Author Archives: riedl

Interesting article on Read/WriteWeb about Spam emails outnumbering legit emails this year.  They also point out that the user experience continues to get better all the time, even as the raw amount of spam keeps increasing, because spam filters keep getting better.  One interesting open question is how good spam filters have to be before they make spam uneconomical.  After all, even though spam is very cheap to send, it isn’t *quite* free.  It will be interesting to see if we can predict whether technology can make spam a bad business decision, or whether we have to change the laws for that to happen.  I wonder if there’s a way to frame this question as an empirically-based research question?

John

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This article by Joel Spolsky is fun even if you’re not hoping you’ll be doing a worldwide tour to promote your next software product :).  Especially good advice about managing the actual presentation part.  (Don’t miss the advice about preparing the talk!)

John

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Here’s an article about a blender that works when you growl at it.  You simulate the pitch you want the blender’s motor to make, and off it goes!

I’ve been thinking for a while I’d like my car to be able to open its doors if I beep at it like it beeps when I press the button on the dongle.  What other toys would you like to work when you “talk” to them?

John

P.S. I’m practicing humming the Windows shutdown tune ..

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I came across hi5, yet another social networking site, as the number 9 site on Alexa, according to traffic.  It turns out that part of the reason for all the traffic, according to Wikipedia, is that hi5 is the leading social networking site in a bunch of central american countries.  It continues to be intriguing to see social networking sites find niches geographically; after all, one of the pitches for the value of social networking is that it spans geographies!  One hypothesis is that even though “The World is Flat”, the vortex argument still breaks at national borders, because most people don’t interact regularly with people in different countries?  Will this continue?  Or will globalization lead to a flattening of social networking?

One interesting way to answer this research question would be to study social networking in the EU versus social networking in Central America.  My conjecture is that within the EU there will be a single dominant player, while across Central and South America there may be different players that dominate in different countries. 

John

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My firefox suffers from major bloat, especially now that I run gmail (with gmail macros, of course), and google reader.  Here‘s a very interesting post that suggests that the problem is not leaks (as conventional wisdom would have it), but our old friend fragmentation.  The argument is that firefox does lots and lots of allocation, and ends up with most of the free memory in tiny little chunks which can neither be returned to the OS (because they’re in blocks that are partially used), nor paged out (because the page has some active stuff on it).  It will be interesting to see the solutions that work in practice …

John

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