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Why Apple should buy Pandora? posted by shuri on 2008-08-20 14:37:50 tags: pandora,news
| The rumor that Pandora may be forced to close down has come back to haunt us. For those of you who still don't know Pandora is an interactive personal music streaming service. You seed it with a few artists or songs you like, and it starts playing. As the songs are played, you can either thumb them up or thumb them down.
I have been a big fan of Pandora for a long time. The thing I like most about Pandora is that it allows you to expand your musical horizons without feeling ignorant. I got to know Hendrix, blues and metal better through Pandora. Another cool thing is there is very little crud: once you log in and tell it an artist or two, just type in pandora.com and it immediately starts playing. So Pandora is great, why isn't making enough money?
Well, in order to make money you need to spend a little and make a lot. Pandora is currently haunted by the evil RIAA. It is being charged more than satellite radio stations do, and certainly more than terrestrial stations that apparently pay nothing. The way it makes money is through visual ads and through affiliate marketing (I'm guessing those links are not just for our convenience). The design of the advertisements are very smart, you hear nothing but music but if you want to give Pandora feedback, when you look at the screen the ads change, grabbing your attention. That's really smart. So what's the problem?
Apparently, with the inflated rates the RIAA, these ads are not enough to cover them. So what can they do? Either lobby their way to lower rates or make more money. How about both?
I argue that if apple buys Pandora they can achieve both. Hoping for unlimited music from Apple may be too optimistic. However, Apple's pull with the music companies can still get Pandora a good deal. Integration with the iTunes music store will sell more songs. Having Pandora pre-installed on all iPhones and iPods can get it to a greater audience. Having Pandora on iPhones will sell more iPhones. Everybody wins. But I think there's more money to be made here.
I always thought Pandora is not reaching their full potential with the visual ads. Are audio ads such a sin? Podcasts do them? Is that so wrong? In case you really want to have uniterrupted music, add an additional 1 dollar a month to your monthly bill and you get ad free Pandora goodness.
No need to thank me...well... |
Cool Innovative Image Viewing posted by shuri on 2008-08-14 08:28:43 tags: news,image,processing
| What I admire is truly creative research that also has practical implications. This image viewing work I think qualifies. Checkout the video explanation here. |
Are you male or female? This site can tell you posted by shuri on 2008-07-30 17:55:11 tags: news,hacks
| So there is 92% chances I'm male according to this site. Go there and check for yourself, just to make sure. They also can magically tell you your browsing history. It uses a something that can be viewed as a security bug in most modern browsers. Cool though and creepy. |
Can you spell S-T-U-P-I-D posted by shuri on 2008-07-30 09:32:49 tags: news,scrabulous,business
| Scarbulous is apparently shutting down their facebook app. I was mid-game and as far as I can recall winning too. You can still play on their site which I find weird.
This is not the first time companies kill potential cash cows. A thing I find silly to do at best. An analogy will help clear things up.
Say someone grew a whole field of corn on your land, better crops than you ever managed to grow on the land in the last five years. What do you do? Do you:
- Chase him off, sell the corn and enjoy a one time profit.
- Reach some agreement with him and let him continue successfully growing corn on your land while you collect a monthly check.
- Burn the corn and shoot the other guy torture his family and swear vengeance will be yours forever.
- All of the above
There is no "correct" answer but I'd go with number 2. |
An alternative to advertising for web 2.0 posted by shuri on 2008-06-06 05:59:01 tags: news,business,models
| Mashable has a nice article on alternatives sources of revenue for web companies. First of you've got to clarify what's wrong with the current ad based model?
What worries me about ads is their reliability. The article suggests donations instead. I think a more reliable sources of revenue would be good for companies since it gives you a source of income you can plan on. Personally, I like the two service level subscription model. The first level is free the second one is premium. The dating industry is big on that model. So why can't other web companies adopt that model?
It's the VC's fault really. Any web company that would start charging subscription fees would face competition from VC funded free services. Then data portability gets thrown in the mix. You end up with a business where the user can switch to another service as easy as switching to a different brand of toothpaste, only the other toothpaste is free and just as good. How can anybody build a sustainable business this way? |
Is this for real? multi-iphone-pong. posted by shuri on 2008-05-22 09:00:20 tags: news,pong,iphone,multi
| I had this idea to write a ping-pong application for the iphone. But I had not idea how to figure out what the distance was between the iphones. Anyway checkout multi-iphone-pong for the iphone. |
Enhance your productivity with Startegic Procrastination posted by shuri on 2008-05-20 21:52:09 tags: news
| I've been making certain advances in my personal productivity and I wanted to share one of the more amusing realizations with you.
Consider the following situation. You have two open ended projects, you could spend hours, days or years on each of them. The first is you research project. If you do a good job on it, a really good job, it might get into a leading conference, that will later help secure some job offer you really want to get.
The second project is a project in a course. Nobody expects it to be published. If you do an excellent job you'll get an A, a mediocre job will still get you an A, and if you do a really bad job you'll get a B. Sounds simple so far, right?
Alas the story gets complicated. And like any good tragedy you the main character have a flaw that will doom you. You want to excell. You really hate doing a bad job. Some might even try to insult you and accuse you of being a perfectionist. How do you overcome this tragic character flaw. The answer lies in strategic procrastination.
