Month: March 2008

Laundering Office

Microsoft has announced that it will – with a European partner – contribute to an open-source project for reading and writing Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio files. The Apache POI API is already used by various open source projects to handle Microsoft Office documents, but work is needed to add Office Open XML support as used by Office 2007 and 2008.

looks like the sourcesense guys are helping microsoft to establish a standard no one wants. not sure that is progress.

Redfin Efficiency

Redfin then refunds 66% (avg $10520) of the buy side fees back to you. Redfin buyers paid 1.015% (avg $5048) below asking price, while brokerage customers paid .087%. Adding those 2 benefits together, a home buyer will save $15568.

the fewer realtors left, the better

Spell failed

The laughing fellow on the left is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International and atheist. The cranky old man in the robes on the right is Pandit Surinder Sharma, a self-described Tantrik Magician. The scene is in a studio on Indian television, where the magician is trying to kill the atheist with sorcery. Sharma had said he could kill anyone with sympathetic magic inflicted on a doll made of dough, and that he could accomplish this in a mere 3 minutes … so Edamaruku confidently offered himself as a victim. The old fake went on for hours and failed.

He should have fallen to the ground and then said: “just kidding!”

Fixing TCP congestion control

Bob Briscoe’s short-term solution is to fix the existing TCP implementation that uses Jacobson’s 20+ year old AIMD algorithm. That means the client side implementation of TCP that hasn’t fundamentally changed since 1987 will have to be changed again and users will need to update their TCP stack.

van jacobson congestion control is per-stream, so creating multiple streams gets around it. a solution is proposed, weighted TCP

Secondary Search

Google started offering secondary search boxes for major sites. Sites were growing accustomed to the idea that users often did not find their company’s content through the site’s own search box or its front page. More often than not, users would find links to specific articles or products on blogs, search engines or other sites, and navigate to that page. “So publishers are building their sites to make sure the experience is the same, whether users are coming in through the front door or the side.”

if their own search didn’t suck so much the argument would make a lot more sense