links for 2009-08-04

This has to be made up there is no other explanation.

"Perhaps more than any other corporate intranet innovation, social software technologies are exposing the holes in corporate communication and collaboration — and at times filling them before the (usually slow-moving) enterprise can fully grasp (and control) the flow." Also as I've said main times "But in truth, social software isn't really about the tools. It's about what the tools let users do and the business problems the tools address."

"In March, a preliminary study reported by Carnegie Mellon indicated that LED lamps were more energy efficient throughout their life, but the researchers pointed out that not every aspect of the production process was taken into account. A new study released on Tuesday by Osram, the German lighting giant, claims to confirm those findings."

"It's not even Word's fault, really, that these problems happen. Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don't work that way anymore. Microsoft has added a metric ton of collaboration features to Word over the years to try and adapt to this reality, from Track Changes to Sharepoint integration. I've used almost all of them, and not only are they somewhat clunky, but getting other people to use them is like pushing a rock uphill. There has to be a better way." I vote for moving away from Word and desktop apps and onto either wikis on open servers or a Google Docs system.

"Former US President Bill Clinton has arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reports. He travelled there to discuss the fate of two jailed US reporters, South Korea's Yonhap news agency says. It says Mr Clinton will try to negotiate the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were sentenced to 12 years hard labour in June." Helps to have friends in high places.

"Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is running for re-election, but her website has suffered Google and Yahoo's death penalty and has been removed from the search index. The reason: Hutchison's webmaster embedded thousands of invisible search-terms in the site in a bid to game search-engines; among them was the phrase "rick perry gay" (Rick Perry is Hutchison's Democrat opponent)." Note Rick Perry is a Republican, article has a mistake, comments caught it, should be revised soon. All that being said, lol.

"Why is Kevin Rose screwing around in Las Vegas with a movie star when a fricking URL redirect service is preparing to eat their lunch? Digg isn’t the shiny new startup that it once was. Twitter has almost twice the audience that Digg has (45 million v. 24 million worldwide uniques in June according to Comscore). As recently as March Twitter was still smaller than Digg. Now, it’s not even close." Never thought about this before but makes sense.

"
If you have been an avid user of Campaign Monitor as well as Joomla!, this is probably what you have been waiting for. We are currently in paid beta to gather some support and see what kind of serious interest exists for this component. We are planning to have the beta for about three months before we come up with a final version."

"So let’s see… i can request a feature, but there’s no guarantee that it will be implemented. Even if it were implemented, i’d have no way of using it until they decide to bless us with another code drop. I also have no way of providing the feature myself and contributing it to the project, unless i keep it privately and keep maintaining it for every new version they release. I don’t care what license they put on it, but you really can’t call this Open Source development."

Who doesn't carry around a boxcutter?

"Rollercoasters! I like rollercoasters!" Sad but true.

"Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email." Google wants you to switch.

"And he's like, Steve? Don't hang up, okay? I'm serious. Don't hang up. Steve? Steve? Oh! Goddammit!"

"More than 4,000 prisoners on death row in Kenya will have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, President Mwai Kibaki has announced. Giving reasons for commuting all these sentences to life imprisonment, President Kibaki said the law did not allow those prisoners to work."

"Twitter hasn't announced this, but we just noticed that they have now started filtering Tweets that contain links to known malware sites." Great job Twitter.

Awesome demonstration of Canvas and Audio elements.

"You see Barack Obama's totally real Kenyan birth certificate that is not photoshopped and completely believable unlike those phony Hawaiian documents? I mean, if there's one country that you know won't scam you, it's Kenya!"

"This thread just solved a big convert performance bottleneck for me, in which basic image operations (resize, sharpen, etc.) would take orders of magnitude more time than with older versions of ImageMagick and would saturate multiple CPU cores for far too long." ImageMagick has issues with multi-processor environments.

" So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin’s right? Would somebody with an equally small number of people to his or her left get on a Sunday morning panel? The trouble, of course, is how to measure that. In principle, it shouldn’t be hard. What I’d like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters, such that almost everyone who gave the “liberal” answer to question 7 also gave liberal answers to questions 1-6, while almost everyone who gave the conservative answer to question 7 also gave conservative answers to questions 8-13. And we’d want population shares associated with each point on the scale. So we could then take known positions of public figures and place them on the scale: say, we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore." Really good idea.

"On his radio show, Bill Cunningham asked conservative columnist Michelle Malkin whether Michelle Obama's University of Chicago Medical Center "salary triple[d]" for working "the same job" "when her husband became a U.S. senator." Malkin replied by citing a chart from her book which falsely claimed that the first lady's salary was $317,000 from 2005 to 2008. In fact, Obama's salary did not increase for working "the same job" — in 2005, she received nearly $317,000 because of her promotion to vice president, which came with an increase in responsibility, as well as a one-time bonus and pension payout." That whole logic thing is so hard to do.

"I'm Boomtown, bitch. Call me." Kara Swisher wants to join Apple's board.

Scoble really wants to be on Apple's board.

"While nearly 80 percent of cool kids—whose levels of substance abuse have risen steadily throughout the '90s—use drugs, the study found that just .007 percent of uncool kids between the ages of 12 and 19 use drugs, down from .012 percent in 1990. "Really, this should surprise no one," Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said. "If you'd ever met any of these kids, you'd be amazed they ever left their own bedroom, let alone smoked a joint."" The Onion FTW!

A search for recursion leads to a search for recursion.

"About 87% of 1,000 adults questioned in June said they prefer to deal with other people in person instead of via computers or smartphones, according to a survey from Brightkite, a mobile social-networking service, and GfK Technology, a market research agency. What's more, half of the respondents said that they do not use social networks." I want to know some ages for this survey.

"Apple® today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006." FCC investigation has to be making everyone a little scared.