
boneheaded moves by major corporations.
Stupid Laptop Tricks
Stupid Laptop Tricks
04/10/2005 12:47 PMIn 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...
While the PowerBook only uses the AMS as a defensive measure to
prevent accidental damage to the disk drive, such sensors could have a
variety of uses. In particular, they have been considered an
alternative input methods in user interfaces for video game
controllers, phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices. While it is to be
seen if they will be successful in these areas, such use at least has
a novelty value
He's even built a couple of silly little apps that make use of the
sensors.
AMSV
isualizer A graphical application that displays a 3-D picture of a
PowerBook. The picture's orientation is a real-time approximation of
the PowerBook's physical orientation. Thus, the on-screen picture
moves with the movement of the AMS-equipped PowerBook.
Stable Window A graphical application that
creates a window displaying a bicycle wheel. The window is
"stable" in the sense that if you rotate the AMS-equipped
PowerBook left or right, the window compensates by rotating itself by
an equal amount in the opposite direction.
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.
It's the operating system, stupid
It's the operating system, stupid
12/15/2003 08:07 PM"Not All Americans Are Stupid Quiz"
"Not All Americans Are Stupid Quiz"
12/11/2003 02:47 AMGrok Description matches for When ad execs get stupid
GrokA matches for When ad execs get stupid
When ad execs get stupid