These two words that seemingly should never go in the same sentence come together to help you get over yourself. First step, assess the number of hours the average team will spend on the class project. Let's say the number is 30 hours. Step two, wait until deadline - 30 hours. Remember to factor in sleeping into the equation. Step three, procrastinate.
Some of you will read this and laugh. That's o.k. To you I say... ha ha ha... I'm being funny. Some of you just don't get it. Since I am a polite guy to you I say... ha ha ha... it sounds funnier in Yidish. To the rest of you, I sincerely hope that at some point in your life I'd have helped you, |
Who online is analogous to a Cable Co.? posted by shuri on 2008-05-18 20:53:46 tags: news,video,online,cable
| What I blog is not always exactly news. For this reasosn, you already know the "right answer" to the question asked. Facebook VP says Facebook is analogous to a cable company. I say, really really bad analogy. So who is is analogous to a Cable Co.?
Maybe it is Hulu? I was all excited to see TV commercials on-line. They certainly can become an on-line "cable company". But they post incomplete seasons, trying to tease the users I guess. Tease them into what? Going back to the television maybe? That is a bad recipe towards becoming an on-line cable company. We want new content. We don't want to have to buy a cable box. We have the eye-balls, don't you want them?
The current analogous to a cable company is sidereel.com. No, strike that they are the tv-guide. The back-end, the pipes are sites like 56.com, megavideo.com, tudou.com. These sites cannot be simply dismissed as youtube want-to-be-s. They host videos longer than 10 minutes, some of them have nice features like being able to play several episodes in a row automatically. Should they be dismissed as simple pirate sites?
Compare Hulu to sidereel. Hulu just re-posted last weeks episode of house. sidereel on the other hand has above 17 links to the full episodes. Granted, sidereel's links are sometimes too slow and that is annoying. The fact that they don't include commercials doesn't make me too happy. I would prefer a source that would deliver the stream fast enough and would be happy if I can watch commercials to help sustain the model. Hulu needs to be better than sidereel.
Take southparkstudios.com, the official southpark site. They make the content available immediately after it finishes to air. They get it.
Youtube thrived on illegal content as well. They proved that illegal content, with brilliant business peoplel, can make business sense. The next cable company is somewhere out there, I am highly skeptical of it being Facebook, Hulu? Maybe.
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51 of 100 largest economic entities are now corporations posted by shuri on 2008-05-18 10:37:38 tags: news
| Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries. That's what's claimed by http://www.corporations.org whoever they are. I find that amazing.
The people closest to you in culture can most likely be found on-line, very likely in a different country. Could this change the country's part in people's life? Can digg.com declare itself a country? How about having a Limited Land Country (LLC)? |
An opinion aggregator of things to come posted by shuri on 2008-03-24 17:22:45 tags: semantic,opinion,swotti,news
| A semantic opinion aggregator named swotti is definitely intreresting and worth checking out. Searching for the MacBooc air gives you summaries of specific opinions regarding its design, weight, battery life as well as general comments. The site seems slow these days, probably due to unanticipated or premature popularity. Sign of things to come. |
Hulu is the future of video posted by shuri on 2008-03-13 15:25:30 tags: news,hulu,tv,online
| I've been playing with Hulu for a couple of weeks now. I have to say it is brilliant! Comparing it to youtube is insulting. These are not amateurish webcam made videos of your neighbor. These are quality episodes and even movies you would have bought on DVD or rented in your video store. Whole seasons of "bones" movies like "the shape of things". Good stuff.
Am I being silly for being excited to watch commercials online? Sure, and yet this is a clear sign of things to come. |
A moment of goodness posted by shuri on 2008-03-08 13:03:08 tags: news,goodness
| | I am sitting here in the corner bakery cafe near my house, woke up a bit late, talked to my parents and my little sister, and I'm thinking that despite the deadline for VLDB and the hard work and stress, this moment in life is great. |
Stage6 closes stage9 launched posted by shuri on 2008-02-28 14:37:52 tags: news,stage9,stage6
| | So I already wrote about how my beloved stage6 closed. Naturally, as I do, I checked in godaddy the domains for stagesix, stage7 and others. Today, mashable is reporting that Disney is launching something they call stage9. I cannot help but be amused. Apparently it is some sort of internet video original content site. What I want to know is what will happen to joox. |
UNG is not GNU which is not Unix posted by shuri on 2008-02-27 10:02:42 tags: news
| Microsoft may be implementing a version of GNU software and libraries called UNG which stands for UNG is Not GNU. That in turns stands for GNU is not UNIX.
An interesting question is whether Microsoft can is allowed to maintain a GNU compatible library stripped of the GNU license via some sort of continuous clean room implementation? |
Oooh, I have a prediction posted by shuri on 2007-12-26 10:34:09 tags: prediction,apple,news
| | After the proof of concept release of the Kindle by Amazon, Amazon and Apple will work together on releasing an ebook. This play will finally start to make a dent on the book industry. For the record, no Apple ShuffleTooth so far.
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Crazy speculation about the future of Google posted by shuri on 2007-11-01 11:43:23 tags: news,crazy,speculation
| It all starts with google healthcare which in 2012 starts volunteering to store your DNA and data mine it for possible illnesses matching them with cure advertisements. So far so good.
One year before that in 2011 justin.tv will have been bought by Google. Google and justin.tv will then focus on full sensory 24 hour capture and data mining.
