More Facebook Advertisers Bail From Beacon. Plus, New Concerns.

Erick Schonfeld - December 3 2007

The backlash against Facebook’s Beacon advertising program just gets worse every day. First, advertising partner Coca-Cola got cold feet over privacy issues. Now Overstock is bailing from the program, and Travelocity is having doubts. What’s more, all of this lack of confidence from the major advertising partners Facebook launched with is coming after it revised its policy to make Beacon opt-in instead of opt-out.

Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.

This objection was doubly true when Beacon was being forced down every Facebook member’s throat whether they wanted to be tracked this way or not. And it was the main reason that MoveOn.org made killing Beacon its Cause Du Jour. Since then, Facebook has addressed most of the initial concerns by wisely forcing people to deliberately and repeatedly choose to participate. But there are still some serious issues with the way the whole system works technologically.

According to one security engineer’s analysis, Beacon partners transmit data to Facebook in bulk about members who visit their site. This is true even for those who opt out of Beacon by clicking on “No Thanks” when asked if the data can be shared with Facebook. The data is sent anyway. Facebook clarifies that it does not do anything with this opted-out data, and in fact deletes it from its servers. But the deletion occurs on Facebook’s servers, not the advertisers’. [Update: It gets even worse. Beacon partners are sending data indiscriminately about every single visitor to their sites back to Facebook, whether or not those people are even Facebook members. This includes very detailed user behavior. Again, Facebook says it deletes most of this data. But what are the partner sites thinking? They might as well be giving Facebook access to their bank accounts.]

From a technology perspective, it is much more efficient for Facebook to manage these deletions and permissions. Most advertisers don’t want to shoulder the burden of figuring out who is participating and who is not. They just send all the data to Facebook and let it deal with the mess.

But from a privacy perspective, this arrangement is all wrong. If I tell the New York Times, which happens to be a Beacon partner, that I do not want to share my travel ratings or the articles I save on the NYTimes.com with Facebook, then the New York Times should not be sending that information out to Facebook under any circumstances and trusting that Facebook will dispose of the information properly. Not to pick on the New York Times. The same is true of any advertising partner. That data should never be transmitted in the first place.

After all, who am I going to blame if I am embarrassed by something disclosed on Facebook because it was inadvertently triggered by an action I take on another site? Well, besides myself. You can be sure it won’t just be Facebook that is going to take the heat. It will also be the offending partner site. Consumer trust is a very fickle beast.

U.N. report: Urgent action needed on 'severe' climate change

(CNN) -- Climate change is "severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" can head it off, a United Nations scientific panel said in a report on global warming issued Saturday.

Exposed mud banks at a reservoir in Spain, November 2007.

The report produced by the Nobel prize-winning panel warns of the devastating impact for developing countries and the threat of species extinction posed by the climate crisis.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, presenting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in Valencia, Spain, warned that some of the effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases may already be irreversible.

The U.N. head said the situation was already "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" could head off the crisis.

The report warns that in spite of the protocols adopted by many Western countries after Kyoto, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise by between 25 and 90 per cent by 2030.

The Kyoto treaty was a global effort to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The United States is one of only a few nations not to have signed the protocol, which expires in 2012.

The report also predicts a rise in global warming of around 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade.

Scientists say up to an 85 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions is needed to head off potential catastrophic changes that could lead to more floods and famine.

Ban Ki-moon told the panel he was hopeful that the report's findings could help bring about "a real breakthrough" in climate change negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, next month.

The climate change panel was delivering its fourth and final report on the science of climate change and the impact of human-produced greenhouse gases at a conference in Valencia.

The Bali talks will set the groundwork for the successor to the Kyoto treaty.

They will also guide global climate policy for at least the next decade, and dictate the types of long-term investment decisions made by big industries and utilities.

Written by more than 2,500 top government-appointed scientists, Saturday's report contains a summary for policymakers attending the Bali talks, outlining the scientific evidence for global warming and ways to deal with it.

However, panel member Achim Steiner, executive director of United Nations environment program, said the report was also meant to serve as a "civilian's guide" to dealing with climate change. He said he hoped individuals could use the information contained in the report to take practical steps to curbing gas emissions.

The U.N. panel -- the recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore -- was asked if goals of reducing emissions could be achieved without the contribution of China and especially the United States, which was one of only a few countries that did not sign up to the Kyoto treaty.

Ban Ki-moon said he had "high expectations" that both countries would play a "constructive role" at the upcoming talks.

"Both countries I think can and should lead each in its own way," he said.

The disagreement over how the cuts in carbon dioxide emissions should be managed may well stall the Bali talks.

Some countries are thought to be in favor of mandatory caps on emissions, which could hit the industrial output of major carbon dioxide producers such as the United States.

Mandatory caps are also unlikely to be supported by developing countries, who fear they could be a barrier to growth.

Opponents of the caps -- thought to include the Bush administration -- favor voluntary restrictions and suggest postponing mandatory caps until the richer world is better able to pay for it, and cleaner energy technologies are more developed.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune on Friday, the U.N. head said the world was "on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act."

However, he insisted that he remained optimistic that international cooperation could still help reverse the damage caused by unchecked temperature rises.

"The overarching message: We can beat this. There are real and affordable ways to deal with climate change," he said in the column.

Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800

If the high price tag for Apple hardware has kept you from buying a Mac but you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get adventurous, you can build your own "Hackintosh"—a PC that runs a patched version of OS X Leopard. What?!, you say. Apple's move to Intel processors in 2006 meant that running OS X on non-Apple hardware is possible, and a community hacking project called OSx86 launched with that goal in mind. Since then, OSx86 has covered major ground, making it possible for civilians—like you and me!—to put together their own Hackintosh running Mac OS 10.5. Today, I'll show you how to build your own high end computer running Leopard from start to finish for under $800.

Right now the cheapest Mac on sale at the Apple store is a $600 Mac Mini sporting a 1.83GHz proc, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. For $200 more, your Hackintosh can boast a 2.2GHz proc with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB drive, and a completely upgradeable case for expanding your setup in the future.

Building a DIY Mac requires some work on your part, so be ready to dedicate time to this project. To make things as easy as possible, I'm going to lay out how I built my Hackintosh from start to finish, from the hardware I used to the final patches I applied to the Leopard install. If you can build a Lego set and transcribe text, you've got all the basic skills required.

The Hardware

There's no definitive best bet for a Hackintosh hardware configuration, so you may be able to experiment and come up with a better selection of parts than I did. However, I can guarantee that Leopard will (or at least has) run successfully on this hardware setup.

To make things easy, I've put together my entire hardware setup as a wish list on Newegg. (You may notice that the total price is listed at around $850, but I knocked $110 off the price tag due to a couple of mail-in rebates—so "Under $800" it remains, however fudgingly.)

The build consists of a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a total of 4GB of RAM (four sticks at 1GB each), an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, a GeForce 7300GT (the same basic video card that comes installed in the default Mac Pro configuration), a 500GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and an Antec Sonata case (which I've always liked for its looks and quiet fans). The motherboard is the most important element, since the patches we'll apply later are tailored specifically for this motherboard. You could probably tweak a lot of the other hardware without many complications, but if you stick with this motherboard and follow the installation instructions, you shouldn't see any major complications.

