new on SWiK

PROTOCOL NEW PHONES FRAMEWORK ALLOWS TESTER EXTEND CERTAIN NUMBER TELEPHONE SET LINES PROVIDES PURCHASER ENJOY FLEXIBILITY

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:04:04 -0700

I love automation, it’s a Godsend. Applied science has allowed home based commerce owners the luxury of building enterprises with peak efficiency. Merely in the midst of the love fest for tech and tools, lots of have seem to forget about the tota...

Announcement: The Pythian Group and Open Query: Partners

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:49:10 -0700

I’d like to share some great news — The Pythian Group and Open Query have become partners!

Open Query is a leading provider of high-quality MySQL, PostgreSQL and related training in Australia and New Zealand. They offer consulting services too, and are also known for their MySQL Graph Storage Engine. Feel free to browse through Open Query web-site for more info.

Open Query was founded by Arjen Lentz, who was employee number 25 at MySQL AB. If you follow the MySQL community then I’m sure you already read Arjen’s blog.

Since you’re reading this blog, I guess you probably already know what Pythian does, but if you want to learn more, please click through to our home page.

Together with Open Query, we are going to extend our service offerings and strengthen our positions in outsourced database management services, consulting, and training.

Xero | The world's easiest accounting system

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:21:38 -0700

auctiondirectusa.com-adu recommend

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:56:27 -0700

Auction Direct USA Used Car Superstore, located in the New York used cars market, the Atlanta used cars region, the Jacksonville used cars area and the Raleigh used cars market, is committed to revolutionizing and legitimizing the used car business.

The Death of Podcasting and the Rise of Videocasting? No, It's About Options

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:56:30 -0700

WikiStart - All - DrProject

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:06:13 -0700

Twilight Lexicon

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:05:42 -0700

The future of PHP

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:05:54 -0700

Tương lai của PHP6, các thay đổi của PHP

woork: Fantastic News Ticker Newsvine-like using Mootools

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:12:27 -0700

Any cool Firefox icon? - WinMatrix

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:09:32 -0700

firefox nice icons

Jones Commercial Property & Real Estate for sale or lease, Retail, Office

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:26:14 -0700

Jones Commercial offers catered solutions to your commercial property, retail, office needs. Lease or sale.

CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:06:03 -0700

To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

NPR ran a story yesterday on Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the guys who helped develop the CAPTCHA technology. The short version: Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort. It sounded interesting, so I called von Ahn to find out more.

Here’s how it works. The New York Times is working to digitize all of its issues starting way back in 1851. It starts by scanning every single page as an image. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It runs two optical character recognition (OCR) programs to turn all of those images of pages into text. Different OCR programs tend to make different mistakes. When the two programs disagree on a word, that word is plucked out and distributed among CAPTCHA security programs spread out across 45,000 web sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster.

Human beings then look at the words as part of the CAPTCHA security measure and do the deciphering by retyping what they think the mangled word is. Depending on the word, as little as two or three people agreeing on what it is is enough to figure it out. The word is then sent back to the New York Times to be reinserted into the text version of the image.

Initially, this project was part of Carnegie Mellon, but von Ahn said that they are spinning out reCAPTCHA as its own company. While The New York Times is paying to use the service, reCAPTCHA is also doing work free of charge for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980.

But von Ahn is looking beyond just re-typing words as security measures. He says that his team has tried using images and having people type what they see. The problem, von Ahn says, is that people don’t spell very well, so even though the image is of a “cat” people could spell “kat” and not answer the question correctly. ReCAPTCHA is also expanding into audio, and using the audio version of CAPTCHAs to have people listen to and decipher words from garbled old recordings or closed captioning transcriptions.

The idea of taking a necessary evil like spam prevention and turning it into something useful is a good one. Who knew selling my old digital camera on Craigslist was actually an act of historical preservation?

Podcastmatters - New Media Dramatically More Efficient Than Old Media

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:05:52 -0700

Adding a New Disk to a Xen VM - Granizada

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:05:15 -0700

Obama to Announce VP By SMS, Email

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:14:18 -0700

You know it's a new era when a US Presidential candidate plans to make a major announcement using a new technology. The campaign of Barack Obama has announced on the blog for its social network that it will be announcing Obama's Vice Presidential running mate first by mobile text message and email. John McCain doesn't even know how to use a computer.

Is This Kitschy?

Do You Think the VP by SMS Move Is a Smart One?
( polls)

Yes. Is it cool, too, though? We think it is. This author signed up for the notification without a moment's hesitation. We learned about the announcement via the company blog of Kwiry, an SMS reminder service we've used in the past.

Will it Really Be First?

Surely there will be media trying to break the story before the official announcement. Will the public really find out first by SMS, as the campaign says? We'll be watching Memeorandum (the political sister site of TechMeme) as well and wonder where we'll find out first.

We expect that if many people do learn about the selection by SMS first, it will likely be an emotional moment that helps advance Obama's mindshare at the very least. Nothing is as immediate as SMS and we think it's a wise move politically to spend political capital like this, in a nod to the new generation of communicators.

Compare This to, Reportedly, The Next McCain Ad

From Politico.com, this apparently official McCain ad speaks for itself. This isn't for real, right?

Google’s AOL Investment a Loss

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:11:43 -0700

In a SEC filing, Google acknowledged that it might come out on the losing side of its $1 billion investment in AOL.

Based on our review, we believe our investment in AOL may be impaired… We will continue to review this investment for impairment in the future. There can be no assurance that impairment charges will not be required in the future, and any such amounts may be material to our Consolidated Statements of Income.

