Here's an interesting way of visualizing the IPv4 address space, courtesy of the geek-centric webcomic xkcd. In the map, the address space is mapped using a fractal pattern that “preserves grouping — any consecutive string of IPs wil translate to a single compact, contiguous region on the map”…
Click the picture to see the original at full size.
I love it when blogs cover media covering media adapting to new media (like blogs). By the time I arrive, the scene is so thick with meta I can barely move my mouse.
Today we have the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporting on the New York Times' adoption of social news widgets on their article pages, allowing users to share news stories via Digg, Newsvine, and Facebook.
The New York Times unveiled a new service today that allows readers to quickly post stories that they find on the newspaper's Web site to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine.
It marks the first time that the country's third-largest newspaper has added a news-sharing tool to its Web site, allowing readers to develop conversations and post comments about specific stories. Readers will be able to add headlines and a small portion of text to the social media sites by clicking on the logos of Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. Those logos began appearing next to The Times' stories this morning in the same box as the print and e-mail tools, although they're initially hidden until users click the "Share" link.
The Times has always been smart about joining in the online conversation, so I'm not suprised to see them do this. The Times did, after all, arrive early at the RSS game through a partnership with UserLand.
The addition of these sharing tools works in the Times' favor, after all: it makes it even easier for their readers to take the Times' content into places (and in front of audiences) it might not otherwise go, and making things easier for users is goodness. It allows the Times some insight into social news activity—they can see what stories get shared, when, and follow the comment stream.Without these widgets, users would have been sharing Times stories anyway, but the newspaper wouldn't have had a convenient method of tracking it.
Of course, if you don't buy the whole "social news is the future" thing, then this might appear to be one of those embarrasing instances of an old media matron dressing a little young for its age. Personally, I think she looks good in this outfit.
One small aside; I'm surprised at the lack of support for del.icio.us, what I still consider to be the grandaddy of social news.
Tags: New York Times, Digg, Newsvine, Facebook, social news, del.icio.us
That's right, you didn't misread that: I'm recommending the PlayStation 2, not the 3.
I'm not recommending the PS2 if you're looking for a gift idea for the must-have-the-latest thing sort of person; chances are, he or she probably offloaded their PS2 months ago on eBay or at the local used games shop and is jamming on a Wii, XBox 360 or PS3 (possibly all 3) and doing so on an HD-capable TV set to boot.
I'm recommending it if you think about it in these terms…
…then the PlayStation 2, currently listed on Best Buy's U.S. site at US$129.99 and at their Canadian site for CDN$129.99 (just under US$114) — and possibly less at other shops — is a cheap and cheerful Christmas gift.
Now consider the edges that the PS2 has over the third-gen consoles that are getting all the press attention these days:
It's a weird selling point, but for consoles, a little age is a good thing. In fact, from this point comes all the other selling points for the PS2.
Unlike computers, there isn't much of an upgrade path for consoles, if any; once released, console developers can't count on the user upgrading the motherboard, RAM or video card the way PC game developers do. This constraint forces console developers to come up with clever ways to eke every last cycle out of the machine.
When a console first comes out, the developers for that console may have had a year's worth of experience developing for that console; oftentimes, it's less. That means that they've got the basics of programming the machine down, but haven't yet had time to fully explore all the capabilities of the machine. That's why “release titles” — games released right at the debut of a new console — aren't as good as titles that come out later on in the machine's lifecycle.
As a machine released in early 2001, there's about 7 years' worth of development knowledge for the PS2 out there. This means that development teams should have a very good idea of the PS2's capabilities, limits and workarounds for any constraints. This, more often than not, translates into good games.
As an established console, having been on the market for 6 years and having moved over 111 million units (according to this Sony site), the PS2 has a library of titles in the thousands. According to Wikipedia, there were 8,181 PS2 titles released worldwide in September 2006 (4,554 in Asia, 1,319 in North America, and 2,308 in Europe). The library becomes even larger if you count original PlayStation games, since the PS2 is capable of playing them.
Better still, many of the top titles for the PS2 are currently available as “Greatest Hits” re-releases at half their original price, which is less than half the price of a typical third-gen console game. You can save even more by buying them used; stores that carry used PS2 games abound.
A big library means more than just a good market for new and used games, it also means that someone near you also rents them out.
Not only is the library big, but there are a lot of great titles in it to, from sports titles like Madden Football and the NHL series to shootin'-and-killin' series like the Grand Theft Auto, Medal of Honor, Metal Gear and the Tom Clancy series, to music games like Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution, to name only a few.
Among them are:
There are all manner of peripherals for the PS2, made by Sony and third parties, from controllers to cables to memory cards to dance pads and even decorative appliques, should you be the sort of person who like dressing up their machines.
