Stasi spy wearing a giant bear costume appears at a sports festival in Berlin.
Paul Krugman, a Nobel prizewinner in economics, criticised Bitcoin in an article in the New York Times in September:
"What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin. Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded – but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation."
Writing in the September/October edition of Technology Review, the New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki noted that Bitcoin might indeed be trapped in a deflationary spiral:
"With ordinary currencies, though, there's a limit to how far down the spiral can go, since people still need to eat, pay their bills, and so on, and to do so they need to use their currency. But these things aren't true of bitcoins: you can get along perfectly well without ever spending them, so there's no imperative for people to stop hoarding and start spending. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which the vast majority of bitcoins are held by people hoping to sell them to other people."
A very passionate post by former Amazon employee and current Google employee Steve Yegge in which he reflects how Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right:
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
And more on Chrome:
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.
Spies from former communist East Germany demonstrate the art of disguise by donning fur wigs, fake mustaches and dark glasses in a Berlin exhibition of recently uncovered and once highly classified photographs.
The exhibition runs at Morgen Contemporary in Berlin until August 20th and you can try try poking around the Stasi archive yourself if you understand German.
An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as "religious headgear". Read more
Netflix's streaming content licensing costs are predicted to rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $1.98 billion in 2012.
Business Insider has a nice selection of photos by Danny Lyon of Brooklyn in 1974.
It appears that Skype as we know it very soon will be over.
Microsoft Corp plans to buy Internet phone service Skype for $8.5 billion in cash, a rich price as it seeks to regain ground on growing rivals such as Google Inc.
Microsoft's interest in the money-losing but popular service highlights a need to gain new customers for its Windows and Office software. Skype has 145 million users on average each month and has gained favor among small business users.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The publishing tide is shifting fast: E-book sales in February topped all other formats, including paperbacks and hardcovers, according to an industry report released this week.
E-book sales totaled $90.3 million in February, up 202% compared to the same month a year earlier, according to a study from the Association of American Publishers. That put e-books at No. 1 "among all categories of trade publishing" that month -- the first time e-books have beaten out traditional publishing formats.
Microsoft says that Google has put in place technical measures that restrict Microsoft's Bing search engine, as well as other search rivals, from "properly accessing" YouTube for their search results. It claims Google uses that otherwise restricted data to index YouTube videos in its own search results.
Above all, fellow cinephiles, we can’t have both $1 movies (like those you rent at Redbox kiosks) and instant access to the newest releases. You can pay $4 to Apple or Vudu the day the DVD comes out, or you can get it for $1 from a Redbox machine a couple of months later. And let’s not even mention Netflix’s streaming-movie collection, most of which seems to date back to the Carter administration.
Apple is being warned against trying to squeeze cash out of the newspaper industry by controlling subscriptions for iPads and iPhones.
The European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA) says it is concerned by the company's plans to direct online sales through iTunes.
If that happens, the ENPA warns, a large cut of their profits would go to Apple.
However, the technology giant insists it wants to give customers choice.
Finally, very interesting analsys of Wikileaks fallout and what it means in regards of how corporations deal with the information:
Consider just how moribund yesterday's institutions are when it comes to information collecting and sharing. Take transparency in corporations. It's built on a set of institutions crafted in and for the industrial age — like annual and quarterly reports. Four times a year, boardrooms publish updates to their accounts, and once a year, a hefty report explaining and discussing them.
Now ask yourself: does that make even a tiny sliver of sense in a world where I can trade equities from nearly any beach in the world, hundreds of times a minute, using my iPhone? It's an obsolete institution, where my demand for information — to analyze, synthesize, and integrate — has vastly outstripped the capacity to supply it. Hence, stocks froth up and down before and after earnings report releases. When I can't get new information from the horse's mouth, I rely on your opinion, the latest rumor, or what talking heads are paid to say. Result: boom, crash, rinse, repeat. But the real question is one of institutional obsolescence. Why, for example, can't we have continuously updated earnings releases — that let us see what companies are earning in real-time — for a continuously connected world?
The latest announcement that blockade of Flash on iPad, iPod and iPhone is almost over fails to distinguish between Flash used in graphics on the site and Flash used in DRM protected streams. It doesn't apply to the later, hence is of no remedy to Hulu viewers, for example.
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) App Store now includes a program that can play video made for Adobe Systems Inc.'s (ADBE) Flash technology, a development that may help owners of Apple's mobile products work around a bitter Silicon Valley feud.
Skyfire Labs Inc.'s namesake program, which can be downloaded for $2.99, is an Internet browser that can play specialized Flash video from many popular websites. The browser runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Read more
Business Week in the recent article put it dead on calling Web 2.0 companies as a season TV show:
Digg’s collapse has become a cautionary tale for so-called Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley, even the current crop of superstars, like Facebook and Twitter. The basic problem is that these new-media companies don’t really have customers; they have audiences. Starting a company like Digg is less like building a traditional tech company (think Apple or HP) and more like launching a TV show. And perhaps, like TV shows, these companies are ephemeral in nature. People flock in for a while, then get bored and move on.
MSNBS posted a good article on the very serious privacy violations introduced by the latest Facebook feature called "Places" which is enabled by defalult:
“Facebook has provided an official and automated means of sharing someone’s location, where users can now be systematically linked to a specific set of coordinates. These new check-ins could be potentially logged into a database, archived, mined... This is a significant change from just mentioning someone. The concern here is that locational data needs to be treated differently than just an average status update. This is why Facebook has tried to design the system so that, in their terms, no one can be checked in to a location ‘without their explicit permission’. Unfortunately, they fell short.”
Why would Facebook stubbornly keep this spooky feature in its new tool, and enable it by default, over the wide-eyed objections of privacy advocates?
There are two ways to create a fast-growing new business:
1. Create a new product that's so useful, millions of people rush to use it.
2. Have an existing business that millions of people use, and force them to use your new product.
Here, Facebook has picked technique No. 2.
session.gc_maxlifetime
This value (default 1440 seconds) defines how long an unused PHP session will be kept alive. For example: A user logs in, browses through your application or web site, for hours, for days. No problem. As long as the time between his clicks never exceed 1440 seconds. It's a timeout value.
PHP's session garbage collector runs with a probability defined by session.gc_probability divided by session.gc_divisor. By default this is 1/100, which means that above timeout value is checked with a probability of 1 in 100.
session.cookie_lifetime
This value (default 0, which means until the browser's next restart) defines how long (in seconds) a session cookie will live. Sounds similar to session.gc_maxlifetime, but it's a completely different approach. This value indirectly defines the "absolute" maximum lifetime of a session, whether the user is active or not. If this value is set to 60, every session ends after an hour.
Paying subscribers will get the same number of ads as users of the free website. Hulu figured out that $9.99 will not generate enough money to its media company parents.
Viewing of online video more than doubled during 2009: the number of videos watched rose from approximately 15 billion in january to more than 33 billion in December. The top 10 video sites accounted for more than 56 percent of online views at the beginning of 2009, but by the end of the year, they accounted for only 52 percent.
MIT Technology review, June 2010