Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
More stuff can be found at gerikson.tumblr.com.
Daily observations, more or less
Charles Stross recommends this article:
Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don’t work that way: it’d require the equivalent of a mass religious conversion, and we have a technical term for periods of history that involve mass religious conversions: we call them interesting. (Usually from a remove of several centuries.)
So Microsoft has laid a bid for Yahoo! Here’s James Robertson’s take:
I have a better idea for Microsoft: fire the people that came up with idea of buying Yahoo. The severance packages will cost you a lot less, and the bad ideas they generate in the future will hurt someone else.
Nice hook:
A Fire Upon the Deep is a science fiction novel written by Vernor Vinge, an award-winning space opera about superhuman intelligences, well-developed aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and Usenet.
Vi får välja mellan brevhemlighet och lagen mot fildelning, mellan skydd för den personliga sfären och upphovsrättsorganisationernas möjlighet att ta betalt på samma sätt som hittills.
Det är inte ett särskilt svårt val. Affärsmodeller kan komma och gå. Men ger vi upp rätten till våra privata liv ger vi också upp rätten till oss själva.
Kalle Lind kommenterar ett gammalt utskällt teveprogram:
Men dom fem tevetimmar som gjordes satte ett rejält avtryck i sin tid och påminde en självrättfärdig befolkning att dom var jävligt förskonade från riktiga problem. Att ta sej tid att leta upp papper och kuvert, köpa frimärken och hitta en postlåda för att gnälla på att Beppe Wolgers pratar och äter korv samtidigt, får betraktas som ett utfall av för mycket tid och för få bekymmer.
The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won’t name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another “me too” blog post.
OMG this is such an awesome post!!11!! I so totally agree with it!! It deserves to be Dugg sooo much!!!
(Hat tip Rui.)
Rättegången mot en filderare inleds i Linköping:
Målet har varit omstritt redan innan det har kommit igång. Detta eftersom det av förundersökningen framgår att både Antipiratbyrån och Ifpi har fått undersöka de beslagtagna hårddiskar som utgör en viktig del av bevisningen, trots att organisationerna samtidigt är målsägande.
— Det kommer vi naturligtvis ta upp, säger Morgan Gerdin [den anklagades advokat]. Jag menar att rätte[n] måste se och bedöma bevisningen med försiktighet eftersom det är en part, målsägande, som har fått ta del av förundersökningsmaterial och de facto svarat för den tekniska utredningen själv.
Helt rätt. Det är otroligt att rättighetsinnehavarnas intresseorganisationer propagerar för högre straff för fildelning och samtidigt förbereder bevisningen. Risken för jäv är ju uppenbar.
Finally got around to installing our VoIP box, so our landline number is active.
Anina Rabe om Tom Alandhs Facit-dokumentär:
Det var äkta svensk mansmytologi i dess prydno […], ett slags idealhistoria om ett land som alltid med stolthet kommer att värdera fysisk aktivitet mycket högre än cerebral.
Så gick Facit också under när teknologin utvecklades. Hade de satsat mer på forskning och utveckling än på att driva ett jävla fotbollslag hade de kanske inte gått i kånken och behövt friställa hela sin personal. Tydligare än så kan inte de svenska prioriteringarna visas.
Nick Carr on the recently announced Facebook ad platform:
Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.
I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with how Facebook is evolving. Sure, the company needs to make money, but somehow it feels like they’re rushing headlong towards the big payout, selling out their users as mere ad consumers.
Ultimately, you have to give your users added value, otherwise they’ll just move on.
Feh, Nokia’s new “Music Store” only supports Internet Exploiter.
That’s beyond lame.
(Hat tip: Jim.)
It’s just perfect that Lotus Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes itself as freakish software. As if frightening, cross-species aberrations of nature are what we’ve all been looking for in an email and calendaring solution. This is a campaign that can only make sense in the intensely inward-looking world of enterprise software.
Jonathan McCalmont slams Gibson’s Spook Country:
I found the protagonists to be hateful, the plot uninteresting and the obsessions of the writer to be as short-sighted as they are witless. Spook Country is a deeply stupid book that thinks it is clever, it is full of deeply stupid characters who think they are clever and it will be adored by legions of fans who are deeply stupid but who think they are clever. Spook Country is Dallas for geeks.