Together these two acquisitions almost complete the picture. All that is missing is technology envisioned by the island, resident evil: extinction, of course the matrix, and brave new world that will enable Google to grow clones of everybody on earth using their own DNA while feeding them the sensory input of their original version. Later the clones knowledge can be harvested or just replacement parts sold to the owners.
That is however a bit wasteful. Using what they call OpenSocial API and an algorithm much like PageRank they will intelligently decide which people are worth cloning and which are not.
Crazy? I am not sure. |
Microsoft's web strategy posted by shuri on 2007-10-19 10:05:33 tags: news,microsoft,web
| Nice little article about Microsoft's web strategy. The article argues that although Microsoft is following Google they are doing a good job at it. With solid software like microsoft office live and interesting stuff like popfly they are certainly a worthy competitor.
I personally still think that Microsoft has a good chance of becoming the number one search engine within the next few years. Sure, Vista doesn't seem to be exactly a success, it doesn't mean that the Windows is dead. With greater integration of their web services in the OS, a move that makes architectural sense not just business sense, they can still leverage their existing market to boost their online offerings. |
EntityRank: Searching Entities Directly and Holistically posted by shuri on 2007-09-26 02:55:35 tags: vldb,2007,mynotebook,news
| Cool paper on entity search in vldb. They allow entity search, looking for data like somebody's phone number, returning the numbers and pages supporting it. For example "Amazon Customer Service #phone".,br> They use the surrounding content to detect the entity.
In order to do this they use the distance from "Amazon Customer Service" to something that looks like a phone number. They also include the quality of the supporting pages.
Then there is this paper which seems to do similar things only on steroids. A much richer extraction and it builds an entity relation graph. Very cool. |
Social Graph or Social Network, what's in a name? posted by shuri on 2007-09-23 04:58:11 tags: news.social,graph,news
| Readwriteweb discusses discusses what the "social graph" means and whether the classic social network is a better term.
I tend not to agree that social graph should be retired. I think it is more than just a mathematicians way of defining a social network. It describes the next race of capturing the structure of the global social network and leveraging the internet and graph theory to allow people to manage and utilize their network better. That was a long sentence. |
Brilliant resizing of images posted by shuri on 2007-08-29 10:12:50 tags: news
| | Read about this brilliant algorithm for resizing images in a way that does not change the important parts of an image. There is a short video demonstrating the technique. The guy who wrote the paper already joined adobe to add this functionality to Photoshop. Very very cool. |
iPhone password cracked posted by shuri on 2007-07-03 16:30:09 tags: news,iphone
| | iPhone password cracked. The passwords are really simple which makes you think that apple kind of wanted the phone to be hacked. This is both cool and smart since it is sure to bring cool hacks. |
Cool stuff from yahoo posted by shuri on 2007-07-02 09:44:49 tags: news,ads,search,yahoo
| | Now that I am working at Yahoo, for the summer anyway, it is very nice to see cool stuff from yahoo. The idea is simple but seems powerful, provide personalized ads based on the user's profile. The example they give is if I am looking to buy a blender, target might show their selection of blenders. Cool. |
Google Video indexes MySpace, Yahoo Video posted by shuri on 2007-06-16 11:21:43 tags: news
| As part of the grand "Google acquires Youtube" plan, Arstechnica is reporting that Google has transformed Google video to index videos from several sites rather than hosting content. Yahoo has been doing this for a while not to mention good old Altavista. This makes excellent sense.
A small test indeed shows that Myspace videos do show up. Youtube videos seem to be dominant but it is hard to tell if they give these videos higher weight. It might make sense to do that. |
Cross Site Scripting in Yahoo posted by shuri on 2007-06-15 17:31:37 tags: news,security,privacy
| | It seems that yahoo has some major cross site scripting site. Security and privacy are a major issue that to me seem to be an indication of the maturity or lack-there-of of the web application world. Solutions? |
Goodbye privacy, introducing google street view posted by shuri on 2007-05-30 18:16:07 tags: news,google,street,view,privacy
| Your privacy may have already been invaded. Take this woman for example:

as captured on the google street view feature.
The expectation of privacy is slowly being eroded. The way I see it either people start objecting or the next generation will have a different expectation of privacy than us. |
Google face search posted by shuri on 2007-05-30 16:57:28 tags: news,google,search
| So I was thinking a few weeks back that you could quite easily combine face detection with an image search to make for an easier people search. No sooner said than done... by google.
google face search
The long version is that you can add an "&imgtype=face" at the end of the image search URL. The short version is to try this:
This is face detection. The next stage is face recognition. Once you found the person you are looking for you should be able to ask for other pictures of this guy. Go ahead google/yahoo implement my ideas why don't you ( :) ). |
AT&T Offering Television Programs posted by shuri on 2007-05-27 20:16:25 tags: news,att,cingular,antitrust
| | Slashdot reports that AT&T is going to offer television programs over the phone line. After buying cingular, what I was wondering was, could AT&T become such a monopoly that it would have to be broken up again? |
Techcrunch covers MyMiniLife posted by shuri on 2007-05-20 09:25:02 tags: news
| Techcrunch is talking about MyMiniLife a friend of mine's startup. The basic idea is an embeddable second life sort of world.
