Trademark Enforcement of a Certain Term Within Open Source

So, I don't want to say the term, but it's clear from this search that a company has been going around to various places and enforcing a trademark. When that happens to open source projects, it gets discussed in public and everybody knows about that action. If they do it to some close-walled company then the discussion is inside the walls and nobody knows. So, thanks to the open practices of open source projects, people can know what kind of a company they are dealing with when they deal with Collabrio.

Keyword Stuffing

One of the "tricks" of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that people will try to use is called "keyword stuffing". Basically, search engines use the frequency and density of certain keywords to determine the importance of a word on a site. It makes sense that if I write a certain word or phrase a high number of times in my pages that it's an important word to me and probably the subject of the page. Webmasters (and SEOs) will take the keywords for which you are trying to get a good ranking and weave them into more parts of the site and content so that your site gets a high ranking. In the "if 2 is good, 100 is better" mindset, this can be pushed too far and the content no longer makes sense. So, what if you could use the word on the page hundreds of times but hide it from users by making the text white on a white background? This would confuse search engines into giving you a higher ranking than you deserve! Search engines don't like to be tricked. Tricking them means that their results are less valuable to their users.

Reporting Keword Stuffers

I went to a "smart athletic people's conference" and we played some games. Of course, the "smart" side of it meant that some of the games should be "heady" games. So, I included a game theory game:

Game 1 - Pricing Game:

You sell beer. You have one competitor who also sells beer. Each day you and your competitor have two choices for your price that day: a high price or a low price. There are four possible outcomes:

  Competitor
  LowHigh
YouLow(1,1)(3,0)
&nbspHigh(0,3)(2,2)

The numbers represent the profit you make that day in the order of (Your Profit, Competitor Profit). So, if you both choose "low" then the result is "1,1" meaning you each get 1. If you choose low and the competitor chooses high then you will get 3 and he will get 0.

Note that the game is symmetrical: "you" and "competitor" can be flipped and the results are the same.

How we will play the game:

Everyone will get two small cards - one that says "high" and one that says "low". We will play until this program tells us to "quit":

import random
limit = 0
loop = 1
while loop == 1:
again = random.randint(0,100)
if again > limit:
print "play again"
limit +=1
loop = input("time for next round? 1 or 0: ")
else:
print "%d rounds, quit now!" % (limit)
loop = 0

I ran this program several times and got results between 3 and 27 rounds. It could theoretically go about 100 rounds, but that's pretty unlikely.

Your score: the sum of the results from each round. For example, if you and your competitor both chose low every time and the game lasted 3 rounds your scores would both be 3.

So, I found this site today of the photos from the sale of equipment for Mp3.com. Wow. There's lots of crazy stuff in there.

The thing that got me the most excited was these two Clarion EMC2 disk arrays. How much space was on those? A couple terabytes? How many hundreds of thousands did they cost? To get that much disk today you'd have to...walk into an apple store and drop down a a couple thousand dollars. Crazy.

So, I did it. Today I purchased the FON social router. I figure, if nothing else, I get a cheap WRT54GL router. If it works out to be a cool service then that's great.

This past spring the wife and I saw the Banff Film Festival on tour in Denver. It was pretty sweet. Perhaps the best move was also the first we saw and it was also made by a Boulderite - Danny Brown of Sensei Studios.

Well, I just found it on Google Video - (and no, I still don't have cable, cable is dead).

So, here it is. Enjoy.

I recently purchased a new Dell Inspiron E1705 machine. It's got a nice intel dual core processor, 1GB of fast RAM, a 60GBSATA hard drive, and most importantly a bright 17" screen. Fancy smancy.

At the time I was debating about getting a MacBook pro - basically the same set of specifications, but about $1000 more money.

One concern I had about the Dell was I heard that their support had gotten worse recently, so I purchased the extra 2 year support contract.

I really wanted a Mac - the OS features are great now that they've got BSD underneath it all and with Intel processors it seemed like it would be speedy yet battery friendly. Turns out that MacBook owners are not the happiest bunch of folks.

First, I read about how crappy apple support can be which is really sad. If it were the Dell he would have known that he was purchasing a specific level of support. My level of support - for something like $70 - got me 2 years of next day on site service. I have a problem, I call, I run through troubleshooting over the phone, if it's still busted (like his) someone is in my house the next day to fix it. None of this "sorry, genius bar is busy goofing off".

I've also read about heat problems on the MacBooks - those are pretty standard complaints about it at this point including this guys point that if you don't have a lap tray it will burn your nuts. Sweet.

Finally, today I got sent a link to this video of a MacBook Pro that refuses to come out of sleep. The best thing about that video - it's hosted on a mac.com homepage. Priceless.

This past weekend while I was out of town, the several bicyclists in the Denver Critical Mass ride got into a bit of trouble with the police. It's a little frustrating, as one rider pointed out, that 75,000 protestors blocking major roads in Denver had no problem, but a group of ~100 bicyclists exercising their right to be on the road got tickets.

Without further discussion - Westword's take on the subject