The Build

Now that you've got all the parts, it's time to start putting your Mac together. We've detailed every step of the computer building process at one point or another in the past here on Lifehacker, so rather than cover that ground again, I'll outline the process with links to our previous instructions. As always, be sure to read your hardware manuals before you begin—particularly from the motherboard—to get to know your hardware before you start the installation. Also, always remember to be careful of static electricity and always keep yourself grounded and your board unpowered until you're finished.

1. Install the motherboard and CPU: You can follow these instructions almost without variation, but the heatsink and fan installation, in particular, is a touch different. Rather than hooking the heatsink to your motherboard, the included Intel heatsink pops into place. For a more detailed description of how this works, consult your motherboard's manual and the manual included with your processor.
2. Install your RAM: The only thing you need to keep in mind when you're installing the RAM is that you should install the matched pairs—that is, the pairs that come in the same package—in like colored slots. This isn't strictly necessary, but it's a good practice and generally means better performance.
3. Install the video card: These instructions actually detail how to install a PCI card, which is just a more general way of looking at your video card. The card we're using is a PCI Express card and should be installed in the top (orange) PCI slot.
4. Install the hard drive and DVD drive: Your hard drive is an SATA drive, which is not the type of drive installed in the instructions (though they do address SATA drives). Just connect one of the power supply's SATA power cables to the drive and then connect the drive to the red SATA connector on your motherboard (it's labeled on the board as SATA1). Follow the same basic instructions to install your DVD drive but plug the drive into one of the other SATA ports (I used the SATA4 port).

When you've finished putting everything together, your open case should look like the nearly completed image below. In that picture, I've yet to install the hard drive and DVD drive and I still need to connect the case power and other connectors to the motherboard. (You may install other features of the motherboard if you prefer, like the FireWire connector for the back of the case).

To make sure everything's working properly, close it up, plug it into a monitor and keyboard and power it up. If the computer boots into the BIOS (by pressing Delete when prompted), you're ready to move on. If the computer won't boot, you may have to open the case back up and double-check your installation. Among other things, be sure that your RAM is properly seated.

I should note that at this point of my installation, I ran into a bum power supply unit (PSU) in my case. Unfortunately that meant that I didn't know whether the PSU was bunk or my motherboard was fried, and since I don't own a voltage meter it took an extra trip to Fry's and some troubleshooting to get to the bottom of it. The point is that when you're building a PC yourself, you can and should be prepared to run into snags, so if you're not ready to troubleshoot if a problem arises, you may want to think twice before trying this. That said, I've built several PCs in the past and this was my only major snag in the course of a build, so it's also very likely that your build could go off without a hitch.

Either way, as soon as you're able to boot into the BIOS, you're ready to get started with the pre-installation.

Pre-Installation

There are two things you need to tackle to prepare your computer for installation. First, you'll need to tweak your BIOS settings to properly work with the Leopard install. Second, you need to patch the Leopard DVD to install on your newly built Hackintosh computer.

Tweak your BIOS: The first thing I did once my build was finished was update my BIOS, since the default BIOS wasn't properly recognizing my processor. Luckily doing so is pretty simple. Just head over to the ASUS download site, narrow down, and then download the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Once downloaded, just stick the file on a USB flash drive. Then boot up your build and enter the BIOS setup. Like I said above, power on your computer and hit Delete when prompted to boot into the BIOS.

Once you're there, arrow to the Tools tab of the BIOS, select EZ Flash2, and then hit Enter. Now choose your flash drive by tabbing to the appropriate drive, find the BIOS file you downloaded, and install it. When the BIOS has updated, your computer should automatically restart.

Now that you've updated your BIOS, you're ready to get into some nitty gritty preparation. If you plugged in your drives like I suggested during your build, you should see your hard drive and DVD drive listed in the BIOS as Third IDE Master and Fourth IDE Slave. (Don't worry about the fact that your hard drive isn't listed as the Primary IDE Master.) Arrow down to IDE Configuration and hit Enter.

In the IDE config, you want to set "Configure SATA As" to AHCI. Next hit Escape once to go back to the Main screen. Now hit the right arrow key to move to the Advanced tab. In the Advanced section go to "Onboard Devices Configuration" and set "JMicron SATA / PATA Controller" to Disabled.

Now you need to arrow over to the Boot tab to configure the boot priority (which tells your computer what order you want to boot off devices in your computer). Go to "Boot Device Priority" and set your DVD drive as priority one and your hard drive as priority two.

Done? Then you're ready to move onto patching your Leopard DVD.

Patch Leopard for your Hackintosh: There are a couple of different ways one could go about creating a patched Leopard DVD. The easiest is probably to download an already patched version using BitTorrent (I can attest to having seen the patched version floating around before Demonoid went under, but it's probably available elsewhere as well). The second method requires patching a Leopard DVD yourself, which isn't really as hard as it sounds.

If you decide to go the first route and you find a pre-patched version off BitTorrent, you can skip to the next section. Otherwise, let's get down to work. To patch the Leopard install disc, you'll need a Mac and a pre-patched image of the Leopard installer on your desktop. You can get this in two ways: Either by downloading the image—again with BitTorrent—or by buying and then ripping a Leopard DVD to your hard drive. Either way you choose, when you're finished you should place the ripped installer on your desktop and make sure that it's named osx-leopard105.dmg.

Now it's time to get patching. To do so, you need to grab the patch files (created by the resourceful OSx86 forum member BrazilMac, who bundled the patch files and whose instructions I followed for the installation), which you can download from one of many sources here under the "FILES FOR THIS GUIDE" section at the top of the page. After you've downloaded the zipped patch files, unzip the archive and drag all of the contents of the archive to your desktop (it should contain two files and three folders in total).

Now open the 9a581-patch.sh shell script in your favorite text editor. At the top of the file, replace XXX with your username on your Mac (so that it reflects the path to your current desktop). For example, mine would look like:

APDIR=/Users/adam/Desktop
DMG="/Users/adam/Desktop/osx-leopard105.dmg"

While we're at it, let's edit the 9a581PostPatch.sh file as well. This time, edit the fourth and fifth lines at the top of the file to look like this:

PATCH="/Volumes/LeopardPatch/leopatch/" # path to the patched extensions
LEO="/Volumes/Leopard" # path to Leopard installation

Save and close both files.

Finally, it's time to patch the DVD. Open up Terminal, type sudo -s, then enter your administrative password (your login password). Then type cd Desktop and hit Enter. Now you're ready to apply the patch. Keep in mind that you'll need plenty of space on your hard drive to perform the patch. I had around 20GB of free space when I did it, though I'm sure you could get away with less. To execute the patch, type:

./9a581-patch.sh

and hit Enter. The patch will now execute, which means you've got some time on your hands. You've been working your ass off up until this point, though, so kick back and relax for a bit. I didn't have a clock on it, but I'm pretty sure the patch took at least an hour on my MacBook Pro.

If you have trouble with the patch and you've got less free space, try freeing up some hard drive space and trying again. When the patch has successfully completed, you should see a new file on your desktop: Leo_Patched_DVD.iso weighing in somewhere around 4,698,669,056 bytes. Now we've got to burn this image to a DVD.

Luckily the patch removes lots of unnecessary files so we've shrunk the almost 7GB install DVD to 4.38GB, just enough to fit on a single-layer DVD. To burn the image, insert a blank DVD, open up Disk Utility, select the Leopard_Patched_DVD.iso file in the sidebar, and then click the Burn button. Once it's finished, you're finally ready to proceed to the installation.

