Desiderata of the Bitter

Salon rapes the Oscars

BeOS for Intel ships!

"In fire."

Weep, my little children. Weep.

SF Bay Trojans: Miata A-Go-Go

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Brought to you by Derrinstown Stud Farm.

On a whim, the first thing I do to find something intersting to post here regarding St. Patrick's Day is type "www.stpatricksday.com" and "www.stpatricksday.org" Unbelievable.

Who was St. Patrick?

The Irish Times' celebrates the day. [graphics intensive]

Maewyn's rap sheet.

Good news for Friday the 13th: we're not all going to die.

Check out the spooky new 1999 Miata.

From alert skull-crusher, Gary Mau:
All those asteroid movies just got validated.

More scientific information about the comet.

From alert runner and all around mess, Matt Healey:

It's fast, it's fresh, and it already has a cult following.

BeOS for Intel is to be shipped on 12 March.

The SJ Merc thinks Gates didn't do well during the Senate hearing yesterday, but Bill thinks he did.

I hate being a Microsoft apologist, and they have done a lot of ethically and legally questionable things, but some of the rhetoric is insane:

"The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English, or Chinese or Spanish, so I could charge you $249 for the license to speak, and so I could charge you an upgrade fee when I added new letters like N or T," said Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. [..]

The problem with McNealy is that he really wishes that he was having the problems Gates is having right now. The analogy he makes is so stupid and wrong as to not warrant comment.

Here's another winner. Senator Kohl was "irked" by Gates' claim that Windows was cheap. According to the SJ Merc, he:

[...] said Microsoft earned such a fat profit that it could afford to cut prices even more and benefit more consumers.

[...]And he quickly told Kohl the company's profit margins were 24 percent -- a figure Kohl called "an extraordinary profit level" in a nation where many industries call a 4 percent year successful.

"You could cut your profit in half and give that money to your customers and still have a very, very successful company,'' Kohl said.

Isn't one of the claims by competitors that Microsoft dumps product into the market for almost nothing (or much less than the development cost) in order to gain market share? I'm sure all of Microsoft's competitors are wetting their beds as they dream about MS cut their prices 20 percent. I'm sure that would work in their favor.

There are many things that are bad about Microsoft, why not be rational about it and attack them there?

Comments welcome.

More on auto-translation from Salon.

Using an electron's spin as a storage device.

This is a really cool (and fairly easy to follow, if not truly understand) overview of subatomic particles.

A bit of insight on Silicon Valley jobs.

I'm especially unmoved by Silicon Valley's worker shortage. Valley businesses, with help from national, regional and local political leaders, have created an unsustainable economy by encouraging overexpansion in a geography that can barely handle the current population, much less an expanded one.

Recruiting outsiders to the valley is growing much more difficult because of the skyrocketing cost of living and dropping quality of life (except for the very rich) in what was once almost a paradise. So valley companies fill vacancies in part by raiding other valley companies.