Ramblings & ephemera
From Tim O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” (O’Reilly Radar: 26 October 2008):
Since “cloud” seems to mean a lot of different things, let me start with some definitions of what I see as three very distinct types of cloud computing:
1. Utility computing. Amazon’s success in providing virtual machine instances, storage, and computation [...]
Posted on October 31st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
The phone rings. Denise picks it up.
“Hello? Yes. Yes, I support MoveOn.org. What? Yep! I’ve got my MoveOn dot shirt on right now!”
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Posted on October 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, overheard | No Comments »
From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008):
Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time - is relatively constant, but supply — online content — has [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional” (Wired: 20 March 2008):
This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | No Comments »
From Robert McMillan’s “A misconfigured laptop, a wrecked life” (NetworkWorld: 18 June 2008):
When the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued Michael Fiola a Dell Latitude in November 2006, it set off a chain of events that would cost him his job, his friends and about a year of his life, as he fought criminal charges that he [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, law, security, technology | No Comments »
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):
One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
Last night Denise was speaking to my Blogs to Wikis class about the legal implications of social software. She was going over exceptions to the 1st Amendment and was discussing obscenity and child pornography.
“Child pornography is a completely different animal altogether. Especially if you’re using animals.”
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Posted on October 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, overheard | No Comments »
From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, technology | No Comments »
From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):
We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Wade Davis’ “Wade Davis: an Inuit elder and his shit knife” (Boing Boing: 26 September 2008):
The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
You can use the watch command, but it unfortunately isn’t available for Mac OS X. At least, from Apple. Sveinbjorn Thordarson (great name!) has a version of watch that you can download and compile on your OS X box. It’s available at http://www.sveinbjorn.org/watch_macosx.
Or, you can use this shell script:
while true ; do foo ; sleep [...]
Posted on October 2nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help | No Comments »