Happy Thanksgiving!

To everyone, everywhere...
especially to all the young men and women serving in our armed forces,
helping to keep us free.

Here's today's "order-of-magnitude" thought experiment - what if everyone made twice as much money (was twice as productive - note to liberals, this is not a zero-sum situation!)  Would that be qualitatively different?  How about 4 times as much?  Or 10 times?  Would this be better for you, or worse?  Just wondering.

This SCO lawsuit against "Linux" is way out of hand.  Pure grandstanding; a "bet the company" move which will either pay off hugely or fail completely.  And either way SCO will be vilified.  Now Source Claims SCO Will Sue Google.  Of course, only they'll wait until Google's IPO has been filed.  "Industry wags are saying that God invented SCO to give people a company to hate more than Microsoft."  This is so counter productive, no value is created by this activity at all.

Fortune wonders Can Google Grow Up?  "[Google co-founder Larry] Page says he doesn't spend much time worrying about competitors: 'That's not what we're about.  We think of what we do as adding more value to the world.'"  The boldface is mine.  Compare Google to SCO.

Check this out - the Milwaukee Art Museum's Quadricci Pavilion, designed by Santiago Calatrava.  What a beautiful sculpture building!  Looks like a design by Frank Gehry, doesn't it?  [ via Ottmar Liebert, in a post titled "Poetry" ]

Samsung Unveils High-tech Robot Vacuum Cleaner.  Wow.  "The Samsung cleaner draws a 3-D map of the environment to identify its relative location, enabling faster and more efficient cleaning of a defined area.  The VC-RP30W can be remotely controlled using a computer with an Internet connection too.  When controlled over the web, a user can monitor its working environment with the cleaner’s built-in camera."  Seems more like a toy than a way to clean your house, huh?

Tim Bray considers Do Databases Suck?  Yes, they do.  They are great for some things, not so great for others.  Like any general purpose solution, they are inherently less optimal for any specific problem.

A not-to-be-named company at which I have many friends recently migrated a large transaction system from a proprietary database optimized for transaction processing to a general commercial RDBMS.  Guess what happened?  Yep, performance sucks.  For any heavy-add application like transaction processing, relational databases are not going to be fast.  In some cases their optimal search and reporting capabilities compensate, in others, they don't.

Adam Curry passes on this ad - okay, I laughed.  Out loud.  For about five minutes :)

Here's a headline that caught my eye: Women Needed to Test Orgasm Machine.  I am not making this up.