This is really frustrating if you didn’t knew. Intel likes to call many of their processors for “business class” systems “Xeon”. When they say Xeon it can mean anything from those dinosaurs based on Pentium II and the latest and greatest ones based on on Core i7. So when you see a system built with Xeon processor you really need to look up its exact subtle number and carefully study its specs to figure out what it really is.
I did not knew oil prices had crossed $4 mark and got a huge surprise to see that last Thursday. I don’t watch news generally because much of it is irrelevant but after we have set up PC to our TV it’s much easier to see exactly what matters. So I was just watching series of MSNBC videos going all the way up to May on oil prices going up, people leaving their RVs behind, people trying to sell out their SUVs, GM planning to dump Hummer, people choosing to do home barbeque instead of traveling for memorial day… There is a new term called Staycation for people staying home for vacation (we heard another term “Junctober” to refer to colder windier October like weather in June at our visit to Vason island)!
Oh… these Kiwi Berries from Te Puke, NZ… some of the best fruits in the world!
I’ve written quite some code whose sole users are probably just few dozen people. Even than I’d went to extra-ordinary lengths to make sure that code was having highest number of features and ease of use than anything else that existed and was comparable. There are lots of businesses everywhere ranging from car rental companies to book stores who have, unlike me, thousands and thousands of users every single day, staff of hundreds and millions to dollars spend.
I couldn’t have read more braindead deal than Skype for $2.1 billion. Obviously Skype isn’t worth that much (so far it has got investments of under $21M). One could have built much more feature rich, customized software for 1000 times less money than that. What about future? Wouldn’t Skype have revenues of zillion dollars in 2010? No, it won’t. Biggies like Microsoft and Yahoo are already coming up with similar software with far deeper reach than Skype could ever imagine to have.
This Business Experiment got initially got me intrigued but then I realized why it would bring only an average results. This experiment basically wants to try running a startup by votes from the people. The idea is to harness “wisdom of the crowds”. I think, the smartness factor would be averaged out in this system instead of “more than sum of its parts”. It’s blind one-shot voting after all; not a structured logical argument going in the crowed which could otherwise have made difference.
Groove is perhaps one of the finest example of technology in recent times which has tons of potential and no vision. If you ask Groove what their product is, they will probably reply with something like this: “it’s a program that allows people to work together on files, projects, meetings and so on.“. And that underlines their severe lack of vision and plain immaturity which otherwise could have changed the face of the Internet.
Peter Provost is switching to Server 2003. I want to say: don’t do it! I’d been using server version of operating system on my dev machines, even on laptops, since I can remember. But now I’m about to change my mind for the first time. Windows Server 2003 is not a cutting edge OS any longer. Infect it sucks!
You really have to spend lot of time to set it up right to reclaim memory and performance.
Some people had really rejoiced when DOJ started the antitrust lawsuit on Microsoft. I thought it was lame - for people who can’t beat Microsoft in any other way. To me it was like suing Mc Donald’s because they are selling their burgers with their own buns instead of giving their customers an option to choose buns from different vendors. Monopolies are the inevitable children of capitalism but they have been declared illegal.
Local trains stops at every station, express train stops between the two.
Every time I read and hear something in AI research, it freaks me out. These “research” people just keeps formulating laws out of thin air without having any strong logical grounds. Every researcher seems to have their own minuscule world of hard and fast rules that they think is capable to explain everything. What’s even worse is that they keep day dreaming that if they keep going like this they are not too far from the finally glory.
I and Don Rittenburg of Groove Networks went in to intense arguments over lunch whether person who creates viruses be punished. I took the side that they shouldn’t be. My point of view was that cyberspace isn’t exactly the real world. It’s man-made, designed to be anonymous and most importantly by it’s inherent nature it’s not supposed to be limited by laws. It gives you immense freedom and if you can be stopped by creating bunch of laws by old fat ignorant politicians then it isn’t the same.
Just watched MSDN TV’s new episode on Managed Code. The topic is pretty trivial for me but what’s exciting is to see one person talking and seating there. I remember my years as a rebellious programmer when followers were few and swimming opposite the popular currents wasn’t easy. In all-Unix all-C++ organization I’d heavily pushed for tools and style I believed in - even if it meant taking over entire responsibility and work load on me.
I and Sundar usually get in to blazingly fast high information density conversations. The recent one which lasted for 15 min spanned through topics such as best porn available on Net, XSL, marriages, divorce laws in Texas, blogging and ants. I just happened to make a statement with him which I thought worth blogging. So here’s what I call “The Marriage Conjecture”. “I was thinking marriage is a big thing. You need to have 100% confidence.
So what’s wrong with cloning? Lot of things. To clone a person, from genetic point of view, is to like learning absolutely nothing from your experiences. It’s an effective stop to evolution of a living being. But fortunately, the Vatican church and many other religious people don’t have to exercise with reasoning. Their objection to cloning and almost everything else could be put in same old one liner: It’s unethical. But why cloning scares lots of people?
For some, thanksgiving is a day when you wake up in the morning, make a list of people and spend rest of the day to hate them for not being with you. We have come up even with a term “Hate Giving Day”. So everybody you knew runs away to their families, suddenly all shops and restaurants closes their doors, entire country like falls in to a comma and you poor soul have no where to go!
This month there’s something strange happening in my inbox. Lots of those emails are marriage invitations and some from the people who I knew as “geeks”. And then I start remembering those days when we set in college labs until late, many times whole night and most of the time escaping from scheduled lectures. The girlfriends and dating was the least of the priority when there is a whole world with challenges in front of you to explore and win (partially that was also eased by the fact that only few female souls thought it worthy to pursue engineering as a field of study).