Excerpt direct from Slashdot:
“Facts and science collide with tribal loyalties, the Washington Post reports: ‘Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.'”
WTF?
I stumbled upon Blog Stock Market the other day which uses a set of metrics to vaulate websites/blogs as if they were corporations with real market shares… WiredAtom fared “ok” considering it has about 0.00001 % of the market share (yoohoo!). And apparently, my “blogshare” is available for trading.
Care to buy some blogshares of WiredAtom? 😉
Another pretty crazy site (thanks, Carl) of the week was Alexaholic. It (somehow) compares traffic of any 2 given (or 5) sites by showing you a series of graphics and charts. It turns out that my humble little dinky site fares pretty well to my former employer’s corporate site! Dang…
Apple never seizes to amaze the high tech industry with its top secrecy of projects and strategies. While most of us hardcore Apple and Steve Jobs fan weren’t surprised, Apple sent another shock wave into the PC galaxy with its introduction of Boot Camp.
The Mac-friendly cluster of the media thinks this is an ingenius idea on Apple’s part to have a trojan horse in the PC world to give the Mac-shy PC buyers no more reason to buy another box from Dell, HP or the like. And by doing so, since Mac OSX is already pre-installed, there’s no reason NOT to try an use it. Hence the great victory of the trojan. The same media cluster also thinks that since Apple is still a hardware company at heart, this strategy will help drive Apple’s hardware sales off the roof (somebody lend me $3000 for some AAPL shares!).
And of course there are also some doomsday predications. Some people think this will spend the end of Mac OSX as we know it. Why would developers want to invest the resources in developing anything for Mac OSX when Windows can also run on Macintosh hardware? This would also erode Apple’s own software business!
I told Murdza that maybe this is the final duel — Steve Jobs is now openly challenging the world to come and see what Mac and Mac OSX are made of. They are confident in saying that, “Look, we think our sh*t is so good that we will even HELP YOU run our competitor’s software on our hardware. And you know what? You will swtich.”
I foresee a lot of dual boots in the coming months. But perhaps the true ingenious of this strategy is still not revealed to the public. Once Boot Camp becomes part of Apple’s next release of operating system (should be due out first quarter of 2007), many of us think that maybe Apple will make it so that Windows will run side by side with Mac OSX without any kind of rebooting, having Windows run at near-native speed, like Mac Classic did under OSX for a couple of years (Darwine comes to mind). Now, THAT would kick ass!
While Singapore is often praised for being an economic and technology miracle in Southeast Asia, some of the decisions made by its political leaders are really dumb. I guess Singapore never pretends to be a “democratic” country anyway.
Slashdot was making fun of Cute Overload on April Fools which basically just made Cute Overload exploded with traffic (a.k.a. The Slashdot Effect). I am glad Slashdot covered the site though. There are tons of cute pictures of animals for you animal lovers… Even if you don’t like animals, I am sure your kids/spouse will appreciate the fun.
via [Slashdot]
An excerpt from Cringely on behalf of PBS:
There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MITs, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MITs — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive position in the history of employment because accepting that job meant that Allen got only 36 percent of Microsoft’s founders shares, compared to Bill Gates’ 64 percent.
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But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allen’s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly won’t confirm or deny it, so I’ll just throw it out for you to consider.During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.
Gulp….
This is far worse than the rumor of Steve Jobs pocketing money without Woz’s knowledge.
Are business geniuses inherently evil?
via [MacDailyNews]
It’s hard to imagine why people keep using Microsoft products when the alternatives are obviously so much better (except for the poor souls who are locked in to the platform because their preferred software vendors, ahem, Autodesk, don’t know any better). Here’s another reason why Microsoft is really, truly, incredibly evil.
Worst yet, the U.S. government is playing into Microsoft’s hands for something that is clearly a punishment for Microsoft’s own antitrust behaviors. Double standards?
Grace also took the “movie character” test and was determined her personality most resemble to that of Mary Poppins…
What jolly…
One interesting note: When I took Bryan out to run errand this morning, the children’s CD was playing exactly that song! Talk about jolly coincidences.
It’s very clear to me
That a…
Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way
UPDATE: Grace wasn’t convinced that she was Poppins. So she did the test AGAIN deliberately choosing certain answers differently….
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She ended up with Mary Poppins AGAIN.
HAH HAH HAH HAH…
If you ever wondered if a movie plot is ever written about you, or that you think a your story ought to be brought to the silver screen to inspire others, now you have a venue to prove it.
This is a website that matches you with a movie character based on 10 simple questions.
I ended up being Hannibal Lecter…
Yum.
So Safari does suck (a little)… A serious flaw has been discovered.
And I thought I was the only person crashing it like Bush is crashing the U.S. national debt.
I have written about using Firefox and how to solve its memory leak problems. The trick I wrote about by limiting the “history” of previous pages on any given tab has been working magics in reducing the memory sneak-up on Firefox. Ever since I reduced the recorded history, the overall memory usage on Firefox has stayed at around 70MB to 150MB, mostly somewhere in between. But it is slow like a dog despite of me turning off many of the unused extensions.
After having used Firefox fulltime for the past several months, the occasional trip back to Safari makes Firefox feel like public transit, slow and dirty. I have been pondering on going back to Safari, but the fact that there are NO remedies to combat its memory leak issues makes me feel reluctant. Having 10 tabs opened at any given time all the time is not a small feat for just any browser, and Firefox has been able to handle it rather gracefully. If it were Safari, the damn thing would have blown up in 3 days, taking the Finder with it sometimes.
Maybe I will give Camino another shot now that I know how to control memory issues…
Blah…
Just another rant on browsers…
It turns out that 42 is the answer to life and the universe.
An excerpt…
There is an important sequence of numbers called “the moments of the Riemann zeta function.” Although we know abstractly how to define it, mathematicians have had great difficulty explicitly calculating the numbers in the sequence. We have known since the 1920s that the first two numbers are 1 and 2, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that mathematicians conjectured that the third number in the sequence may be 42—a figure greatly significant to those well-versed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
It would also prove to be significant in confirming the connection between primes and quantum physics. Using the connection, Keating and Snaith not only explained why the answer to life, the universe and the third moment of the Riemann zeta function should be 42, but also provided a formula to predict all the numbers in the sequence. Prior to this breakthrough, the evidence for a connection between quantum physics and the primes was based solely on interesting statistical comparisons. But mathematicians are very suspicious of statistics. We like things to be exact. Keating and Snaith had used physics to make a very precise prediction that left no room for the power of statistics to see patterns where there are none.
via [Slashdot]