But just one more thing before you do. Copy the patch files that we just unzipped from your desktop to a USB thumb drive and name the drive LeopardPatch. We'll need these files for the post-installation patch that we'll apply later.

Installation

If you've followed all of the steps up to this point, you should now be ready to fire up the patched Leopard install DVD. So power on your Hackintosh, insert the DVD, and let the boot process begin (you did remember to set the DVD drive as the first boot device, right?). You'll be prompted to press any key to start the installation or hit F8 for options. Hit F8.

You'll now see the boot: prompt. Enter -v -x and press Enter. (Don't ask me why, but this is the only way the install DVD would boot for me. Not using these options caused the boot to hang indefinitely every time.) You should now see lots of text scrolling over your monitor. You may even see some daunting errors. Don't be alarmed; just let it continue. After several minutes, the graphical Leopard installer should be staring you in the face.

Format the install drive: I know that you're raring to install now that you're finally here, but there's one thing we need to do first: Format our hard drive so that it's prepared to receive the Leopard installation. So go to Utilities in the menu bar and select Disk Utility (if you don't have a working mouse yet, you can still access the menu bar from the keyboard). Once Disk Utility fires up, it's time to format the drive. Here's how:

1. Select your hard drive in the left sidebar.
2. Click on the tab labeled Partition.
3. Select a 1 partition Volume Scheme, name the volume Leopard, and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format.
4. Last, click the Options button and choose Master Boot Record as the partition scheme.

Now that your drive is ready, so are you.

Install Leopard: This really is the easiest part—just follow the on-screen instructions and choose your newly created Leopard partition as the install destination. Then, before you make that final click on the Install button, click Customize and de-select Additional Fonts, Language Translations, and X11. These components were removed so we could fit everything on the patched DVD, so we won't be installing them now.

Now you're ready. Click install and grab a quick drink. In around 10 minutes, Leopard should have installed, leaving you with just one more step before you're running with the Leopard.

Post-Installation

After the installation completes, your computer will automatically restart. Unfortunately you're not ready to boot into Leopard just yet—you've got one thing left to do. So insert the thumb drive you copied the patches to and, just like last time, hit F8 when prompted by the DVD. Again, enter -v -x at the boot prompt and hit Enter. When the install disc finally loads, go to Utilities in the menu bar and select Terminal. It's time to apply the post-install patch.

When terminal loads, type cd /Volumes/LeopardPatch at the prompt and hit Enter to navigate to the patch directory. Now, just like when you patched the install disc, type:

./9a581PostPatch.sh

...and hit Enter. The script will move and copy files about (answer yes when prompted), and when it's finished, you'll be prompted to restart your computer. When your computer reboots this time, you're ready. It's time to boot into Leopard.

OSx86 on Your Hackintosh

Let your computer reboot, but be sure to leave the install DVD in the drive. When the DVD prompts this time, just let the countdown time out. When it does, your installation of Leopard will automatically boot up. You've done it!

From this point forward, you're running Leopard on your PC just as though you were running Leopard on a regular Mac. You'll be jubilantly welcomed in a handful of languages as if Steve Jobs himself is shaking your hand for a job well done. All of your hardware should work exactly as you'd expect. Your sound, networking, and video will all work off the bat. (I haven't tested the motherboard's built-in wireless yet, but it reportedly works.) Your iPods will sync flawlessly, and CDs and DVDs read and burn just as you'd expect.

On the software front, Mail, Address Book, iTunes, and everything else I've tried so far work flawlessly. Firefox is browsing, Quicksilver is doing its thing, Spaces are rocking, Stacks are stacking, Cover Flow is flowing, and Quick Look is previewing. I haven't tried Time Machine yet, but the patch we used reportedly works with Time Machine as well.

But Really, How Does It Work?

I'm still stretching my legs in this new build, and I'm planning on bringing some benchmarks to the table soon so you have a better idea how this machine matches up to its Mac counterparts, but so far it's running like a champ. The only problem with the install at the moment is that it won't boot without the Leopard DVD in the DVD drive at boot—meaning that every time you reboot you'll need to make sure that the Leopard DVD is sitting in the DVD drive. It's not a dealbreaker for me by any means, but it's an annoyance. I've found one post suggesting a workaround at the OSx86 forums (near the bottom of the first post in the thread), but I haven't tried it yet. If and when I do, I'll be sure to post an update.

And that's that. It's a chore to set up, to be sure, but it's also the most powerful Mac per dollar I've ever used. If you've got any experience building a Hackintosh of your own or you've got any questions, let's hear them in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who loves a good hack and cherishes his Macintosh, so building a Hackintosh was a perfect fit. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Marketing In A Web 2.0 World: Why The Best Products Sometimes Win

For 100 years, it has been a truism that “the best product doesn’t win. The product with the best marketing wins.” At the risk of being thrown out of capitalist society, I claim that on the Web, this is no longer true. The best product often does win, with virtually no marketing, if it is easy to adopt.

The job of marketing was to bring prospective customers to try the product. Marketers tell customers about the product, why they should want it, and how to get it.

However, on the Web, marketing is easy. Too easy. You can post a link somewhere, it’s seen globally, and potential users only need to invest one click and 30 seconds of filling out a form to become a “registered user”. It’s easy for them. They do it by the thousands.

If the job of bringing the customers to the door becomes trivially easy, then what is the hard part of the job? Getting users to come back a second time is MUCH harder than it used to be. They have so many other places to go. It’s all equally weightless. They click from a 24 hour work place to a global mall with thousands of options. Adopting a Web service requires users to invest hours – hours that in most cases they don’t have.

So, in previous product cycles, marketing was the most expensive part of a launch, and the product strategy was wrapped around it. Getting attention was the hard part. Now, keeping attention is the hard part. In this new product cycle, figuring out how to get users to adopt is the hard and expensive thing. Marketing serves the adoption work by bringing in the right number of prospects for us to experiment with (in a nice way).

When I work with entrepreneurs from the old days (anybody over the age of 25), they often don’t believe me. The good ones unfold their carefully planned marketing budgets and affiliate programs and strategic alliances. They assume that if they can persuade the customers to try, the customers will buy. Then they do a trivial amount of marketing – a blog post, an email newsletter ad, an email campaign, and look at the numbers. A lot more responses than expected, with smaller conversion rates. At that point, they understand the need to invest in the product and the initial customer experience.

Marketing can be a bad thing because it doesn’t deliver much value to the customer. Over time, customers try to avoid paying for marketing expenses. The biggest cost savings available to a Web startup is to cut the marketing budget. In the old days, marketing consumed 30% to 50% of a launch budget. That is a lot of money that can potentially be invested in product innovation and customer service.

If you can find the one feature that people will use and adopt, right way, it makes everything else easier. So, release early and often and watch your usage dashboard.

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Mon, Dec 11, 2006 @ 10:44 AM

The One Machine

Dimensions of the One Machine

The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.

What are the dimensions of this global Machine?

Today it contains approximately 1.2 billion personal computers, 2.7 billion cell phones, 1.3 billion land phones, 27 million data servers, and 80 million wireless PDAs. The processor chips of all these parts are feeding the computation of the internet/web/telecommunications system. So how many transistors are powering the Machine?

An Intel Pentium processor circa 2004 has 100 million transistors in it, while a Itanium processor inside a server has over 1 billion processors since 2005. More current models have more transistors of course, but these older models would be closer to an average count.

