Monday, March 11, 2002

[Joel on Software] My publisher sent me a couple of new books today which might be of some interest to this crowd: Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers who Lead Programmers J. Hank Rainwater The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World Christopher Duncan 8:41:09 PM

Yo!  This is an unofficial mind-bomb month  at UserLand.  Radio Community Server, OPML coffee mugs, and Jabber P2P connections.   Wow.  Hold onto your socks.  Now all we need are people as smart as AC to put it into action.  Fortunately, if today's sales flow is an indication, there are. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 7:01:50 PM

[Slashdot] The State of Recordable DVD's 4:32:06 PM

[The Motley Fool] Buffett's Annual Letter. Warren's annual letter to shareholders, Kmart, and college savings. article links to the whole text and an article with excerpts... the excerpts are worth the read 2:05:39 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Titles and Links for RSS. New Radio feature.  Nice.  I used it for this post.  1:51:45 PM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] NYT.  Wow.  Andersen's behind the scenes decline is moving so quickly that it plans to sell itself to Deloitte and Touche.  10:02:32 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] WSJ.  Was this a recession?  Economists, including the NBER, don't know what to call it. >>>But by the standards of economic output -- the volume of goods and services -- it is a tougher call. Judging by the latest government figures, this has been the only recession since World War II in which gross domestic product shrank for just one quarter, and it wasn't by much. The reason is productivity. Just as Dell (Dell sold 18% more computers last year than the year before) turned out more, and better, computers with fewer workers, the entire U.S. economy managed to produce more per worker last year. That is rare: productivity almost always declines during recessions.<<< 10:01:49 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] The Economist.  A long article on friction between the US and Europe over plans to topple Saddam.   Note:  the Economist is one of those rare publications where the journalist is expected to be a domain expert.  The magazine rarely quotes outside analysts.  I got quoted once by the Economist, but in order to get that quote, I had to provide a level of analysis that went well beyond what I typically provided time-strapped journalists. >>>On one measure, America spends a staggering 40% of all the money the world spends on defence. The Pentagon’s budget is now over ten times that of the next biggest military spender in NATO (Britain). This gap in resources translates into a technology gap, as Europeans would have found in Afghanistan. No wonder Lord Robertson, NATO’s secretary-general, worries aloud about European “pygmies”. This difference in military might, which will be exacerbated by the proposed leap in America’s defence spending this year, explains much of the alarm in Europe about the Bush administration. America is waking up to the huge preponderance of its military power. Europe, realising this, is worried both about the wise application of that power, and its own relative weakness.<<< 9:58:24 AM

[Tomalak's Realm] O'Reilly Network: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon. The computers at Google are asked to tirelessly count and re-count the number and destination of links on every page that Scooter, the Googlebot, can lay its user-agent on. Those links are made by human beings, doing what they do best, link by link, drip by drip, layering a film of order over the Internet. 9:48:20 AM