Archive for the ‘cringely’ tag
The Real Origin of “Bug” #
PBS’s Cringley can be a little sloppy. This week, after a long column about how Apple really should include Blu-ray drives on it’s computers (true, but only moderately interesting), he dropped something of a bomb. I’d always heard that this was origin of the word “bug” in technology:
was that a malfunction in the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1947 was traced to a dead moth that in its last living act had shorted out a circuit card. They taped the moth carcass in the computer logbook and history was made.
It turns out, the moth story isn’t right. Bug “was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878.”
Social Networks are CB Radios #
PBS’s Cringely’s latest column seems as much dissatisfied with Facebook clutter as it is about anything, but there are a few interesting points.
The tip-off that we’re nearing the end of a cycle is the flight to quality we’re seeing from some of the bigger players. At Facebook, for example, you can no longer register using an e-mail address from an anonymous mail site like Mailinator, Operamail, or Countermail. Facebook demands that you take an extra three minutes and get a Yahoo Mail or AOL mail address for example. This is clearly the company pruning its subscribers in anticipation of an acquisition in the next couple quarters. There is no other reason to do it. MySpace isn’t doing it despite a very real sex offender scandal, but then MySpace has already been sold and Facebook hasn’t yet.
Once Facebook has been taken and one or two others, the golden era of social networking acquisitions will be over and the entrepreneurs will be headed for that Next Big Thing.