The Nigerian 419 email scam — as a video!

Wonderful movie by Zefrank. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Windows vs Linux in a library environment: a cost comparison

From a study by a US library.

“Excluding administrative costs, the 15-year cost of 25 Linux systems in a lab environment is estimated to be $41,359 versus a 15-year cost of $100,000 to $155,000 for Windows PCs serving the same function. Although these estimates are based on rough cost estimates, the overall cost of hardware and software deployment, coupled with the shorter overall time spent on administrative tasks, yields significant cost savings over long-term deployment cycles in our work environment.”

Bertrand Russell on the US Presidential Election

With a month to go, Dubya is still ahead in the polls. Most of my US friends gloomily predict that he will win. How the American people could re-elect him and his regime is beyond me. And then I remembered something that Bertrand Russell once said. “A distinct logical merit of a democracy”, he observed, is that “no elected official can be more stupid than his constituents, for the more stupid he is the more stupid they were for having elected him”.

What the Bubble got right

As far as technology is concerned, Paul Graham is one of the most perceptive essayists around. His Hackers and Painters book is lovely. Now he’s written an intriguing essay challenging the irrational pessimism that replaced the irrational exhuberance that fuelled the last technology boom. For those who are too busy to read even such seminal stuff, here’s the Doc Searls digest:

…investing in concepts isn’t stupid; it’s what VCs do, and the best of them are far from stupid.

I think the Internet will have great effects, and that what we’ve seen so far is nothing compared to what’s coming. But most of the winners will only indirectly be Internet companies; for every Google there will be ten JetBlues.

Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth that you’re the best, but how do you survive to that point? And it is in this crucial stage that the Internet has the most effect. First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.   increasingly the founders of the company are the real powers, and the grey-headed man installed by the VCs more like a music group’s manager than a general.   Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.   I found myself talking recently to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. I thought it would be useful if I explained what a nerd was. What I came up with was: someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself.

The fact that a few crooks during the Bubble robbed their companies by granting themselves options doesn’t mean options are a bad idea.

What you want is to increase the actual value of the company, not its market cap. Over time the two inevitably meet, but not always as quickly as options vest.   The press, ever eager to exaggerate small trends, now gives one the impression that Silicon Valley is a ghost town. Not at all. When I drive down 101 from the airport, I still feel a buzz of energy, as if there were a giant transformer nearby.

Silicon Valley may not be the next Paris or London, but it is at least the next Chicago. For the next fifty years, that’s where new wealth will come from.

Technology is a lever. It doesn’t add; it multiplies. If the present range of productivity is 0 to 100, introducing a multiple of 10 increases the range from 0 to 1000.

What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you’d be surprised at how far you could get.

…in the coming century, good ideas will count for more. That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections. That doing good work will matter more than dressing up– or advertising, which is the same thing for companies. That people will be rewarded a bit more in proportion to the value of what they create.

Upgrade your dog

This came courtesy of a link in Slashdot, but follows directly on my item on cellphones for dogs. I especially like the photos taken by the gadgetised mutt. My favourite is this:

Just one problem — looks like the owner is an Apple user. Hmmm…

Generating dynamic timelines

Anyone who teaches the history of anything needs a timeline. How nice then to find a clever web-based tool for creating timelines.

Another useful T-shirt

After the HTML one, how about this?

Lots more in the same vein from lowercasetee.

Why the US cannot win in Iraq — by a soldier serving there now

Extraordinary, frank article by Al Lorenz, a former state chairman of the Constitution Party of Texas and a reservist currently serving with the US Army in Iraq.

Ed Felten on the importance of open disclosure

Ed commented on the bike-lock story. Now he’s been reflecting on the CBS ‘fake memos’ episode. His conclusions are the same as mine in the bike-lock saga. This is what he says:

“What’s true with CBS is true elsewhere in the security world. Disclosure teaches the public the truth about the situation at hand (in this case the memos), a benefit that shouldn’t be minimized. Even more important, disclosure deters future sloppiness — you can bet that CBS and others will be much more careful in the future. (You might think that the industry should police itself so that such deterrents aren’t necessary; but experience teaches otherwise.)

My sense is that it’s only the remote and mysterious nature, for most people, of cybersecurity that allows the anti-disclosure arguments to get traction. If people thought about most cybersecurity problems in the same way they think about the CBS memos, the cybersecurity disclosure argument would be much healthier.”

Canon’s new digital camera

First, the good news:

16.7 megapixels EOS-1Ds Mark II. It has a 36 x 24 mm CMOS sensor (full 35 mm frame size), ISO sensitivity through to ISO 3200, faster continuous shooting (4 fps) with a large and improved buffer (32 JPEG, 11 RAW). Optional extras include a Wireless Transmitter which supports 802.11b/g as well as tethered LAN for transmission of images directly back to a server.

Now the bad news: It will cost £5,999 in the UK.

More details here.