I haven’t read SC yet, but a lot of the things he mentions about Gibson’s previous novel Patter Recognition ring true.
Today I’m at home with the kid, who has strep throat. (The worst is over, it’s basically just quarantine today). Hence the (relative) flood of posts.
In other words, I’m posting on my own time, just in case someone wants to sue me.
Referring to versions of OS X by cat names, when those names appear nowhere in the operating system itself, seems astoundingly user-hostile. I have no idea what the cat name is for the operating system I’m running, and yet when I try to evaluate shareware, the authors are often asking me if I’m a panther or a tiger or something. Hasn’t anybody noticed how stupid that is over at Apple?
(Footnote at the end of the post.)
The practice (by users) of referring to point releases by nicknames is indeed rather stupid. I’m imagining not every Mac user keeps up with the rumour mill concerning the nicknames, and how many remember that the version-before-last was referred to as “mangy alley cat” 5 years ago?
The rest of Anil’s post is worth reading too.
I like John Gruber’s writing, but he sure does come across as a noble defender of the Apple faith instead of, y’know, a writer
I feel the same. Gruber’s linked list is consistently high quality, but Apple’s recent successes with the iPhone and stock market valuation seems to have turned his head from writing well-reasoned articles about software. Now it’s all triumphalist odes to Apple’s greatness.
I’m a bit bummed I renewed my subscription to Daring Fireball.
It’s modern times, you can observe the buildup to a marriage ceremony through Twitter and it’s confirmed through a Facebook status change.
Facebook debuted a BlackBerry client today, in an effort to bring more investment bankers to its platform. (As if the college girls weren’t inducement enough.)
Love the illustration, too.
Today is United Nations Day.
I usually find out about this when I wonder why the buses have flags on them (a tradition on Swedish flag days). Do any other countries honour this day?
The UN is held in wide regard in Swedish official discourse, something that I find a bit weird after reading international publications. The UN is a flawed institution, a product of the coming Cold War and paradoxically, weakened compared to the League of Nations.
On the other hand, it is the pre-eminent international institution for certain issues. I should perhaps be less snarky and more constructive about it.
I wish there were a way to get everyone to look at the [New York Times river] on their cell phone. Eyes would open.
How about becoming the King of the World?
BTW, I fail to see why I should care about a mashup of the webfeed from one newspaper that’s in another continent and timezone from where I am. No one escapes the blinkered view of Silicon Valley, not even Dave.
Two tech-related things I need to get working, posted here to shame me into doing so:
Business-wise, in and by themselves, online social networks represent nothing except target-able, monetizable eyeballs – after all, given that there are no membership fees and very little you can actually do with personal information that doesn’t violate the most basic notions of privacy, the holy grail of having a pre-processed, thinly sliced (and hopefully compliant) audience you can sell anything from breath mints to deluxe sedans is all that is left.
He goes on to point out that the so-called “captive audiences” of these social networks are fickle, and will readily seek out the next shiny bauble.
I predict Facebook will be a ghost town within two years, but not before the founders and VC’s have gotten filthy rich off some desperate Murdoch clone — Ballmer, maybe?
So Al Gore (+3,000 others) gets the Nobel Peace prize. That certainly ditches his plans to be become president someday. Having a prize from a bunch of Norwegians do-goodnicks is like having a girl drowned in a pond.
Possibly apocryphal story, when Churchill was told he had received the Nobel prize he exclaimed “Not for peace, I hope?”
Another thing about these so-called “Web 2.0” applications: nearly all of them rely heavily on email (aka Web -1) to notify you about events. If you’re not proactive and turn off email notifications in Facebook, for example, you’ll get inundated in messages that have to be handled somehow. Reading messages won’t make the corresponding flag in Facebook go away.
Similar issues exist for Jaiku and Twitter.