Tech crunch says that this is a very hot space right now. It is very cool being mentioned on techcrunch and being mentioned in the same paragraph with millions of dollars. So check it out |
The end of crawling and privacy posted by shuri on 2007-05-16 12:29:43 tags: news
| Many things are changing, sometimes its hard to notice. Crawling used to be the only way of discovering pages and fetching content. Sitemaps was one of the first ways that this changed. Web sites pushing lists of URLs and notifying search engines that the site was updated. The popularization of RSS feeds also offer a never ending stream of URLs with new content.
An interesting paper in www2007 talks about "Navigation-Aided Retrieval" which augments the retrieval model with the assumption that the user is willing to navigate a bit to find what he wants. Could this mean that a less exhaustive crawl would still be just as good?
Google's Web history is another interesting application that sprung lately. Using the google toolbar and any other method they can use they record the URLs you visit. I do not know if they did this before but they are doing this now. Everybody is talking about the implication for personalization. I am saying another hit for crawling and a bit of a hit for privacy.
Regarding privacy and toolbars, Microsoft presented a work in WWW2007 that analyzed password strength. They collected the information for this research using the windows live toolbar. Most of the people that heard the presentation seemed more interested in the use of the private data than in the password strength.
To summarize, there seem to be two loosely related trends, brute force crawling is getting slightly less important than it used to be and you can safely assume that you do not have any privacy. |
Search in english, get results in english... even if the site is french posted by shuri on 2007-05-16 11:59:47 tags: news
| Techcrunch reports of a new cross language Google search service to be launched soon. The idea is simple, if a French site, for example, has a good answer to my query, automatically return it translated to English.
A friend of mine had a similar idea for a startup. Wait enough time and someone will think of your idea, and unlike you, actually do something about it. |
Allfreecalls.net is back? posted by shuri on 2007-05-13 17:17:07 tags: news,free,calls,phone
| Techcrunch has kindly brought to our attention that the service that brings free international calls for all is back.
It seems that they changed the service a bit, possibly to avoid being stopped by "the man". You register your own number and ten other numbers, and then dial their access number. For those of us who try to keep in touch with friends and family over seas this seems like a good deal. Go on, try it. |
www2007 initial summary posted by shuri on 2007-05-13 17:02:38 tags: news,www2007
| The www2007 conference is over. It was fun. There were some real good presentations. I summarized and linked to some below. I am sure there are many more good papers that may have been missed during the conference due to the presentations.
The yahoo party was fun and I won a squeezebox music player :). The banquet was fun and I thought the food was good.
Banff is amazing, a small town of 6700 people according to wikipedia which is largely only there for tourists. The main street is a long street with almost nothing but restaurants and gift shops. Lake Louise is really close by and everything is beautiful. Wild life, snow, mountains, forests, all very beautiful.
One of the interesting things about the www conference is that it is so diverse, people from the academia and industry all come here to look for good ideas. Furthermore, the Internet touches almost every field these days and
the conference is just huge. A production of this scale is really difficult and all in all I think it was a great success.
So, I hope to be back in Beijing, China in 2008. |
Why We Search: Visualizing and Predicting User Behavior posted by shuri on 2007-05-12 13:18:15 tags: news,www2007
| This paper by Eitan Adar et al. is an interesting paper that tries to find correlations between topic event streams generated from blogs and news sites, and try to use one stream to predict the others shape. They use dynamic time warping to map individual segments of the curves such as peak, rise, fall and run.
They explore various ways of visualizing the topic behavior through time. |
Learning to Detect Phishing Emails posted by shuri on 2007-05-12 10:21:33 tags: news,www2007
| Very nice work by Ian Fette et al. The first thing they do is define "identifying phishing spam emails" as a different problem than just regular spam. Then they use a decision tree based classifier and a set of smart features to identify phising attacks.
The features include: when the domains in the links were registered, ip number links and comparison of the domains of the links in the email to the domain of the "click here" type of links. |
Predicting Clicks: Estimating the Click-Through Rate for New Ads posted by shuri on 2007-05-11 13:20:03 tags: news,www2007
| How to determine ad ordering if you do not have extensive click-through-rate probabilities? That is what this paper does. They use machine learning, logistic regression, to predict the click-through-rate (CTR).
The basic model builds on previous work. The first thing they try to add a notion of ad quality, the landing page quality, and relevance. They further tried to improve the results by adding features, which key terms appear in the title and the tex, and using machine learning to learn quality. |
Page-level Template Detection via Isotonic Smoothing posted by shuri on 2007-05-10 10:00:26 tags: www2007,mynotebook,news
| Cute work about template detection, short summary follows.
Previous work, site based, two phase. The limitations of this technique, pages may not be processed in site order, new sites may be a problem and processing may be inefficient.
Essentially, they:
- obtain training data site specific
- learn site specific templates
- try to learn a global detector for templateness.
Features they use include: placement on the screen,back ground color, identify series of links that are likely to be part of the template, average sentence size. Then they use a classifier to differentiate between the template parts of a page and the content.
In the results they show that shingling after template detection works better than shingling without template detection. |
A Banff View posted by shuri on 2007-05-09 10:30:17 tags: news,www2007,photo
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Banff Hotel posted by shuri on 2007-05-09 10:29:36 tags: news,www2007,photo
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Efficient Search Engine Measurements posted by shuri on 2007-05-09 10:08:51 tags: news,www2007,search,engine,measurement
| If you happen to miss the www2007 talk "Efficient Search Engine Measurements" by Ziv Bar-Yossef and Maxim Gurevich you should go and read the paper.
