Thiel and Levchin also wanted workaholics who were not MBAs, consultants, frat boys, or, God forbid, jocks. “I asked what he liked to do for fun. We can’t hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot.'”
Month: November 2007
Transit stops on Garmin
One of the biggest benefits of transit agencies making their raw schedule data publicly available, as TriMet and others have done, is that riders are free to do interesting things with the information that the agency itself might not have thought of or have taken the time to do themselves. Case in point: Brett Warden in Portland is using TriMet’s GTFS feed to create a POI (points of interest) file for his dashboard-mounted GPS.
nice open geodata example
Warner Music Boss on being wrong
By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.
telcos, you are next.
Stefano on Java IP
The trick is that Google doesn’t claim that Android is a Java platform, although it can run some programs written with the Java language and against some derived version of the Java class library. Sun could prevent this if they had a patent on the standard class library, but they don’t and, even if they did, I strongly doubt it would be enforceable since Android doesn’t claim to be compatible (and in fact, could very well claim that their subset/superset is an innovation on the existing patent and challenge Sun’s position).
sucks to be sun right about now. they should have listened to the ASF.
Better Debates
Questions would be posed by candidates to each other, as well as by journalists and the public. But an answer would not be the end of that round; in fact, it would only be the beginning. Rebuttals and further rejoinders would be the meat of these conversations. They would not be done on the fly, but would come after the candidates and their staffs had some time to consider their responses. They’d point out flaws and inaccuracies in their opponents’ statements, drilling down into details where warranted. Wherever possible, people would use the Internet’s elemental unit — the hyperlink — to point to source material or other supporting information.
structured debates, fallacy detection.. where is ed?
CIA Interests
among them, “knowledge management”. if you use hopeless terms like that, no wonder you don’t find the WMD
SimCity donated to OLPC
The goal is to renovate it and take it in new directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about education, Alan Kay’s about oo programming, and many exciting ideas about blogging, game mods, and lessons learned from WoW, The Sims, Spore, etc
2007-11-30:
The goals of deeply integrating SimCity with Sugar are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s work with Logo. It should be easy to extend and re-program SimCity in many interesting ways. For example: kids should be able to create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like Logo’s turtle graphics or Robot Odyssey’s visual robot programming language!
heh. it appears the OLPC may be the best (last?) chance for alan kay’s ideas to be implemented at scale.
Bush Consequences
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things. The damage to the economy does not make headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
Intranet Explorer
when Microsoft talks about compatibility they’re largely talking about intranet sites inside corporations, which are often maintained poorly or not at all, so anything that’s broken by a browser change will remain broken forever. And it’s easy to see how the needs of large corporate customers can come to dominate the thinking of a software organization
this is why microsoft utterly fails on the web: they are internally divided, provide bogus arguments against the evolution of the web because it would hurt their cash cows.
Zumastor
a community project started by Google members to bring enterprise storage features to Linux.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
