Archive: November 19, 2008

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Wednesday,  11/19/08  10:48 PM

Another long day...  but better than yesterday.  Progress is being made on a few fronts, not least my todo list, which is still scary, but at least the first derivative of the length is negative :)  No ride today; I walked outside at 5:00 all ready to go, only to find a freezing fog.  Yuk.  I wimped out and went to dinner instead.

Foreign Policy has Five physics lessons for Obama...  These are all good, I especially like the one about nuclear energy, let's hope that becomes reality. 

Mitt Romney thinks we should Let Detroit go bankrupt.  Me, too. 

Tim O'Reilly: Daddy, where's your phone?  "The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on."  Huh.  I've experienced exactly what he describes - the incredible convenience of having Google and Wikipedia in your pocket at all times - but I'm not sure about his conclusion.  The user experience of a "real" computer is still too much better.  It might not always be so, but it is today... 

Fregata magnificens from Panda's Thumb... 

Here we have the Infinity Bookcase.  It's excellent, but perhaps a bit impractical; not all the books are easily accessible, and it does take up a bit of space... 

Jerry Yang is stepping down at Yahoo.  So be it...  the next leader of Yahoo will definitely have her work cut out for her... 

That's it then: Steve Ballmer says Yahoo acquisition won't happen.  Well...  if they were interesting to buy at $20/share, wouldn't they be more interesting at $10/share?  I'm not sure this isn't a plot to sink the stock lower, then buy them anyway... 

Ouch in re: Floyd Landis; The bionic man joins OUCH cycling for 2009.  Excellent, we will be following his return - and recovery - with great interest... 

The 2010 Tour de France is departing from Rotterdam!  How great is that?  You can already predict one billion people will be there, it will be amazing.  (I wonder if Floyd Landis will be in the peloton?) 

Excellent: Virtually gone, giant clams make comeback

Google voice search [for the iPhone] hits a home run.  Sounds massively cool.  The number of reasons to get an iPhone keep increasing.  Maybe with voice you don't need a real keyboard? 

Chris Anderson considers the miraculous power of scale.  "The Internet, by giving everybody access to a market of hundreds of millions of people, can work at participation rates that would be a disaster in the traditional world of non-zero marginal costs. YouTube works with just 0.1% of users uploading their own videos. Spammers can make a fortune with response rates of 0.00001%. "  It is a bit disorienting; there is just no way to picture the numbers of users out there.  Probably all reading this right now, too :) 

Hard to believe, and yet, not: PC Magazine ceases publication.  I can remember when it was like a 'phone book, with 500+ pages, but I guess the days when people care about their PC in that way are gone.  It is now just a tool.  In fact for many people "computer" is synonymous with "internet", or even "Google".  They're going to try continuing on as a website; good luck with that...  

 

 
 

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