In those olden days before IBM invented the hard drive, data was stored on punch cards. I did a term paper in college using punch cards to sort my database.

Vanderleun remembers those days.

Speak, memory! The brilliant and always fascinating Kevin Kelly @ The Technium today brings up a long-lost method of making a data base:

Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once. In computer science terms, you could do a “logical OR” operation. This ability of the system to sort and link prompted Douglas Engelbart in 1962 to suggest these cards could impliement part of the Memex vision of hypertext.

The subject ignited a long-lost memory in me from my days as a student at the University of California at Berkeley.

While it may be faintly amusing, I think it also holds a lesson for our increasing dependance on statistics — especially in this election year of a poll a minute. It’s about a job I had and about being in on the ground floor of the acronym GIGO (Garbage In. Garbage Out).

Edge-notched cards. Oh, my sweet lord, that brings back the remaining specks of a mostly obliterated memory.Sometime in the summer of 1966 in Berkeley I was part of a group of “students” hired to punch the codes into a mountain of cards that recorded the data from some obscure study. The study in question was was the life’s work of a couple of academics at the University.

Read it all.

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a “Spamford Wallace”, has been busted again. This time to the record tune of $234 million (£120 million) for bombarding MySpace users with more than 735,000 messages, the Associated Press reports. The judgment is being called a landmark victory for anti-spam crusaders, and it breathes a little respectability into the much maligned piece of American anti-spam legislation, the Can Spam Act of 2003.

MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told AP that Wallace and his business associate Walter Rines created scores of MySpace accounts and hijacked existing users’ accounts by stealing their passwords. Once inside, the duo, in some cases masquerading as trusted friends, messaged other users urging them to check out cool new videos or websites, some of which linked to pornographic sites.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Wallace and Rines, who never attended the hearing, to pay $300 per message, the maximum penalty allowed under the Can Spam Act guidelines.

The punishment is not enough. It’s time to bring back the public stocks.

With new technologies come new ways to be polite or to be rude. Here’s a guide on how to behave on Internet forums, especially when you’re seeking an answer to a question.

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

India’s Tata Motors unveiled a $2500 people’s car, slated to go on sale this fall. Here’s the story of how it came to be.

 At Tata’s Engineering Research Center, near the bucolic surroundings of the Tata Motors (TTM) factory in Pune, India, there are two cars on display. One is a complete prototype of the Nano, the $2,500 compact car Tata unveiled in January, which has all the essentials and safety features of India’s higher-priced automobiles along with a sticker price that will forever change the economics of low-cost cars. The other is a neat bisection, with the car’s innards clearly visible. “Every day we invite people to come and examine the car and ask: ‘How can we make more savings?’” says Tata Motors Chief Executive Ravi Kant.

That quest to build the world’s cheapest car hasn’t ended. The Nano should be available this fall, but the mission began back in 2003, when Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors and the $50 billion Tata conglomerate, set a challenge to build a “people’s car.” Tata gave an engineering team, led by 32-year-old star engineer Girish Wagh, three requirements for the new vehicle: It should be low-cost, adhere to regulatory requirements, and achieve performance targets such as fuel efficiency and acceleration capacity. The design team initially came up with a vehicle which had bars instead of doors and plastic flaps to keep out the monsoon rains. It was closer to a quadricycle than a car, and the first prototype, Wagh admits candidly, “lacked punch.” Even a bigger engine, which boosted the power by nearly 20%, was still dismal. “It was an embarrassment,” says Wagh.

But the failure was also the catalyst for Tata’s decision to build a proper car, not an upgraded scooter on four wheels or anything flimsy or cheap-looking. “We didn’t want an apology for a car,” says Ravi Kant. “We were conscious of the fact that whether it was a $2,500 car or not, it ought not to have looked like a $2,500 car.”

This sounds like the Model T for the Third World, a revolutionary product.

Sidebar: the first “people’s car” was the Volkswagen – German for people’s car — sketched out by none other than Adolf Hitler.

Malcolm Gladwell writes Big Ideas and where they come from:

In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.

