Author: andy

Pointers

John Perry Barlow writes movingly about his friend’s suicide, and responds to some incredibly spiteful comments. Blogging at its best. #

Shelley Powers on Bush’s state of the nation speech. #

For those who care about such things: information about the DNS Root Servers. #

This is just too freaky. If I wasn’t at work right now (just doing some lunchtime surfing, okay) then I’d play with this some more. (Via Bruce Sterling)

Pointers: Cluetrain

The full text of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Quote: “ Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.” #

Angry Coder: Going Independent part 1 and part 2. (Via Mike Gunderloy)

Minus 100 points

Microsoft’s Eric Gunnerson, who AFAIK “owns” C#, describes how features are added to the language (or not): “So, we decided on the additive approach instead, and worked hard to keep the complexity down. One way to do that is through the concept of ?minus 100 points?. Every feature starts out in the hole by 100 points, which means that it has to have a significant net positive effect on the overall package for it to make it into the language.”

This is an unusual and refreshing approach in these days of bloatware; where huge numbers of features are forced into an app (think: Word) so that marketing can produce a longer tick-list than the competition. Its kind of hard to imagine the Work team (to pick on them again) saying “Hey – the built-in spreadsheet feature is really neat but it just doesn’t have a net positive effect. Lets leave it out.” marketing would /terminate/ them.

It seems to me that the C# can get away with this because, uniquely in shrink-wrapped software, the programming language component just isn’t marketed on the basis of its features anymore. Layered stuff like RAD designers, IDEs, and components, are – and they have the feature lists to prove it, but languages themselves havn’t been since the Turbo Pascal era. Funny, that.&nbsp

Doom and Gloom

NY Times: Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no “smoking gun” proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.” #

BBC: Richer, stouter, and no happier. “The Worldwatch Institute says more than 25% of the world’s people now enjoy the style which used to belong to the rich. But it says rising obesity and debt, and increasing pressures on time, are reducing many people’s quality of life.” #

Guardian: An unnatural disaster. “Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first comprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world. The sheer scale of the disaster facing the planet shocked those involved in the research. They estimate that more than 1 million species will be lost by 2050.”