Perhaps a simple listserv-like functionality would be in order, in that if you simply hit reply and send you can acknowledge a notification, and it will disappear from the service in question. Other one-word commands like ‘OK’, ‘ACCEPT’, ‘IGNORE’ could be used to handle requests. This would have the added benefit of enabling an auto-ignore of stupid Facebook app invitations via email rules, truly a mashup worth implementing!
As it stands, sadly, the traffic is one-way, placing the onus on the user to clear their email and their flags. The tending of the social garden just gets even more burdensome.
Update 2007-10-12: posting this late last night I forgot the real reasons these emails exist: spam. They serve to remind casual users about the site and also serve as a potential vector for future advertisments.
In a comment to the latest iPhone unlocking, Gruber states the obvious:
So there’s a buffer overflow in MobileSafari’s TIFF handling code that can be exploited to execute code with root privileges. And we’re supposed to treat this as good news?
So far so unremarkable. But later he feels the need to add:
(Hint: it’s actually a security vulnerability.)
I can only imagine he got a lot of feedback from iPhone users who saw this as the bee’s knees and didn’t think through what it really meant.
Also, why doesn’t Apple patch this vulnerability? They’d close a security hole and deny potential unlockers access to the device, and they could justify it, rightly, by being committed to security.
Economies will collapse, currencies turn to dust. Corporate headquarters […] will be looted and burned. Vast, globe-spanning empires will rise and then, as decadence sets in, fall. Man’s entire bloody history will play out at Internet speed.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
The US/EU tech divide, illustrated.
Well, I don’t know a single person who uses AIM, so the feeling is mutual…
Three things I heard on the radio this morning got me thinking. (All links in Swedish).
A report from Maria Beroendecentrum says that if you “just experiment” with drugs at an early age, you run the risk of having your life hit the skids in the future. The presentation of this news was typical of the official Swedish fearmongering about drugs. The interesting part was that the sample was drawn from people who had recieved treatment from Maria. This part of the population is really small, basically you get admitted if you’re underage and really shitfaced. Admittedly many kids are drinking too much nowadays, but if you’re in contact with Maria you’re already a population outlier. Separating “casual drug use” as a factor in your future health seems a bit far fetched.
Parental leave for a billion SEK is unclaimed each year, which is a net save for the government. So why is our social service minister so hell-bent on controlling parental leave when the child is sick (“VAB”)? I’m guessing that the difference is an order of magnitude.
Many pensioners are continuing working after 65. This is great news. We need to have a society where anyone who wants to can work as much as they can.
[…] to make sure the whole operation runs smoothly, there are a ton of regulations, organizational hierarchy, committees, agreements and other schemes which effectively add up to a government bureaucracy sim. Maybe this sounds stale, but if you’re trying to be authentic you may as well go all the way.
I was thinking about this the other day, but it’s far larger and weirder than I imagined.
(Via Matt’s most excellent link feed.)
I’m cynical enough to suspect that if the victim of this weekend’s brutal and fatal beating hadn’t been from a wealthy family, and if the crime hadn’t been committed in one of the richer parts of town, that the media wouldn’t have cared so much.
But if this can raise awareness of the possibly fatal consequences of assault, so much the better.
Nick Carr on Facebook and the “grownups”:
It’s hard to apply a $10 billion valuation to, in Mathias’s words, “a circus ring.” So now Facebook is “a platform,” which certainly sounds important, not to mention boring.
I feel I’m fast approaching some limit where the effort to follow and tend the social networks I’m a member of — Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, the circle reading my blog, the feeds I’m reading — is exceeding the value those networks provide to me.
If it gets to the point where you feel stressed taking care of your social networks, some re-prioritizing is definitely in order:
Online networks
What’s the Latin for “blogging”?
In 2004 and 2005, the United States bought 185,000 AK-47s from an Eastern European country — after Iraqis rejected U.S.-made M-16 assault rifles — as part of a $2.8 billion program to deliver military equipment to Iraq. But a recent Government Accountability Office report said that 110,000 of them were unaccounted for, with about 30 percent of all arms distributed to Iraqi forces by the United States since 2004 missing.
(via Danger Room.)
James Robertson on the iBricking brouhaha:
[…] Apple has always desired stability over hackability - they are targeting consumers, not geeks.