One rainy day last November, Myhrvold held an “invention session,” as he calls such meetings, on the technology of self-assembly. What if it was possible to break a complex piece of machinery into a thousand pieces and then, at some predetermined moment, have the machine put itself back together again? That had to be useful. But for what?

The meeting, like many of Myhrvold’s sessions, was held in a conference room in the Intellectual Ventures laboratory, a big warehouse in an industrial park across Lake Washington from Seattle: plasma TV screens on the walls, a long table furnished with bottles of Diet Pepsi and big bowls of cashews.

Chairing the meeting was Casey Tegreene, an electrical engineer with a law degree, who is the chief patent counsel for I.V. He stood at one end of the table. Myhrvold was at the opposite end. Next to him was Edward Jung, whom Myhrvold met at Microsoft. Jung is lean and sleek, with closely cropped fine black hair. Once, he spent twenty-two days walking across Texas with nothing but a bedroll, a flashlight, and a rifle, from Big Bend, in the west, to Houston, where he was going to deliver a paper at a biology conference. On the other side of the table from Jung was Lowell Wood, an imposing man with graying red hair and an enormous head. Three or four pens were crammed into his shirt pocket. The screen saver on his laptop was a picture of Stonehenge.

This looks like fun.

LIVERMORE, CALIF. — Five years after his retirement, ex-firefighter Tom Bramell still likes to visit Station No. 6 for old times’ sake, whistling in amazement at all the changes — the strange faces and slick high-tech engines.

But one thing remains exactly the same, and it’s what Bramell misses the most about his firefighting days. The sturdy little object hangs from the ceiling in the firehouse’s engine bay, emitting its familiar faint orange glow.

He calls it the long-lived lightbulb of Livermore.

That’s actually something of an understatement.

At 107 years and counting, the low-watt wonder with the curlicue carbon filament has been named the planet’s longest continuously burning bulb by both Guinness World Records and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

As objet d’art and enduring symbol of American reliability and ingenuity, it’s been lauded by senators and presidents.

It boasts a website — http://www.centennialbulb.org/, drawing a million hits a year — a historical society and even a webcam that allows curious fans to check on it 24 hours a day.

My friend and technical writer, Tom Bunzel, went where no man was meant to go: into the world of Microsoft Vista. Tom’s not happy, and explains why here.

Paul Graham:

Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren’t more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn’t sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo’s or MSN’s search box.

Why isn’t it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better.

This has a nice sound to it, but it isn’t true. Google’s founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.

It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.

Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there’s a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]

From the evidence I’ve seen so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers usually end up doing better. Not always, but usually there’s a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO.

Of course, the reason startups do better when they turn down acquisition offers is not necessarily that all such offers undervalue startups. More likely the reason is that the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down a big offer also tend to be very successful. That spirit is exactly what you want in a startup.

While I’m sure Larry and Sergey do want to change the world, at least now, the reason Google survived to become a big, independent company is the same reason Facebook has so far remained independent: acquirers underestimated them.

Corporate M&A is a strange business in that respect. They consistently lose the best deals, because turning down reasonable offers is the most reliable test you could invent for whether a startup will make it big.

Do you have any obsolete skills, such as taping a nickel onto your tone arm head to keep the record from skipping? Or using a slide rule?

You are not alone. And Robert Scoble created a website for folks like you, us.

No doubt, sometime in the future building a website will become obsolete.

There are plenty of reasons for owning a hybrid auto besides fuel economy — quiet ride, environmental/political concerns, etc.

But if you want to know how one hybrid pencils out over another, or how long you’ll break even on the extra cost, this article is for you.

 For those who’ve been following the development of the all-electric car from Tesla…

…Tesla says it hired Fisker Automotive and CEO Henrik Fisker to work on a future Tesla model called internally its WhiteStar project, designed to be Tesla’s second model. Its first, the high-performance, battery-powered Tesla Roadster, is scheduled to go on sale in late 2008 — if the $98,000 Roadster is ready on time, after several delays.

Imagine Tesla’s surprise, according to the lawsuit, when Fisker, a former designer for BMW AG, announced at a Jan. 14 press conference at the Detroit auto show that he will introduce his own high-performance, battery-powered car, called the Fisker Karma, starting around $80,000, starting in 2009.