One thing to note is that there are just as many processing chips in the Machine (one billion from the one billion online PCs) as there transitors in an Itanium chip. The Machine is a super computer where each "transistor" is computer. A very rough estimate of the computing power of this Machine then is that it contains a billion times a billion, or one quintillion (10 ^ 18) transistors. Since only the newest servers have a billion processors, the figure is probably an order of magnitude smaller. When we add the transistors for cell phones, handhelds, it calculates out to about 170 quadrillion (10^17) transistors wired into the Machine

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Today the Machine has as 5 orders more transistors than you have neurons in your head. And the Machine, unlike your brain, is doubling in power every couple of years at the minimum.

In 2003 alone a total one quintillion transistors were produced, but not all of them are wired up into the Machine. Many transistors made their way into cameras, TVs, GPS units and the like, few of which are currently online. One day they will be. Every chip will eventually connect to the web in some fashion. That would mean we would be adding as many transistors to the Machine in a year as exist right now.

If the Machine has 100 quadrillion transistors, how fast is it running? If we include spam, there are 196 billion emails sent every day. That's 2.2 million per second, or 2 megahertz. Every year 1trillion text messages are sent. That works out to 31,000 per second, or 31 kilohertz. Each day 14 billion instant messages are sent, at 162 kilohertz. The number of searches runs at 14 kilohertz. Links are clicked at the rate of 520,000 per second, or .5 megahertz.

There are 20 billion visible, searchable web pages and another 900 billion dark, unsearchable, or deep web pages (for instance pages behind passwords or the kind of dynamic page that Amazon will produce when you query it). The average number of links found on each searchable web page is 62. Assuming the same count for dynamic pages that means there's 55 trillion links in the full web. We could think of each link as a synapse -- a potential connection waiting to me made. There is roughly between 100 billion and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, which puts the Machine in the same neighborhood as our brains.

There were more than 5 exabytes (10^18) of information stored in the world in 2003, but most of this was kept offline on paper, film, CDs, and DVDs. Since then online storage has mushroomed. Today the Machine's memory totals some 246 exabytes of information (246 billion gigabytes!). This storage is expected to grow to 600 exabytes by 2010.

But not all the information flowing through the Machine is stored. An increasing amount is generated, pushed, or into the net without anything more then temporary copies. One study estimates that the information stream in 2007 is 255 exabytes while the storage only 246 exabytes, and that this gap between generation and storage will widen to 20% per year. We might think of this total amount of information as "movage," or even the 9 exabyte difference as RAM. The total movage estimated for the Machine in 2010 is one zetabyte (10^21).

To keep things going the Machine uses approximately 800 billion kilowatt hours per year, or 5% of global electricity.

One of the problems we have discussing this Machine is that its dimensions so far exceeds the ordinary units we are accustomed to, so we don't have a way to reckon its scale. For instance, the total international bandwidth of the global machine is approximately 7 teratbytes per second. We used to talk about one Library-of Congress-worth of information (10 terabytes), but that volume seems absolutely puny now. In ten years terabytes will fit on your iPod. Keeping that metric for the moment, one Library-of Congress-worth of information is zipped around on the Machine every second. These are very deep cycles of processing. What will we use to measure traffic in another 15 years?

We could start by saying the Machine currently has 1 HB (Human Brain) equivalent . That measure might hold up for a decade or so, but after it gets to 100 HB, or 10,000 HB, it begins to feel like using inches to measure galactic space.

While personal computers are increasing in power roughly in tune with Moore's rate, doubling every few years, the Machine can advance in power even faster because its total power is some exponential multiple of all the computers comprising it. Not only is the power of its "transistors" doubling in power, but the number of them are doubling, and the connections between increasing exponentially. Computer chip manufactures talk about making chips in 3D, rather than their conventional flat 2D now, in order to gain another dimension in which to expand the number of transistors. The Machine offers more than this. It can expand in all its many dimensions so that its power may be rising at a rate that exceeds the rates of its components.

Somewhere between 2020 and 2040 the Machine should exceed 6 billion HB. That is, it will exceed the processing power of humanity.

Halloween

One more!

Animator vs. Animation II by *alanbecker on deviantART

Are you bored?

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

JAJA!!...hace tiempo que no escuchaba esto!

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

Lifehacker Recommendation: Job Search Engine Optimize Your Resume

Marco has sent you a link to a post on Lifehacker:

Title: Job Search Engine Optimize Your Resume
Link: http://lifehacker.com/software/job-search/job-search-engine-optimize-your-resume-317046.php

Marco says: Nice!

7 Ways to Grow the Action Habit

People at the top of every profession share one quality — they get things done. This ability supersedes intelligence, talent, and connections in determining the size of your salary and the speed of your advancement.

Despite the simplicity of this concept there is a perpetual shortage of people who excel at getting results. The action habit — the habit of putting ideas into action now — is essential to getting things done. Here are 7 ways you can grow the action habit:

1. Don’t wait until conditions are perfect - If you’re waiting to start until conditions are perfect, you probably never will. There will always be something that isn’t quite right. Either the timing is off, the market is down, or there’s too much competition. In the real world there is no perfect time to start. You have to take action and deal with problems as they arise. The best time to start was last year. The second best time is right now.

2. Be a doer - Practice doing things rather than thinking about them. Do you want to start exercising? Do you have a great idea to pitch your boss? Do it today. The longer an idea sits in your head without being acted on, the weaker it becomes. After a few days the details gets hazy. After a week it’s forgotten completely. By becoming a doer you’ll get more done and stimulate new ideas in the process.

3. Remember that ideas alone don’t bring success - Ideas are important, but they’re only valuable after they’ve been implemented. One average idea that’s been put into action is more valuable than a dozen brilliant ideas that you’re saving for “some other day” or the “right opportunity”. If you have an idea the you really believe in, do something about it. Unless you take action it will never go anywhere.

4. Use action to cure fear - Have you ever noticed that the most difficult part of public speaking is waiting for your turn to speak? Even professional speakers and actors experience pre-performance anxiety. Once they get started the fear disappears. Action is the best cure for fear. The most difficult time to take action is the very first time. After the ball is rolling, you’ll build confidence and things will keep getting easier. Kill fear by taking action and build on that confidence.

5. Start your creative engine mechanically - One of the biggest misconceptions about creative work is that it can only be done when inspiration strikes. If you wait for inspiration to slap you in the face, your work sessions will be few and far between. Instead of waiting, start your creative motor mechanically. If you need to write something, force yourself to sit down and write. Put pen to paper. Brainstorm. Doodle. By moving your hands you’ll stimulate the flow of ideas and inspire yourself.

6. Think in terms of now - Focus on what you can do in the present moment. Don’t worry about what you should have done last week or what you might be able to do tomorrow. The only time you can affect is the present. If you speculate too much about the past or the future you won’t get anything done. Tomorrow or next week frequently turns into never. As Ben Franklin said, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

7. Get down to business immediately - It’s common practice for people to socialize and make small talk at the beginning of meetings. The same is true for individual workers. How often do you check email or RSS feeds before doing any real work? These distractions will cost you serious time if you don’t bypass them and get down to business immediately. By becoming someone who gets to the point you’ll be more productive and people will look to you as a leader.

It takes courage to take action without instructions from the person in charge. Perhaps that’s why initiative is a rare quality that’s coveted by managers and executives everywhere. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. When you have a good idea, start implementing it without being told. Once people see you’re serious about getting things done they’ll want to join in. The people at the top don’t have anyone telling them what to do. If you want to join them, you should get used to acting independently.

