Archive Amazon

Feb 4 2007

You Can Help Find Jim Gray

Hey YOU! Yes, ‘YOU’ – you know, ‘Person Of The Year‘. Well it sounds like your time has come to try save someone.

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Amazon has stepped in to help the helpers. They have done a fresh satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service.

Then they’ve created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat.

BRILLIANT IDEA! I really hope they find this guy. Alive .

GO HERE NOW

Comments | posted in Amazon, Help, Idea, Jim Gray, Mechanical Turk, Missing, Werner Vogels

Nov 20 2006

Second Life : The Book – Out now!

O’Reilly has finally released its book on Second Life, available for pre-order now via Amazon called ‘Second Life : The Official Guide’.

I had heard about a Second Life Hacks book from O’Reilly in the works a while ago. Someone in world had even gone to the trouble of mocking up a book cover ages ago which I saw in a sandbox area, claiming the authors to be the ‘FIC’ (Feted Inner Core). Since all the hack shenanigans on the grid recently, I can’t imagine a ‘hacking’ book will go down well with those who get scared by that term. ‘Hacking’ is not always bad. In fact without it, innovation would find it very hard indeed.

Second Life Hacks Mockup Someone once called me a hacker about 14 years ago. I was rather proud! I think they only called me that because I sat down and worked things out by myself, rather than followed ‘official intructions’