Paul Graham on buying an iMac: "So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings. I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a bad human rights record. That was new. In the past when I bought things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. Oh boy! They make such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They make such great stuff, but they're such assholes. Do I really want to support this company?"
- Michael Stillwell
Commissioned my first artwork. It is to contain a house, sun, and angry lady. The artist's father is confident the artist can deliver.
"Eventually, to keep the pinballers playing, the games became so advanced that entry-level players faced an impossible barrier. High-schoolers in 1986 were either dropouts or professionals in 1992 and without inflow of new players that year essentially marked the end of pinball. In 1992 The Addams Family was the last machine to sell big. By this time, pinball machines used a free-game system called replay boost. After any replay, the score required was increased by some increment. Apparently, only hardcore pinballers were left and this was the only way to prevent them playing indefinitely for free."
- Michael Stillwell
http://arstechnica.com/busines... Interesting: two companies, Gear6 and Schooner, sell memcached appliances that combine a good chunk of RAM with Flash.
"During one of our first conversations, Brent James told me a story that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to hear from a doctor. For most of human history, James explained, doctors have done more harm than good. Their treatments consisted of inducing vomiting or diarrhea and, most common of all, bleeding their patients. James, who is the chief quality officer at Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and clinics in Utah and Idaho that President Obama and others have described as a model for health reform, then rattled off a list of history books that told the fuller story. Sure enough, these books recount that from the time of Hippocrates into the 19th century, medicine made scant progress. “The amount of death and disease would be less,” Jacob Bigelow, a prominent doctor, said in 1835, “if all disease were left to itself.”"
- Michael Stillwell
"The judges' wine ratings typically varied by ±4 points on a standard ratings scale running from 80 to 100. A wine rated 91 on one tasting would often be rated an 87 or 95 on the next. Some of the judges did much worse, and only about one in 10 regularly rated the same wine within a range of ±2 points."
- Michael Stillwell
Will the open web be a casuality of the coming fight over the web? "And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the plattform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill."
- Michael Stillwell
Paternal grandmothers do no share any genetic material with grandsons, and so "In six of the seven societies, having a paternal grandmother nearby improved the survival of granddaughters (50 percent X-relatedness) by up to 4.5-fold, but for some unknown reason decreased the survival of grandsons (zero percent) by 8 to 29 percent."
- Michael Stillwell
The beginnings of a standard for JavaScript libraries: 0.1 is how they should declare their dependencies. Future versions are supposed to have e.g. filesystem libraries.
- Michael Stillwell