Extreme Sports of The Future


Looking at the genius xkcd comic Gravity Wells got me thinking about the extreme sports of the future.
Mars’ moon Deimos’ escape velocity is only about 20 km/h (12mph) and can be escaped using a bicycle and a ramp.
Mars’ other moon Phobos has a slightly stronger gravitational pull with an escape velocity of about 40 km/h (25mph).
We have pretty much exhausted the possibilities of extreme sports that can be done here on earth (a.k.a. “stupid shit”) so what is the only possible evolution for the X Games of 2030? That’s right: outer space.
Here are my suggestions:

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Is Facebook Stealing My Content??


Soon after publishing my last post “Google’s Starfish” here, I was very (unpleasantly) surprised to discover the whole post appear as a “note” on my Facebook page. I wouldn’t have even noticed that, unless someone post a comment on that post, inside Facebook.
In the past, I did, on my own will, configure the RSS of pashabitz.com to appear on my Facebook.
But still, my natural reaction was to get extremely pissed, even though no explicit rule was probably broken here by Facebook. I’ve been trying to figure out why I got so mad. Here’s what I came up with:

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Google's Starfish


Reading “The Starfish and the Spider” now. The book is about how decentralized organizations and entities (the “starfish”) without clear hierarchy and leadership are equipped to defeat classic, centralized organizations (the “spider”). One of the first examples given in the book are the p2p music sharing sites that defeated the big record labels.
I immediately started thinking about the centralized giants of software and the internet, and who their “starfish” were.
So with Microsoft it’s easy: the Linux operating system is the starfish that “defeated” it.
What about Google (the web search / web advertisement spider) and Amazon (the online shopping spider)? Who (or “what”) is going to be their starfish? I think inventing that starfish will be quite interesting.

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Lessons Learned: Never Hire a Roman Graphic Designer


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Smartly Using Your Domain Name Assets to Survive the Economic Crisis


During the current horrible economic conditions, many business leaders across the world are scratching their heads trying to survive and looking to find new income sources.
Meanwhile, the new fad that’s taking the world wide web by storm is the usage of obscure TLDs (top level domains, that’s the few letters coming after the last dot in the web address), such as http://bit.ly, http://cli.gs/ etc.

So, here at pashabitz.com, I will provide a way for existing companies, large and small, to transform their businesses and expand into new and exciting markets, using these obscure TLDs (ideas are free of charge, as usual):

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Two New Tools for People Who Like Building Search Engines, Taking Over the World Etc.


Amazon Elastic MapReduce

_Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
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80 Legs
(Still in private beta)

80legs is a platform for running web-scale applications, or any application that requires fast access to data from across the entire Internet. We give developers access to the bandwidth and computing power of over 50,000 computers at prices anyone can afford. With 80legs, web-scale analyis is for everyone.

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The Return of the Command Line


I grew up using the command line. And then with the Mac, Windows and the Internet - it was gone.
But it’s been coming back slowly.
I’ve been thinking about the “web command line” for a while.
Yes, Google Search is a web command line for years now, doing conversions and calculations (to name a few) and not just search.
And there’s been some attempts to take this further, like yubnub.org
But recently the command line is creeping back in web’s true style - unnoticed, uncoordinated, distributed. Slowly and surely.
It’s in twitter where you use prefix characters to denote other users and topics in a text box inside your browser.
It’s in blip.fm where you control broadcasting to other sites by a prefix exclamation mark in a text box inside your browser.
It’s in aardvark where you interact with other users using text commands in the text box of your IM client.

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Fox News is on Drugs


So, this guy Glenn Beck is live on Fox, interviewing this guy Robert Gellately, author of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.
Glenn Beck: So, when Lenin came to power through the 1917 revolution, he had all the heads of factories and businessmen killed, right?
Robert Gelatelly: Right.
GB: And, this is sort of like what president Obama is doing to the AIG execs now, right?
RG: Right.
And it goes on.

A little crazy in the head, aren’t we?

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Video Bitz 14/02/2009


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Super Bowl Makes Trailer Junkies Happy


Last night was Super Bowl 43. Alas, I am in a timezone that doesn’t allow me to even care. But I love a good movie trailer, and a big bunch of them was released during the commercial breaks last night.

So here are four of them, in a biased order of ascending coolness:

1. G.I. Joe:

2. Terminator Salvation(sorry, no embed available)

3. Star Trek:

4. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen(better quality here than in YouTube)

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