Oh Come On - How Stupid and Gullible are People?

I'm getting kind of tired of these emails/IM that try to get others to forward the response to 10 friends - or whatever.

Today on Snopes, they have "busted" the myth that you can receive a $60 or $160 cell phone credit by forwarding a specific text message to 10 friends.

This has been going on for YEARS now. Have people not clued in yet? I guess not, because there must be people that fall for these and perpetuate the myth.

I clearly remember the early days of ICQ. We'd get a message saying something along the lines of "if you don't forward this IM to 10 other people, they'll think that your account in active and kill it". Bloody ridiculous that people would even for a second think that this is the case.

Wake up and give your head a shake, this Internet isn't a new thing and here's Rick's Rule of The Internet #1 - don't take ANYTHING at face value. Question it - and challenge it - and see if it holds weight.

Technodrool v1.0

Earlier this week, I was reading about the new USB 3.0 standard coming out and how it's throughput was estimated to be about 320 megabits/second (about 10x the throughput of USB 2.0).

Upon reading this, I was quite intrigued and started thinking how technology continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Today, there's an article about a Japanese company (seems to be fairly well established - no fly-by-night sort of thing) who has announced a fibre-optic based communication link - basically, the future of USB.

First of all, what's interesting about this technology is that it's capabilities exceed that of the existing USB capabilities. Reportedly, the thought that this new fibre optic link will not only link USB devices, but also other devices with communication links. One of the primary links would be between the computer and the monitor.

For one thing, if this comes to pass, this might alleviate some of the proliferation of non-standard communication interfaces out there (one cable does all, sort of approach).

What really got my techno-drool factor going though is that the CURRENT expected throughput is about 10 gigabytes per second - an improvement 30 fold over USB 3.0 and 300x greater than the current standard USB 2.0.

Scientists there speculate that in the future, they expect the throughput to be up in the 30gbps range.

The (Legal) Eagle Has Landed!

The more that we get immersed in this technology, the more it appears that it has a drastic impact on all areas of our lives, and this is something that we don't always take into consideration.

Case in point, in the news today are two totally unrelated, but still "related" (if you follow me) stories as it revolves around the legalities of the Internet.

Story #1 - Copyrighted Materials (Part I)
Photographers have either filed, are in the process of filing, or are considering filing a suit against Google. The premise of this suit is that their photographs in books that Google has been scanning as part of their "open library" perspective are including copyrighted photographic images and the photographers are not being compensated accordingly.

Story #2 - Defamation of Character in a Digital Age
A 16 year old Arkansas boy is suing his mother for allegedly hacking his Facebook and posting slanderous comments about him.

Story #3 - Copyrighted Materials (Part II)
Okay - this one technically isn't related to my topic as it has nothing to do with the Internet, but the basic premise is there and I wonder if in context of story #1, if it has more relevance than would be originally believed.

This story is about Canadian (Toronto?) establishments that are playing music for their customers. The legal eagles are sending these restaurant and bar owners cease and desist orders and/or bills for having played copyrighted materials without compensating the artist.

This story, I'm especially interested in as my nephew is a lawyer in the entertainment industry and I'm sure that he'd have some interesting views on this.

Regardless, as I mentioned, story #3 doesn't have any "virtual" component...yet...but how long will it be before individuals and corporations "mine" the Internet looking for material that belongs to them and suing the pants off of the publisher looking for compensation?

I Would Never Have Even Considered!

Printer.com reported a study that was undertaken. Apparently (and this actually makes sense when you stop to think about it), the fonts that you choose can have affect your printing costs.

According to their study, two printers were setup to print two documents. One of the documents used Arial (a pretty common font) and the other used Century Gothic. Their study shows that the printer that printed the Century Gothic document used 31% less ink! Feel free to extrapolate the net cost savings per year and if it's just worthwhile or not.

Very interesting tid-bit for a rainy and dull Wednesday afternoon!

And The "Oops - My Bad" Award for 2010 Goes To...

...AOL!

Yes - I know that it's early in the year, but apparently they pulled the supreme technological boner.

Two years ago, they spent $850m to acquire Bebo as they were interesting in using the Bebo technology to beef up their Instant Messaging presence.

A scant 24 months later and AOL states that it is not economically feasible to enhance Bebo to the extent that they feel they could make a profit.

"Bebo, unfortunately, is a business that has been declining and, as a result, would require significant investment in order to compete in the competitive social networking space."

Umm...really? Did no-one actually do this type of analysis before making the purchase?

I'm guessing that someone in AOL Mergers and Aquisitions might have a few questions to answer.

0 A.I.

I am formally declaring this year 0 A.I. (after iPad Launch)!

I've read that anywhere between 300,000-500,000 of these suckers were sold during the first weekend. With a cost of between $500-800 a pop, this is a whole lot of sheckles for our friends at Apple.

Not to be a wise-guy or anything, but I also hear that there are starting to be a number of complaints from the Gamma-testers as it relates to the quality of the WiFi signal.

Those Sneaky Marketeers!

Read an article the other day. I don't believe that the technology quite is there yet, but the article suggested that they are developing a technology that would embed cameras in stores for the sole purpose of analyzing traffic patterns, and also (especially) to see where people congregate. I guess that the general concept is that be seeing the gazelles by the watering hole, marketing will get a better sense of where people's interests lay.

At first, I was concerned and disturbed by this - and to an extent, I still am.

However, the fact that we are monitored and taped more than we probably realize is probably an eventuality. I guess that I would not be the only person in the world who was caught on tape trying to adjust a wedgie - but still - geesh, this sort of thing just really sticks in my craw.

In certain aspects of our society, this taping in public life does serve a purpose. Helps us to find tapes of a lost child - for instance. Or perhaps, persons of a more nefarious nature have been identified on tape, so in this respect, it's a benefit.

I swear though, I'm going to profit off of this. I will buy stocks in a technology company and then organize hundreds of flash mobs to congregate around the products manufactured by companies just to drive the stock price up as the stores scramble to stock up on the product. Naw - not really, but heck - it could be fun to manipulate these marketing gurus.