Slashfot vs Digg

Slashdot rolls news out slower, but has a more mature, intelligent and insightful userbase, or at least it sign/noise filtering system works better than Digg.

Digg is king for its speed and "getting the low down" on stuff thats quick and dirty. Slash

Bit like Magazines vs Newspapers, mags will have older news but more indepth coverage and appeal to a niche.

I Robot

Evolution is pushing the human species away from talking. I feel a strange and increasing lazyness when opening my mouth. Speach is slow an cumbersome. Our mouths and jaws will become less pronounced. In the future communication between humans will eventually happen as synaptic exchanges.

I see evidence around me of people preferring texting an instant messaging over speach. The trend is set. What a glorious thought, as to paraphrase Michael Stipe I'm "loosing my humanity". Embrace it and rejoice.

Movie: Garden State

::Warning *major* spoiler:: This is not a deep movie. Its quite devoid of any substance whatsoever.

Somehow the lithium leeked through the screen into my veins because I felt nothing for those sodding characters.

Natalie portman can't act. There I said it. That lame, cutesy and clever character just grated my ass. And the scrubs guy, spewing cheesy crap like "I feel home when I'm with you.". I'm telling you thats straight from Finding Nemo. I felt like the guy vomiting on the plane.

Oh and don't get me started on the whole "trying to be unique" moment. You know when Natlie Portman looks like a spaz waving her hands. Ironic if you think about it.. after all it is contrived.

As others have said its a sad day when something like this makes the top 250. Non-USA and older voters save the day, when you compare votes: under 18 give it 9.1 while 45+ give 7.2. Top 1000 voters gave it a 6.. and so must I.

6/10... a definite "must see" movie! ...if you really bored or desperate.

Migrate Windows XP/2000/2003 across hardware, "The SAFE way"

One thing that has always frustrated me about Windows, is moving your current installation to new hardware. There just doesnt seem to be a *RIGHT WAY TO DO IT*. I think there is a way that is 100% safe. Read on..

Overview

The basic idea is, clone your install to new PC, however before that copy off hardware specific information from the destination PC and restore it once you imaged it with your old install

Definitions

• source - The machine install your are migrating from.
• destination - The machine you are migrating to
• live boot cd - Bootable recovery CD such as Bart's WinPE (free) or Winternals Erd Commander 2003. Probably best to search emule for already configured rescue cd's eg search "winpe". Whatever you use it should be capable of running REGEDIT, and copying files. These programs load a copy of Windows into ram, ala knoppix, except its windows :)
• alternate window install - Instead of a boot cd if you have another copy of Windows (2000/XP/2003) on another drive / partition, you can use this instead of a live boot cd

Requirements

1. Disk imaging software (Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc)
2. live boot cd or alternate windows install
3. 2 PC's

Method

1. Install fresh O/S onto new machine unless it has one already. eg, if you have XP installed on your source PC you need a fresh copy of XP on your destination machine.
2. Boot up your destination PC with live boot cd or alternate windows install and copy /windows/system32/drivers folder and the HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Enum reg key to another HD/partition/usb drive etc.
3. Create an disk image of your source machine
4. Restore image from source machine onto destination.
5. Boot live bootable cd or alternate windows install copy back drivers and run reg key
6. Reboot

Other methods

The next big internet thing : (DRAFT)

Is going to be reputation and quality of information. Geeks intrinsically know this as SNR (signal to noise ratio), an the rest of us the amount V1Agra emails versus real ones.

To clear up the signal we are going to use a noise reduction filter. Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) has been doing this ages with their comment moderation system. I really do think though, the next killer app of the internet is reputation management and global distributed content rating system.

The first major obstacle is solving the SSO (single sign on problem). And it seems this is proving far trickier than remembering your girlfriends birthday. (makes mental note)

Forums are powerful but fall prey to manipulation. The largest forum of all, Usenet, made popular by Google's Groups is one such example. Searching in a competitive industry such as "backup products" results in "xyz is great, abc is crap" posts from the opposition companies employing drones to post anonymous negative sentiments about competing products. Companies have realised that value misrepresenting and the inherent trust browsers have in reading comments. The older and wise of us are few in numbers.


This is linked to SSO (single sign on) problem. Once we have an open, practical way to link identity information amongst sites

How do you carry your reputation around everywhere? Blog comments, forums, usenet posts, irc chat, email, IM. Thats right, it the SSO (single sign on) problem. Once we have an open, practical way to link identity information amongst sites

*THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS* but if I dont post something I never will :)

Butterfly Effect

Pretty sweet Frequency meets Altar Boys movie.

The movie is about a boy with the ability to change events in his past.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Pro:
Good acting, dark and thought provoking at times
Ashton Kudger was actually bareable can you believe it?

Con:
Lame ending
Chaos Theory - pseuodo science. The movie opens with a quote supposedly from "Chaos Theory". Thats says a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a thunderstorm on the other side of the world. etc. IOW a small change in a chaotic system will lead to vastly different system in the future. In the movie however changes dont really have big effects. In all the futures he still goes to college.