technology

Cory Doctorow's broadside against the iPad, especially compared to to Xeni Jardin's infantile fawning, is probably the most cogent criticism you'll find right now.  Worthwhile just for the William Gibson quote.

Anyway, here's Hitler's response to the iPad.  It pretty much sums up everything you need to know if you're interested in a tablet PC.

This pretty much sums up my feelings about LinkedIn.  I get about, oh I don't know, 100% more work-related communications through Facebook than LinkedIn.

If you are planning for Armageddon, have a lot of time on your hands, don't mind being bitten by gigantic spiders and have a desire to weave yourself the strongest clothes ever,.....then this is the story for you.

Researchers and a team of 70 people spent four years harvesting spider silk from these gigantic spiders in Madagascar in order to weave one big (11' by 4") golden cloth.  So, now they have the only  large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk in the world.  Which is sort of cool in a geeky scientific way. But four years gathering spider silk....

Handlers had to extract the silk by hooking the spiders to a silking machine.  That's right.  They built a special contraption from designs from the late 1800s when some French dude had this clever idea to weave spider silk.  You are wondering how such critical technology could be allowed to fall from every day use, aren't you?   Well, the  experience of this intrepid band of researchers is telling. Researchers experienced trouble recruiting spider handlers who were OK with being bitten by these beauties. The biting part may be the  downfall of spider farming becoming a hot fad or growth industry.

That and having to wait four years for your next piece of spidey wear.

Neat to see these sotfware-production formulas spelled out so succinctly:

Over my years of watching software projects, I have identified two mathematical formulas that guide much of the industry. These formulas are:

Software Produced = Number of Workers x Hours Worked.

And:

Cost of Software = Number of Workers x Hours Worked x Hourly Cost Per Worker.

I call these the “Software Management Formulas” or SMFs. Understanding these formulas makes much of the absurdity in the industry understandable.

I've worked at more than one company where this is how things got done.  Or "got done," I should say.  It wasn't until I started working with a small group of programmers, all working remotely, that I understood what was wrong at these companies.*  Often the result of the "throw a body at it" approach is that your star programmers will end up going through the code and rewriting large portions of it anyway.  Why not just start off with a small group of good programmers in the first place?