Month: December 2007

A Talent Contest We’re Losing

The European Union took a step recently that the US Congress can’t seem to muster the courage to take. By proposing a simple change in immigration policy, E.U. politicians served notice that they are serious about competing with the United States and Asia to attract the world’s top talent to live, work and innovate in Europe. With Congress gridlocked on immigration, it’s clear that the next Silicon Valley will not be in the United States.

h1-b is completely broken. between this, the monopoly money housing bubble and the waste going into “homeland security”, the us is well-positioned to slip badly

Competing with free

neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23k other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.

Apple Ripoff

She insisted that the drive belonged to Apple, even though I had paid an inflated price to buy a new one. She showed me the language on the reverse side of the form I signed. There was no guarantee that the drive they had just put in my Mac was new! It might have been someone else’s defective drive.I grabbed a copy of the agreement and left.

I would never pay for a mac with my own money.

Baby Driving

With a 6-month-old at the controls, researchers at the University of Delaware are encouraging underage driving. Conventional wisdom has held that because of safety issues, children aren’t considered ready for that until age 4 or 5; the earliest age doctors might recommend powered mobility is age 3.

Damn. I still don’t have a driver’s license. Should we increase the autonomy of babies by giving them scooters and HCI interfaces so they can tell us what they want? Or does that make them grow up too fast? Discuss.