Geek News and Musings

We hear it all the time when it comes to various social media offerings. Blogs were dismissed early on by all important people who said they “don’t care about what people wearing pajamas sitting in their basement have to say about their cats.” Twitter was dismissed by people who “don’t care what so-and-so ate for lunch.” And on and on. But what’s interesting is this same sort of attitude seems to also be playing out on a larger scale, in how people look at innovation. Investor Peter Thiel is apparently complaining that Silicon Valley companies aren’t doing anything really important any more. But, I think, like the complaints about Blogging, Twitter and other social media efforts (some of which Thiel invested in), he’s focused too much on all the fluff and ignoring the fact that plenty of serious things are going on. However, there’s almost always been random silly startups that get lots of attention (and some of them later turn into being serious, important companies). Google, Amazon and eBay were all derided as being frivolous in their early years, but all turned into something much larger.

Along those lines, Dan Lyons has perhaps his most ridiculous column to date (and that’s saying a lot), in that he sets up by complaining about the same “frivolous” innovation going on in Silicon Valley, and then uses Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures as the counter-example of a company taking on the real hard problems. Uh, yeah, the real hard problems of hoarding patents, waiting for someone else to do the real work, and then shaking them down for money? Lyons, like so many others, seems to not recognize the difference between ideas and execution. What has Intellectual Ventures actually executed on. What product has it brought to market? Absolutely none. The only thing it’s done to date is collect hundreds of millions of dollars from a few tech companies so that those companies can avoid getting sued, and can dig into IV’s patent database to countersue those who sue them. Lyons quotes Myhrvold making the following statement:

“The old Silicon Valley was about solving really hard problems, making technical bets. But there’s no real technical bet being made with Facebook or Zynga,” says Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft who now runs an invention lab in Seattle. “Today almost everyone in the Valley will tell you there is too much ‘me-tooism,’ too much looking for a gold rush and not enough people who are looking to solve really hard problems.”

Myhrvold is being misleading yet again. There’s always been “me-tooism” in the Valley, and sometimes it works out, and often it doesn’t. Microsoft, where Myhrvold worked for many years, was pretty damn famous for its brand of “me-tooism.” And, oh yeah, it too could be dismissed in its early days for not being “about solving really hard problems.” And, of course, there are plenty of tech companies out there that are working on solving hard problems, so cherry picking a few you don’t like does not make for a representation of the entire industry.

“What bothers me is the zillions of wannabes who will follow along, and the expectation that every company ought to be focused on doing really short-term, easy things to achieve giant paydays. I think that’s unrealistic, and it’s not healthy,” Myhrvold says.

So don’t worry about the wannabe and followers. They’ve always been around Silicon Valley and the ecosystem tends to take care of them over time. Focus on building what you’re building (which in Myhrvold’s case, still appears to be nothing) and let the market take care of the rest. It always seems to do just fine.

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For a while now, people have been submitting versions of this video made by a guy from Zen Magnets, in which he both reveals a voicemail he received from Jake Bronstein, the owner of competing firm Buckyballs, and then proceeds to compare the two products. Apparently, it all started when Zen Magnets decided to sell a package of both its own magnets and Buckyballs’ competing product, in order to let people compare directly. Bronstein didn’t like the public claims that Zen Magnets were better, so he left an angry ranting voicemail, demanding they show official testing results by the end of the day or he would get an “army of lawyers” after Zen Magnets:

Zen Magnet’s response is cute, if at times juvenile. Beyond playing the message, they then compared the two sets of magnets on screen, highlighting various tests which they claim show that Zen Magnets’ offering is of higher quality. Where the story then got weird, is that the Zen Magnets’ video disappeared — the result of a DMCA takedown.

Now, Bronstein appears to be admitting that he sent the takedown notice, because the video includes a few photos of him (ever so briefly). That seems like a pretty clear abuse of the DMCA takedown process, as it would be difficult to argue that the use of those photos was not fair use. Of course, at the same time, Bronstein also admits that his voicemail “was off the Douche-o-meter” and sent Gizmodo a photo of him holding a trophy for the “Douchiest Voicemail of the Year.”

