Global Nerdy

HotelChatter’s top 5 list of hotels that cater to geeks:

1. Tribeca Grand, New York City. The iStudio rooms — those are the ones whose numbers end in 06 and 16 — are equipped with Apple G5s and enough multimedia production gear to create your own indie film or song. There are Bose SoundDocks for your iPod, or if you’ve forgetten yours, they’ll loan you one, pre-stuffed with (presumably hip) music.
2. Hotel@MIT, Cambridge, MA. I stayed here back in 2003 and loved it. Yes, there’s free WiFi with a strong signal everywhere, but the T1 wired access in the rooms is a dream. Each room has access to the networked printer. The laptop-sized room safes are a bonus. Room art: Scientific American comics in the bathrooms and photos of MIT engineers hard at work and play. I personally recommend this one.
3. Woodlyn Park, New Zealand. Themed rooms: a couple are half-underground, like Hobbit houses, a couple of others are built into a Bristol freighter plane and a few more are inside a 1950s train car.
4. Faena Hotel + Universe, Buenos Aires. A geek chic hotel that’s stylish, yet has geek niceties like a well-placed flat screen (the interior designers took glare into consideration) and good Wifi. Not necessarily a geek hotel, but at least it has nice amenities.
5. Sidi Triss, Tunisia. A geek hotel primarily because it was Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s home in the original Star Wars.
6. Wynn, Las Vegas. No idea why this made the list: yes, it has nice HD TVs and VOIP phones in every room, but that hardly makes it a geek hotel. The true geek hotel in Vegas for the longest time was the Alexis Park Resort, a small casino- and slot machine-free oasis across the street from the Hard Rock Hotel and home to both the DefCon and Black Hat conferences. DefCon has since moved to the Riviera.

For the Star Wars fan who’s already bought all the toys, posters, movies, book and model kits, here’s a set of TIE fighter speakers…

Jeremy Zawodny points out the dangers of having an automated news feed and stock ticker on your company’s home page…

You know you’re living in the 21st Century when you’re accused of murder and your computer is seized for evidence, but it become even more painfully apparent when they find a history of Google searches for incriminating phrases like:

• how to commit murder
• instant poisons
• undetectable poisons
• digoxin doses

…as well as searches for gun laws in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

(By the bye, those search links above will run a Google search, so if you’re planning on icing someone, don’t click on them, mmmkay?)

The moral of the story, from a Machiavellian point-of-view: when Googling for murder techniques, use an OS that you boot from a USB stick.

“In the new world of network-enabled information gathering and dissemination,” writes Tim O’Reilly in the O’Reilly Radar post Journalism Through Computer Programming, “programming is as critical a skill as writing and photography.”

Tim wants to keep recent programmers-as-journalists meme alive (see our previous posts, Newspapers Need Nerds! and Nerds and Newsrooms for more), and it’s an interesting idea. In a world where computers have found their way into just about every facet of life, it only makes sense for people with computer programming skills — even if they’d never think of themselves as computer programmers — to follow.

Maybe I should have saved the Bizarro World graphic from my article about American mobile web use being higher than European for this one instead. This Information Week article quotes Microsoft Business Group president Jeff Raikes as saying “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else.”

“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” says Raikes, “what you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Such statements may fly in the face of the Microsoft credo that every non-sanctioned copy of their software translates into a lost sale and the effort and money they’ve put into things like Windows Genuine Advantage, DRM and the BSA. However, Raikes is acknowledging a truth put eloquently by Tim O’Reilly: obscurity is a far greater threat to creators than piracy.

Joe from TechDirt comments:

[Raikes] said the company wants to push for legal licensing, but doesn’t want to push so hard so as to destroy a valuable part of its user base. The company recently got a stark reminder of this lesson when a school in Russia said it would switch to Linux to avoid future hassles with the pirate police.

Simply put, today’s Microsoft Office pirate stands a good chance of becoming tomorrow’s Microsoft Office purchaser. The benefits extend even further when it comes to Microsoft’s development and server tools: as the recent admission of Romanian president Traian Basescu showed, piracy can create a tech boom, which in turn drive paying customers to companies like Microsoft.

We here at Global Nerdy have a couple of things in common with Romania. One is George. The other is that I too have benefited from pirating Microsoft development tools when I was an indie coder with barely enough money to buy a development machine. After landing a couple of contracts, I made the transition that Raikes talked about: from pirate to paying customer of Visual Studio as well as ancillary products such as books, third-party ActiveX components and leigt copies of Windows. Microsoft also benefited from my developing software for Windows, thereby feeding into their business ecosystem.

On both a macro (Romania) and micro (me) level, I think the benefits of piracy far outweighed the revenues from theoretical “lost sales”.

Who knew that CDs and DVDs had a scent?

Pictured to the right is one of Malaysia’s two black labradors who have been trained to detect the scent of polycarbonate, the primary material for optical media. According to the Reuters story titled Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight movie pirates, the dogs will be used to find discs in “unlikely” or unregistered containers.

If I were a Malaysian DVD pirate, I’d try to smuggle my contraband in durian shipments. That oughta throw the dogs off the scent.