How are the most popular sites of 2001 doing now? Surprisingly, the vast majority have lost market share. So much for the theory that they could manage to lock users in …
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David Pogue asks a cogent question: why do people buy ringtones? It’s an amazingly stupid thing to do. Almost any song one buys for use as a ringtone one already has as in Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC or some other format; why pay an extra $3 a year or $2.50 a month or whatever insanely expensive rate your phone company charges? You’re just paying for the privilege of playing something you already own!
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Daring Fireball points out that top-posting in emails is rude. That is, you should put your reply after whatever it is you are replying to. One of my brothers never does this, and it’s making me reconsider my will …
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Adobe have a really cool web colour selector freely available. Just pick a base colour and a rule to use, and it will derive other colours to use (I used a similar free tool to pick the colours for the previous version of this blog). Requires JavaScript, but worthwhile nonetheless.
04 February 2018: updated URL & text (it used to use Flash!)
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Dario Taraborelli has some examples of how text typeset with LaTeX is demonstrably more beautiful than that done in Microsoft Word. LaTeX is an amazing typesetting system, one I cannot recommend highly enough.
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No, not me (I’ve been using Linux for almost nine years now); Mark Pilgrim recently completed one year of using Linux (he switched from Mac OS). His verdict? Well, he prefers Linux to Mac OS and Windows. No real surprise there …
05 February 2018: updated URLs
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A former Windows user details his experiences after using Ubuntu Linux for some time. His verdict? ‘After Ubuntu, Windows looks increasingly bad, increasingly archaic. increasingly unfriendly.’
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EROS was a nifty operating system project which implemented some excellent ideas; one of these was capabilities — a novel approach to handling security and access controls. One of the developers of EROS wrote an introduction to capabilities which is useful to understand this intriguing concept.
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The GNU project now have a guided tour of emacs which shows many of the neat features of the world’s best text editor/web browser/mail reader/news client/integrated development environment/scheduler/task planner/personal organiser/kitchen sink.
If you don’t already use emacs, take a peek to see what a real text manipulation environment is like. If you do already use emacs, take a look to see what features it offers which you may not yet use.
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Hyperspatial Text Classification
While reading the docs for CRM114 (a text classification engine; text classification can be used to determine if email is spam; if a log entry is important; or if a newspaper article is worth reading) I discovered that it supports a hyperspatial classifier. It’s a pretty neat idea: a document is broken into its component features (e.g. phrases and individual words; this step is pretty standard for classifiers); each feature is then hashed to a 32-bit integer value; the document is then considered to be a point in a 232-dimensional space — if a feature is present once, then the value of that dimension is one; if twice, then two and so forth.
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Read on to learn how the music industry’s insanity turned a man with upwards of $20,000 in records and CDs into a music ‘pirate.’ Make a quality product at a reasonable price, and people will buy it. Make a rotten product at an insane price, and they won’t. Is that so hard to understand?
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Benjamin Ferrari examines why emacs is an excellent choice for a text editor. He’s quite convincing (although in my case preaching to the choir): we all write volumes of text on our computers, day in and day out; wouldn’t we want to optimise that activity as much as possible? Why then do people limit themselves to such sub-standard tools as Microsoft Word or Nisus Writer or vim? Using those to edit text is much like hammering nails with screwdriver.
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