Spa 341, pulled out of your routine...

Michael Pitek, founder of The Performance Group (341 Linwood Avenue), who spent a lot of time and money converting an old mansion on Linwood Avenue into a corporate retreat. Since then, the business model has been expanded to include a spa, now open to the public, that must be labeled the premiere urban sanctum in WNY. - New York

read more | digg story

Turn a flashlight into a handheld burning laser

Laser Flashlight Hack! - video powered by Metacafe

DIYer Kipkay extracts the laser from a DVD burner and mounts it in a small flashlight to create a handheld laser burner that can light matches and burst balloons. Hit the play button to see how he did it. This project isn't for the faint of heart: it involves pretty specialized components and soldering, but that'll all be worth it when you're camping with your pals and you start the fire by pointing your homemade handheld laser at the tinder. For more info, Kip posted the laser mod over at Instructables, too. UPDATE: Several readers rightly point out that your burning handheld laser could pose a safety risk to humans, especially when pointed at eyeballs. Watch your kids, proceed at your own risk, treat as you would a weapon, etc. Thank you.

When I grow up I want to be like them! :P

driftin kemkraft 400

How to Communicate with Body Language

It is often said that in face-to-face communications, the words we speak actually account for less than 10% of the meaning that we convey, while body language accounts for more than half of our message (our tone of voice supposedly communicates the rest). Body language is important, and if your words say one thing but your body says another, the person you are speaking to is more likely to believe the message your body is communicating. Here's how to start using body language to improve your day-to-day communications and, more importantly, to improve your quality of life.

10 things your IT department won't tell you

The Wall Street Journal talks to 3 IT experts to find out what risky computing they try to keep you from engaging in, then asks 3 productivity mavens (including our very own Gina Trapani) how to get around the blocks. The list offers a nice point-counterpoint of why your IT department considers something a risk, how you can bypass their roadblocks and do it anyway, and—perhaps more importantly—how to get around it in a manner that won't completely freak out your IT department. (I'm not saying it won't just a little.) For more, see how else you can.

Geek to Live: Survive IT lockdown

by Gina Trapani

I visited a friend at her office recently, and watched her launch Internet Explorer on her computer.

"Um, there's this new-fangled thing called tabbed browsing," I told her, teasing. "You should try it some day. It's totally bleeding edge."

She looked at me, annoyed.

"I'd use Firefox but I don't have privileges to install anything on this computer. It's for SECURITY REASONS."

Sound familiar? Using a workplace computer with limited user rights can be a serious pain in the arse. Now, we here at Lifehacker would never recommend that you break your workplace's IT department computer usage policy (ahem) but there are ways to get stuff done with the software you need on a machine where your user login has restricted rights.

Run portable software from an external disk

They may be able to restrict your ability to install software, but they most likely haven't blocked access to your computer's USB ports.

Whether it's a thumb drive or your iPod, you can run the software you want at the office from an external writable disk. Namely, Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird will let you browse the web with extensions and tabs, and check your Gmail, Yahoo Mail and personal email all from the plugged-in drive. Tons of other standalone, self-contained apps exist from word processors to media players for an external drive. The more space you've got the merrier, so if you don't have a thumb drive, be sure to use the extra space on your iPod in disk mode.

Here's a quick rundown of portable app downloads for your escape from IT lockdown:

• Portable Firefox web browser - includes extensions & plugins
• Portable Thunderbird email client - take your email settings with you
• Portable GAIM instant messenger client - if you can't install AIM or Trillian, includes your buddy list

A whole bunch of other portable software downloads are available at PortableApps.com, the IT lockdown inmate's best friend. Also, if you've got an iPod you want to use at work but you can't install iTunes, see yesterday's feature on playing music on your iPod without installing a thing on your computer, The Self-Sustaining iPod.

Route around web site blocks

So you were playing Yahoo! Games at the office happily for months, and then one day the site was blocked. What to do? Well, there are a bunch of methods for routing around web site restrictions, and it'll take some trial and error to hit on the one that works for you.

Here are a few options:

• Use Google's translation service as a 'proxy'
• TorPark anonymous browsing for a thumbdrive
• Browse restricted web sites with Virtual-Browser
• Use Google Mobile as a 'proxy'

Lifehacker reader Amit Agarwal also compiled a list of 7 different approaches in his article How to Access Blocked Web sites.

Luckily I'm administrator on my machine on an unrestricted network, so I want to hear from the lifehackers out there dealing with lockdown. Necessity is the mother of invention, so how do you deal with IT restrictions at work? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, wishes everyone free access to the tools and information they need to work (and play) efficiently. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

MamaPop Reviews the iPhone

Comments for: http://www.mamapop.com/mamapop/2007/07/mamapop-reviews.html

jelus beyond language. YOU WHORE. (sobs)

Posted by: Tracey (Sweetney) | July 05, 2007 at 12:42 PM

YOU WHORE I HATE YOU. lol, had to say it. Yes, jelus over here too. I still loves mah way outdated razr but I wouldn't turn my nose up at an iphone.....

Hacker. Dropout. CEO. When Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Palo Alto three years ago..

...he had no car, no house, and no job. Today, he's at the helm of a smokin'-hot social-networking site, Facebook, and turning down billion-dollar offers. Can this kid be for real?

“I'm just lucky to be alive." Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of social-networking site Facebook, is talking about the time he came face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. It was the spring of 2005, and he was driving from Palo Alto to Berkeley.

Just a few hours earlier, he had signed documents that secured a heady $12.7 million in venture capital to finance his fledgling business. It was a coming-of-age moment, and he was on his way to celebrate with friends in the East Bay. But things turned weird when he pulled off the road for gas. As Zuckerberg got out of the car to fill the tank, a man appeared from the shadows, waving a gun and ranting. "He didn't say what he wanted," Zuckerberg says. "I figured he was on drugs." Keeping his eyes down, Zuckerberg said nothing, got back into his car, and drove off, unscathed.

Today, it is an episode that he talks about only reluctantly. (A former employee spilled the beans.) But it fits the road he has taken--an adventure with unexpected, sometimes harrowing, moments that has turned out better than anyone might have predicted.

Zuckerberg's life so far is like a movie script. A supersmart kid invents a tech phenomenon while attending an Ivy League school--let's say, Harvard--and launches it to rave reviews. Big shots circle his dorm to make his acquaintance; he drops out of college to grow his baby and Change The World As We Know It. Just three years in, what started as a networking site for college students has become a go-to tool for 19 million registered users, including employees of government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. More than half of the users visit every day. When a poorly explained new feature brought howls of protests from users--some 700,000--the media old and new jumped to cover the backlash. But Facebook emerged stronger than ever. According to comScore Media Metrix, which tracks Web activity, it is now the sixth most-trafficked site in the United States--1% of all Internet time is spent on Facebook. ComScore also rates it the number-one photo-sharing site on the Web, with 6 million pictures uploaded daily. And it is starting to compete with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and other tech titans as a destination for top young engineering talent in Silicon Valley. Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says it is on track to bring in $100 million in revenue this year--serious money indeed.

Yet there is an undercurrent of controversy about whether Mark Zuckerberg is making the right decisions about the juggernaut he has created. Late last year, a blog called TechCrunch posted documents said to be a part of an internal valuation of Facebook by Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO). The documents projected that Facebook would generate $969 million in revenue, with 48 million users, by 2010. The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) and others reported that Yahoo had made a $1 billion offer to buy Facebook--and Zuckerberg and his partners had turned it down. This followed an earlier rumor of a $750 million offer from Viacom (NYSE:VIA). Yahoo, Viacom, and Facebook would not comment on the deal talk (and they still won't). But Silicon Valley has been abuzz ever since.

