Emergent Dialect Watch: "Reap the Percussions" · 6 days ago
Overheard in an airport in the US a couple years ago. Gives me that ol’ sic transit gloria mundi feeling, but it’s also strangely appropriate
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Analogy · 497 days ago
PHP is to software engineering as Fimo® is to scupture.
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FYI · 625 days ago
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alt.not-a-truck.series-of-tubes.lol.lol.lol · 659 days ago
That is all.
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The Tube(s) · 660 days ago
I haven’t had cable or broadcast TV (where I live you get about 2.5 channels without cable) in about ten years, but I’ve watched plenty of movies (and TV shows on DVD) at home during that time.
Initially, my cable service was included in my apartment rent, then they reduced my rent (!) by $22 and unbundled the cable service. The cable company continued the service for free for at least six months, then finally shut it off after receiving no response to their exhortations and incentives. I could easily afford it, but during the cable era, I’d found that my interests were broad enough that I could usually find something marginally interesting to watch, and without TV I had a lot more time.
Fast forward ten years, and we just gave away our TV; it hadn’t been turned on in months. If we want to watch video content, we use a 17” laptop or 20” widescreen LCD monitor. Between prompt DVD releases and, uh… alternative means of acquiring content, I just don’t feel the need to “tune in,” and I certainly don’t miss advertising.
I don’t plan to get another TV or cable when my son is “old enough” to watch either; I’ve decided that I want him to learn his culture from people I like, rather than the random jerks who’ve managed to stumble into the limelight.
We’ve all heard factoids about the number of hours of TV per day, hours of advertising per year, number of murders, etc. that the average child sees. I, for one, welcome don’t plan to have an average child. :)
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Troll me Harder! · 706 days ago
Amazon trolls are some of the best.
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Satire is Redundant · 827 days ago
A colleague recently received an email inviting him to an interop workshop. At the bottom of the email was the following:
Maps, public transportation information, driving directions, hotel recommendations and other useful visitor information can be obtained from the attached document.
The attached document is a ZIP file.
Inside that ZIP file is a Word document.
The Word document contains the same text as the invitation email.
At the bottom of the Word document, presumably containing the actual “useful visitor information,” is another Word document, embedded as an OLE object, which is of course unusable in OpenOffice.
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What's Right With WS-*? · 853 days ago
In my admittedly biased opinion, Service Oriented Architecture (the politically correct buzzword for systems that are built using the WS-* stack) has a reasonable chance to succeed where DCE, CORBA, Jini, a nearly infinite variety of in-house frameworks and even the Internet have failed to deliver on the promises of distributed computing.
My use of “failure” in this case should not be construed to convey any stigma, because distributed computing is inherently difficult, and the [booming voice]Promise of Distributed Computing[/booming voice] has been outlandishly overstated from Day 0.
There are approximately as many distributed computing frameworks as there are reasons for their failure. Many have been underspecified, and many more have been underimplemented.
It is my contention that SOA is the first distributed computing framework to attempt to comprehensively address all three problem areas of distributed systems:
- Application Semantics (data formats, protocols, business logic, ...)
- Identity (authentication, authorization, ...)
- Networking (connectivity, scalability, fault tolerance, physical security, ...)
In addition to this breadth of conceptual scope, there are many cultural ingredients baked into SOA that will help it achieve wider adoption than previous distributed computing frameworks.
I won’t even try to back up my assertions just yet, but hopefully I’ll be writing more on the subject soon.
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Mice Pace · 855 days ago
From a great article on The New Republic you probably can’t read for free:
MySpace fills most of the space on its music pages with the work of awful bands, hundreds of thousands of them, and trolling among them provides a kind of perverse entertainment. The music is searchable by five criteria: band name, band bio, band members, influences, and “sounds like.” After an hour or so of using the search mode to find something worth the effort, I got punchy and, after the words “sounds like,” typed “shit.” Pages for more than three hundred bands popped up, and the first five, I can attest, were well categorized.
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I Am a Galley Slave · 1206 days ago
Awhile ago (but not so long ago it wasn’t still on the front page until I wrote this… sigh) I linked to a Times article on “Rogue Economist” Steven Levitt.
More than a year later, I have recently been contacted by an “Online Marketing Manager” with Harper-Collins, who offered to send me a galley of a new book written by Levitt and Steven J. Dubner, author of the original article.
The book has a terrible title, but it’s pretty good. I’ll write a more detailed review soon.
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