The argument that Mac's don't have viruses because their market share is less than PCs does not hold water. First of all, the fact that there are zero viruses in the wild, that do not actually require your active, painstaking cooperation to install themselves, should motivate any hacker trying to make a name for himself. In addition to that, you could earn a living from winning prize money for hacking Mac's. Here's another contest for hacking an OS X machine.
No matter what it is, there is nothing that cannot be done. If one manifests the determination, he can move heaven and earth as he pleases. But because man is pluckless, he cannot set his mind to it. Moving heaven and earth without putting forth effort is simply a matter of concentration.
-T. Yamamoto Hagakure
More useful, powerful words are seldom spoken.
...or else.
Or rather, the most commonly cited reasons for not starting a startup, and why most of them are bad reasons. The new article by Paul Graham. Some highlights:
- The median age of a founder is 27. Actually, that's how old the founders of Sun were when they started their little company.
- Knowing nothing about business is not a good reason to avoid starting a startup. Just worry about making something people like. When you've got lots of people looking at your site, you can always figure out how to monetize it. On the other hand, if your site is a piece of useless crap all the business knowhow in the world will not help you.
- Investors do not hold past failed startups against you. In fact, this is viewed as good experience.
Paul Graham is a fellow filled with good advice about startups, and occasionally drops these inexplicable, indecipherable, bizarre opinions on things (like Lisp, in which he says Lisp is the most awesome of the awesome, the badassingest of the programming languages, the tool that will give you the unfair business advantage. However he can't tell you why, because it's inexpressible in your "words", for some reason. Pah, I say.) However, you can't argue with the fact that he's a successful entrepreneur, with the investment organization Y Combinator that has a success rate of something like 25%. So, there you have it.
Took a little breather.
Also, here's what happens when you freak out a room full of Japanese ladies:
Rock on, citizens!
Well written, funny post over at The Escapist on what it's like to man the cash register during Chirstmas time at Electronics Boutique. Definitely check it out.
I just got back from the theater screening of the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica season 3 (i.e. episode 10 of season 3). Evidently they're screening them in a few cities across America. First of all, let me just say that I got there an hour before it started, and I was literally the 300th person in line. The writers for the show came out and were all freaked there were so many people there.
Anyhow, after the episode (best episode evar) the writing staff (minus Ron Moore and David Eick) came out and fielded a bunch of questions. Here are all the ones I could remember, paraphrased:
1. Are there any plans to do a feature-length movie? Answer: Funny you should ask that. Next question.
2. Do you know how the series will end? Answer. No. We know how season 3 ends. Ron Moore steers us in a general direction, though.
3. A general note. Ratings for the show are way down. Downloads, iTunes or otherwise are not being counted in this measure for some reason. They then asked people in the crowd (about 280 in my screening) to raise their hands if they downloaded the show, and nearly everyone did so.
4. Is it hard to kill off supporting characters? Answer: Yes. Between us all, every supporting character has hypothetically died at least four times. Every time someone proposes killing a character, someone else makes a spirited defense for that character. We're saving lives everyday!
They also talked about how the writing happens in interesting ways. For example, during season two, they knew they had the unresolved issue of what to do with the nuclear warhead that Baltar gave to Gina aboard cloud 9. So, to remind themselves, they just write "Remember the Nuke" (or a similar phrase) on their white board and just left it there.
It looks like the new OS X version will allow a mix and match with Python and Objective-C. There's now a full bridge connection Python and the Cocoa libraries: To open up the benefits of the Cocoa frameworks to a wider developer audience, Leopard embraces two other highly dynamic languages for use in building Cocoa applications: Ruby and Python. These two languages are an excellent fit for integrating with the Cocoa frameworks, and they both have high quality bridges to Objective-C. These bridges allow you to mix and match Objective-C, Ruby, and Python, allowing you to choose the best tool for the job at hand while using high level Cocoa features such as Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Key-Value Observing (KVO). so the developer can access the whole OS X gui framework from Python code. Check out the description here
Whoa, in game footage of Assassin's creed during an onscreen demonstration. Check it out here. I'm sure you'll notice especially the large crowds populating the city. Pretty amazing, although there's no word on how goal-directed the crowd NPCs are.