When the air conditioning is cooling the room and it’s a lazy Saturday morning, she can be very spoiled. But she’s allowed.
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Crows Using Cars To Crack Nuts
Crows can sometimes be very smart, as this video shows. (via Digg)
Curious Ace
I tried to take shots of Ace taking a nap, but she woke up and took great interest in the camera as soon as she heard something was going on.
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I should have followed my UQAN idea
Another day goes by, and another questions and answers service comes up. As this TechCrunch article suggests, Q&A services are growing bigger because people are better answer-givers than search engines. Yahoo! Answers is now the biggest Q&A service around, but more and more are popping up. I already wrote about Guruza and Illumio which look very similar to my own UQAN idea. The new guy on the block is Answerbag and there are probably more to come (Google Answers is a paid service so it’s kind of different.)
All this brings me to the inevitable conclusion that I should have followed the idea of UQAN (Universal Questions and Answers Network) instead of dropping it a few years ago.
Anti-Virus Programs
I’m always asked about free anti-virus programs. I don’t use an anti-virus, as I have a firewall and I’m very careful with programs I download and run. I sometimes use online scanners, like McAfee FreeScan, Trend Micro Housecall and Symantec Security Check. These, of course, cannot give you the always-on virus protection installed software can.
As it turns out, there are many free anti-virus programs. I’ve always known about AVG Anti Virus but in the latest anti-virus comparison done by www.virus.gr the second place winner was a free anti-virus program I heard about for the first time: Active Virus Shield by AOL. If any of you uses it, let me know how it is.
Shoveglove – The Sledgehammer Workout
If you’re looking for the out-of-the-ordinary workout, here’s one you can try… it’s the shoveglove. The guy who invented it seems very serious about it, so I guess it’s worth a shot. I think I’ll stick to the gym, at least for now. (via Freakonomics Blog)
QuickRef.org – Find programming references quickly
QuickRef.org is a search engine for programming documentation. You simply lookup a name (of a function, class or whatever) and it pops up a list of matches. It works good and looks very useful. I, of course, also like the website because its title is: “QuickRef.org – all your docs are belong to us” :-) (via Digg)
10 High-Tech Vehicles
Here’s a list of ten very very cool high-tech vehicles. Some of them are high-tech just because of the technology, but some of them also look great. (via Digg)
Browzar – the secure browser that wasn’t (or: How tech sites sometimes report stuff without checking the facts)
A few days ago a new web browser, called Browzar, appeared on the Internet. Claiming to be a privacy-oriented browser, Browzar immediately caught the eye of technology websites which started reporting it. Here are some examples: The Register, Lifehacker and Download Squad.
However, after a few days it turned out that Browzar is not really what it claimed to be. Browzar is simply a wrapper around Internet Explorer, which is not a bad thing by itself. It keeps your privacy by cleaning Internet Explorer’s cache and history, thus protects other users of the same computer from knowing what you’ve been doing. That’s not enough for a browser to get so much hype, as there are many tools that do this already.
This wouldn’t make it to my blog on a regular day. But I’m troubled with the way this browser got so much news before anyone really tried it to see what it’s worth. The hype around this browser was very much unjustified, and this is why I didn’t include links to its download page.
Are we in a new bubble?
Around the year 2000 there was the dot-com bubble. Companies got a lot of money just for adding “.com” to their names, and even companies like Kozmo.com, whose delivery costs exceeded their total revenue, grew bigger and bigger for no reason.
I remember back then that a website or a service with a user base had its worth calculated according to the number of registered users. That’s why ICQ got a lot of money from AOL (the technology of instant messaging developed by ICQ was relatively simple). I even remember that there were numbers saying “one user is worth so-and-so cents”.
Then, after everyone realized they were not actually making any profit, there was the hi-tech downturn and investors were very careful with their money. Now, following the whole Web 2.0 craze, investors are again investing in small web startups. However, lately some startup companies closed their doors. True, most of them are small and simply have rough competition. Take, for example, the online calendar market. It is now filled with competitors, Google Calendar among them. Kiko.com is a startup that had an online calendar as a product and sold itself on eBay later. Here are some notes from a Kiko.com GUI developer..
But this is not what worries me most. I’m mostly worried about websites that are given money according to popularity. It reminds me of the cents-per-user times and how much it didn’t matter later on when no one was making money. Now, in an interview with Paul Graham, Mr. Graham says we’re not in a bubble. He also says things like “founders shouldn’t worry about a business model when they start a company. They should have something that people want and worry about the business model later.” Although I would like to believe that’s true and go start my own company, such remarks frigthen me most.
So are we in a new bubble or not?