Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd. Linus Torvalds, by way of Typical Programmer. Satire, of course.
Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image This is an area where the Internet industry could use improvement. Here’s the damning statistic: But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations. ...
Ask Patents A new site for digging into prior art from Stack Exchange. Will it result in more patents being overturned? I doubt it. Certainly prior art exists for this type of effort. Back in 2000, O’Reilly launched a site called BountyQuest with similar goals. Tim O’Reilly explained why the site never worked out in 2003. Generally speaking, I’m not convinced that the patent problem can be solved by digging up prior art like this. Most of the time when I see a patent claim, I can think of products that covered similar territory before the patent in question was filed. I’m sure that defense attorneys and their consultants can do the same. ...
New York Times: Steve Sabol, 69, Creative Force Behind NFL Films, Dies Farewell to a man who was the master of his craft.
In today’s New York Times, David Carr writes about the subjects of articles demanding to review their quotations before they are published. Needless to say, this practice is corrosive to the practice of legitimate journalism, which is about reporting on things that public figures would not openly tell you on their own. I think it’s interesting to look at why this is taking place. Not only is the democratization of the media hurting news reporting as a business, but it’s also reducing the value of the media as an interface between public figures and the public. At one time, if public figures wanted to disseminate a message, they had to talk to reporters with the hope that the reporter would convey their message in the way they intended. ...
The Scott Sumner Rally Matthew Yglesias explains how a determined economics blogger that nobody had heard of a few years ago led the charge on promoting the policies that underlie the stimulus policy announced by the Fed today. It’s an amazing story.
Apple’s Magic Is In The Turn, Not The Prestige MG Siegler’s explanation of what makes the iPhone an extraordinary product. Put me in the group of people who thinks there’s an elegance to the fact that the new iPhone always looks a lot like the one you already have, but is better in many substantial ways. You get this massively different product that looks almost the same on the outside. I appreciate that. ...
Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out. ...
William Moggridge, 69, Dies Moggridge designed the first laptop computer and co-founded IDEO. He was also director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which has posted a tribute.
Coming from a background in higher-level languages like Ruby, Scheme, or Haskell, learning C can be challenging. In addition to having to wrestle with C’s lower-level features like manual memory management and pointers, you have to make do without a REPL. Once you get used to exploratory programming in a REPL, having to deal with the write-compile-run loop is a bit of a bummer. From Alan O’Donnell’s article, Learning C with GDB. What I take away from this is that I’m not using REPLs nearly enough, especially when I’m learning new things. ...