Ramblings & ephemera
From Spencer Reiss’ “Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today” (Wired: 21 April 2008):
Almost a third of [Amazon]’s total number of sales last year were made by people selling their stuff through the Amazon machine. The company calls them seller-customers, and there are 1.3 million of them.
…
Log in to Amazon’s [...]
Posted on September 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “The Florentine” (The New Yorker: 15 September 2008): 92:
… the rules by which conspirators must proceed: confide in absolutely no one except when absolutely necessary, try to leave no one alive who might be able to take revenge, and, above all, never put anything in writing.
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How Venice protected [...]
Posted on September 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, art, business, history, security | No Comments »
As some of you may have heard, Google has announced its own web browser, Chrome. It’s releasing the Windows version today, with Mac & Linux versions to follow.
To educate people about the new browser & its goals, they release a 38 pg comic book drawn by the brilliant Scott McCloud. It’s a really good read, [...]
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business | No Comments »
According to this announcement, a Linux client for Dropbox should be coming out in a week or so:
http://forums.getdropbox.com/topic.php?id=2371&replies=1
I’ve been using Dropbox for several months, and it’s really, really great.
What is it? Watch this video:
http://www.getdropbox.com/screencast
It’s backup and auto-syncing done REALLY well. Best of all, you can sync between more than one computer, even if one is [...]
Posted on September 1st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Tech Help, Technology, business | No Comments »
According to RFC2606, available at http://www.rfc.net/rfc2606.html, the following domains have been reserved for examples in technical and other writing:
example.com
example.org
example.net
In addition, the following TLDs are reserved for obvious uses:
.test
.example
.invalid
.localhost
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Famous domain name sales
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10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful
Why software is difficult to create … & will always be difficult
Who made [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business, history | No Comments »
From Robert Sam Anson’s “Birth of an MTV Nation” (Vanity Fair: November 2000):
Now watched by more than 340 million viewers in 139 countries (among them, Russia, China, and Vietnam) …
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Russian music sites
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
I just had a student email me asking about Russian music download sites. Here’s what I told him:
http://www.mp3sparks.com isn’t accepting payments. Dunno why. They haven’t for a long time, so they’re out of the picture, as far as I’m concerned.
I recommend looking at http://www.mp3fiesta.com now, as well as http://www.mp3sugar.com.
There’s a huge list of Russian music [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, art, business | No Comments »
From Joshua Porter’s “Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?” (Bokardo: 14 November 2007):
… web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.
Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using [...]
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, art, business | No Comments »
From Fake Steve Jobs’ “Why Dell will not bounce back” (11 May 2008):
On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers and play them off each other. They brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people to refine this practice. One example: If you want to [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry Page’s “How to Motivate Your Staff” (Business 2.0: December 2003: 90):
We wrote a program that asks every engineer what they did every week. It sends them e-mail on Monday, and concatenates the e-mails together in a document that everyone can read. And it then sends that out to everyone and shames those who [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, Technology, business | No Comments »
From Brian Gibbs’ letter printed in Wired (January 2005):
The explanation that the decline of brands is due to competition, informed consumers, and constant innovation is insufficient. There’s another factor wreaking havoc. Over the years, brands have lost their meaning because advertising campaigns developed by creative types have been clever and witty, but often not relevant.
Once, [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
From Charles Glass’ “The New Piracy: Charles Glass on the High Seas” (London Review of Books: 18 December 2003):
Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | No Comments »
From Jono DiCarlo’s “Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software” (5 October 2007):
Do
Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no†to features that don’t fit the vision.
Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
Don’t rely on configurable [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business | No Comments »
In Clay Shirky’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007), he takes on the persona of someone talking about what new changes are coming with the Gutenberg movable type press. At one point, he says, “Such a change would also create enormous economic hardship for anyone [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: On Writing, art, business | No Comments »
From Douglas Rushkoff’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):
But I think many writers - even good ones - will have to accept the fact that books can be loss-leaders or break-even propositions in a highly mediated world where showing up in person generates the most [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: On Writing, art, business | No Comments »
From Foreign Policy’s interview with Richard A. Clarke, “Seven Questions: Richard Clarke on the Next Cyber Pearl Harbor” (April 2008):
I think the Chinese government has been behind many, many attacksâ€â€penetrations. “Attacks†sounds like they’re destroying something. They’re penetrations; they’re unauthorized penetrations. And what they are trying to do is espionage. They’re engaged in massive espionage, [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
A coffee shop where the employees all wear platform shoes, glitter make-up, orange spiked hair, feathers, and silver spaceman pants.
It’s name:
ZIGGY STARBUCKS!
My friend Michael Krider made the following suggestions:
Drink names:
The Cafe Young Americano
Caffeine Genie
Sumatra-jet City
When employees hand your money back after a sale, they say, “Here’s your ch-ch-ch-change.”
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The value [...]
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, Musings, business | No Comments »
From “A-Z Retail Tricks To Make You Shop“:
Escalators - Multi-level Department stores often use their escalators to encourage you to see more of the store. Travelling either up or down the store you will find you have to walk half way around the level in order to find your next connecting escalator, as opposed to [...]
Posted on August 29th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off
From Mary A. Dempsey’s “Fordlandia” (Michigan History: July/August 1994):
Screens were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros (rubber gatherers) by distributing [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, business, history, politics | Comments Off