"It's all been very interesting," deadpans Zuckerberg, sitting in a conference room in Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters. He looks every bit the geek in his zippered brown sweatshirt, baggy khakis, and Adidas sandals. He came into the room eating breakfast cereal from a paper bowl with a plastic spoon. He still lives in a rented apartment, with a mattress on the floor and only two chairs and a table for furniture. ("I cooked dinner for a girlfriend once," he admits at one point. "It didn't work well.") He walks or bikes to the office every day.

Zuckerberg's college-kid style reinforces the doubts of those who see the decision to keep Facebook independent as a lapse in judgment. In less than two years, the two reigning Web 2.0 titans have sold out to major corporations: MySpace accepted $580 million to join News Corp. (NYSE:NWS), and YouTube took $1.5 billion from Google. Surely any smart entrepreneur would jump at a chance to piggyback on those deals.

Looming over the Facebook talk is the specter of Friendster, the first significant social-networking site. It reportedly turned down a chance to sell out to Google in 2002 for $30 million, which if paid in stock, would be worth about $1 billion today. Now Friendster is struggling in the Web-o-sphere, having been swiftly eclipsed by the next generation of sites. The same thing could happen to Facebook. New social-networking sites are popping up every day. Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) bought Five Across, which sells a software platform for social networking to corporate clients. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is beta-testing a site named Wallop. Even Reuters is planning to launch its own online face book, targeting fund managers and traders.

So is Zuckerberg being greedy--holding out for a bigger money buyout? If so, will that come back to haunt him? If not, what exactly is his game plan?

Zuckerberg's answer is that he's playing a different kind of game. "I'm here to build something for the long term," he says. "Anything else is a distraction." He and his compatriots at the helm of the company--cofounder and VP of engineering Dustin Moskovitz, 22, his roommate at Harvard, and chief technology officer Adam D'Angelo, 23, whom he met in prep school--are true believers. Their faith: that the openness, collaboration, and sharing of information epitomized by social networking can make the world work better. You might think they were naive, except that they're so damn smart and have succeeded in a way most people never do. From a ragtag operation run out of sublet crash pads in Palo Alto, they now have two buildings (soon to be three) of cool gray offices and employ 200 people who enjoy competitive salaries and grown-up benefit packages--not to mention three catered meals a day with free laundry and dry cleaning thrown in. And they continue to crank out improvements to a Web site that is in every meaningful way a technological marvel.

Right now, the folks who fronted Zuckerberg that $12.7 million back in the spring of 2005 and the other venture investors whose money and connections have helped juice Facebook's growth describe themselves as content. After all, since news of the Yahoo deal surfaced, the user base has continued to boom, arguably increasing Facebook's value. But when those money guys start agitating to realize a gain on their investment, can a sale--or more likely an IPO--be far behind?

"What most people think when they hear the word 'hacker' is breaking into things."

Zuckerberg admits to being a hacker--but only if he's sure you understand that the word means something different to him. To him, hacker culture is about using shared effort and knowledge to make something bigger, better, and faster than an individual can do alone. "There's an intense focus on openness, sharing information, as both an ideal and a practical strategy to get things done," he explains. He has even instituted what he calls "hackathons" at Facebook--what others might call brainstorming sessions for engineers.

But it was old-fashioned breaking-and-entering hacking that spawned Facebook--and Zuckerberg was the culprit. Zuckerberg grew up in the well-to-do New York suburb of Dobbs Ferry, the second of four kids and the only son of a dentist (he has no cavities) and a psychiatrist (insert your own mental-health joke here). He began messing around with computers early on, teaching himself how to program. As a high school senior, at Phillips Exeter Academy, he and D'Angelo built a plug-in for the MP3 player Winamp that would learn your music listening habits, then create a playlist to meet your taste. They posted it as a free download and major companies, including AOL (NYSE:TWX) and Microsoft, came calling. "It was basically, like, 'You can come work for us, and, oh, we'll also take this thing that you made,'" Zuckerberg recalls. The two decided to go to college instead, D'Angelo to Caltech and Zuckerberg to Harvard.

"I'm here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction. "
-Mark Zuckerberg

That's where the hacking episode occurred. Harvard didn't offer a student directory with photos and basic information, known at most schools as a face book. Zuckerberg wanted to build an online version for Harvard, but the school "kept on saying that there were all these reasons why they couldn't aggregate this information," he says. "I just wanted to show that it could be done." So one night early in his sophomore year, he hacked into Harvard's student records. He then threw up a basic site called Facemash, which randomly paired photos of undergraduates and invited visitors to determine which one was "hotter" (not unlike the Web site Hot or Not). Four hours, 450 visitors, and 22,000 photo views later, Harvard yanked Zuckerberg's Internet connection. After a dressing-down from the administration and an uproar on campus chronicled by The Harvard Crimson, Zuckerberg politely apologized to his fellow students. But he remained convinced he'd done the right thing: "I thought that the information should be available." (Harvard declined to comment on the episode.)

Study: Fellatio may significantly

Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 9:19 AM EDT (1319 GMT)

(AP) -- Women who perform the act of fellatio and swallow semen on a regular basis, one to two
times a week, may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent, a North Carolina State
University study found.

Doctors had never suspected a link between the act of fellatio and breast cancer, but new research being performed at North Carolina State University is starting to suggest that there could be an important link between the two. In a study of over 15,000 women suspected of having performed regular fellatio and swallowed the ejaculatory fluid, over the past ten years, the researchers found that those actually having performed the act regularly, one to two times a week, had a lower occurance of breast cancer than those who had not. There was no increased risk, however, for those who did not regularly perform.

"I think it removes the last shade of doubt that fellatio is actually a healthy act," said Dr. A.J. Kramer of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. "I am surprised by these findings, but am also excited that the researchers may have discovered a
relatively easy way to lower the occurance of breast cancer in women." The University researchers stressed that, though breast cancer is relatively uncommon, any steps taken to reduce the risk would be a wise decision. "Only with regular occurance will your chances be reduced, so I encourage all women out there to make fellatio an important part of their daily routine," said Dr. Helena Shifteer, one of the researchers at the University. "Since the emergence of the research, I try to fellate at least once every other night to reduce my chances."
The study is reported in Friday's Journal of Medical Research.

In 1991, 43,582 women died of breast cancer, as reported by the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Len Lictepeen, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, said women should not overlook or "play down" these findings. "This will hopefully change women's practice and patterns, resulting in a severe drop in the future number of cases," Lictepeen said. Sooner said the research shows no increase in the risk of breast cancer in those who are, for whatever reason, not able to fellate regularly. "There's definitely fertile ground for more research. Many have stepped forward to volunteer for related research now in the planning stages," he said. Almost every woman is, at some point, going to perform the act of fellatio, but it is the frequency at which this event occurs that makes the difference, say researchers. Also key seems to be the protein and enzyme count in the semen, but researchers are again waiting for more test data.
The reasearch consisted of two groups, 6,246 women ages 25 to 45 who had performed fellatio and swallowed on a regular basis over the past five to ten years, and 9,728 women who had not or did not swallow. The group of women who had performed and swallowed had a breast cancer rate of 1.9 percent and the group who had not had a breast cancer rate of 10.4 percent. "The findings do suggest that there are other causes for breast cancer besides the absence of regular fellatio," Shafteer said. "It's a cause, not THE cause."