Some people look at the easy hacks available for Windows and see nirvana. Apple looks at the same thing and sees hell.
There’s a tension between the Apple that has always been rather closed and proprietary, and the “new” Apple users, many from Unix backgrounds, who value hacking their computers and phones.
For some reason the iPhone has brought this tension to the surface.
When it rains, it pours: I’ve forgotten my iPod, Tele2’s data net is down, and I don’t have anything to read. Lesson learned: always pack a backup book.
[…] IBM hit the wall back in the 80’s, and while they aren’t the industry leader they once were, they still rake in plenty of cash. That’s likely the future for MS: the new IBM.
Sounds likely.
Nyss skickade IOGT-NTO ut ett nyhetsbrev med hela sitt epostregister i CC-fältet, 670 adresser närmare bestämt. Snyggt där.
When you bought and activated your iPhone, you entered into an agreement. When you hacked it, you ended that agreement. Don’t try to crawl back into bed and attempt to spoon Steve Jobs just because you want the iTunes WiFi Store to work on your unlocked iPhone.
Pretty much nails it. Have an unlocked iPhone? Don’t update it. TANSTAAFL.
You know, Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by a great monster.
Eurogamer reviews Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts:
The Brits are an incredible turtle race. Weak for much of the early game, digging in and setting up a defensive line is critical. Their build-‘em-anywhere trenches, for instance - such a simple technology, but you can’t really beat a dirty great hole in the ground for keeping bullets away from your face. Even the most basic infantry becomes devastatingly effective in a trench, as only incendiary attacks can realistically clear them out. Otherwise, they’ll just keep on chipping away at whatever’s fruitlessly trying to blow them away, an often insurmountable barrier to a vital victory point.
<gerikson> some guy was complaining that we (systems and support)
didn't do anything but always pointed to SOX
<gerikson> we told him to shut up and submit a ticket instead
(n.b. we’re due to attend a brainwashing course to learn how to be more customer-oriented, this thing will be a thing of the past.)
We can only conclude, based on the figures they provide, that the Treasury Department has secret classified knowledge of a coming scourge of baby boomer vampires. This generation of Americans will begin retiring in three years and, instead of moving to Florida to play golf, or volunteering with the local library, they will become bloodsucking immortal creatures of the night, an army of the soulless undead, hiding from the sun, preying on the weak, and cashing their monthly checks throughout the unending centuries until the system racks up a deficit of $13.6 trillion.
Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.
Testing Jottit: gerikson.jottit.com
On my way in to work. Tele2’s data net seems to be down, sigh. Last time this happened I actually called and complained, but today I’ll try to survive.
Stephen Fry is a mobile geek. Who knew?
Via James Robertson, an online quiz on American civics.
I scored 53 of 60.
You know it’s a bona-fide meme when two people link to it. Both Rui and Gruber link to Wil Shipley’s criticism of the “new Apple”, more concerned with sucking up to the content companies than delivering great products for users.
John writes in a comment:
The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.
I wholly agree, but I don’t think we’ll see anything that will make customers happy from Microsoft. They’re deeper into the content companies’ pockets than Apple.
Nice, James Robertson gets a recommendation from Rogers Cadenhead. I love it when my good taste is validated by others.
Avast me mateys! Today be International Talk like a Pirate Day! Arrr!
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.
It’s all fun and games until she changes the channel or maxes the volume…
One lesson to learn from all this is that those early Royal Society guys were very smart, and when they say something has a mysterious (0.4)x in it, you should assume they know what they are doing. Another lesson is that mechanics was pretty well-understood by 1668.
Mark’s blog is well worth reading, by the way.
Erik:
Corn-based Ethanol is a wonderful political tool. It allows politicians to pretend to care about the environment while actually tailoring to one of the largest lobbyist group in the US.
So true. Whenever you find something that politicians whole-heartedly endorse, you don’t have to look far for a lobbyist.
Just spent 75 minutes getting from St Eriksplan to Gullmarsplan. “Signalling error” at Gamla Stan, a real chokepoint for all traffic going South. It’s the kind of subway outage that’ll be front page news next morning.
