...said someone in 1890. In Manhattan. About the real estate market.

You could be right, and you probably are, but only with respect to, at most, the medium-term.

Any here more interested in Dr. Hawking's thoughts on the possibility that neutrinos are faster than light ? Seems a bit more timely concern, though I do see his point about human survival.

18 or 19 years.

The time between Michelson-Morley and Annus Mirabilis 1905.

If, by "on the verge", you actually mean possibly 20 years away from a theory explaining this result once confirmed -- then you could be spot on right.

Quote From Daring Firewhatnot:
"It’s almost hard to remember now, but just a few short years ago, Yahoo was the place for hot startups to find a home."

You mean Yahoo was the company with money to burn buying into hokey startups (exception for Delicious and a *few* others I'm sure).

I think there's a general misunderstanding about what's going on here. So let me try to clear it up (and hope I succeed). As an independent company, Sun was essentially a failing concern. Pure and simple. When Oracle purchased Sun, they purchased them for the assets that Sun happened to own (either through in-house R&D or through either shrewd or lucky acquisition - choose your poison). They did *not* purchase Sun for business strategy. I can guarantee you on that. Thus, there is a new business strategy in place with respect to capitalizing on Sun's assets.

So by this reasoning, the alienation of the OO, MySQL and Java communities is by no means a random occurrence. Oracle's new business strategy with respect to these products is what is alienating these communities. If you want to pretend that Oracle and Ellison are not behind this, either you're simply in denial, you're heavily invested in Oracle technologies, or Oracle writes your paycheque (again, choose your poison).

oh ya, to all those who saw no harm in the Sun acquisition....

Even if Apple stopped doing anything today, I think it's safe to say their products will be around and developers will be developing for them five years from now because there'd still be enough somebodies somewhere using an iPhone or iPad. If you're not convinced, just look to Palm ;)

That's pretty amazing. Except that the letters a, e, and o are nearly indistinguishable. To prove it is the smallest legible font, one would have to show that a long enough sequence of just the letters a, e and o could be spelled back by a reader. aeoeoaoeoeoaoeoaoeeeoaaaoeoaoa. I doubt it.

Practically speaking, that would mean a word like onomatopeia would be hard to identify. Of course, the context in which a word shows up probably accounts for more than half of the reason a reader can identify that word so quickly in a sentence.

Guaranteed that most of the artists you listen to, including the few that you worship, would disagree with you on that statement. Unless you were born in the before the early 50s, there is very little of any music released in the past 40 yearsincluding electronic music, and heavy that wasn't influenced by them.

To illustrate... take Kraftwerk & Neu! who are the cornerstones of modern electronic, dance, etc., they were influenced by Beatles pop and lyrical style. As for heavy, listen to the Beatles' Helter Skelter.. it is considered proto-metal, their only song of the kind, very influential on metal, and it's still an insane listen today.

Yes, but if there is one album worth buying again and again, that would be the White Album.

40 years later, it awakened the Holy See, which was never really a fan of the Beatles or John Lennon particularly (read the history yourself), to the Beatles' genius.

Google should invest R&D in rewriting and optimizing the Ruby interpreter and "adopt" it the way they did Java. It definitely has potential for application development on mobile platforms. Maybe optimized for the VM-environment à la JRuby. Apple already sees its potential on the desktop - hence, MacRuby. Yes, Ruby. The force is strong in that one.

I guess Jobs forgot to forward that memo to his buddy Ellison ;)

Looks like Apple gave... some bottom of the barrel IT guys (at least in the risk assessment part of the job)... a rope.

And they hung themselves and their employers with it.

Ya, I'm sure they are. But too bad I see this as more a win for the true open source development and dare I say even Stallman et al. and his philosophy. Anyone with huge investments in Java should have had second thoughts when it became clear that Sun wasn't going to "donate" its control of the language, its libraries and its VM-licensing to a non-profit industry-run consortium which should have been setup as early as ten or even fifteen years ago.

This is not a win for MS at all for a simple reason: once bitten, twice shy.

It's easily argued that these three most valuable assets acquired in the Sun purchase are, taken as a whole, not even worth a fraction of the existing and potential business of the product they've already had, Oracle. They couldn't give a shit about Java, MySQL or gawd OpenOffice. It's more likely he was thinking: "hmmm, how do I squash three great products at least one of which had terrifying potential???"

Yet no one seems to mind watching trailers (and now ads for new gadgets or deals at local businesses) before a movie at the theatre.

oh wait, on second thought... that's probably why attendance is down at the theatre (despite this new rage called 3D :p)

It's an oversimplification, but people do vote with their wallet.