Gruber: The OS Opportunity
These PC makers are lacking in neither resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers.
In which I switch on a 30 year old computer and it just works
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting my parents and getting out an old computer. One of the first computers I used a lot was the Shar...
Why People Don’t Install Firefox - Part III
In Part I we discussed a framework around understanding the Firefox user experience at the moment a person installs Firefox. In Part II we walked ...
You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research…
How did we geeks become experts on macroeconomics?
There are certain topics that are certain to incite the internet. Emacs vs vi. Programming language holy wars. When it comes to programming geeks, though, I’ve got one that will get them to break out the flamethrowers . All you have to do is bring up topics like fiat currency, the gold standard, money creation, the…
YC Terms are Poor
I love Y Combinator. They are scrappy, innovative, entrepreneur-friendly, and created a model that VCs originally laughed at but are now copying. I love Paul Graham’s essays and I like him pe…
Why HTTP?
The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will…
Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it."
A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31…
At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind
Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy. As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t […]