New rule: if you're a fancy NYC Internet marketing group, check spelling on your promos

These folks have hosted high-falutin' events in NYC since the heyday of the dot coms in the 90s.  Now they come to us is a famous NYC reference, an ode to the Seinfeld "Master of His Domain" episode.

And the subject is important: the extension of TLDs, or Top Level Domains, which I think is a serious issue.  The ICANN plan is foolhardy and dangerous.

But back to our NYC friends.  They misspell the word "domain" in the subject line of the email they send out, in a message about "domains"...

Oops.  It happens.

Google Chrome computer ad renders improperly ... In Google Chrome

Carl Page, Larry's father, presaged Google long before its inception

Watched a surprisingly accurate 2004 documentary about Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page today on Biography. They got all the essential facts right.

They emphasized that as Stanford grad students Larry and Sergey had to scrimp on hardware and develop superior algorithms.

While telling this story to a friend I recounted how Larry's dad, MSU computer science prof Carl Page, gave a lecture probably sometime in the 80s where he said his best time at MSU was the year he took a sabbatical at Stanford.
And...

Soviets were great at software and algorithms because they worked with horrible computer hardware. They had to write great software and use the available cheapest hardware because they had no choice.

I wish I could recall the exact year of the lecture.
Larry's insight was to use cheapest hardware and superior algorithm and softwware. Hmm, ring a bell? I wonder what conversations Larry and his father had that influenced Larry as he and Sergey built Google.

Think about it.  Dr. Carl Page, respected computer scientist, said his best year was in academe was at Stanford.  That's where Larry went to grad school, and where he met Sergey. (The documentary claims that Larry and Sergey didnt't like each other at first.  No clue if this is true.)   Dr. Page recognized you could make up with cheap hardware and excellent software what others tried to do.

Those two instincts: to use superior algorithms, and to use the cheapest hardware, may have come from Dr. Carl Page's insights. 

It never occurred to me until today, but I think Carl Page Sr. may be Google's grandfather.  A fitting thing to realize, as Dr. Page died of a cruel illness, Post-Polio Syndrome, just before his son fathered Google.

http://www.cse.msu.edu/?Pg=64&Col=2

Is it a URL, or is it an app? This is the decision point.

It matters.

Screen shots show hidden hilarity in The Onion's hilarious MacBook Wheel video

This video came out many moons ago but it still cracks me up every time I see it. It does such a great job of spoofing trade shows, Apple fanatics, and Apple itself. But there are split-seconds of embedded humor as well.

You have to watch this video multiple times, and use the Pause button frequently, to realize how exquisite it is.

http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no,14299/

HP admits in lawsuit settlement: they lie about ink levels

Hewlett-Packard is as storied a name as Ford or GE: the archetypal two guys in a garage.

Yet in recent years, not so storied. Carly Fiorina damn near ruined the company with the Compaq merger. And Mark Hurd brought scandal.

So today it was no surprise that HP sent me a note offering to settle for 6 bucks or so for ripping me off on ink levels. You see, HP makes one third of its revenue on ink.

That's right. This dynamic vendor of laptops, desktops, servers, and services makes 1/3 of its money on ink.

And they make a substantial chunk of change by lying about whether your printer is out of ink.

They even tell the printer to stop printing black if the printer is out of blue. Allegedly.

We will see if the lawsuit hues the company more to Hewlett and Packard, two decent guys in a garage, or more to Fiorina and Hurd, decidedly less decent folks.

Steve Jobs the devil? Bill Gates a saint?

Who'd have ever thought we'd reach a point in history where Steve Jobs would prove to be evil, and Bill Gates to be saintly?

I've been using an iPad as my only computer for a few months now. It is like being in prison.

It has a real operating system, like a Mac, but Steve buried the file system.

I can't plug my digital camera, or other USB devices, into it.

The apps I can download are vetted by Steve and his band of merry criminals.

It is so deliberately crippled, it's criminal. Tiny Tim and Agathie Christie.

Sales of motherboards down; CNBC reporter draws very wrong conclusion

CNBC reporter draws incredibly stupid conclusion on a report that motherboard sales are down 10%.  Erin Burnett holds up a smartphone and declares on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that every computer has a motherboard, therefore this means sales of all computer devices are going down.

INCREDIBLE!  The report was obviously about motherboards as a commodity used to build PCs.  Motherboards for PCs, made by companies lie ASUS, are the kind of commodity whose sales can be tracked. 


I'm not sure how the term "motherboard" applies to a device like an iPhone or an iPad -- the devices pack their smarts in amazingly tight spaces and may not have a "motherboard" at all.  In any event those are proprietary packages of electronics, not commodities whose sales are known.

The correct conclusion to draw is there may be a drop in PC sales -- and that the drop is likely because of the sustained popularity of smartphones and the amazing rate of sales of the iPad.  Even Mac sales are down due to the explosive demand for iPads.

Really dumb conclusion. Erin is really pretty, though.

"Lorem Ipsum" article on AOL reports Chrysler design competition

"Lorem Ipsum" is placeholder Latin text used to budget space for an article to be published.  It's been used in print publishing for decades, and the practice has made its way onto the Web.

Unfortunately, sometimes people publish the Lorem text instead of the actual article.  This could be because a writer or editor pushes the wrong button before the article is ready, or maybe a content management system burps during the editorial process.

This morning an AOL Auto article promised to tell about a competition for a new logo for Chrysler.  Instead we got the Latin filler text.

Later, it got better.

http://autos.aol.com/article/rebranding-chrysler/ 

At Staples you can't find the aisle with staples!

So I was looking to buy a new stapler at, as it happens, the local Staples. I much prefer them to the really big box stores such as Best Buy -- less crowded, and the salespeople in the computer section seem more knowledgeable. I went wandering the main aisles looking for which row might have staplers..

Finally I checked out an aisle labeled "Tape and Fasteners"...

See the word "Staples" or "Staplers" anywhere? But let's try row 20 and we find...

Hmmm....  Wouldn't you think they could do something clever on the sign with their own store name ???

The MakerBot: A Three-Dimensional Printer

Cool video demonstration of a 3-D printer:

Clever tech guy foils neighbors stealing his Wi-Fi signal

This is awesome!  A tech person discovered that his neighbors were stealing his Wi-Fi signal.  So he decided to thwart them by fiddling with their Internet experience.  For instance, he turns images in Web pages upside-down.  Take a look at an example:

Click screen shot for full-size image.

He uses software magic to turn all images in Web pages upside-down.  He also redirects links to http://www.kittenwars.com/.  The guy behind that site send him an e-mail to him saying that he gets mail from people who think kittenwars has been hacked and demanding that he improve his security!

This is just plain delicious.  The Wi-Fi owner could've just enabled WEP and the neighbors would never get the pass code.  Instead he decided to have some fun with the bandwidth thieves.  Bravo!

See http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html for the full story.