Of course, I’d argue that the bogus DMCA takedown was even worse than the voicemail, but none of this fight does Buckyballs any favors whatsoever. In their anger at being compared to Zen Magnets, the company has come off as petty, vindictive, willing to make questionable use of the law to silence criticism… and, at the same time, called a lot more attention to all of that. Perhaps if they’d just let the original eBay sales go through without comment, things wouldn’t be so bad. And, after all, if they really believe that their own magnets are better than Zen Magnets’, then, um, wouldn’t they be happy that Zen Magnets was out selling their products for them?

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The image accompanying this post is encoded with JPEG compression, a standard which, while it has been improved somewhat, has been more or less in its present form for almost two decades now. Over those two decades, images have changed their role on the web dramatically, and consequently the number and quality of images on the web have been increasing exponentially. Yet the way we make those images easy to share and transmit hasn’t caught up with the times.

Increases in bandwidth, it must be said, have made the matter one of very little urgency, and it’s important to admit that it takes less time to load a content-rich webpage (the front page of CrunchGear averages 1-1.5MB) than it did to load a barebones page in the old days. But even so, it’s just as true that images take up the bulk of the bandwidth and making them more efficient means making the web more efficient. It looks like Google is trying to do just that with its new WebP image format.

Continue reading…

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We’ve had a bit of a tumultuous relationship with Jonathan Mann over the past year. It was August 2009 when Mann (who is sometimes also known as “therockcookiebottom” or “songadaymann“) wrote his jingle about Bing. I called it the “worst jingle ever” but Microsoft clearly disagreed as it won their competition. Mann responded by writing a song about me which was actually pretty good. And then he went on a streak of awesome.

There was the song about Microsoft brainwashing kids with his Bing jingle. There was the Steve Jobs song. And there was the song about the iPhone 4 antenna issue, which Apple even played at their “antennagate” event. And now he was kind enough to write a song about our acquisition by AOL.

Mann is actually on the road at the moment, and doesn’t have all his equipment that make his songs magical, but wrote us the song anyway. This is actually the second song about our big move (which we really appreciate). Watch Mann’s video above. And below, check out his awesome Bronado song (though that one is NSFW). I think it’s even better than this one.

While there had been plans to move forward with a markup on the COICA censorship bill this week, it appears that those plans have been delayed, effectively shelving the bill for the time being. This should keep it off the agenda at least until after the elections, but you can expect it to come back before too long. From what’s been discussed, it sounds as if those backing the bill really hoped to push it through before any opposition actually recognized what was in the bill and could mobilize protests — but that didn’t work. So, next time it comes around, those who feel pretty strongly that our gov’t shouldn’t be in the business of censoring websites without due process will be better prepared as well. It certainly doesn’t mean that this fight is over. You can bet that supporters of the bill will put forth a much stronger media campaign as well. But, at least this dreadfully bad piece of legislation didn’t just get rushed through.

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A couple of years ago, I used a Dremel tool to grind off the twin spigots on my espresso maker’s portafilter. (Here’s how to make one.) The result is called a “naked portafilter” (also called a “bottomless portafilter” or “crotchless portafilter”).

Why make a naked portafilter? Four reasons:

1. You can observe the changes in color of the liquid espresso as it comes out of the filter, which is useful for timing your shot.

2. The espresso looks beautiful as it comes out (see some photos here).

3. It will accept a “triple shot” filter basket.

4. It’s a good way to learn how evenly you tamped your coffee grinds into the filter basket — if you did a poor job, the espresso will come on in multiple streams.

I’m not a very good tamper, and often a tiny spray of espresso will squirt off to the side, hitting the counter, the machine, or me. It’s a big mess. My friend Kent Barnes, also a naked portafilter enthusiast, suffered the same plight, but unlike me, he did something about it. He found a silicone cupcake liner that fits over the filter basket and cut a hole through it. Now the errant streams are reigned in, without losing the benefits of the bottomless portafilter.

Kent bought his silicone baking cups at Daiso (a Japanese “dollar” store chain), but any silicone cupcake liner with a top diameter of approximately 3-inches will do. You can trim off the top until you achieve the diameter needed to fit the filter basket.

Mark Frauenfelder

[Photos: Kent K. Barnes / kentkb]

Wilton Easy Flex Silicone 3-Inch Reusable Baking Cups, 12 count - $10

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Wilton

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Goodsie, a new webapp from the creators of the awesome Flavors.me, helps you create an attractive storefront to sell your stuff. It’s currently in private beta, but we’ve got 10,000 invites so you can give it a try. More »

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