According to Tesla’s complaint, “The Karma has great similarities to the WhiteStar and will be a direct competitor to the WhiteStar in the marketplace.”

Popular Science:

The days of lugging around and pulling out hefty guide books could be nearing an end: The eyePhone, a program currently being developed in Europe, uses a combination of satellite information, object-recognition software and Internet data to provide information on landmarks in a scene captured through a mobile phone’s lens.

The user snaps a photo, highlights a building or mountain or some other major site, then waits as the object-recognition program, developed by SuperWise Technologies AG, identifies this image and links it to the relevant facts. Initially, the search draws on pre-processed information, but by clicking on “more,” you can gather additional details. The advantage of the Apollo object-recognition system, according to its developers, is that it can work in a variety of weather or lighting conditions, and effectively picks out objects regardless of the person’s position. In other words, you don’t need to be standing in a certain place for it to recognize a church or mountain peak.

Check out this promo video; but don’t get too anxious, since the technology probably won’t be available for consumers until 2009 or 2010.

THE Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

 

As someone who has broken the same pinky toe three times and fractured my fifth metatarsal once, I can immediately see the appeal of a rug that lights up when you step on it. (I will conveniently neglect to mention that all my breaks happened during the middle of the day.) Invented by two engineering students at London South Bank University, the rug uses electroluminescence to glow under the weight of a footfall.

Electroluminescence works by passing a current through a material which emits light when electrified. The most commonly used medium for these applications is a powdered phosphor. When excited, it produces an instantly recognizable green-cyan glow—you can see it in LCD wristwatches and thin film nightlights.

My daughter babysits a three-year old named Dean. Dean saw a vinyl record sitting on his grandma’s table and asked her what it was.

Grandma: Oh, that’s my music.

Dean: Don’t be silly. That won’t fit in a CD player.

Paul Graham, software entrepreneur, artist, essayist and venture capitalist, writes about online trolls.

…Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word. Though in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it’s usually uncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate. That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.I think trolling in the broader sense has four causes. The most important is distance. People will say things in anonymous forums that they’d never dare say to someone’s face, just as they’ll do things in cars that they’d never do as pedestrians—like tailgate people, or honk at them, or cut them off.

Trolling tends to be particularly bad in forums related to computers, and I think that’s due to the kind of people you find there. Most of them (myself included) are more comfortable dealing with abstract ideas than with people. Hackers can be abrupt even in person. Put them on an anonymous forum, and the problem gets worse.

The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree with something, it’s easier to say “you suck” than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You’re also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world…

From Popular Science:

Cyclists have been waiting a long time for this one. Based on a 1490s sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, The Ride’s rear hub mimics an infinite number of gears, rather than the mere 21 offered by the usual chain-yanking transmission.

So you can always find the perfect gear ratio, whether starting from a stop or speeding down a hill. Twist a dial on the handlebar, and ball bearings in the bike’s NuVinci transmission tilt between two rotating metal discs.

John Tierney:

…Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing “The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.

Besides writing scholarly analyses of gadgets, Dr. Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting gigs involved an early version of this very technology on the shelf at Best Buy: a digital photo frame developed for a startup company that was later acquired by Kodak.

“This is not the frame I designed,” Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. “It’s bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can’t see, but there’s a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?”

He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.

“I give up,” he said with a shrug. “In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.”

Even the dumb devices come with blind-embossed controls. When I want to adjust my Samsung monitor, I need a flash light and reading glasses to tell which button is which.

Via Maggie’s Farm:

More Chinese quality control:

“About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman.”

British company 3do has created a product of intelligent molecules that are soft and pliable one moment, but which stiffen on impact. Very cool stuff.

 Video here.

…here’s how to create a secure password (and how he creates his own passwords), I listen. His post on the topic is extensive, so I’ll try to boil it down to the essentials. If you have the time, I encourage you to read the whole thing, though.