Luckily the buses weren’t too crowded so we were able to route around the damage in some comfort, if not speed.
Fred Clark quotes Mark Twain on Patriot Day:
We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter — exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place — the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Michael Mace on the coming clash of Apple vs. Nokia:
[W]hen you stand back and look at what’s happening in the [mobile] industry worldwide, it’s clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They’re like two armies trying to take the same hill. One’s coming from the west, the other from the east, so there’s not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there’s going to be an explosion.
I don’t know who will win, but I’m pretty sure that the main losers will be all of the other device companies and mobile operators who happen to be hanging around on the hill.
My advice to them: Run.
Great post. It explains in some detail the challenges facing both companies, and the certain doom that comes to those (telcos, Microsoft, Motorola) who do not understand the future of the industry.
Twitter is down, and has been for 7 hours. A “Skype moment”, or a simple snafu? They’d better get going, it’s already 9:30 AM on the US East coast.
In the meantime I’m playing with Jaiku. I snagged my username there for a while back but haven’t really played with it much. But now they have IM integration, which is the primary way I interact with Twitter. So it’s more usable for me now.
I created the #mobitopia channel too. Mobitopians, please join!
very unexpectedly, 2.5 hours turned into 12. We apologize, and are working hard to make our upgrades less negative for everyone.
It would be interesting to know exactly what went pear-shaped.
For the curious, I was attending a kräftskiva yesterday. ¶
I’m drunk, but not so drunk I can’t post via email.
Just because I don’t hop onto every random Facebook app you throw at me doesn’t mean I like you less. It just means I don’t give a crap about that particular app.
Sorry to harsh your mellow, but that’s the way it is. If you seriously believe your app invitation will change my life, feel free to send me a message.
That is all.
Rui:
The iPhone is brilliantly designed, has a supremely satisfactory user experience, but it feels, in a way, like the smartphone segment’s Rain Man – wondrous storage, polished performance, but low social skills and the inability to do simple things that most people take for granted. ¶
Finally got connected. No thanks to Bredband2’s utterly horrible customer support.
On the debit side, my dad and I went to Shurgard to shift our crap to a smaller storage space. Of course, the idiots hadn’t unlocked it. I’m gonna get medieval over the phone tomorrow.
It’s now two weeks since I contacted the building’s ISP and they still haven’t been able to connect us to the wider net. Another household has the same issue.
Frankly, if your ISP can’t even connect new subscribers, perhaps you should be looking at alternatives.
Seems that posting from gmail results in dupes. Checking from gmail mobile. ¶
Spoilers should be avoided. Right now I’m having a hard time staying away from Wikipedia. I’m listening to Dan Simmon’s The Terror and really want to read more about the Franklin expedition in 1845. But doing so would reveal the ultimate fate of the expedition, and right now it’s up in the air what will happen.
I’m pretty sure that no supernatural giant polar bear attacked the ships, but who knows?
Really, that right there should be a clear indicator of how ill regarded Java development has become that people are willing to embrace the insanity that is Erlang in order to avoid using it.
Saw that Iceland has stopped granted whaling rights as the demand for whale meat is too low. After all the furor from environmentalists and the matching anger of the whalers, it turns out that very few people actually want to eat whale meat.
Another victory for the free market!
Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you’ve amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it’s good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people.
This hits the nail squarely on the head. ¶
Man, I can’t believe I’m getting a cold. I do not have time for this. ¶
Ever wonder why Live.com is slower than Google? Hint: it’s cause Google is out executing Microsoft in the datacenter.
I think it’s because Google is running Linux.
The RIAA have the same problem here as the TV and movie studios - while they all chase after the youth demographic, they completely ignore those of us who have non-trivial amounts of disposable income. […] While they all chase after a limited pile of dollars, they leave the much larger pool on the table. Actually, they make sure to stop next to the table and pee on it…
Det gör alltid ett synnerligen kosmopolitiskt intryck på Carl Bildts blogg när han befinner sig på ett utrikesministermöte och sitter och slöbloggar på laptopen samtidigt som den lettiske utrikesministern fåfängt försöker påkalla hans uppmärksamhet från podiet. ¶
The new SMS tickets in the Stockholm subway are mighty convenient. They’re a bit more expensive than the paper kind, which is a bit weird if you think about it. I think it’s because otherwise the textually challenged (i.e. everyone over 35) would feel discriminated.
