May 2005
Sunday, 29 May 2005
Movies and Theaters - Lets make the Customer King and make more money: “When there are 40k DVD titles, all the TV shows and Movies we can capture on our PVRs and VOD and PPV, you have to really want to go to the movies.”
Saturday, 28 May 2005
IT departments to get smaller and less technical: “by 2010 six out of 10 people affiliated with IS organizations will take-on business facing roles”
Friday, 27 May 2005
Mac users discover Tiger’s hidden Booleans: “‘Does no one at Apple use Mail?’ Evidence suggests the answer is ‘no’.” - points off for ambiguity of negation
Thursday, 26 May 2005
Last November I ran across the weblog of one Kirk Thompson, video store clerk and occasional werewolf, thought it was great character writing (yes, good first person is actually hard), and posted it to memepool. Today the story ended. The author, comedian Ritchie Duncan, has written the story behind the story.
Mac OS X 10.4 - more bling than bang?: “Does no one at Apple use Mail?”
Voyager 1: exit stage left: “the entire Voyager 1 team agrees we have crossed the termination shock”
Wednesday, 25 May 2005
Gas giants credited for solar system formation: “The fact that a simulation of planet formation produces an end state in good agreement with the observed solar system does not prove that the simulated events actually happened”
Thursday, 19 May 2005
Shorter hours in software: “Employee burnout and less job security also may factor in coders cutting back their workdays, said Diane Berry, an analyst at research firm Gartner. There’s a ‘realization that if the company is going to have layoffs, many will do so irrespective of how hard people worked in the past,’ she said.”
Tuesday, 17 May 2005
Good-Bye to Venture Capital: “Ever wonder what we did for a living in early-stage venture funding? I bet you think we spent the day searching for the next insanely great company. But we spent most of our lives in endless meetings with people who were lying to us: scientists who swore that their patents were solid and entrepreneurs who insisted that they had no competition. We lied right back at them: said our money was different.”
Our friend Scott Berkun has a book, The Art of Project Management. He’s in the midst of a book tour, and is discussing it on his weblog.
Monday, 16 May 2005
Drug meant for symptoms treats a disease: “signs of the genetic mutation fueling the disease diminished in 81 patients and vanished in 51”
Sunday, 15 May 2005
Stars spotted on the edge of a massive black hole
Tuesday, 10 May 2005
Lost asteroid clue to Pioneer puzzle
Sunday, 8 May 2005
The Perfect Storm That Could Drown the Economy: “Besides, adds Jeffrey Frankel, ‘some of us have been warning of this hard-landing scenario for more than 20 years.’”
Friday, 6 May 2005
Google Accelerates Search: “As of this writing, that number stands at 8,058,044,651. That’s over 8 billion pages, a very large number and one that folks at Google are appropriately proud of. There’s only one little issue with that number. It’s on the low side. In fact, it’s estimated that it represents less than one percent of the actual number of pages on the web. In 2001, that number was estimated at over 500 billion pages in what is called the Deep Web, a part of the web that has not been indexed by search engines yet.”
Thursday, 5 May 2005
Clearing smog has led to ‘global brightening’: in my copious free time I’ll set up the cheerful “ways in which we’re all doomed” web site
Tuesday, 3 May 2005
In Defense of PowerPoint: “We have had poor talks long before PowerPoint. We have even had bullet points long before PowerPoint–long before computers. In the old days, people typed, stenciled or hand-lettered their slides onto transparencies which were shown with the aid of overhead projectors or wall charts, or photographed them on to glass-plated photographic slides and then, later, 35 mm. slides. These talks were also dull and tedious.”
New Method Predicts Monster Waves: “‘Two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash,’ said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a senior scientist with the GKSS Forschungszentrum research center in Germany. ‘It simply gets put down to ‘bad weather.’’”