First question: How are passwords cracked, anyway? Primarily through brute force “dictionary” attacks, where software tries to guess a password by running through a series of common phrases or words in various combinations. Sure, we know that “password” and “qwerty” are easy to crack, but password crackers have gotten much more sophisticated these days. Now, they check hundreds of these common “root” passwords (here’s a list)… in combination with various “appendages,” including all two- and three-digit combinations, single symbols (like ! and ?), dates from 1900 on, and a few others. The crackers also sub in common characters like “3″ for “E” and other typical hacker-speak substitutions.

What’s that mean? Basically, if you thought the safe-looking pigl3t9! was a secure password, you’re sadly mistaken. Any modern password cracker will suss it out in a matter of minutes.

Before you begin to despair, Schneier offers simple rules on how to create a password that cannot be easily cracked by such methods. (Mind you, given enough time, any password can be cracked, though. But this will make it much harder.)

The trick is to use a “root” that is not in that list that I linked above, and to put your “appendage” (or two of them) in an unusual place: Either in the middle of the root or at both the beginning and the end.

Schneier’s example is to use a word that you can pronounce but which is spelled “wrong”: armwar or pitchsure or baysball are all examples. Then attach your appendage(s): arm9!9war or 1066pitchsure6601 or bay1776sball. It shouldn’t take much effort to commit any of these to memory.

Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic:

I still believe that a lot of the “Web 2.0” hype is just that—hype—and that many of the putatively revolutionary advances in sites like MySpace, not to mention the scores of copycat sites still springing up around the Web, will quickly become commoditized (see “The Web 2.0 Bubble,” April Atlantic). They rely too much on the packaging and marketing of tools that exist elsewhere on the Web, and they lack a compelling retention mechanism, which leaves them open to the quickly changing loyalties of their (mostly young) users. This is what happened to Friendster, which lost most of its mojo almost overnight after MySpace—shinier, sexier, scarier to grown-ups—hove into view.

I stand by this general principle, but at the moment I’m completely entranced by the new, turbo-charged Facebook. It’s the best mousetrap I’ve seen since I first laid eyes on eBay. No wonder that, in a moment of perhaps accidental honesty, Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, the owner of MySpace, said when asked about the flood of people signing up for MySpace, “I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook.”

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, while he was a student at Harvard in 2004. The general concept was to digitize the legendary freshman-year “facebook,” and allow students not only to gawk at one another’s photos but also to flirt, network, interact. The site’s instant popularity prompted Zuckerberg, showing a restraint beyond his years, to roll out the site to other colleges rather than opening it up to everyone—first elite schools, then more broadly. The mode of expansion was itself ingenious because it forswore willy-nilly growth in favor of building meaningful communities whose interlocking loyalties tied them more closely to Facebook. Eventually, the site moved beyond college to high-school networks, then company networks, then everyone. At the same time, it began adding features, most notably one last year that allows you to track what your friends are doing on Facebook.

At the moment, Facebook is the site that, in my experience, comes closest to fulfilling the promise of social media. In so doing, it raises some bigger questions about how we’re going to be using the Web in the future and whether some of the received wisdom about the Internet—that we’re headed inexorably toward a digital universe of chaotic, endlessly shifting interactivity—is true.

The catchall term social media encompasses Web applications that allow individuals to create their own pages—filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications generally called “widgets”—and interact with other users. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another. In practice, as with Goldi­locks and the porridge, the gruel tends to be too hot or too cold. On MySpace, the flood of pseudo-buddies and marketing come-ons disguised as offers of friendship quickly becomes suffocating. Too hot. On a business-networking site like LinkedIn, the very nature of the concept becomes self-defeating: The subset of people you want to schmooze with and who want to schmooze with you is simply too small, and too difficult to separate from the much larger group of people you are trying to avoid or who are trying to avoid you. Too cold.

Facebook is getting the temperature just right, and in the process has been able to give social media real social capital. Gathering friends on MySpace requires nothing more than banging through a lot of profiles and “friending” everyone you find. I know relatively few of my MySpace friends. I know most of my Facebook friends; I even like some of them. This is because Facebook prompts users to explain how they know one another. It’s no idle feature, since, as you quickly discover, allowing users into your circle allows them to track your moves on Facebook and vice versa. Even more compellingly, it allows you to track, if you wish, their interactions with other users, all from your own user page. You can play with your privacy settings to prevent this, but as you become acculturated to the site, you realize that you have to give information to get information.

