Viewing profile — zipdog

Not just OSS, though, if you read the history of new products or discoveries the same pattern regularly occurs.

Samantha was an obscure name until 1964: http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2010/7/samantha-the-u...

Its not a parody, but it deliberately uses the form of the Daily Mail. However, instead of delivering the ephemeral and trivial content of the DM, it uses that form to deliver cont…

Good point. I was thinking in terms of workforce, influence and global reach, but Goog and Apple have that too. (Made edit to original)

As there's more choice, people seem to be more interested in what others are doing, so when something gets some traction it can grow very big very fast. (And this game had some hel…

Harmful to a few internet companies, but beneficial to other US companies. The leaks have identified that the NSA conducts industrial espionage to the benefit of US companies. That…

I don't think there is a necessary contradiction in "favoring access" to government-promoted or funded arts and sciences, as well as "favoring access" to full disclosure of surveil…

It would be interesting to know what the questions were (or even what genre) - to get a better sense of the significance of getting them right. Unfortunately there is no indication…

What is more troubling is not that so few of these results results are reproducible, but that it appears almost no-one is trying to reproduce the results of earlier studies. The ab…

Cornering the market in a useless item in order to drive up its price? Reminds me of the time Porsche cornered the market in VW shares and squeezed the short-sellers: http://www.te…

I agree. But I think countries can be a useful proxy if they aren't all, say, Western European, or Carribean. The big culture zones IMHO are Americas: North, Central, South and Car…

I've been with an EA studio for the last five months and met with people from a dozen other EA studios and like you toxic is not a word I would use to describe the EA I have seen. …

Research indicates its may not be a placebo, eg: "Gluten Causes Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Subjects Without Celiac Disease: A Double-Blind Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial" (T…

I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so …

The "long tail" on tools is very true, and something that took me a while to learn. I used to think I could get away with a smaller toolset of more general tools, and to just 'wing…

Yesterday a friend explained the physiological reasons behind 25 minute breaks: basically the muscles (including eye muscles) go into a different state of relaxed-tension and its g…

There's two big problems I can see with your argument that we need more consumption. But first, I agree that consumption is one of the factors that has helped raised the standard o…

I find this an appropriate comment by Hofstadter, in the Intro to 'Godel Escher Bach', on the gender of the Tortoise: The Tortoise turns out never to have been attributed either ge…

Trustworthy and Automatic (for the link shortening) do not combine well. At least the bit.ly service means that the traffic can be gathered and analysed (and presumably those links…

The hwy exit differs from place to place. In Canada there's an angled edge to indicate which side the exit is on. But I'm guessing that most places have some system that subtly ind…

The oceans are already absorbed enormous amounts of atmospheric CO2, and it's messing up marine ecosystems by changing pH levels, among other things. It's a major cause of coral lo…

There's been a variety of papers using MRI scans to show the brain restructuring itself during learning. This takes time. Mathematics and CS deal with abstraction upon abstraction,…