In colloquial usage, a “steep learning curve” means the knowledge in question takes longer to learn; a “shallow learning curve” means it’s a nice quick process.

If you actually plot a learning curve, though, with time on the x axis and understanding on the y axis, you’ll see that your intuition fails you. A steeper curve indicates quicker learning, and the converse.

This has been a thorn in my pedantic side for a while, but I haven’t done anything about it. Finally, Rob of Cockeyed.com has. Let this be a lesson to everyone.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around this even as I’m typing it, but the Compiler blog has been nominated for a Webby Award. OMG HFS, indeed!

We are an official nominee in the IT Hardware/Software category of the 12th Annual Webbys. And we’re not alone — Wired has been nominated for a total of six Webbys: Wired.com for best news site, best copywriting and best home page, Danger Room for political blog, Game|Life for games-related website and Compiler for software website. Epicenter and Gadget Lab were also designated "Honorees" in the business and culture categories, respectively.* Check out all of this year’s nominees at webbyawards.com.

Compiler is also currently leading the People’s Voice vote in the Software/Hardware website category. Of course, we’re heartily encouraging you to go to the People’s Voice website and help keep us on top — so please cast your vote now! To find us, go to the Marketplace section, then expand the Software/Hardware category. Free registration is required, and you can vote once in each category. (Did we mention the other five awards Wired is up for?) Winners will be announced May 6th.

This is huge news for us. It not only represents Compiler’s first ever nomination for a major industry award, but it’s a validation of all the hard work we’ve been doing over the last few years.

This Webby nod also comes hot on the heels of Wired’s win for Best Classic Website at last month’s SXSWi Web Awards. It’s been a great year so far. A huge thanks to all of our supporters, the other nominees and everyone with a pulse and a valid e-mail address who cast a vote in our favor. Cheers.

* We should also mention that Wired is a Media Sponsor of the Webbys, along with Variety, Reuters and Adweek. Our relationship with them in no way influences the voting or the promotion of the event. In fact, the only reason I knew we’re a sponsor is because I saw our logo flash by on the Webbys site right now — I’m running FF3b5 and haven’t activated AdBlock Plus yet. No funny stuff, I swear!

We’re always ones to argue for more data portability on the internet, so we’d like to take this opportunity to humbly ask that you, our readers, port some of your data over to us.

We’re trying to get a better idea of who you are and what you like to do — more than your thoughtfully-written comments can tell us, anyway. So, we’ve crafted a little questionnaire. Click here to take our Compiler reader survey. We’ve kept it as painless as possible. It’s just two pages and it takes about a minute or so to complete. Everything is totally anonymous.

Most of it is the standard reader survey stuff (did we mention it’s fast and anonymous?), but when you’re done, we’ll have a better understanding of each other. And really, isn’t that reason enough?

Today marks the start of a huge overhaul to the internet’s underlying address system. The master address books for the web are beginning to update to a new format known as IP version 6.

While you and I use names, like Wired.com or Google.com, to move around the web, our computers use numbers — translating from words to numbers so that we don’t have to remember the actual numerical address of the sites we’re visiting.

The bad news that the web grew much faster than expected. The current addressing system, IPv4, will exhaust the pool of possibilities by 2011.

Continue Reading “Internet Address Upgrade Creates More Tubes” »

Not convinced by with our earlier post about licensing your content in the public domain as Tantek ???elik advocates? Then consider The Pirate’s Dilemma a new book that argues we need to re-think our entire approach to copyright, content and ownership.

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, has a short article up over at Torrent Freak which highlights some of what he claims are the book’s core ideas, including the notion that piracy is often a precursor to innovation (a kind of twist on the old idea that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery).

Continue Reading “Does Digital Piracy Mean Innovation is Coming?” »

The Compiler crew will be taking the rest of the week off, resuming our regular coverage on Monday November 26.

How are we spending our holidays, you ask? Scott’s busy scouting locations in the Smoky Mountains for an epic machinima Civil War drama starring the voice talents of Judd Nelson and Leonard Nimoy. I (Mike) will stay at home — I’m trying to figure out how to get ZFS running on my first-gen iPod shuffle. If that doesn’t work, I’ll probably just put some Les Rallizes Denudes on it and walk around San Francisco instead.

Feel free to send us tips over the weekend in case we get the urge to blog. Otherwise, be excellent to each other and we’ll see you next week.

Photo of "the dirty bird" by Brave Heart via Flickr

The fate of the world may not hang in the balance this time, but a team of engineers have resurrected Bletchley Park’s famous Colossus computer, the World War II code breaking machine widely recognized as one of the first programmable digital computers. It took fourteen years to reconstruct a Colossus since the machines were meticulously broken apart and destroyed after the war.

A new contest, The Cipher Challenge, will pit the rebuilt Colossus’ code breaking skills against modern machines running Colossus emulators. The contest is part of fund-raising drive for the British National Museum of Computing.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this BBC article is that Tony Sale, leader of the Colossus rebuilding project, says that “a virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does.”

Now that’s progress.

Continue Reading “World War II Colossus Computer Resurrected To Crack Codes Once Again” »

Long URLs are a pain, which is my the many URL shortening services cropped up a few years back, but what if you want a short URL and you want to keep prying eyes out of your bookmarks? That’s the scenario behind Hidelinks, a new service that offers a shortened URL and the option to lock it with a password.

The service is dead simple to use, just head to the site and paste in the URL you want shortened. Then enter a password and it hit the “Shorten Link” button. Hidelinks will spit out a shortened link which you can copy to the clipboard or bookmark in your browser.

When someone tries to access the URL using the link, they’ll be asked for the password before they are permitted to see the page. For instance, here’s a link to Compiler generated with Hidelinks (the password is “wired”).

Continue Reading “Hidelinks: Keep Your Bookmarks Safe From Prying Eyes” »

The New York Times announced yesterday that it is opening up the premium Times Select portion of the site to the general public. First launched in 2005, Times Select followed the standard, outdated approach to putting print news on the web — it charged viewers a subscription fee.

Apparently someone over at the Times has finally realized what the rest of the internet had figured out long before Times Select first launched: thars money in them thar ads. Not that Times will admit it was wrong, a spokesperson tells PaidContent.org “This is what is really important — it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

In other words, Times Select was so successful they changed the entire business model.

Continue Reading “Gray Lady Gives It Away” »