An online poll conducted in the ’90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people’s least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial “M” for Musicology.
In the dark, abysmal depths, there dwell timeless alien horrors that once roamed the void of space in the ages before the earliest building blocks of life congealed within the primordial waters of our doomed planet. From far beyond the stars, they came to this world when it was young and forged mighty edifices in the inaccessible places where nothing else could exist, there to rest in dreamful torpor for endless aeons.
The game works by showing you a series of geometries that need to be adjusted a little bit to make them right. A square highlights the point that needs to be moved or adjusted. Use the mouse to drag the blue square or arrowhead where you feel it is ‘right’. Once you let go of the mouse, the computer evaluates your move, so don’t let up on the mouse button until you are sure. The ‘correct’ geometry is also shown in green, so you can see where you went wrong.
Concerns about DMCA takedown abuse and fair use aren’t limited to Lawrence Lessig, the EFF, and Free Press—John McCain and Sarah Palin are going all mavericky on the issue as well. Yesterday, their campaign sent a letter to YouTube complaining about rightsholders (especially news organizations) that filed illegitimate DMCA takedown notices and managed to have important campaign clips pulled at crucial times. The letter is yet more evidence of why human judgment—not just automated filtering or scanning—is crucial in such cases.
We wrote a few days ago that following Microsoft’s decision to officially call its next operating system Windows 7, there were simply too many opportunities for a good headline. Well, now we get another chance thanks to Microsoft. In a post so ridiculous that I find it hard to believe it’s serious, Microsoft’s Mike Nash lays out how Microsoft got to the “7″ in Windows 7. The problem is really the beginning of paragraph three: “Anyway, the numbering we used is quite simple.”
Setting one’s clock ahead by 15 minutes is a useful trick for procrastinators. I do this myself with my alarm clock, not that it ever does me any good, in the hopes of being a little bit earlier out of bed.
How many times have you stumbled home after a long night out with friends, only to plop down in front of the computer and start sending e-mails that you would wake up regretting the next day? OK, maybe some of our older readers in the crowd have never moved beyond “drunk dialing,” but many of us are probably more familiar with the embarrassing phenomenon, a technological evolution of the drunk dial. Thanks to a new project out of Google Labs, however, you can at least stop yourself from sending “impaired” e-mails during certain hours.
At long last, John McCain and Barack Obama can pantomime lightsaber duels or get their Numa Numa on like any other red-blooded American. In a move that a spokesperson for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called “a major step into the future,” the Senate Rules and Administration Committee has deigned to permit links to third-party sites like YouTube and Flickr from Senators’ official pages.
Microsoft may have made a big push to settle many of the antitrust actions facing it around the globe, but those efforts have run up against a major stumbling block: the company’s inability to document the protocols need to interoperate with its own software. Documentation problems got Microsoft in hot water with the EU, and they’re now the only reason it continues to be under court supervision in the aftermath of its antitrust settlement. But, despite having interoperability become a corporate strategy, its documentation efforts came under fire in a court hearing earlier today.
Jack Thompson is a master of self-promotion. The Florida resident has made a career out of talking to anyone who will listen about the evils of video gaming, the violent ideas and passions that gaming puts into the minds and hearts of children, and the soulless industry that cranks out these terrible games. Whenever there is a tragedy he’s there to jump in front of the camera and find a tenuous link between real-world violence and gaming. The legal system finally decided the man went too far, however, and has made it official: Thompson has been disbarred.
Whether search is 90% solved or whether the last 10% will take 90% of the effort, - either or both according to Marissa Meyer - there is a lot of improvement to be had in search. If you honestly want to find authoritative information about a topic that’s been over-SEOed like ‘ring tones’ or ‘mortgages’ – or you’re searching for a semantically challenging term like ‘bush’ - or you’re looking for something particularly esoteric – Google leaves you with a lot of cruft to wade through.