Meanwhile, unlike almost any other service on the Web, Facebook lets you decide to restrict this activity to your friend group and/or hide it from Google’s prying eyes. The experience is initially unnerving, but once you get the hang of it, you start feeling like you’re part of some great undulating, pulsing virtual experiment—like that scene in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire when Cassiel and Damiel wander Berlin hearing the innermost thoughts of everyone around them, except funnier and less pretentious. There’s even a cool little app called Friend Wheel that charts the connections among your friends and presents it as a nice spin-art-type graphic.

A technique for cracking computer passwords using inexpensive off-the-shelf computer graphics hardware is causing a stir in the computer security community.

Elcomsoft, a software company based in Moscow, Russia, has filed a US patent for the technique. It takes advantage of the “massively parallel processing” capabilities of a graphics processing unit (GPU) - the processor normally used to produce realistic graphics for video games.

Using an $800 graphics card from nVidia called the GeForce 8800 Ultra, Elcomsoft increased the speed of its password cracking by a factor of 25, according to the company’s CEO, Vladimir Katalov.

The toughest passwords, including those used to log in to a Windows Vista computer, would normally take months of continuous computer processing time to crack using a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). By harnessing a $150 GPU - less powerful than the nVidia 8800 card - Elcomsoft says they can cracked in just three to five days. Less complex passwords can be retrieved in minutes, rather than hours or days.

As far as PR goes, Apple’s enjoyed a long lucky streak.  When I look at Apple I see just another multi-billion dollar company who’s prime objective is to add more dollars to the pile, something which Apple’s been very good at lately. 

Sure, Apple comes out with tech that has a high level of sex appeal, which in turn drives gadget lust and that in turn keeps the dollars flowing in, but it’s the dollars that matter.  Others see Apple in a very different light.  Some don’t see a corporation with billions of dollars, but instead see an underdog fighting against the oppressive regimes imposed on the poor, defenseless users of technology by other companies. 

To these people, Steve Jobs isn’t a CEO, but instead a freedom fighter, and a few times a year he and his band of guerrillas come out of hiding to take a stand against “the man” before sinking back into the shadows.

Last week, the LA Times had a story about SanDisk, which has carved out a profitable niche by making useful MP3 players that cost much less than Apple’s.

“Apple products are works of art,” said Daniel Schreiber, a SanDisk senior vice president and general manager of its audio and video business unit. “We’re looking to make devices that you don’t need to worship.”

It’s amusing to watch Apple behave like Big Brother. For all its counter-culture, ponytailed acolytes, Apple has often been a nasty player, getting away with strong-armed tactics while selling overpriced and underpowered computers.

Now it’s striking back at iPhone owners who had the temerity to break the AT&T monopoly. Slashdot:

It was rumored last week, and Apple has now confirmed it: ‘Apple said today that a firmware update to the iPhone due to be released later this week “will likely result” in SIM-unlocked iPhones turning into very expensive bricks…

So what are users of SIM-unlocked iPhones to do? Not run the latest software update, that’s for sure. Users can instead pray to the hacking deities — the famed iPhone Dev Team that released the free software unlock, and iPhoneSIMfree, which released a commercial software unlock — to write applications that will undo the unlocks, as it were, if those users want to run the latest iPhone software.’”

A US mother-of-three has invented a sex toy that connects to a vacuum cleaner to give an orgasm in just ten seconds.

The gadget, called Vortex Vibrations, works by concentrating the air flow to create a rapid and gentle vibration, reports the Sun.

…At the time Joanne, from Utah, had not had sex for 15 years following her divorce.

She said: “In my attempts to alleviate frustration, I began to think what I could do. I noticed how the rubber moved in the top of the vacuum. After several hours, I came up with the prototype. The first time I tried it I reached an orgasm within 10 seconds.

“That was when I knew I was on to something that could potentially bring pleasure to all women.”

Especially those who haven’t been laid in 15 years.

BusinessPundit tried a Mac, wasn’t impressed and wrote about it.

There was hell to pay.