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There's a showdown in Ann Arbor, MI between geeks and suits. It starts when local public tax-funded parking garages start posting the number of available spaces on their site. A few geeks decide to make it more useful while driving so they code up some asterisk hacks to scrape the page and bridge the web content to a phone and presto! you can call to hear which garages have the most spaces available for parking. Not so fast says the city and they shut down access to the site from the app and stop publishing real-time stats (mostly grumbling about a loss of "control"). Geeks are in an uproar (mostly trying to teach the suits what "public domain data" means). This long ass blog post tells the entire tale from both sides of the fight.
posted by mathowie on Mar 16, 2009 - 55 comments

Jon Katz' new book to be made into a movie? Now this just boggles the mind. I've read Geeks, and it was an interesting story (to fellow geeks), but I just can't imagine this as a movie. It's non-fiction, so there's little, if any drama happening in any single scene. The screenwriters are going to have a field day with this. I predict that the movie may contain the general points as frames of reference, but everything else will be made up.
posted by mathowie on Jan 14, 2000 - 0 comments

Behold the power of slashdot. When slashdot ran a story about an ISP shutting down a guy hosting a FBI spoof video, the owner of the single person ISP became inundated with hate mail. It's seems like this is happening fairly often: slashdot runs a story based on some early information that may or may not be checked, the zealots get fired up and go on the rampage. The last time I remember it happening was the bogus Dreamcast telnet story that resulted in numerous angry calls to Sega's tech support lackeys. It's sad to see that even a group of mostly educated geeks often reacts with pack mentality before thinking of the implications of what they're doing.
posted by mathowie on Nov 30, 1999 - 0 comments

Yet another story on geeks having a form of autism. This one sounds a bit farfetched, it's almost as if someone made up a syndrome for all the classic geek 'symptoms.' I know a lot of geeks with an amazing capacity for empathy, in fact I think geeks understand human suffering more than the average joe because much of their childhood is spent being tormented.
posted by mathowie on Sep 27, 1999 - 0 comments