Upgraded hosting plan. Working on new layout in Wordpress. More to come.

Netflix just informed me that it will no longer have account profiles. Profiles are a useful feature that let multiple people on one account have different queues. We also use them to separate “movie” and “series” queues, so that if we send back a disc of Lost, we get a new disc of Lost.

(more…)

At ETHICOMP2008, Don Gotterbarn will be presenting a paper entitled, “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death, and the Training of the next generation”. The abstract is currently available on the ETHICOMP2008 website. Having read the abstract, I feel I must respond to some of the points made there. I hope I am not doing Don too much of a disservice by responding before having read the entire paper.

(more…)

By way of Tim O’Reilly, I came across some interesting articles:

This one, by Nicholas Carr, asks, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

And a response by John Battelle:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004494.php

I think this is pretty clearly a cultural conflict between written culture and internet culture. It should not surprise us that this would happen - a similar thing happened in Plato’s time, as part of the transition from a pre-literate culture based on oral traditions to a literate culture - this was addressed by Eric Havelock and Marshall McLuhan.

(more…)

So I was poking around the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine today, and found out it does a terrible job of indexing blogs. Split posts (”read more”) are frequently dropped, as are comments. I think it just doesn’t do well with very dynamic content.

I’m afraid of what this might mean for the future. I’ve always assumed that we’ll have at least a crappy, slow, hard-to-access record of all of this information. It looks like it’s still possible for much of it to be lost to the sands of time.

I say we should have better internet archives. There should be a lot of wealthy people now who have an interest in making sure this stuff stays around forever. It could at least make for an interesting Google Labs project.