The Long Tail is a provactive book (based on an article by a Wired magazine editor), that talks about the new abilities for sellers to focus on (and make profit on) the items farther away from majority appeal.

See:
http://www.wired.com...hive/12.10/tail.html
http://longtail.type...d.com/the_long_tail/
http://www.amazon.co...p/product/1401302378

From a review of the book:

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions that is also known as "heavy tails", "power-law tails" or "Pareto tails". In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off". In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events--the long tail--can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority. In this book the author explains how due to changing technology it is now not only feasible but desirable in business to cater to the "long tail" of this curve.

The author explains how in traditional retail, you have the 80/20 rule, with 20 percent of the products accounting for 80 percent of the revenue. Online, instead, he sees the "98 percent rule." Where 98 percent of all the possible choices get chosen by someone, and where the 90 percent that is only available online accounts for half the revenue and two-thirds of the profits. He also explains how filters and recommender systems that help people find what they are really looking for are crucial ingredients. Thus, in a nutshell, Anderson's theory is that mass culture is fading, and being replaced by a series of niches. Thus the subtitle of his book, "Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More."

My internet service provider just got bought out by another company and decided they would discontinue the old email addresses.  So now i have to go around to every site i've ever signed up at and change my email address.

So some advice:

• Never actually use your ISP provided email address when you sign up at places, and never give it out to friends and family.
• Set up another email account like gmail or one through your own domain name+hosting, and use that.
• It's fine to just forward email sent to your other account to your isp account, and then do everything from there, but the key is not to ever become dependent on an email address that is tied to your isp, since it's not reliable as a permanent address.

mouser and I have been using redmine lately for various projects, and I must say it really helps productivity.
I find this kind of the ultimate `getting-things-done` tool, even if you don't need a bugtracker for what you're doing per se. It's a bit hard to explain everything so I'll just break down the features below:

I just got my copy of "The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey" and thought I would post a little about it.

For those of you not familiar with the magazine "2600", it's a small magazine about hacking phones and computers, that was stared in the mid-80s as a few printed sheets stapled together and mailed out by a couple of college students. It's always been a kind of loosely put together collection of musings and pictures of odd phones, and the occasional cool hack.  It's always had a very distinctively underground feel, bordering on illegal, and has developed a kind of cult following.  I've always been a fan of the magazine though i don't understand most of it and only read it occasionally.

With the release of this new big anthology, the best writing of 2600 is about to become a lot more well known.

The book is edited and contains chapter introductions (sometimes substantial) by Emmanual Goldstein, one of the original founders of 2600 and still the driving force behind the magazine.

I expected the book to have the eccentric/indie feel of the magazine and be similar in organization to anthologies like "The Best of Creative Computing" -- that is, filled with pictures and organized into randomly themed areas.

Instead, the book is organized chronologically, and separated into 3 main sections for the decades of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and subchapters in each section.

It's a big hardcover book, 871 pages.  And there are no pictures or photos(!).  This is actually a little strange given how many photos and illustrations are in the magazine normally.. I wonder in fact if this wasn't a decision made out of legal concerns.. No explanation is given.

The lack of images and the minimal discussion about the history of the magazine is going to be a little disappointing to anyone who gets the book hoping for a visceral immediate feeling of nostalgia the way one gets from reading the Creative Computing anthologies for example, nothing looks or feels like the original magazine, and the articles are all professionally laid out and typeset uniformly.

It's a great collection of essays that reflect the hacker mindset and the amateur hobbyist perspective on hacking -- a collection that anyone interesting in the history of hacking would be thrilled to own.

If you're expecting to get a collection of the best hacker writing in the last 3 decades, suitable for a general audience, you're likely to be dissapointed.  2600 was always hackers writing for other hackers, and these are not professional writers.  And if you're expecting a visual walk down memory lane through the history of 2600 you'll also be disappointed.

But if you are looking for a collection of the best essays from three decades of the magazine and the hacker community, providing a representative and thorough look at the emerging issues in hacking over time, you've got yourself a new bible.  It's a fascinating book and a great way to jump into the raw source literature if you like that kind of thing and are curious about the hacking community.  And if you're a fan of the magazine it's impossible not to be a fan of this book.

I've been talking about Wake over network recently and have successfully managed to make my computer wake from sleep (but not off) via a PHP script on my webpage.

Is there a way of making the computer go to sleep via a webpage? I'm mostly thinking of using Orb via my mobile phone so won't have access to a remote desktop connection, but I could put IIS onto the computer (Vista Enterprise SP1) if IIS could shut down the computer.

Or is there just a program that could do it (that could also be placed on a phone or loaded from a webpage).

Thank you experts!

Couldn't find a similar thread with the search feature, nor the first five pages of topics here in Living Room, so I decided to make a new thread. Here goes!

Show us your physical desktop!