Is Digg Being Manipulated?
March 17th, 2006 There is a "very interesting article":http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2006/03/digg_is_used_fo.html on "Digg":http://www.digg.com/ being used to spread rumours of a Google buying out Sun. The hypothesis being that a blogger and his friends are using Digg to promote some posts he wrote speculating on a Google purchase Sun to "Pump and Dump":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_Dump on Sun. Interesting if true but what it really raises the spectre of really popular social applications is they are open to manipulation. It reminds me of a speech I saw recently by "David Weinberger":http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ on the authority of trusted sources. The contrast between "Digg":http://www.digg.com and "SlashDot":http://www.slashdot.com is just that, with Slashdot the news on the front-pages is controlled by a trusted source, with Digg it’s a community of people, the so-called "Wisdom of Crowds":http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385503865/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/102-8270283-1996930?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155. But when does the wisdom of crowds become "The Stupidity of Mobs":http://media.gatewayva.com/photos/rtd/special/ibook/index.htm? Self-regulation of communities is fine in an ideal world when no other motives come into play. But ego and commercial gain can work against these better principles. A controlling authority is still needed if crowds are to be trusted.
The MBP
March 13th, 2006 Things are going well with my new MacBook Pro (the MBP). Its fast, its slick, its bloody hot. I mean really, there are parts you should not touch. On the top near the power plug, around the hinge. Damn could cook an egg on the thing. Also had a few problems with some builds. So the benefit of my experience. * Don't use "Darwin Ports":http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/. Build everything from source if you can. Some of the stuff i installed off darwin ports just didnt work on the intel macs. Better off compiling it from scratch * On that use "make -j2". No point having dual cores if you don't use them both for compiling. * "Eclipse":http://www.eclipse.org/ didnt work for me. So i've moved to "IntelliJ IDEA":http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/, which has a Universal version for Macs. Apart from that no real complaints. Got a nice "iCurve":http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/icurve/ for my desk after i saw it on "Robby Russell's blog":http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/04/the-art-of-the-start-low-costs.