The paper describes an efficient and accurate method of estimating various properties of the search engine such as the size of the document collection. It does so through the standard query interface. I will not do it justice if I try to describe the details so go and read it. |
Navigation-Aided Retrieval by Pandit and Olston posted by shuri on 2007-05-09 09:49:02 tags: news,www2007,user,model,ir
| The basic idea of this work is to assume the user of the search engine is willing to do some navigation to find what he is looking for.
The question then becomes not what is the most relevant document but where should we "drop off" the user, for him to be most likely to find what he is looking for. Cool.
Further, they highlight the paths that could lead the user to interesting pages. |
For those not in WWW2007 posted by shuri on 2007-05-08 11:00:14 tags: news,www2007
| | If you are not in www2007, and you still want to see a cool lecture, go here and look for PRABHAKAR RAGHAVAN. This excellent lecture covers both Yahoo answers and advertisement auctions. The implication of any optimizations to advertisement auctions means big money and that is why you should care. |
WWW2007 worth a read posted by shuri on 2007-05-08 10:54:40 tags: news,www2007
| | When attending the Query Log Analysis of the WWW2007 conference, this work seems good. The presentation talks about a better model of search engine users and the way they click. For example, the user model takes into account if the user considered a result and its attractiveness. |
I am in WWW2007 posted by shuri on 2007-05-07 14:19:11 tags: news,www2007
| That is it. I am here in Banff Canda, in the WWW 2007 conference. I will be presenting my paper Do Not Crawl in the DUST about identifying different URLs with similar text. I am excited to see my Israeli colleagues, Maxim Gurevich and Ziv Bar-Yossef who are also presenting a paper about efficient search engine measurement.
I will try and update the web site with anything I find interesting. |
Guerilla marketing posted by shuri on 2007-04-22 15:49:52 tags: news,adver,ising
| | You have to check out these inspiring images of guerilla marketing. |
Why paper to-do lists work better posted by shuri on 2007-04-22 15:43:21 tags: news
| It took me some time to figure this out, but for me, paper todo lists work better. Now the great Life Hacker are agreeing with me :)
They link to two lists with five reasons and six more reasons why paper is better.
I tried to figure out why paper works better for me, what I came up with is:
- Limited storage: You can only write so much on one page and you can only do some much in a week.
- Easy Access: It is very easy to clear your mind GTD
style.
- My horrible hand writing: For some reason it is easier for me to read my horrible hand writing.
I believe that someone can make a lot of money by finding out why paper works better and using that to improve the electronic methods. Paper won't be the best method for ever, but for now, paper works for me. |
Podcasts you should know about posted by shuri on 2007-04-08 01:22:45 tags: news,podcas,s,online,shows
| There are a few podcasts on the web that you should know about. But first, let us make something clear. No, you do not need an iPod to listen to podcasts. For that matter, you do not even need an mp3 player, just any old computer will do. You just go to the webpages, and click on the links or play buttons.
Now that we have got that out of the way we can give some good links to podcasts. The first I think should be diggnation. In this podcast, the founder of digg and his sidekick slash friend Alex Albrecht cover some of the week\'s most popular stories. But one thing should be clear, people do not listen to the podcast to catch up on these stories. People listen to this podcast because these two guys are funny and interesting. Especially when they get drunk, and they do get drunk on the podcast a lot!. Personally, what I find amazing is the founder of a company like digg, who has, in my opinion, changed the face of the web, remains real and can get drunk each week reminiscing on stuff they did as teenagers.
The second podcast that is excellent is also part of the revision3 podcast empire and its called InDigital. This is a podcast that is produced with simply amazing quality. Each undetermined amount of time they release a podcast that includes several interesting technology reviews. Again, good stuff!
Cranky Geeks is the third show I watch regularly. A very fun show where John C. Dvorak and a changing panel of cranky geeks assemble to complain about the latest news. A very entertaining and interesting show. Especially entertaining is the obsessiveness at which John C. Dvorak plugs his blog and the cranky responses he receives when doing so.
Yet another good podcast is This Week In Tech or
TWIT for short. This is one of many excellent podcasts offered by the twit.tv "network". This podcast comes with no video, and covers some of the hot news in tech every week. Again, a very fun podcast. Checkout the twit.tv website for more excellent podcasts about macs, security and open source.
These are the podcasts I listen to on a quite regular basis. Notable is the attempt of several players, such as revision3 and twit, to become a network of podcasts. It will be certainly interesting to see what happens in this space and who will be the major players three years from now.
I am sure there are many more podcasts out there I should be listening to. I am setting up a podcast page so email me if you think there is some podcast I would like. |
Healthy food and Subway vs. Quiznos posted by shuri on 2007-04-07 22:27:13 tags: subway,food,fast,news,diet,heath,quiznos,heal,h
| One thing that disturbs me about the US is how hard it is to eat healthy food. On the next commercial break, try and pay attention to what is being pushed to your head.
There are two things that are publicized very often, two things that have opposite effects on your body. On the one hand they are trying to sell you fast food, greasy food, unhealthy food. The other most popular type of commercials sell you diet pills, ab muscle contraptions, and expensive diets. As long as they can keep you buying both, why should they care?
