Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 51 of 72.
Eric Wynalda says “our core fans are the only ones who matter.” Stark contrast to Mark Cuban’s comments I mentioned on Wednesday. “Our fans now know our names, and it’s time we start doing a better job of learning theirs, because there will come a time when that might not be possible.”…
Tiffany & Co. has a sterling silver stylus for $70. It might work with the new Tablet PCs that do not require a battery in the stylus, but I am not sure. Luxury digitized ink!…
P.W. Singer of Salon details the use of private military firms (PMFs) in Iraq and elsewhere. “[T]here are more private military contractors on the ground in Iraq than troops from any one ally, including Britain” “Soldiers within the private military field typically make between two to 10 times what they make with their home-state military. Much as in regular industry, those at the higher end have an elite background, except that in the PMF world, having been in a Green Beret, SEAL or Special Air Service unit supplants being an Harvard or Wharton MBA as a point of distinction.”…
Want to lock your luggage but know it will be busted open by the TSA and its purpose rendered useless? Travel Sentry certified TSA locks can open be opened by the TSA without breaking open your lock. You lock and unlock your suitcase own suitcase, but there’s a special TSA key that allows airport security to unlock your bags as well. (via Crypto-Gram)…
.theprodukkt produced a first person shooter, .kkrieger, with the entire code under fitting into 96k! Impressive. (via Slashdot)…
“AT&T Wireless announced the availability of a new music recognition service today that allows customers to identify songs simply by placing their phones near a music speaker.” Customers dial “#ID” from any AT&T wireless phone and provide a 15 second sample. They then receive a text message on their phone with the artist and song….
Seth Schiesel writes in today’s New York Times about the new market for expensive gadgets. The article focuses on Sony’s premium brand: Qualia. “People want their name monogrammed in diamonds on the cellphone or they want the pagers entirely encrusted in diamonds. We had the wife of one rapper who had a pink phone and she wanted it encrusted in pink diamonds.”…
Amazon’s search engine, A9, launched in beta. Also includes yet another toolbar. Pages are cached and you can view Alexa data directly from the results page. You can log on using your Amazon account and view search history as well. “You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page.”…
Mark Cuban writes about the true business of basketball. The purists are the minority, and in order to survive as a business you must provide entertainment value. The purists hate the arena crew shooting t-shirts and music over the loudspeakers. I am a soccer purist. I attend a game and detest the constant barrage of marketing. If basketball purists are a minority, soccer purists are an even greater minority. I see the kids stretching out their hands for an autograph from a player they do not even know. They try to figure out who he is from his signature. At…
I added a link for each post to its Tecnhorati cosmos. I followed the howto detailed by Dave Sifry. You want to change the ampersands to XHTML compliant of course. Why is there a blank rank parameter? Omitting this parameter seems to work fine, so I took it out. Most links will probably lead to “Ouch! No results found.” but it is still a good thing to have and more powerful than a TrackBack….
Mulrooney Soccer Academy is a soccer day camp in San Jose featuring professional soccer players as coaches. Richard Mulrooney, Landon Donovan, Craig Waibel, Pat Onstad, and other professional soccer coaches will teach 90 kids per session. Formerly Cannon Mulrooney soccer camps, but with Joe Cannon in Denver it makes sense to rebrand….
Patrick Hruby of ESPN writes about the perks available to professional athletes. Barry Bonds, for example, lords over four lockers and a $3,000 black leather massage recliner in the San Francisco Giants’ clubhouse; his teammates enjoy single lockers and standard-issue folding chairs Barry’s locker room setup is a big deal here in San Francisco. While other players may receive perks such as a luxury box or a limo ride to every game, it is not as visible as locker room pampering. Stars such as MVP Jeff Kent had to look at Barry’s setup every day….
Sun released an early access version of Java Studio Creator, formerly known as “Project Rave.” Sun hopes this tool will provide an easy to use interface similar to Visual Studio and maybe even convert some Visual Studio developers to Java developers….
Wired News : “Scirus is a search engine for scientists that allows them to dig through not just scientific journals, but also unpublished research, university websites, corporate Internet sites, conference agendas and minutes, discussion groups and mailing-list archives.”…
eBay has some new Java and SOAP APIs and is not afraid to let the world know. Jeffrey McManus has an article on MSDN on creating an eBay search application using VB .NET and the eBay SDK for Windows. On April 20 Jeffrey will show the Bay.NET user’s group how to create eBay applications using .NET. The meeting takes place at Microsoft’s San Francisco office….
Wired author Leander Kahney now has an Apple blog, Cult of Mac available in Wired’s Web space. Should be a good way to promote his new book, The Cult of Mac published by No Starch Press, due in September….
“Bay Area Linkup is a unique, private place where you can quickly make professional and personal connections with others in the SF Bay Area.”…
Ryan Grim of Slate writes about the decline in use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). The Drug Enforcement Administration claims it reduced the LSD supply by 95 percent with the arrest and conviction of Clyde Apperson and William Leonard Pickard in rural Kansas in November 2000. The article also mentions the correlation between Grateful Dead and Phish tours and the use of LSD. (via BoingBoing)…
Manchester United has declared a ban on players signing memorabilia. “[T]he players will refuse to sign footballs, shirts, posters, portraits or anything else that could constitute a collector’s item.” The club suspects that dealers are paying children to wait outside the training grounds all day for sale on the Internet….
Bram Cohen released BitTorrent 3.4.2 yesterday. Trackers can now send non-fatal human readable messages to clients. See Rerequester for details. New array-based bitfield for memory efficiency….
Rick Skrenta’s latest blog entry comments on the scalability of Google’s service offerings. “[T]he story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.”…
Danny Hakim of The New York Times writes about the new safety technologies making their way into today’s cars. Americans in general still want to control their cars, and are wary of even a train that drives itself. Japan gets to tryout this technology first while the marketers figure out how to sell the idea to Americans. The Prius in Japan can park itself. An Infiniti can keep itself in the center of the lane. I would like to see car manufacturers abandon what they think we want and instead give us great products. Who would have thought the Prius…
Josh Levin of Slate writes about the Multiparker MP 710, an automatic parking system. The car engine is off, so there is no need for ventilation. Cars can be parked in tight space without need for illumination. Sounds cool! Does it save any money or is it just a cool gadget?…
Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform. We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer. MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it’s very, very close….
David Pogue has an article in today’s New York Times about peer-to-peer photo sharing, free of charge. ShareALot and OurPictures, are designed to shoot your photo files directly to the desktops of designated friends and family members, completely bypassing e-mail and Web sites. ShareALot appears to be the better product since it is free and supports Windows, Mac, and soon Linux….