It's a minor point, but it's still a point: the second-gen version of the PS2 (the currently-available slimline one) is small and light. If you travel with it, it travels well. If you don't travel with it, it's unobtrusive.
With all the attention being focused on the XBox 360, Wii and PS3, you won't be locked in a Tom Arnold-vs-Arnie Jingle All the Way-style fight for a PS2. That's one less shopping headache.
Amidst the hype for the latest, greatest electronic doo-dad, don't pass up the PlayStation 2 as a gift possibility. Under the right circumstances and for the right person, it just might be the perfect gift.
The theme is geeky DIY over at Red Hat Magazine's holiday gift list. Better still, they're running a contest where the prize is everything on the list. 'Tis better to give and receive.
[W]e want to hear from you. Enter to win the gadgets in this gift guide by telling us what you'd like to see in Red Hat Magazine in the upcoming year. The best ideas will win the loot, and good entries will win something cool, too. Here's the fine print.
So, in the best spirit of free and open source, I'm redistributing somebody else's list of gift ideas!
Tags: Gift ideas, open source, Red Hat
There's a funny Craiglist New York ad for a web developer. Written in language that is very close to “legal” C# (I gave it a quick peek, and even put it into Visual Studio just to be double-sure; it won't compile), it lists these details:
What the ad doesn't reveal is the name of the company — at least not directly anyway. You have to figure out the company name by writing a program to decrypt perqvgfvtugf using the ROT13 algorithm, and then submit the code for your decryption program to the company.
It's a cute way to promote the position, and the “make the ad look like code” tactic seems to have worked: it's already near the top of the list at Reddit.
Rafat "paidContent" Ali notes a move by a boring old standards body that might have big implications for the adoption of movie download services.
A major hurdle in the legitimate download-to-burn services taking off has been removed: At its Nov. 29 meeting, the DVD Forum gave formal approval to a new type of recordable disc that will accept movies encrypted with CSS, the same copy-protection system used on retail discs, for playback on set-top DVD players, reports Video Business.
This could eventually mean that movies downloaded from the iTunes Store, Movielink, and others become much more useful. Generally speaking, you can only play the movies you download from these services on the computer you downloaded them to. Even when you can burn a copy onto a recordable DVD, that DVD isn't playable on the DVD player hooked up to your TV.
I say "could eventually mean," because, of course, the media companies selling their movies through these services might not be so interested in permitting their customers the right to burn regular DVDs. I would expect them to ask for restrictions on the number of times a downloaded movie can be burned at the very least (the same way that you can only burn an audio CD from an iTunes playlist a handful of times, although that can be circumvented by modifying the playlist).
The funny thing is that would never have been a problem had the studios and consumer electronics manufacturers behind the DVD standard not designed CSS from the start specifically to not work with recordable discs. The goal, of course, was to combat piracy. Instead, this design flaw has resulted in a situation where legitimate movie download services are less useful to paying customers than are the free sources trading in unlicensed content.
Tags: DVD, CSS, download-to-burn
I like to keep up with events in the old country, whcih is how I ran across this item in the Globe and Mail about how one of Canada's largest media companies was getting into the social media game.
Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. is working on a plan that could soon see Canadians broadcasting their own cooking, gardening and home improvement shows on the websites of The Food Network, HGTV and other channels.
The strategy was unveiled yesterday when Alliance announced a partnership with GS New Media to create BlogTV.ca, a Canadian website patterned after a popular Middle East site that lets people broadcast live through webcams to computers and cellphones.
Alliance Atlantis is licensing the BlogTV service from Israeli company Tapuz, who appear to license the service on a geographic basis, so only Canadian users will be able to access BlogTV.ca (apparently the geolocation service Tapuz uses is a little shaky—I've seen a few Canadian users complain that their access requests were denied because the site was for use by Canadians only). That doesn't sound very web 2.0 to me. Hell, it doesn't even sound web 1.0. Obviously Tapuz wants to sell this thing a bunch of times over, but the geographic limitation of their business model is completely at odds with the way the internet works.
It would appear that the service will initially launch focused on live streaming. In other words, flip on your webcam and, hey-presto, you're broadcasting through BlogTV (BlogTV also allows users to record their broadcasts for later play). The focus on live, unedited video strikes me as weird, although I suppose it's one way to discourage users uploading copyrighted content as they do on YouTube. Unfortunately, it's also one way to discourage users from visiting the site and making it successful, as they've done with YouTube.
I suppose I should thank god it's not actually blog TV—watching people blog would be booooring TV.
It looks like techno-journo-bloggo Matthew "Geekwatch" Ingram doesn't think much of BlogTV either.
In contrast to BSkyB licensing YouTube's platform, this deal is kinda "meh."
Tags: BlogTV, Alliance Atlantis, Tapuz, YouTube