Update 2007-02-09: As Jim rightly points out via IRC, not all people over 35 are uncomfortable with texting, our fathers among them.
The point still stands, though: they could have priced it at parity with the paper tickets, as I believe the cost of the service is offset by the savings in printing and distribution of the tickets.
I was the original inventor of RSS. Unfortunately, I left the plans in a train on the eve of the D-Day landings, where they were picked up by Dave Winer’s grandfather, and hoarded until the late 1990s.
John Battelle reviews his 2006 predictions:
9. The massive telephony industry will begin to crush mammals left and right as its core business model continues a long and painful death dance. “Mammals” are defined as anyone who happens to be in its way as it attempts - scarily but unsuccessfully - to force a two-tiered Internet onto all of us.
This is clearly continuing. I cannot provide one succinct link about this, but I can tell you this - I have three good friends who have tried to do innovate mobile startups, and failed, due to the suffocation of the telephony industry. One of them said to me: “There is simply no innovation in mobile, we can’t get traction, period.”
This obviously has implications for the “Apple phone”.
- Do not, under any circumstances, consider upgrading an XP system to Vista… even if it’s fairly new and even if it’s Vista Supremo Premium Ultra-Capable.
Drat, I was thinking about doing this.
The Register predicts the “iPhone” will fail.
This is a pretty good summary of the difficulties Apple will have trying to sell their putative phone. The last sentence is just silly though.
And hey Mr. Macalope, just because it’s been covered before doesn’t make it any less plausible.
Dave Winer, quoted wildly out of context:
I’d go further, and say that the person of the year is not you or us, but me.
(Couldn’t resist, ‘cause it’s only funny ‘cause it’s true.)
Man undrar: Diskas disken först av hemhjälpen, sedan av diskmaskinen och slutligen av Fredrik Reinfeldt? Hur rent kan det bli?
(via Isobel.)
If Patrick O’Brian would have blogged, he’d have blogged like this:
Mr. Crowdis does not own a computer right now (although he is planning to buy two). He writes his blog entries longhand at his kitchen table in the mornings, after he has breakfast and takes his pills. Then he mails them across the country to New Brunswick. There, a family member types them into a computer and posts them on Mr. Crowdis’ eclectic blog, Don To Earth.
(Link.)
Reporter: “What word processor do you use to write your novels, Mr. O’Brian?”
POB: “I use pen and paper, like a Christian.”
The folks who consider their RAID arrays adequate backup have, in my opinion, little imagination and even less experience with Really Bad Days; not only do you want complete offsite backups on media with a 30 year lifetime, you want copies of them stored on at least three continents in case of the occasional bad asteroid day.
LO-chefen Wanja Lundby-Wedins utspel om att hårdare regler i a-kassan leder till att facket tvingas hålla hårdare på turordningsreglerna får hård kritik.
[The Windsor knot] is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the double-Windsor; no such not exists, unless it is meant to refer to the ludicrously large 16-move knot, Li Co Ri Lo Ci Ro Li Co Ri Co Li Ro Ci Lo Ri Co T.
(Via Björn via email.)
Behind the Scenes at the Microsoft Zune Design Laboratory
Funny. Via Gruber.
It’s a really strange industry, where on one hand people are talking of “MobileAjax” as the killer app, where the cost of one Ajax line is probably equivalent to the cost (in terms of CPU, memory used,battery) of a full Midp1.0 application, while other are strugling with putting everything in a single class to fit in constrained devices.
Obviously people thinking about mobile Ajax have only been working with emulators.
Wikipedia’s list of countries without an army:
[Monaco renounced] its military investment in the 17th century because the expansion of ranges of artillery had rendered it defenseless. Defense is the responsibility of France.
(Via Matt’s del.icio.us feed.)
