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The Magpie Developer
Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer. |
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Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry.
(Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that. |
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Drinking stories that put yours to shame
Via Keith
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood. |
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making vodka pills in 24 hours
Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms. |
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Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz. |
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(Monday, January 1)
Predictions for 2007
This will be what I call a "growing" post. I will continue to edit it over the next for 3 days, so expect it to change.
My predictions of 2007:
Google will go beyond just being a larger application supplier in the mobile market. We won't see GoogleNet in 2007 but we will start to see smaller, sleeker Google data centers start to pop up in semi-metropolitan city centers maybe even with wi-fi where the local municipality isn't bright enough to understand anything except "you are willing to give us free wifi?" "Sure!", (think smaller markets where it would not be conducive to business to put a Google officer regularly). For example take your state's (except Cal, Tx, and Fla) 3rd largest city, that is where a new Google Datacenter will "pop-up" over night.
Amazon will be bought by Walmart.
Cell carriers will start to consider themselves threatened by free wifi/googlenet voip cell service and will start to try to nickel and dime mobile consumers out of every possible mobile webservice they can think of (which just means they ignore net neutrality on the mobile sector).
The x360 will continue to gain market share because of it's "marinated" network service. Blu-ray will peak around June, and Sony will realize that it must make a major decision, either start to produce HD-DVD movies, or keep going the way of the PSP movie format (aka the DeadEnd). The Irony? HD-DVD movies will thrive because of the allowance of the tech elite to copy HD-DVD movies by bypassing the DRM scheme, which is the reason more people buy HD-DVD players. Unfortunately the HD-DVD consortium of movie/media companies will not understand this.
Nintendo will have a good year as their mobile play system (DS) is merged into their home infrastructure (netconnect24) for the wii. They will start to discover (much to the discomfort of Microsoft) that people would like to continue playing the same save game over mobile as they would over the net at their home at night. (ie let's make Link better during the day while playing on the subway, playing the DS, which will upload his new stats at night when I walk through the door of my house for my console games).
Second Life will fall off the face of the press. Much like the tech bubble of the past, people who have millions in LD, will wish they would have cashed out much, much earlier, and although they may get out at the right time before the major crash, they still will become a majority jaded and write many massively critical articles about the 2nd life economy and Linden Labs handling of the crash.
Netflix (along with VC and major level investment backing) purchases Blockbuster (this is my wildcard)
MSN search gains HUGE market in the search sector after Vista's release, much to the surprise of many people. It will turn out that consumers WILL just find it easier to web search via some box in their OS rather than opening up a browser. Fair? No. Good Business for MS? Oh yeah.
The New Radiohead CD is fucking insane.
Amazon's Elastic Computing coupled with S3, really starts to catch on and many people (besides Walmart) start to see the value of the visionary that Bezos is (and takes Amazon with him).
I get into the Top 400 Hardwood Backgammon players on xbox live.
Yahoo's Panama overhaul flops, but fortunately for them so does PPC spending on Google. Everyone starts to realize that traffic doesn't matter for shit. Only conversions do. Where is the company offering Cost Per Conversions?
Apple's iTV will be lame and overslammed with DRM issues, but fortunately this will bring DRM issues to the main stream media. Where people will start to understand that unless you can acquire a physical non-DRM'd copy of whatever music/movies/TV shows you are going to buy, then you can automatically assume you will pay for it again the future. The general public will start to understand that most DRM services should offer a "free kingdom" in which they can take their media and convert it to some type of standard somehow, i.e. itunes .m4a files can be burned to CD then re imported as MP3s and thus be non DRM'd and reside in the "free kingdom".
Digg goes kaput. It was a great experiment. Welcome to Google's spam problems, minus the PHD's.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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Travis - The Boy With No Name
Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho. |
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Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross)
One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake. |
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Feist - The Reminder
I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice. |
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Catan - Xbox Live Arcade
I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game. |
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Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare
No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say. |
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Beautiful Evidence (Tufte)
Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting.. |
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Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather
Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better. |
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Game of Thrones (Martin)
I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more. |
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2003-2007, Eric Thompson |
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