I have seen some strange things in my time but this has to be one of the geekiest ones. A student in the UK has converted 0.01% of the English edition of Wikipedia Encyclopedia into a printed book. If you were to actually print all 3 million articles on Wikipedia then it would be roughly equivalent to 952 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. And, as you can easily make out from the photographs, the book is huge – it’s about 1ft 7in. high or just as tall as a 30″ widescreen monitor.
Yes, the operating system that you’ve never wanted to use is celebrating 40 years of life. As you may know, Unix represents the basis for all Linux distributions; but did you know that also Mac OS X based their operating system versions in Unix? Well, what this operating system represents it’s a lot more that you may think.
Born in 1969 as “Unics” from two guys named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, has a long way and a lot of history. Written originally in Assembler programming language, quickly changed the code since one of the founders also developed the “C” language. Bill Joy, in 1978 created 1BSD, operating system also based in Unix, that will later represent in other important developments like BSD, FreeBSD, SunOS and Mac OS X.
Other ramifications of this development, produced Minix OS for academic proposals, that later Linus Trovalds will use to build the first Linux distribution in 1991. Here’s a very nice picture that will help you understand a lot more of these ramifications:
Closing the article, here’s a quote from Joel Spolsky that talks about Windows and Linux:
“What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.”
I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.
Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:
Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:
Here are some of amazing facts about it:
Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set
Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!
Recently I’ve posted about an interesting stat of the blogsphere: Over 95% of current blogs in Internet are abandoned, and one of the reasons that I’ve mentioned is the existence of Twitter. Well, I guess similar stats always comes in two. A study made from the Harvard Business revealed a lot of stats regarding to Twitter users, including one related to their users and how they abandon twitter.
10% of the Twitter accounts hold the 90% of the tweets available every day, and most of the users that register themselves usually uses one or two tweets and leave the account completely. Here are some other stats from the report:
So, what we can say about this inconsistency in blogs and twitter? People that start a blog and/or a twitter account but they never update it again… well I’m sure that the answer is one thing, perseverance it’s not a quality for most of us. Specially when we have some expectations and we don’t see a quick result, like I mentioned about blogs and how people relate to that as a “financial independance” and rapidly get disappointed.
Blellow burst onto the scene a few months ago, and after winning a few awards paired with an explosive launch at SXSW, the social networking site is experiencing explosive growth. For any self starters, entrepreneur, freelancer, or contract worker, this network has been the hub for meeting new people, finding job leads, and joining project teams seeking specific talents. Companies are welcome to also post their job listings for a reduced nominal fee to attract some highly talented professionals.
The unique name is an extension of its unique community. Putting together some of the best aspects of popular social networking sites, it fosters creativity, innovation, and looks to be the dominant force in finding work for the self starters around the world. While Elance and Odesk serve as bidding job boards, Blellow looks to use its extensive network to rely on recommendations and friendly introductions to new people to pair people with the right project.
If you’re looking to expand your contacts, find unique job postings, and converse with people in a specific industry or topic, then Blellow is the place to network!
I find it funny how multinational companies still get the littlest things wrong. Ask is really trying to find it legs in the search engine market, but they obviously have a huge amount of competition to stand out. Today I followed Ask on twitter with my own personal twitter account.
Now I hate automatic direct messages on twitter at the best of times, but this is what Ask sent me.
Now if ask can get something as basic as a reply message wrong the why the hell do they think they can get me to use their search engine! Jeeves its “look forward to answering your questions!” Sort it out.
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
Have you ever wondered what social networks are dominating in what parts of the world? Well over at Vincos.it they have put together a great map that illustrates which countries are using what, and it seems as though Facebook is easily in control of the world!
I was wondering how O&M created the popular Zoozoo ads for Vodafone without using computer animation, here are some behind the scenes video clips that will give you some good idea about the whole production process.
You may also want to check these photographs from a studio in South Africa where these videos where actually shot. Pictures are courtesy the official group of Zoozoo on Facebook.
For instance, here’s the original Zoozoo phone backup ad that’s currently getting aired on television during IPL cricket breaks:
Google Labs has a new toy for us to play around: Google Squared. This lab it is focused on giving you, with the same results that you can find on a regular Google Search, an enhanced layout and data presentation. The results are shown in a spread sheet form with related fields to your search that can help you to receive the information that you are looking for in a quicker manner.
Let’s try it: I’ll use a simple search “mountains“. Here’s the result:
Pretty nice. On the “Description” field I can find (bold text) the name of common mounts and mountains around the planet, the “Image” section with an accurate image for each result. And here’s the catch, each search will have related fields shown in the sheet; for our case: “Height“, “Location” and “First Ascent“. Another cool thing, you can add columns to be introduced to your search.
Of course this new type of search takes about one or two seconds more than a regular Google Search, and since it is part of Google Labs, it is completely experimental for now; so you shouldn’t expect that this one could replace your common searchs.
With updates to Flock, Firefox, Opera, and even IE, browsers are becoming key factors in how we choose to integrate our online experiences with our daily lives. Each of the above mentioned browsers have key factors that stand out and make them useful to someone, all depending on our tastes. What if you could find a search engine that learned, adapted, and showed you extra content that you would not have found otherwise?
Worio is the social search that has somehow found a way to intelligently learn from your search habits and adapt itself to your likes and dislikes. Worio creator Ali Davar focuses on the search as a form of discovery. He comments that Worio will show you things that you perhaps never even thought of, but are related to your initial search.
The idea of discovery is key to Worio, and information is collected and saved on your habits. The mechanism can be turned off and it will simply function like any other search engine, but the uniqueness also comes in being able to share your favorite links and sites right from the search, without having to rely on social bookmarketing efforts or emailing people. Anyone within your network can see your habits and you can see theirs. Taking this concept a step further, Worio now supports Facebook connect. Now you can directly share your passion, your searches with friends in Facebook and open people up to a whole new world of discovery.
The search looks very promising and has a bright future, we’d love to hear what you think.
Yes, the operating system that you’ve never wanted to use is celebrating 40 years of life. As you may know, Unix represents the basis for all Linux distributions; but did you know that also Mac OS X based their operating system versions in Unix? Well, what this operating system represents it’s a lot more that you may think.
Recently I’ve posted about an interesting stat of the blogsphere: 
The 
Google Labs