Why You May Not Want An iPhone

Give Steve Jobs credit: He's managed to get the entire tech community--and much of the rest of the world--talking about a pricey gadget that only a handful have seen or touched.

Apple's iPhone finally goes on sale June 29, and for many potential buyers, the only issue is whether they'll be able to get their hands on one, as it's certain to sell out immediately. But whether you are a music lover, a business e-mail addict, a mobile power-user or just a normal consumer, there are several good reasons to think twice about dropping $500 for the first-generation iPhone.

Will that be enough to slow iPhone sales after the initial rush? There are, after all, plenty of other options for consumers who want a smart phone, which is essentially a high-end phone with the ability to do other functions, like e-mail. Previously just expensive toys for information technology nerds and executives, smart phones are gaining mainstream appeal. Research firm Yankee Group projects that smart phones will grow from 11% of this year's mobile-phone market to about 20% of phone sales in 2010.

Jobs hopes to pick up 1% of the market by the end of 2008. But consumers are finicky and have options. If Apple's iPhone doesn't stack up, numerous competitors, like Samsung, LG Electronics, Nokia and a host of phones running rival Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, will be happy to take their business. Elevation Partners, the private equity firm that has invested in Forbes Media, has announced plans to buy a 25% stake in iPhone competitor Palm.

The iPhone's battery is one example of a feature that could flop. By all indications--Apple is still being mum about almost all details regarding the device--the iPhone's rechargeable battery is sealed inside its case. That's what Apple does already with its iPod devices, presumably to save space. The company says the battery will last up to five hours of talking, watching video and browsing the Internet.

But it's not clear how those claims will measure up in the real world. What happens if you use the phone's wi-fi connection heavily? Or a Bluetooth earpiece? Without a midday charging pit stop, iPhone owners may have to consistently choose between using its Web and multimedia features or saving battery power for phone calls.

Other smart phones have similar battery drawbacks. Palm, for example, says the battery in its newest Treo 755p will last for up to four hours and 12 minutes of talk time. But when that's up, you can easily swap out the Treo battery for a charged replacement. Many people carry a spare, especially while traveling on business. With the iPhone, it seems you may be tethered to a backup-battery accessory, which is far from ideal.

Making matters worse, rechargeable batteries have a limited lifespan and can be charged only a finite number of times. This number varies, but Apple says a properly maintained iPod battery--whatever that really means--can retain 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charging cycles. Eventually, it will hold a charge so short that it must be replaced, which could at best mean a trip to an Apple or AT&T store, or at worst, an annoying, mail-in battery replacement service.

The iPhone's stripped-down data features could also provide incentive to wait for a better offer. Apple's boilerplate is that the iPhone is a "revolutionary" device for browsing the Internet on the go. To an extent, it has a point: Apple's Safari is arguably the most powerful mobile Web browser. And the iPhone's large display will surely make surfing the Web more enjoyable and functional than on a tiny Motorola Razr screen.

But for whatever reason, Apple decided not to allow the iPhone to work on AT&T's fastest, "third-generation" (or 3G) wireless network, opting instead for its slower "EDGE" network. The difference is apparent even on a small-screen device browsing scaled-down, mobile-edition Web sites. When you're surfing full-size Web pages, as Apple touts on the iPhone, the slow speeds could be a deal breaker.

During Apple's first-quarter earnings conference call, finance chief Peter Oppenheimer said the company is "very much sold" on the slower network because it is more widespread in the U.S. This is a valid point, sort of. AT&T says it has 3G coverage available in 165 major U.S. metro areas, with dozens more on the way, and EDGE coverage in 13,000 cities and towns. But a 3G device can seamlessly hop between the faster and slower networks. And many of the iPhone's competitors, like the 7-month-old Samsung BlackJack, do just that. So why did Apple skimp?

One reason may be the iPhone's built-in wi-fi capability, meaning it can connect to local hot spots and avoid AT&T's data network altogether. This is much faster than using the cellular Web, but imperfect. Wi-fi access is not as universal as you think, and often it's not free. Spending $10 to use a faster Internet at Starbucks doesn't sound practical on top of a $40-per-month, all-you-can-eat EDGE data plan. You may already have a wi-fi hot spot in your home or office--but chances are, you have a computer there, too, with a screen larger than 3.5 inches.

Then again, wi-fi may be a cool feature if Apple opens the iPhone up to developers to write interesting software like network or peer-to-peer games, on-the-go photo sharing software or any other mobile-friendly apps. Jobs is particularly fond of the iPhone's Google Maps software, which he says "blows away" any previous version, and the iPod music software, which he says is "the best iPod we've ever made." But it's not clear if Apple will let other people write software for the iPhone, at least right away, and that could be a reason to stay away.

For example, if you're looking to check your corporate e-mail with any ease, you may have to wait. It's not clear if the iPhone's e-mail software will initially--or imminently--support "push" e-mail from Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers or Research in Motion BlackBerry servers. Apple has a deal with Yahoo! to support real-time "push" e-mail delivery. But CrackBerry addicts should be iPhone-hesitant, at least until we get more information about compatibility. (RIM did not immediately return a request for comment.) Jobs said recently that Apple is "working to find a way to allow developers to build applications" but that security is a sticking point.

Rabid e-mailers or texters may also be skeptical about the iPhone's keyboard-free design. Jobs dislikes the tiny QWERTY thumb keyboards on many of today's smart phones, with good reason: Typing is slower and less accurate than on a normal, full-sized keyboard.

But it's not apparent that typing on a touchscreen will necessarily be any better. Many BlackBerry users, once familiar with the keyboard, can type without looking. Can you thumb out a text message on an iPhone screen without undivided attention? Will it work in the rain? Or if you're wearing a bandage? Will it scratch, as the iPod screens have been infamous for?

Lastly, one of the most anticipated, unknown iPhone features is its real price tag. We already know that it will cost $500 to $600, depending on storage capacity. But AT&T's contract requirements could easily quadruple that price. To qualify for the lowest pricing on many smart phones, carriers require that you subscribe to an all-you-can-eat data plan for around $40 per month, in addition to a $40-or-more-per-month calling plan.

So much for getting the cheapest calling plan and just using the wi-fi feature for the Internet. Add text messaging and taxes, and you're looking at a bill near $90 per month. Over the two-year contract period, that's more than $2,000.

Businesses manage that expense for executives' BlackBerrys, but will consumers happily pay that much? AT&T says existing customers will get the same deal as new customers switching from Verizon Wireless or Sprint Nextel--but subscribers will have to extend their contract for two more years. Will AT&T offer a version for prepaid service subscribers? Many consumers can justify buying a $500 smart phone/iPod hybrid. But AT&T's service terms could break the deal.

Ready Or Not, Here Comes The iPhone!

MOUNT POCONO, Pa. - Some folks at AT&T are planning a hardball debut for their customers--at least those they're hoping might become their customers on Friday courtesy of the Apple iPhone.

At the AT&T store on Route 940, just down the road from a Wal-Mart Superstore, manager Narene Hassan is ready for the hordes she expects to show up Friday afternoon to grab for the brass ring--Apple's latest must-have gadget.