Back to Subway vs. Quiznos. Quiznos is good, its tasty, but I do not think it is as healthy as Subway can be. Quiznos sells you their pre-configured sandwiches. They taste great, a bit more expensive, but the sandwich-people will not let you configure the sandwich however you want it.
Subway on the other hand, let you choose the bread, the size,and each and every individual ingredient. You can get exactly the sandwich you want, exactly as healthy as you want it and at a good price. So although I sin every once in a while with a Quiznos, I think I like Subway better.
Oh, oh, and at least in westwood, UCLA students get a discount.
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Announcing iPod ShuffleTooth posted by shuri on 2007-04-06 19:15:46 tags: news,ipod,apple
| I will get to the iPod ShuffleTooth in a minute. First I want to talk about a few theories, hopefully soon to become full-fledged rumors.
Many things bothered me about the non-existing iPhone. The first thing that bothered me was that it seemed to me, Steve Jobs was forced to dedicate the entire key-note speech to a product that will not come out for six months, giving out its specs in an ultra-competitive market for all the phone makers to try and match. Rephrasing an IBM motivational slogan, "people expect more from Steve Jobs". This is why I think we can expect some surprises along the way.
The second thing that bothered me was the price. Summing up the price of a phone and an iPod seemed wrong. Surely the two share some circuitry? Surely the price can be lower? Given that you have competition, you can't just sum the prices up? Right? That is why I think that one of the surprises we can expect is a much lower price for the iPhone.
Finally, as wonderful apple is in designing superbly intuitive products for the people, disregarding all hockey pucks that may have slipped by, would they expect us to actually hold this big square to our ears? Is this their idea of good human design? Furthermore, I have this notion that they want us to have more than just one iPod per person. This is why I think one of their products is going to be the ShuffleTooth, a bluetooth supporting
ipod shuffle
that will support communication with phones in general, and offer superb-integration with the iPhone. You tuck away your iPhone safely in your bag, clip that tiny shuffle-tooth to your shirt and plug in the ear-phones. No heavy, big, bulky bluetooth headset hanging from your ear. You can answer calls with one click, simultaneously pausing the music. The iPhone may even push more music to your shuffle after a period of time. But will that be the last iPod you will ever need?
The next obvious step, a step many scientists have been talking about for years, is making the iPhone your gateway and hub of your personal area network, a small wireless network that exists only in a small space around you, used only by yourself, and is shared between all your gadgets. A bigger video ipod can then be used to watch movies or read books. The sound can be streamed directly to your ShuffleTooth while the video will be pushed to your big screen video iPod.
Am I right? Time will tell. But I hope I am right because it sure does sound cool. |
Books on writing
posted by shuri on 2007-04-05 23:00:56 tags: news,writing
| I have recently read two good books on writing I wanted to share with you. The first has the populistic and somewhat provocative name
"How to Write a Damn Good Novel"
by James N. Frey. It is simply an excellent book! The book gives the reader a speedy introduction to all the basic concepts of a novel, including characters, conflict viewpoint and dialogue. So, even if you have never taken a literature course in your life, you will get to know all the concepts you are expected to know. The book also contains many references to other books so you know where to get further information.
Another excellent book, albeit totally different, is called
"Bird by Bird"
by Anne Lamott. Lamott covers some of the same issues that Frey does but in a much more "zenful" sort of way. The book is full of personal stories and experiences that should help the novice writer. The first 100 pages were great. At some stage it became a bit too...zenful for me.
Many issues are common in such books: accepting your first draft is going to be bad in order to overcome the perfectionist's freeze, not forcing your ideas on your book and getting to know your characters rather than forcing them to act the way you want them to.
One more book I suddenly remembered is
"On Writing"
by Stephen King. If you like the author and want to be a writer too you should enjoy it. It is a combination of writing advice and a personal memoir that is fun to read.
So read, write, and be happy. |
Interview with Kevin Rose
posted by shuri on 2006-01-26 15:27:48 tags: news
| O.K. If you have not heard about digg you should not waste time any more time.
Start off looking with the latest video podcast ("t.v" show delivered over the internet?!) in diggnation.
This podcast supposedly covers some of the stories on digg. It is actually very very funny watching these two guys try and talk while consuming more and more alcohol. So check it out
Digg is one of the hottest things on the net. A real competitor to slashdot in the nerd news departement. Why is it so hot? It leverages on the current "everything social" trend. If you inisist on using the web2.0 buzzword do it youself. The digg spy is a very interesting AJAX application of although I am afraid it is not very useful.
So anyway, check out this interview with him. Good times :)
|
online application uses xul
posted by shuri on 2006-01-17 13:18:31 tags: news,web
| Wow. I simply did not know this was possible. Yes, you need to install the best browser around to see this.
Some more details are available there.
There are a lot of technologies floating around today. Ajax, xul, xaml
and xforms. Some seem like buzzwords (Ajax, web2.0). But you can see
some applications are already out there.
Where is the web going? You can either wait and see or try and do something about it.
I am sorry I do not have a forum yet.
|
How you could have made a million dollars
posted by shuri on 2006-01-16 17:47:13 tags: news
| I am jealous. This guy
made a million dollars by selling pixels... PIXELS! The first time I
read about this I dismissed it immediately. Who wants to buy pixels for
a dollar each? Practically charity, right? But it turned out to be pure
genius. The initial publicity for the site made the price reasonable.
