July 2010
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Our obsessive project tracking problem
Building Better Software: “JIRA suffers from a problem that a lot of really good issue tracking tools suffer from. It’s really good at tracking things. And for a lot of developers, that causes a ‘when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ problem. Actually, scratch that. It causes a ‘you’re holding a screwdriver, but for some reason you want to pound nails with it’ problem.”
Thursday, 29 July 2010
A spending goal too small for aging America
Matt Miller: “This fall we’ll have a phony debate about extending the Bush tax cuts, when it’s inevitable that taxes will rise as the boomers age.”
Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large
Alex Payne: “I fundamentally do not believe that there is an easy way to build scalable anything. What’s happening is that people are confusing easy problems for easy solutions.”
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Chairman: FTC Leans Toward ‘Do Not Track’ Registry
Advertising Age: “Yet that is happening every day on the internet.”
Monday, 26 July 2010
Rough justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisoners
The Economist: “You’re (probably) a federal criminal”
Monday, 19 July 2010
Gene Weingarten column mentions Lady Gaga.
Gene Weingarten: “I spent an hour coming up with the perfect, clever, punny headline for this column. If you read this on paper, you’d see it: ‘A digital salute to online journalism.’ I guarantee you that when it runs online, editors will have changed it to something dull, to maximize the possibility that someone, searching for something she cares about, will click on it.”
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Nokia: ‘we prioritize antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict’
Engadget: “That’s why Nokia designs our phones to ensure acceptable performance in all real life cases, for example when the phone is held in either hand.”
Happy 10th anniversary, Perl 6
Journal of masak: “On this date exactly 10 years ago, Jon Orwant threw coffee mugs against a wall during a meeting.”
Friday, 16 July 2010
Trinity
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Economics Behaving Badly
George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel: “But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.”
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning: “of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult”
How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made
Marshall Kirkpatrick: “If the message that comes out of this is that you can make TV commercials in 30 minutes, then we’re all out of a job”
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Stuff
squid314: “Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there’s no way to take the Japanese home islands because they’re invincible…and then they realize they totally can’t have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season. So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they’ve never mentioned until now.”
Sunday, 11 July 2010
With iPad, computers demoted to “Syncing stations”
Mr Blog: “Yet they still must suffer all the babysitting and housekeeping that goes with keeping a full Mac or PC functioning: patches, drivers, viruses, malware, system updates etc. – all just to run iTunes.”
Friday, 9 July 2010
Lobbyists’ Plot to Thwart Cell-Phone Driving Laws Crashes and Burns
Mother Jones: “The National Safety Council has estimated that 28 percent of all vehicle crashes are attributable to cell-phone use.”
Judge slams, slashes “unconstitutional” $675,000 P2P award
ars: “This amount is more than I might have awarded in my independent judgment,’ she said. ‘But the task of determining the appropriate damages award in this case fell to the jury, not the Court. I have merely reduced the award to the greatest amount that the Constitution will permit given the facts of this case.’”
Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona
Dana Milbank: “… according to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been ‘essentially flat for the past decade.’”
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Christopher Nolan, the Man Behind the Dreamscape
NYTimes.com: “… ‘The Dark Knight,’ which in 2008 earned the all-time highest domestic gross for a motion picture not made by James Cameron.”
Walking Away From Million-Dollar Mortgages
NYTimes.com: “‘Those with high net worth have other resources to lean on if they get in trouble,’ said Mr. Khater, the analyst. ‘If they’re going delinquent faster than anyone else, that tells me they are doing so willingly.’”
To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery
NYTimes.com: “The study also found that plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.”
Monday, 5 July 2010
Study shows teens benefit from later school day
The Associated Press: “It’s about adult convenience, it’s not about learning”
Predictive Modeling Warns Drivers One Hour before Jams Occur
Scientific American: “If, for example, Highway 1 is clogged and too many drivers who receive messages flock to Highway 2, it will become clogged; engineers will customize the model so it can determine whether sending the messages to only 25 or 40 percent of drivers, say, would best balance the two roads.”
Sunday, 4 July 2010
Happy 4th of July
Friday, 2 July 2010
Apple Acknowledges Flaw in iPhone Signal Meter
NYTimes.com: “The problem is so ridiculous that it is humorous. But none of this is going to have any impact on sales.”
How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late
Andy Grove: “As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”