She's expecting a shipment sometime on Friday, but like her counterparts in other AT&T-owned stores, she has no idea how many devices will be in the shipment. All she does know is procedure. She'll close the store at 4:30 p.m. and re-open at 6. Then she'll start selling the device to the throng: first-come, first-served, one to a customer until they're gone.

What if she sees 400 people lined up at 2 in the afternoon, and she knows she has only 25 iPhones? Will she tell the last 375 that it's hopeless and they can go home? Nope, not at all. "They'll find out when we open at 6 p.m.," she says sharply to a visitor. "Do you know how many lines I've had to wait in--at Wal-Mart, Target, everywhere ... and I still haven't gotten a Wii for myself." She's referring to Nintendo's latest videogame console--just one of the hard-to-find devices that are so often sold out as soon as they appear.

Vengeance is sweet. Dangerous, too, apparently.

Standalone stores like the Mount Pocono AT&T are contracting security guards for two days over the weekend. They're also installing new, larger safes. Some managers of the 1,800 AT&T stores nationwide are also thinking about metal barriers outside for crowd control, and portable toilets for those who may be camping out for a long time, awaiting that 6 p.m. announcement that will provide the first clue as to whether they'll get one of the coveted devices.

Meanwhile, clerks in each store have been given a script they're required to stick to--the same one Narene recites to every visitor. "They'll go on sale at 6 p.m. on Friday. That's all we're authorized to tell you," says one clerk at a store in nearby Stroudsburg.

The big question for AT&T is a simple one--why would you outbid all the competition to acquire rights to sell the device-of-the-decade, calculated to attract as many customers as possible, then promptly do your best to alienate them?

They're not, insists an AT&T spokesman. "Any customer who shows up and cannot purchase an iPhone--and walk away with it that day--can purchase it at the store and have it delivered to the store or to their home for later," says AT&T spokesman Michael Coe. "Any customer can order a phone that day. We do have a direct fulfillment process."

Neither AT&T nor Apple will say just when they might be able to produce that shiny new device, why they aren't shipping enough immediately to satisfy intense demand or, for that matter, why the all-but-unprecedented secrecy regarding the two companies' marketing techniques.

Certainly, that's been Apple's modus operandi in the past--a company totally paranoid about any disclosure of any aspect of any new product.

It could also be quite a crafty move on the part of AT&T: Make sure you snag that customer at the point of contact (and for a mandatory two-year contract), then worry later about satisfying the demand. At the same time, the company's operations department says it is now giving store managers the right to tell customers lined up in Friday's sweltering temperatures just what their chances are for walking away with one in their pocket at 6 p.m.

As for Apple, the first techno-nerd is already in line Tuesday morning at the company's store on New York's Fifth Avenue. Lounging in a portable canvas folding chair, a banana in his left hand, he points out that he was also at the head of the line for Sony's PlayStation 3 videogame player when it launched.

The question of consumer demand for the iPhone has been examined in some detail by Parks Associates, the Dallas-based market research firm. They believe there will indeed be a substantial audience of "early adopters, the core audience"--but they make up only 3% of those surveyed, especially considering the iPhone's price points of $599, or $499 for the cheaper model.

"Beyond that segment, we do see a cliff," says Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at Parks. "It is a chasm between early adopters and the mass market that will certainly be a chasm for Apple to cross."

And in the case of the iPhone, the chasm may be even bigger than Apple's other most-sought-after devices. When Parks' researchers moved the price point down to $399 or $299, demand remained virtually unchanged. "It was not until we reached $199--the average cost of a smart phone--that demand began to rise," says Cai.

What worries most of those surveyed? Some 50% cited the high price, 32% feared the battery drain of a multi-use device, 30% worried it would perform none of the functions particularly well, and 29% feared it would be too complex to use. Indeed, many were cautious about putting all their digital eggs in one electronic basket. If the battery dies, they've lost their phone, iPod and PDA in one horrible moment.

Still, there are always folks like Narene Hassan who are still ready to stand in line forever for a Wii.

"The Wii was so successful because it wasn't just targeting a small core audience," Cai observes. "After two days, lines for the PS3 disappeared. After six months, you still can't find a Wii, because it's appealing to a mass audience."

So, the question is, Does Apple have a PS3 ... or a Wii?

Getting the Video out of Your New iPod--for Cheap!

So I buy a video iPod, figuring it would be a cool toy. (Gotta get those toys.) It arrives and I'm ready to give it a whirl. I pony up my two bucks, download the pilot episode of Desperate Housewives, insert a standard A/V-to-RCA cable into the earphone jack and try to play it back on my TV.

No Luck. Damned Apple.

I'm here to tell you not to worry. You don't have to fork out for an outrageously priced "proprietary" Apple video cable. You don't even have to buy an expensive dock. You can connect your Video iPod directly to a TV, and you can do it with the ordinary camcorder A/V-to-RCA cable you probably already have lying around your house.
You just have to be tricky.

Here's how: What You'll Need

Find out How!

Source: MacDevCenter.com by Erica Sadun, author of Modding Mac OS X

haaaallloooooo!!!!

MyFreshEgg

What works for bananas, works for eggs. Aptly naming their site wheresyoursfrom, UK-based Chippindale Foods was the first company to offer customers full egg traceability. Also check out intermediary MyFreshEgg, which aims to be bringing the same services to a host of farms and egg producers.

Remember that ad campaign??

Generate unlimited email addresses with Gmail

Want to automatically assign email filters on the fly? The Modern Day Alchemist, aka Super Gmailer, shows us how:

Here's how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

We've blogged about unlimited Gmail addresses here at Lifehacker before, but this is another way to use this handy little feature; it should (hopefully) cut down on the Gmail noise. — Wendy Boswell

Use Gmail Generate Unlimited E-mail Addresses [The Modern Day Alchemist]

WOOOOOW!!!!

Deep Breaths...Exhale through your mouth...one more time, this time Harder!

MH

Animator vs. Animation Part 2 ...haha!!

Steve Jobs Outlines iTunes DRM-free Plan

Speaking at a joint press conference with EMI Group in London, Apple CEO Steve Jobs reiterated his stance against copy protection in music downloads, and explained exactly what the iTunes Store is doing to promote interoperability between portable media devices.

Starting in May, the iTunes Store will offer EMI's catalog worldwide without copy protection, and those enhanced tracks will also be encoded at 256kb AAC - twice the bit rate as current Fairplay-encoded tracks - for US$1.29 each. The existing DRM-enabled library will still be available at the standard $0.99 a track, allowing users to choose which version of the songs they want. Full album pricing, however, will remain the same: Users will not have to pay a premium for DRM-free full album purchases.

Mr. Jobs called the new DRM-free music option an "interoperability safety net," meaning users can purchase tracks without worrying which brand music playerthey will load the songs on.

Apple is also offering EMI's DRM-free deal to all music labels. Mr. Jobs predicts that about half of the 5 million tracks available at the iTunes Store will be DRM-free by the end of 2007 as additional labels come on board.

Users hoping for video downloads without copy protection, however, will still have to wait. Mr. Jobs said that the video market works differently than the music market since CDs are already sold without copy protection, but commercial DVDs are not.

Although Apple is the first company to offer EMI's library without copy protection, it won't be the only one. EMI is offering its higher priced DRM-free music to other resellers as well. So far there is no word on which music download services will sign on.

Apple's place as the market leader in music downloads puts the company in a strong position to advocate DRM-free song purchases. Despite resistance from other labels, the deal with EMI may signal the beginning of the end for music copy protection.