2007 December

Dec 20 2007
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The Lane Hartwell Problem

Posted by | media | No Comments

Arrington’s post about photography and copyright is excellent. Of of all the media wars: Video; Music and Images – photography is the most important. The reason – everyone is now a photographer with unlimited film and photographs can’t be quoted as a snippet. 1. Zero cost trial and error creates professional looking results. The photography marketplace is decreasing. The zero cost ubiquity of digital images mean that the sum total quality of amateur output is often better than the sum total of professionals. Search on Flickr for something that you would normally buy from a stock library. The professional photography market is moving from a craft dominated industry of recording events to an artistic one with room for a minority of top creatives, in the same way that it did for painting in the 19th Century. The same number of photographers are fighting for less dollars. 2. The Internet creates…

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Dec 14 2007
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Amazon launches grid database – final component for a zero hardware startup

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Amazon SimpleDB has just been released as a Beta, its like S3 but for databases, allowing structured queries. What this means is that you don’t need to worry about database clustering or possibly backup (although I have never gotten a decent answer to the question of whether you still need to backup S3 data). This potentially provides a beautiful solution for startups – EC2 as application servers, SimpleDB for structured data and S3 for binaries. It is not clear whether SimpleDB can be used, somehow for efficient full text search. If only S3 had a front end like Squid to enable automatic cache on demand for binaries, and there were a better front end to instantiate, configure and manage EC2 instances, then Amazon would be the default choice for most startups.

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Dec 12 2007
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Newly released map of the Internet with accurate statistics, by Amazing Britney S. Crotch and Top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911.

Posted by | technology | No Comments

There seems to be a worrying trend of people who actually believe that the Internet is benign. That it contains primarily useful information and will make stars out of people who make wooden educational toys or sincere bands from Portland. Those of us that have been working in the Internet since before the Web, know a different story. Here is a Newly discovered map of the Internet with accurate statistics. And here are the names of the authors to help you find it in future: “Amazing Britney S. Crotch and top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911”: Internet traffic and content by percentage: The World Wide Web: Porn: 22% Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan, Ron Jeremy, Eric Estrada: 21% Finding Porn or Paris Hilton: 14% Trying to Find other stuff: 8% Information about how to build web sites without tables and with rounded boxes: 7% False Apple rumors: 6%…

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Dec 11 2007
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Liberal America is growing old and dying in Woodstock

Posted by | america | No Comments

Woodstock is a curious place. It is famous for a concert which it never held and as the spiritual epicenter of free thinking in the 60’s. Yet despite the occasional sign saying ‘hippies welcome’, on a snowy December evening before Christmas it looks more like a Republican fantasy of small town America. The setting for ‘A wonderful Life’, perhaps. The hippies are old now, and they line up to protest the Iraq war as the bus to New York passes through. In the background, an apathetic youth with hoodie and baseball cap perches on a mountain bike: gormless, slack-jawed and vacant. If young people are less radical than their grandparents, society is abnormal compared to historical trends. More importantly, the historical precedent is that this kind of society is more likely to stumble into large scale conflict.

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