The graph in this article is most interesting. The feature that fascinates me is not the huge crossover from short-term (0-14 week) to long-term (27 weeks or more) of employment, it’s the purple time series describing 15-26-week employment. It has spiked but is now dropping again. I think I know what this means. It’s the… Continue reading Sheep from Goats: the rise in long-term unemployment
Month: April 2010
The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!
Google sent me one of the unlocked developer Nexus One phones. It arrived today. And, in the wake of recent news about Verizon not after all carrying the Nexus, stimulated some interesting thoughts in my mind about where the cellphone market is going. The balance of power is changing fast in ways that are going… Continue reading The Nexus One has landed: telecomms companies, beware!
My open-source project is cooler than yours
Yes, GPSD is way cooler than your project. You know how I can tell? Because my latest feature request is from a scientist who wants to use GPSD as part of the control software for an autonomous robot submarine. That’s how I can tell. No word yet on whether the robot submarine will have a… Continue reading My open-source project is cooler than yours
Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad
It’s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else’s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse says of the iPad… I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don’t really use it. Maybe I think I’m going to be using it. But I also think… Continue reading Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad
Penguicon!
For any of you who happen to be in Southeast Michigan or its environs, Cathy and I will be attending Penguicon from April 30th to May 2nd. A&D regular Ken Burnside will be there as well, sharing a room with us and hawking his excellent 3D space games – Attack Vector: Tactical, Squadron Strike and… Continue reading Penguicon!
Hear, O Nobly Born: The Way of the Hacker
I get several requests in an average week from people who want me to teach them the way of hacking. Yesterday I got an unusually witty one in the form of a mystical poem, imploring me to accept the author as a disciple. I replied that I don’t know how to do what he seems… Continue reading Hear, O Nobly Born: The Way of the Hacker
Incentives to be Open
A correspondent pointed me at a paper by Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel, Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation, which builds on my papers in some interesting ways. Here’s one of the money quotes: Building on arguments of Ghosh (1998), Raymond (1999), and von Hippel and von… Continue reading Incentives to be Open
Pandora’s Biases
Back in February I experimented with Pandora Radio and loved it…enough that I bought a subscription within a few days. It’s my background music now; I might never own an analog radio again. For a while I ran around telling all my friends about how Pandora was the greatest thing! since sliced bread! you should… Continue reading Pandora’s Biases
Adventures in feline ethology, part three
A while back, in Sugar and the Bathroom Demon, I blogged about the knotty questions of evolutionary biology and ethology that engage me when I interact with my cat. I returned to this theme in The Nose of Peace. And today I have something new to report. My cat, at the age of 16, has… Continue reading Adventures in feline ethology, part three
IBM: Now trying to dig out…
IBM has issued another statement on the TurboHercules imbroglio. This one is reported by the Linux Foundation, but comes from Dan Frye. Dan Frye heads IBM’s Linux Technology Center and was actually at the top of my mental shortlist of likely voices of sanity over there. (Full disclosure: Dan kept me supplied with IBM Thinkpads… Continue reading IBM: Now trying to dig out…
You have ascended
Redoubtable hacker Chip Salzenberg wrote me last night with the subject line “You have ascended”. I quote in full: Long time no chat. Hope you are well. In fact, I don’t have to hope, because I just read this in a book: Raymond in his brilliant The Cathedral and the Bazaar [2001] … That’s all… Continue reading You have ascended
IBM: Digging itself in deeper
Yesterday I blogged about the escalating dispute between IBM and TurboHercules SAS. I said, and will repeat now, that the central issue for the open-source community in this matter is not the antitrust allegations, but rather the fact that IBM has raised a patent threat alleging that Hercules violates its intellectual property. And especially, that… Continue reading IBM: Digging itself in deeper
IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?
Sadly, Florian Mueller’s scream of outrage (IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community is not an April Fool’s joke. IBM has done what it swore not to in 2005 – picked up the patent weapon and aimed it to block an open-source project. I was thoroughly briefed on this about… Continue reading IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days?
The iPad: Second Coming of the Newton?
The just-released and much hyped iPad is Apple’s second foray into hawking a tablet computer. And all the reasons Steve Jobs would like us to forget that are, in fact, good reasons to remember the Newton and the fact that it never became more than an early-adopter status toy. It, too, was greeted with hosannahs… Continue reading The iPad: Second Coming of the Newton?
Abusing CIA for Fun and Profit
No, not the Central Intelligence Agency. I refer to CIA.vc, a nifty free service that monitors commits on open-source repositories in real time and echoes notifications to IRC. And not really abuse, either – rather, I just implemented a way to make it do something else useful. Others might consider doing likewise.