Archive: February 9, 2003

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Sunday,  02/09/03  04:11 PM

Thomas Friedman has written a thoughtful op-ed piece for the N.Y.Times entitled "Vote France Off the Island".  I'm sure W would!  (Hey, how do you get your own letter?  Can I be "O"?)

Here's a recently posted [internal] memo from Sun engineers explaining why Java on Solaris is not appropriate for their internal software projects.  "As it stands client-side Java remains primarily a web language."  These dogs are spitting out the dog food.  Whew.  Adding insult to injury, Pixar is starting to use Lintel servers in their render farm.

Are smart cards a smart idea?  France is experimenting with a country-wide implementation.  They seem inferior to credit cards in every way to me...  The current economics of credit cards make their use for small transactions inefficient, but this is a market effect not fundamental to the product.

Every month there is a new story about broadband access over power lines [here's this month's, in Wired].  What a dumb idea.  We already have cable "everywhere", why would you establish a parallel network with a bunch of technical problems cable doesn't have?

Clay Shirkey has written an interesting article exploring the network effects of weblog traffic.  He concludes that "them that has, gets" - visitors and traffic, that is.  Meanwhile little 'ol 'blogs like mine languish in obscurity.  So be it - let the market decide!

Dave thinks Clay doesn't get weblogs.  But this is a market thing, not a weblog thing.  I doubt weblogs are immune to market things...

CNN has an interesting article about the state of Kazaa.  The lead for the story is about an unknown band who thinks its great that people are downloading and listening to their music.  That is the thing the RIAA just doesn't get.

I'm getting ready for the NBA all-star game, later today.  As usual this event marks my transition from football to basketball, from here on out I'll follow the Lakers all the way to their fourth consecutive title (you heard it here but probably not first :).  I love it that the all-stars are wearing old Air Jordans to honor Michael.  That's cool.

 
 

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