A view from abroad, the New York Times take on the cuts at the BBC http://nyti.ms/hMlpcQ

Fantastic (anonymous) essay at Boing Boing reflecting on DFW, Pale King, and suicide. http://t.co/hcRSNwU /via @xenijardin

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Educational Technology: http://bit.ly/dTGuOL

Vaguery: These are so, so good: WHAT YOUR FAVORITE CLASSIC ROCK BAND SAYS ABOUT YOU ... http://bit.ly/fQBJJj

It occured to me a couple of days ago that I've been a full-time self-employed writer for over eight years now; and with a couple of exceptions, every company I ever worked for before then has gone bust (and as far as those exceptions go, I believe a statute of limitations probably applies by now).…

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he…

thesharmanator: Interesting views on common mistakes made by web service API providers - lots of truth here in my experience - http://tinyurl.com/26w4ypw

The official announcement (well, the addition of a website for it) of Google’s goo.gl URL shortening service’s new website and features on the 11th got me thinking really hard about competition, and Google. Specifically – how do you compete against the biggest technological behemoth ever seen by…

metabrew: Just read about Conc-lists (and an Erlang implementation) - my favourite new data structure in ages :) http://bit.ly/9URZKA

In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to…

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States. The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send…

by Terry Jones | @terrycojones | Comments: 3 | 26 October 2010 I find it useful to try to think clearly about communication systems. This includes the ways in which they are synchronous or asynchronous (or a mixture), and the disruption that occurs when new technology allows us to replace…

Clear scope for job cuts here, eh So, what happened there then? Like a night out that goes a bit out of control, the BBC was suddenly in a mating game with ministers and the result was an agreement to freeze the £145.50 licence fee to 2017. At the same time the Beeb takes on direct responsibility…

Pragmatic Programming Techniques - NOSQL Patterns NOSQL Patterns Over the last couple years, we see an emerging data storage mechanism for storing large scale of data. These storage solution differs quite significantly with the RDBMS model and is also known as the NOSQL. Some of the key…

Pragmatic Programming Techniques - Scalable System Design Patterns Scalable System Design Patterns Looking back after 2.5 years since my previous post on scalable system design techniques, I've observed an emergence of a set of commonly used design patterns. Here is my attempt to capture…

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing…

Vaguery: COGNITIVE SLAVES http://bit.ly/9K74Xa

I have several friends who are "Product People". Their self-proclaimed definition as a Product Person is that they focus on the "user experience" of everything they make, and could care less about the "backend". To them the entire purpose of software is a magic show whereby a programmer creates the…

Marco Arment asks if the iPad is going to do to netbook design what the iPhone did to smartphone design. ★

Would every tech company qualified to call itself a true innovator and industry leader stand up, please? ... Not so fast, Google. Yesterday, Google officially pulled the plug on Google Wave, their novel infrasructure for digital communication. Wave fused together the concepts of email,…

This weblog post is at least a decade in the making. Seriously. I wrote the original version of this sometime in the late ’90s as a mailing list post, then revised it again when someone at Apple asked for tequila recommendations. Likely forwarded it a dozen times or so in the interim years. Every…

Hacker News Bot: Who Can Name the Bigger Number?... http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

emilsit: Thought-provoking. Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications http://bit.ly/bdvRCp So maybe they should be themselves

“My friends and family think I’m doing just fine, Sugar, but nothing could be further from the truth. All I can think about is how I fucked up.” Dear Sugar, About eighteen months ago, I got pregnant. In a move that surprised both my boyfriend and me, we decided we wanted to keep the baby. Though the…

You are here: Home ‣ Dive Into HTML 5 ‣ ❧ here are over 100 elements in HTML5. Some are purely semantic, others are just containers for scripted APIs. Throughout the history of HTML, standards wonks have argued about which elements should be included in the language. Should HTML include a …

annames: This is doubtless the greatest commentary in the history of any sport ever: http://bit.ly/cs1n95 (start at 3:45pm and work upward)