An 11 year old boy called a friend form his home (wired, POTS) phone, but when heard an unfamiliar sound he asked his mom what the “noise” was. She explained he was hearing a BUSY SIGNAL. Almost everyone has call waiting (or uses a mobile phone) so the young man had never heard a busy signal. We live in interesting times.
Bruce Schneier writes about precautions when taking your laptop into the US.
Video: “Anthropologist Donald Brown is the leading authority on “human universals” - the hundreds of attributes that every human has in common. He has found that all of us, no matter where we were born or what else we believe, share traits like the use of tools, the desire to gossip, wariness around snakes, and a desire to feel empathy.” [via Daphne Page]
Noam Cohn reports (in a longish article about Craig Newmark): “The suit [ebay vs. Craigslist] was set in motion by eBay’s decision to introduce a rival online-classified site, Kijiji, in the United States last year. Kijiji is already the market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Taiwan.” Who knew?
Dave Winder says: “Open is a funny thing, you can’t be partially open. You can’t edge your way toward open. You can’t be open and hold the valuable stuff in reserve for yourself.
Spencer E. Ante writes about how Facebook will spend the $100 million in venture debt it recently raised. Answer: Facebook will buy another 50,000 servers. Even more interesting is a snapshot of the scale of server farms Google and Microsoft are using.
Watch the first three minutes of Sprout Wings and Fly. You’ll be charmed. I promise. More background at J-Walk.
WOW! Check this video demo of Google Earth 4.3 with 3D buildings, lighting effects and integrated street view
My programmer friends are giving ack high marks. Ack (created by Perl guru Andy Lester) is a fext file search utility that understand file hierarchies. It’s way more powerful and flexible than the standard Unix/Linux grep. Here’s what one code jockey has to say about ack:
James A. Martin writes about using Google Docs Offline. If this is reliable, working online usually, then syncing to laptop when going of fthe net would be very usefuIl.
Sign of the times: BANK OWNED FORECLOSURES. A recently opened store front in Arroyo Grande, CA.
Since I’m very interested in the concept of a completely open mobile phone, I follow the OpenMoko project.