The last 1000 pixels were sold on eBay for 38,100 dollars.
You could say it is just a scheme. But the real funny thing is the
buyers got their moneys worth in advertisement. Read about it some more
on yahoo.
|
Rubiks Cube competition
posted by shuri on 2006-01-16 12:48:20 tags: news
| | The Rubiks cube lives on. Check out this video which shows a new world record. The video also talks about solving it blindfolded.
|
Narcissistic Leaders
posted by shuri on 2006-01-14 20:58:50 tags: news
| This is not news, only new for me. Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons.
An interesting paper that tries to analyze leaders according to their
personality type, specifically narcissistic leaders of course.
The article mentions Jack Welch, Larry Ellison as well as Napoleon
Bonaparte. It mentions the benefits of having a sidekick which made me
think of comic books and super heroes. A good read.
|
Seagate BUYS Maxtor
posted by shuri on 2005-12-22 23:29:30 tags: news,storage
| | I
am out of storage space and I need to buy a new hard disk. I have been
asking myself should I buy Seagate or Maxtor disks? Well, soon it will not matter! From my limited experience Seagate make great hard disks.
|
Yahoo buys del.icio.us!
posted by shuri on 2005-12-10 12:36:31 tags: news
| Yahoo buys del.icio.us!!!
I keep being impressed by what Yahoo does. I hope they are indeed smart
enough to get the most out of these kinds of purchases. Keeping the
del.icio.us community happy while working the technology into their
sites.
|
Strong Typing vs Strong Testing
posted by shuri on 2005-09-21 12:40:07 tags: news
| No this is not exactly news, but it is interesting.
Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing
Bruce Eckel, of "Thinking in Whatever" fame writes about strong typing
vs strong testing. His conclusion is that strong typing is not
necessary because it is merely an incomplete form of testing.
Also check out This presentation talks about why Bruce Eckel likes Python.
|
Interview With Hans Reiser
posted by shuri on 2005-09-14 14:03:18 tags: news,linux
| As
you may know I like filesystems. Not only the simple systems challenge
aspect of them. Filesystems are also interesting as a system for
organizing and representing information.
Hans Reiser is responsible for reiserfs. The folks at Namesys are working on reiser4 that is supposed to bring some cool stuff like filesystem plugins and small file efficiency.
But even if you know all that the interview is worth a read. Hans talks about his background and about the discipline needed to compete in the filesystem market.
|
Distributed Filesystem using BitTorrent and Kademlia
posted by shuri on 2005-09-04 13:10:24 tags: news,file-systems
| An interesting link found here points to a project called Localhost.
This project seems to build a file system over BitTorrent and Kademlia.
I gave a similar project this semester, a distributed file system over
Chord. It even works.
|
Next Gen Intel Chips
posted by shuri on 2005-08-19 01:23:52 tags: news
| | The Inquirer has a piece
speculating about the next generation Intel chips. Multi-core VLIW with
Transmeta style translation of code and a big pile of cache.
Performance per watt is the new motto, which is what, they claim, lured
Apple to do the switch. Interesting.
|
Yahoo, Alibaba and Jack Ma
posted by shuri on 2005-08-15 15:02:51 tags: news
| | It is already old news that Yahoo baught Alibaba. This story in the new york times tells the story about the man behind Alibaba. You may find this story
interesting as well, it is an interview of Jack Ma from October 2004.
It talks about Yahoo eBay and Alibaba. Jack Ma talks about the mistakes
eBay made in china. Impressive guy and interesting stuff.
|
Yahoo buys Konfabulator
posted by shuri on 2005-07-26 17:16:12 tags: news
| Yahoo bought Konfabulator
and then made it available for free. I think this is a very interesting
purchase and might allow Yahoo to more easilly acquire desktop real
estate. Go yahoo.
The Konfabulator saga is interesting. Konfabulator was a good
candidate to be purchased by Apple. Only then Apple made Dashboard,
kind of a Konfabulator clone. So they added support for windows
machines. Now, Yahoo buys them, interesting.
|
Sandy, our dog, died
posted by shuri on 2005-07-21 08:55:21 tags: news
| | Our dear beloved dog Sandy died two days ago. Goodbye Sandwich.
|
Cool GUI Invention
posted by shuri on 2005-07-20 11:17:07 tags: news
| | I like people who manage to innovate in fields that have been around for some time. Check out this Fold n Drop feature. You can watch the video and there is a nice java demo.
|
IBM, Israel and the open way
posted by shuri on 2005-04-26 10:48:35 tags: news
| | IBM agree to foster development of open-standards technology by Israeli start-ups. cool.
|
Amazon printing books? On demand?
posted by shuri on 2005-04-13 17:09:19 tags: news
| I do not know what amazon is planning. Maybe you do not need big warehouses when you print and ship on demand?
Anyway, they bought BookSurge, a company that specializes mainly in out-of-print books. here and here
|
Mandrake changes its name to a stupid one
posted by shuri on 2005-04-08 16:25:35 tags: news,linux
| | My
favorite GNU/Linux distribution a.k.a Mandrake by Mandrakesoft is
changing its name to a new and stupid one Mandriva. Details here. Originally read at osnews
|
VB Business Opportunity
posted by shuri on 2005-04-07 15:07:39 tags: news
| | A few weeks ago in class I suggested that the end of the VB 6 license is a good business opportunity. Apparently Real Software think so too. Check it out here
|
Seagate and DVRs
posted by shuri on 2005-04-07 15:03:42 tags: news,storage
| I like Seagate, I trust their hard-drives. They seem to be trying to be more than just hard-disk makers.
