UN says there is absolutely zero evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
Place a wet blanket upon your mania.
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In the past few months I've exactly zero moments to write a post. To serve as the vanguard post for many more to come, here is a silly you tube video:
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Cuong Do, one of the original engineers at YouTube from the beginning, talks about how YouTube achieves scalability in a Google Tech Talk. Definitely very informative.
I'm a little late with this one, but perhaps you've seen this interview with an Ubisoft Splinter Cell developer. In the interview, he states that "the PS3 can't handle AI nearly as well as the 360."
First off, let me state that I am in no way a Sony fanboy. I don't even own a current generation console. That said, this statement is completely devoid of meaning.
You know what AI is? A plain old algorithm. A search process, selecting a rule from a rule base, or running through a pattern matcher. Saying the PS3 cannot do AI is like saying it cannot do sorting or print the first ten integers.
What some people are referring to to support the Ubisoft developer's argument is the PS3's relatively poor branch prediction ability. The argument then being, since most game AI is simply a giant switch statement, performance will suffer.
My response to this is, developer ignorance of AI is not a good excuse. If you think AI amounts to a giant switch statement then you need to go read a book, or a modern survey of AI planning.
When you've got a piece of software, and you're thinking about how to get money in exchange for it, there are clearly many sources advising you to give it away for free - the logic being that you monetize eyeballs. By far, the most popular way to do so is some form of advertising. One way this works is through site adds, where if you're clever you'll figure out how to make the adds targeted, such as Pandora. Another way this works is through some sort of affiliate program. In an affiliate program you get a fraction of the payment a customer gives a company you helped hook up through your site. Any coupon finding service works like this, like this one.
The typical value you get in exchange for an ad click, though, is extremely small. To get a feeling for the state of things, check out Guy Kawasaki's review of one year of blogging (for those unaware, Guy Kawasaki is an extremely popular blogger on tech entrepreneurship, who also happens to be a venture capitalist). He got on avg. 6,200 page views per day, and with the adds placed on his site, generated $3350 during the entire year. To contrast this, look at something like MySpace, which evidently makes $30 million in advertising dollars. And that's because they get, according to TechCrunch, 15 million daily unique logins.
What I"m trying to say is, this model makes financial sense only if you can attract a gigantic amount of traffic to your site. So much so that, in order to reach sufficiently many people, what you're doing has to appeal to the absolute lowest common denominator. Everyone has to be in the target market for your software.
Do you think Mathematica could survive with this model? Photoshop? Maya 3D? These are spectacular achievements of software that absolutely could not survive if the creators were gripped with the Web 2.0 mania that demands you give your software away.
So, if the circumstances are right, be unafraid to do the old fashioned thing and exchange what you've made for money. If you possess specialized knowledge which you've used to make something great, people will pay you for it.
Nuff said.
There's an excellent article over at Ars on the history of the Amiga computer. The computer, loved by so many, that absolutely will not go away. Long after humanity is gone and the Sun has gone nova, there will be two things to carry on our legacy: Cockroaches and the Amiga. You heard it here first.
So, Ars Technica noted that, exciting documentaries about the history of the PC have been made (e.g. Revenge of the Nerds, by Bob Cringely), which only mention the Amiga in passing, if at all. Yet the Amiga did things like have specialized graphics hardware a decade before anyone else, and pre-emptive multitasking. It influenced a generation of engineers. Given it's great presence felt in the computer industry, why is it barely mentioned in PC history?
As I began researching, I discovered the answer, and it surprised me even more than the existence of the computer itself. The story of Commodore and the Amiga was, by far, even more interesting than that of Apple or Microsoft. It is a tale of vision, of technical brilliance, dedication, and camaraderie. It is also a tale of deceit, of treachery, and of betrayal. It is a tale that has largely remained untold."
Do yourself a favor and check it out.
If you're anything like me, your competency at food preparation is zero plus one. That is, you can basically identify one kind of food from another, you can excise the really dangerous bacteria from it with threshold confidence, and you can chop stuff up and stick it in a pot / wok / frying pan and turn the heat on. And the food doesn't kill you or turn you blind or anything. But that doesn't mean it tastes good.
So, I found this very helpful, short, guide on properly frying an egg. Take this knowledge and impress your significant other.