"Eww, Saratoga", drunken Web 2.0

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote:

Fashion & Style
Drunk, and Dangerous, at the Keyboard
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: October 19, 2008
Mail Goggles, a new feature on Google’s Gmail program, is intended to help stamp out a scourge that few knew existed: late-night drunken e-mailing.

To understand the title of my post read the article through to the end and have a laugh.

Clover Machine

Source: Wired

The Coffee Fix: Can the $11,000 Clover Machine Save Starbucks?
By Mathew Honan 07.21.08

...The Clover coffeemaker debuted in a handful of cafés in 2006 and was promptly hailed as the best thing to happen to coffee lovers since the car cup holder. With an $11,000 asking price, the Clover has become a fetish object among the coffee-obsessed. Long queues signal its arrival in new cities, and self-described "Cloveristas" post videos on YouTube demonstrating the machine's flashy brewing process. There are more photos on Flickr paying homage to this shiny gadget (700 and counting) than actual Clovers in existence (roughly 250 worldwide)....

Good coffee. They have them at my local Starbucks.


James

Growth and learning mindset

Source: NY Times

Unboxed
If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
Published: July 6, 2008
Adopting either a fixed or growth attitude toward talent can profoundly affect all aspects of a person’s life, a researcher found.

Good article for perspective which actually reminds me of something I read years ago (sorry do not have a reference or link) about how US Seal units, military special forces, have a problem with figuring out which recruits are most likely to get through their extremely rigorous and difficult training.

And if I remember correctly, an expensive study found that those who tended to succeed were those who did not give up, which to me sounds rather circular, but also interesting in what I read was the experience that natural talents did tend to give up.

So people who were stars in high school or college or in some other way, who had a tremendous amount of ability to tap also turned out to be less interested in accepting the painful ordeal of the training.

Hope I remember that ok, but I put the warning about going from memory, and the linked to article kind of has a different tack anyway.

Windows is a legacy system

Source: NY Times

Digital Domain
Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: June 29, 2008
Microsoft’s flagship software, Windows, built upon the same core architecture as preceding versions, seems to move an inch when its competitors take a lap.

Here's a telling quote:

...Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now.

I don't think there is much reason to look for growth or innovation with Microsoft Windows. So I'm saying, what we have today is the best that there will be, as Windows is a legacy system with no further significant innovation to be had.

What frustrates me when I boot up my machines which both have Windows Vista is that even though they are booting up faster they are still too slow, even if from hibernation, when I realize that I'm waiting on things that I do not need.

One of the issues in the past with the idea of starting over is dying as the web takes over for everyday use, so the OS can become a black box and conceivably in the future most users will not even know what their operating system is.

That's the future, when the browser is boss and who cares what the OS is as long as you have full browser functionality, as cloud computing takes off, so then the OS is a commodity which I think Microsoft fears.

So did Microsoft sit on Internet Explorer for so many years, after crushing Netscape so that it could eke out a few more years of dominance? I'd say, no, as the evolving web simply wasn't ready to move things forward and as readiness enters the system, rapidly products are being developed so even if they did (wild speculation, not saying they did), it would have been a pointless exercise in futility, as they say.

The browser wars are really about the move of the underlying operating system from center stage to under the hood. As the hood closes on Microsoft Windows, other engines can drive the vehicle, and take all of us far faster and far further than we've ever gone before...

Glass studies

Source: MSNBC

Scientists reveal why glass is glass
Despite solid appearance, glass is actually in a "jammed" state of matter
By Robin Lloyd
updated 1:37 p.m. PT, Mon., June. 23, 2008

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

Interesting article especially the part about metallic glass. Here's one more quote:

...An icosahedron is like a 3-D pentagon, and just as you cannot tile a floor with pentagons, you cannot fill 3-D space with icosahedrons, Royall explained. That is, you can't make a lattice out of pentagons.

When it comes to glass, Frank thought, there is a competition between crystal formation and pentagons that prevents the construction of a crystal. If you cool a liquid down and it makes a lot of pentagons and the pentagons survive, the crystal cannot form....

Explains a lot.