They are doing something with Digitial Video Recorders (DVRs) and digital rights management. Check it out here.
|
Unlimited email storage from google
posted by shuri on 2005-04-02 15:59:55 tags: news,google,email
| | I
do not think this is an april fools joke. Google is going to offer two
gigabyte mail boxes. Supposedly, the storage capacity will be increased
daily. Read more here
|
Ask Jeeves bought for $1.9B
posted by shuri on 2005-03-27 10:50:53 tags: news
| IAC/InterActiveCorp bought ask Jeeves for 1.9B through exchange of stocks. News At cnn.com
What does IAC do? They own: Ticketmaster, big e-commerce site that sells tickets, home shopping service HSN and the popular travel site Expedia.
HSN started as a retail radio station
in florida. Now it is the 4th largest cable television network in the
U.S (according to their site).
|
Punch-cards are coming back
posted by shuri on 2005-03-16 11:27:30 tags: news
| IBM is showing off the long awaited next generation of punch-card technology. Well... sort of.
Checkout the news.
Why is this interesting? Because a square inch can hold about a terabit of information.
I always said that hard disks are nothing but a glorified record players.
|
Yahoo search services
posted by shuri on 2005-03-01 11:52:52 tags: news
| Yahoo is opening up an API so anybody can use their search services.
News here. The actual site is here.
They do not use SOAP, they use something called REST.
Yahoo just keeps doing stuff. Sure it is about three years after google did something similar, but it is still great. I like yahoo.
It is also an opportunity for google to support more than 1000 queries a day. Competition is good. Bill, is MSN next?
Yahoo has rate limiting too. Web Search is limited to 5,000 queries per day.
|
Attacks Against Local Search Engines
posted by shuri on 2005-03-01 11:21:25 tags: news
| Well, this guy describes some attacks on web servers. The attacks mostly leverage a "local" search. The index is built from the files directly.
Guessing is also mentioned which I find interesting personally.
|
Fiorina leaves HP...
posted by shuri on 2005-02-13 13:48:04 tags: news
| This
amazing woman, Carly Fiorina, is forced to leave HP. She will be
remembered for merging the two giants Compaq and HP with her bare
hands. I am sure a lot will be written on what went on in there.
This nytimes piece talks about it.
This nytimes piece talks tries to answer the question: what would happen if she were a guy?
news.com talks about the money she gets.
Other news and related comments everywhere
And another one trying to figure out what went wrong
|
Ohhh. Finally. QT4 will be offered GPL for windows
posted by shuri on 2005-02-08 00:15:31 tags: news
| What this
means is that a great crossplatform native commercial quality
framework, that includes GUI, will be available free (as in speech) for
practically any platform. Sababa (which sort of means cool or great).
KDE for windows? Konqueror conquers windows?
|
Google domains, browsers and the unexpected
posted by shuri on 2005-02-07 13:53:44 tags: news
| Recent activity in google should get you thinking.
First off they had been granted a right to sell domain names.
Cool. But why? Collect statistics? sure ok. But that is probably not the whole story.
Maybe it has something to do with their much speculated browser
Does this give them any additional rights other than selling domains?
The cool, amazing thing about google is that they constantly make you
expect the unexpected. Surprise you and make you see what was under
your nose the whole time.
|
Web Search Sites See Clicks Add Up to Big Ad Dollars
posted by shuri on 2005-02-06 17:21:48 tags: news
| Big money in web ads
"Google, the most popular Internet search company, announced that it
had passed a significant milestone by selling $1 billion of advertising
during the last three months of 2004."
"Google did not invent the concept of keyword search ads..."
"But so far Google has been the most successful"
|
PSP is A OK
posted by shuri on 2005-02-06 15:42:30 tags: news
| PSP is A OK
"The PSP will go on sale in the United States and Canada on March 24 for $250."
primarily been designed as a game device; can do more.
a copy of the Sony film "Spider-Man 2" loaded on the new 1.8GB Universal Media Disc (UMD) format Sony has debuted with the PSP.
"do for digital media what the Walkman did for analog music"
"three to six hours on a battery charge"
|
Who will become the Intel of photography?
posted by shuri on 2005-02-06 15:36:01 tags: news
| chips in cameras:
"Digital photography could become one of the next big opportunities for
the chip industry"
"Improve the picture by combining the image sensor with a massive array
of analog-to-digital converters. With this somewhat-novel architecture,
signal degradation and lighting problems are reduced because pixels are
independently monitored and controlled."
"Kodak and Hewlett-Packard use TI chips extensively in their cameras,
she said, while Olympus and Panasonic have picked up the companys chips
for select models."
|
PlayStation 3 Cell chip aims high
posted by shuri on 2005-02-06 15:26:55 tags: news
| cell processor for playstation 3
Intel have already started working on dual-core chips,
Cell goes several steps further
Cells processing units--called "software cells"--can handle completely separate jobs
allowing the processor to perform a type of distributed or grid computing,
Cell bakes security into the silicon with innovations such as a memory design that allocates memory into secure chunks
PlayStation 3 will be the first major piece of hardware to use the Cell
Also check out these arstechnica links
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