Back in April, I had pointed out that Google’s investment in AOL was worth $500 million, mostly because there were rumors that AOL was being valued at $10 billion as it was being prepped for a sale. At the time Google made an investment in AOL, its estimated value (as per deal terms) was $20 billion. Some people believe that AOL is worth less than $10 billion these days.

Apparently buying Bebo for an outrageous sum hasn’t helped prop-up the company valuation, as Time Warner gets set to bust it up. Maybe they need to hire Brett Favre as a spokesperson to get people jazzed up! As for Google - too bad they have to take the lumps. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Mozilla Labs " Blog Archive " Introducing Snowl

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:09:21 -0700

In a Down Economy, Angel Investors Change Course

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:16:21 -0700

The grim economy has led not only to a drop in consumer spending and the foreclosure of more than a million homes, but to changes in the way angel capital is deployed. Angels, by definition, invest their own money in startups, so downturns in the stock market and falling home values can mean they have less to invest and are more gun-shy about investing it.

While data for the first half of 2008 isn’t in yet, most angel investors with whom I’ve spoken tell me that rather than run from the lousy market, they’re adapting to it by doing more follow-on investments, syndicating deals amongst multiple angels and, in some cases, investing greater amounts of money into a single startup so it can pay the bills during the dry spell for early-stage capital that they see lying ahead.

“Two trends we’ve seen are: We’re investing in deals we’re already in, and [we're] keeping them alive longer because conditions are not ripe for an exit,” said John May, founder of Washington D.C.-based Active Angel Investors. “We’re also giving more runway to portfolio companies. When times are tight, we want to overfund.”

In order to get more investors involved in the deals they’re doing — and further spread the risk — May says his group is investing with angel groups and in companies outside of the Washington D.C. area. Angels typically avoid investing in companies located far away from them because helping an early-stage venture requires a lot of hands-on assistance.

There are about 258,200 angel investors in the U.S., and in 2007 they invested $26 billion in 57,120 deals, according to data from the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. Jeffrey Sohl, head of the CVR, said he expects the amount invested in the first half of this year to be flat over the same period in 2007, but the number of angels to continue to rise (it rose by 10 percent from 2006 to 2007). “Since their net worth may be down, angels have less to invest, so we’re seeing that instead of one angel putting $100,000 into a deal, four or five angels might put in $25,000 to $20,000 apiece,” he explained.

In times like these, some angels look to other forms of investment altogether, but the heads of organized angel groups say that’s not common. Knox Massey, who runs Atlanta Technology Angels, said that just one or two of the more than 50 angels there have started started looking at, for example, distressed property.

One reason might be that many angels in organized groups are former entrepreneurs who don’t merely invest for a return, but also to stay involved with growing companies. That being said, members of angel investment organizations represent only about 20 percent of the total angels out there, according to Sohl. Some angels might be pulling back during the downturn, but an overall rise in formal angel groups with more disciplined-than-usual investment strategies could serve to keep investment dollars at even levels. None of the groups I spoke with said they’d seen above-average churn in membership over the past 6-12 months; in fact, many indicated that they have wait lists for new members.

There are also three trends taking place that are working in angel investors’ favor: The cost of starting many types of companies is lower, ventures firms have stopped doing a lot of seed and early-stage investment as their funds have gotten larger, and the tough economic climate is pushing valuations down — which means angels can get more of a company for less money. According to data provided by Angelsoft, a company that manages angel deal flow, average valuations have dropped to $2.3 million from $3 million in 2006.

“Angels aren’t quite as profligate with their cash as they might have been when their home was worth $10 million, but for many angels who view investing in startups as a serious exercise, this is a good time to put their money to work,” says David Rose, the head of New York City Angels and CEO of Angelsoft. Let’s hope it stays that way.

This was originally published on BusinessWeek.com.

Ogre Forums :: View topic - wxOgreMVC open sourced

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:14:46 -0700

Update on the Lustre Roadmap (1.8 through 4.0) - System News

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:14:28 -0700

A directory of the newest and most interesting sites on the web.

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:21:33 -0700

Directory of Web 2.0 Sites

A directory of the newest and most interesting sites on the web.

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:52:49 -0700

Directory of Web 2.0 Sites

Tropicabana game

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 02:43:57 -0700

Tropicabana is a new puzzle game. Run the Tropicabana by performing for the audience, purchasing upgrades and hiring a new band. Make your band the best show in town and see how much money can you retire with.

Buying used cars has never been so easy. Discover over 1500 low-mileage, late-model, preferred vehicles - and over 30 brands at Auction Direct USA Used Car Superstore.

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:56:59 -0700

This article discusses boat loan reviews. This site reviews all types of boat loans, including easy boat loans and bad credit boat loans.

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:53:18 -0700

Boat Loans Reviews

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:52:05 -0700

E Boat Loans

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:38:19 -0700

E Boat Loans

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:32:34 -0700

Article reviewing boat loans offered by E Boat Loans. Discussion of easy credit boat loans and bad credit boat loans also.

Auction Direct USA Used Car Superstore is committed to revolutionizing and legitimizing the used car business. Guided by principles of trust and open information exchange, Auction Direct USA provides a truly unique and satisfying used car buying experienc

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:15:26 -0700

Auction Direct USA Used Cars Superstore – No hassles

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:14:34 -0700

Auction Direct USA Used Car Superstore is committed to revolutionizing and legitimizing the used car business. Guided by principles of trust and open information exchange, Auction Direct USA provides a truly unique and satisfying used car buying experience.