Funny, Interesting and Useless links

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ddt
Quick request -- could we avoid shortened URLs on this forum? I don't know about others, but I look at the URL to see where it's going to take me, and can't do that with tinyurl and bit.ly etc.

ddt

Ta DA!

http://www.wheredoesthislinkgo.com/

and if you don't like that fully ddt compliant URL (snicker snicker), you specifically excluded URL LENGTHENERS in your post above.... so, (being the contraraian I am coupled with my desire to beat you up (another snicker-ette) here is the LENGTHENED URL; albeit just as blind a leap. bwahaahahahahahaaaahahahaha

http://5z8.info/nakedgrandmas.jpg_z3a1mz_openme.exe

this one has the added feature that it masks itself as an evil-doer link, when in fact it's just as innocuous as all my short urls.
(okay, devious character mode OFF)

JK,

General thoughts WRT Twine?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks-updated-iphone-app-aids-internet-of-things.php

I think he's really reaching to tie Facebook and that vague "Internet of Things" together with a protocol. Reminds me of bizdev guys I used to work with who thought that chunks of infrastructure were as easy to plug together as Lego. As the linked Dave Winer article says, content is what's interesting. More than that, I should not say.

It can be weird what the "blue sky" innovators think is trivial implementation.

"So, why don't we just leverage the existing backend." — some guy whose level of understanding is a block diagram. Those arrows are really easy to draw! Oh, I'll leverage my foot on your backend.

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johnny k
"So, why don't we just leverage the existing backend." — some guy whose level of understanding is a block diagram. Those arrows are really easy to draw! Oh, I'll leverage my foot on your backend.

Ha! Oh yeah, even for people who should know better, it's hard sometimes to grasp the scope of changes required (or implementation to create).

"The Internet of Things" is the more important concept in all that and the supposed legitimacy conferred on the idea of "messaging" (new and shiny, right? oy.) I've seen TIoT come up more recently (months ago, but still 'recent') WRT wireless carrier data plans and how the move to metering interacts with the idea that everything sends data all the time (and even with ideas about the already-paid-for 2G networks being kept around to support it, which clearly wasn't going to happen, even before T announced the planned demise of its EDGE network.)

Was it someone here who made the comment about how everything is better when you add "-as-a-Service" to it?

Shoes-as-a-Service
Cake-as-a-Service

Yeah, the messaging thing is not really thrilling. It's not like we were waiting for the perfect protocol to usher in a new age of connected things. We're waiting for a confluence of things - price, ease of use and most importantly, actual problems being solved.

Add networking to anything and it's going to increase failure points, so I don't think we're ready for networking every goddamn thing in our lives. Just think of the annoyance when you have a wall switch and a pull cord that have to be lined up to turn a light on - 2^2 combinations. Add networking and it's something like 2^8, to pull out a number - and you have no control over most of those switches.

Hey, as someone who gets PAID (occasionally) to draw arrows, I... yeah, it's pretty easy.

Dang, I know I wrote something ages ago for Technology Review about Internet 0 (outta the Media Lab)... .

ddt

I had a boss who pitched a huge database project to a government agency, involving massive daily updates from five locations around the country to a central location. This was in the early 90's, so the internet wasn't much use for bulk data transfer. He had, with a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation made at a bar after several drinks, calculated erroneously that the data to be transferred would conveniently fit on a floppy disk. He figured the remote locations could FedEx a 3.5" floppy to the central site every evening. He got the contract based on a proposal based on that calculation. The actual amount of data to be transferred was huge, and the rest of the contract was spent frantically pricing T-1 lines and dealing with the passive opposition of the five remote locations that felt no real need to change the way things were or assist us in what was, after all, a deviation from our proposed system.

We lost the contract. There may have been penalties, but the government ended up funding us for a year or so trying to implement something that had no chance of succeeding. (There were a lot of other issues, but the data issue was the clearest example of my "blue sky" boss being tripped up by his stark inability to see the "little picture.")

Internet 0 fails massively on the ease-of-use metric. It's clever engineering work.

Agreed, Johnny K. Giving each light socket an IP address is pretty amazing, and one could do a lot with that, but yeeesh from ease-of-use.

ddt

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Agreed, Johnny K. Giving each light socket an IP address is pretty amazing, and one could do a lot with that, but yeeesh from ease-of-use

The ability to make every lightbulb part of a botnet would certainly rate quite highly on the list of potential drawbacks.

Mars Rover: Powered by communism!

Well, it WAS going to the Red Planet.

lol...

This pops into my head sometimes when I have to use the History menu in a browser.

ddt

ddt - obtuse. No idea what you mean there...

but....

holy hell! Did Nixon bow, too!??

Ah, you didn't get to the "History! History! History!" part?

And yes, Nixon bowed. As has Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush, and most presidents. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/08/obamas-the-only-president-whos-ever-bowed-except-for-all-the-others

ddt