Random stuff for the week

Been a pretty slow week, what with MacWorld whimpering its way back to its hole for next year. Things have actually slowed down this week, and instead of being just an overwhelming amount of things to accomplish, its more just a normal amount of extremely aggravating things to accomplish.

Going back through my history file for the week, I did find some cool things I came across...

You have to love Woz.
I'd seen his site, but a pal passed this specific story on from his site: him buying sheets of $2 bills and having fun in Las Vegas... Casino security gets involved, as does the Secret Service. It's pretty damn funny:

You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.

Interconnection, Peering, & Settlements
This thing is kinda huge, but chock full of information on the different peering/business models on the net. It doesn't just give a rundown, but tries to quantify what's successful. Found it pretty interesting, but probably need to reread it as I haven't had a chance to cross check a lot of what it's saying. Seems to jive with what I already knew, tho. From the abstract:

Above this engineering layer is placed a level of financial interaction between providers, commonly termed "financial settlement." The paper will examine the various models of settlement commonly used in the communications industry, and then examine their applicability to the Internet environment. The requirements of a financial settlement will be examined, as will the relationship between retail service models and settlement models. The conclusion drawn in the paper is that the zero-dollar peering relationship and the customer/provider relationship are the only models that are stable within the Internet environment, and other models of financial interaction pose excessive risk to one or both interconnecting parties. This polarization of the interconnection environment into just two models is an important feature of today's Internet industry.

I'm not dead!
This is just surreal... the living dead in India. Apparently through corruption and other means, the government is declaring people dead so that others can take their land/property. Something like 35,000+ people. To quote:

"My son produced a fake death certificate to revenue officials and grabbed my 12 acres (five hectares) of property. The government still refuses to recognize me as alive," said Rashida Bibi, 62, who was declared dead in 1993.

Carly Fiorina is making friends with developers
No way I'm going to take sides on this one... but saying something like the below prolly can't be good for your employee morale, nor something people will just love hearing in a depressed economy:

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday.

Creating VCD Info
Pretty *nix oriented, but still lots of good info no matter what platform you use. Explains when you might want to use specific sizes, different encoding parameters... helpful. It'd be nice to see something this in depth for divx.

Killer robot dogs. Seriously.
Shades of the rat-things from Snow Crash. One step closer to my lethal pack of roving Aibos. Cool.

What is OSX?
Excellent introduction to the history and technologies of OSX for those with a technical bent. Reminded me a lot of Oreilly's short book on OSX for linux switchers, but much more general. From the abstract:

This document does not aim to regurgitate Marketing KoolAid,not that there's anything wrong with it™, but is intended primarily as an introduction to Mac OS X of those members of the technical community who are not familiar with it. You can think of it as a somewhat low-leveltaste of Apple's operating system. Consequently, some parts are fairly technical, and the implicit assumption is that you are familiar with fundamental concepts of one or more of BSD, Mach, UNIX, or operating systems in general. In many cases I have made no attempt to provide background details of the concepts referred to in the discussion.