Posts

You watched Planet Earth, didn’t you? It’s the eleven part BBC/Discovery Channel nature documentary series that’s been getting tons of hype recently. Here’s the thing – the hype is deserved. The footage is stunning, and the producers managed to capture animal behavior that has never been documented on film, all in stunning HD. If you have a high def television and you haven’t checked it out, you’re really cheating yourself. Wikipedia has a good episode guide if you want to find out what you’ve been missing. ...

Chris Anderson has an excellent post on spare cycles and how they are the fuel of Web 2.0. Albert Einstein used his spare cycles as a patent inspector to come up with his theory of relativity. The least favorite spare cycles activity I’ve observed among coworkers is day trading. It doesn’t seem as popular now as it was eight or so years ago. I can remember certain coworkers being glued to Yahoo Finance and eTrade all day, trying to wring out a few bucks trading stocks. ...

I’ve never been on the “impeach Bush” bandwagon, but if he knew of the plan to fire San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam to end her investigation of government officials associated with the Duke Cunningham corruption scandal, he must resign. Needless to say, everyone else associated with that firing has to resign too.

Stephen O’Grady on applying the Moneyball philosophy to growing a small company: So when I consider what I want RedMonk to be, and where I want us to go, I think not of Forrester, Gartner, or IDC. I think of the A’s and the Twins. The implications for hiring here are significant: you do not, as might be expected, go for the big name, the high profile, high visibility folks that drop you resumes (you’d be surprised at some of the folks that want to work for us, trust me). You instead try to hire the folks that will become those big names. You don’t hire the stars, you try to make the stars. ...

Ed Felton explains why people care about the 09 number (aka the AACS secret key). Go read … The user revolt at Digg and elsewhere, over attempts to take down the now-famous “09 F9 …” number, is now all over the press. (Background: 1, 2) Many non-techies, including some reporters, wonder why users care so much about this. What is it about “09F9…” that makes people willing to defend it by making T-shirts, writing songs, or subjecting their dotcom startup to lawsuit risk? ...

A study finds that many popular news sites do a poor job of producing RSS feed that reflect the full breadth of stories that they publish. I think the conclusions are a bit overdrawn, but hopefully the study will nudge news publishers toward putting more stories into their feeds. One possible solution to the problem the study cites is to subscribe to feeds from more than one source. I also read Slate’s Today’s Papers and Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch pretty much every day. ...

John Gruber has a nice post countering Steve Ballmer’s jab at the iPhone’s price. I also liked Paul Kedrosky’s short and compelling argument for people who don’t think the iPhone will succeed because of its price: the original list price for the Motorola RAZR was $499.

Check out Jessamyn West’s explanation of the trouble’s she’s run into trying to get a couple of old computers donated to a library into a usable state. Here’s a snippet: I work at this library about 90-120 minutes a week. This week I showed up and the librarian said that her friend has said the product key was on the side on a sticker. “Doh!” Sure enough, there were 25 characters and I dutifully typed them in. No go. Turns out the sticker on the side of the machine is a Win98 product code and somehow, mysteriously, these computers have Win2k Pro installed on them. No one knows how. I ran down the options with the librarian. 1) Buy an XP license or three from Tech Soup. 2) Hassle her friend to figure out wtf is up with the software on these computers. 3) Wipe the drives and install Ubuntu. ...

Data transfer prices for Amazon S3 will be cut 50% for all but the largest users, and are dropping for everyone. The data storage fee ($0.15 per gigabyte per month) will not be reduced.

The article focuses on how volunteers are helping with recovery. Interesting stuff: Recovery efforts across the Gulf region are almost wholly driven by volunteer relief and reconstruction agencies, some of them bootstrap operations that did not exist prior to the storm. Many are funded by private donations from churches and community non-profits across the country; others receive a mix of corporate one-time grants and government-stipended volunteer staffers for a few months at a time, who can serve the recovery effort to reduce their college tuition (Americorps and its affiliates: National Civilian Community Corps, Volunteers in Service to America). The most well-known volunteer agency working in the region is Habitat for Humanity, whose slow progress was the subject of a recent NY Times article. ...