My husband, who used to be a pretty good early adopter of technology, said he wishes he could turn the internet off. It’s killed journalism, it’s killing pornography, it’s killing writing, it’s killing a lot of things because everybody, anybody can write a blog now and thinks their opinion is worth as much as facts [...] [Posted: 14 Jul 2010]
The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see [...] [Posted: 12 Jul 2010]
Obviously we went through a period where models reflected the Twiggy phenomenon, but that didn’t have much to do with what actually was attractive to the opposite sex. Hugh Hefner just gave me the giggles with this quote from an interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times. In it, Solomon asserts that the [...] [Posted: 11 Jul 2010]
And so, in the revised entry for rock included in the O.E.D.’s June 2010 update, Melle Mel trumps Big Bank Hank as the earliest known M.C. to “rock the mic.” Though fresh evidence could always push the usage back even further, there’s a certain justice to setting the record straight, more than three decades after [...] [Posted: 11 Jul 2010]
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works [...] [Posted: 11 Jul 2010]
The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent. That’s from yesterday’s New York Times piece, Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich. Makes sense, actually. Rich people can avoid the fallout of foreclosure more easily [...] [Posted: 10 Jul 2010]
His ranked-income hypothesis, on the other hand, suggests that utility is based on an individual’s rank among peers. As he describes it, “People might care about whether they are the second-most highly paid person, or the eighth-most highly paid person, in their comparison set.” Gender, age and other factors become very relevant in comparing income, [...] [Posted: 10 Jul 2010]
A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices — whether to have kids, when, how many —may be one of the reasons parents [...] [Posted: 9 Jul 2010]
Most of the time, renter’s, homeowner’s or condo owner’s insurance are for personal considerations, not commercial. Therefore, understanding whether or not your art is a hobby or a business is key to understanding whether or not you need any additional insurance policies for your art business. If it’s a hobby, then you may be covered. [...] [Posted: 9 Jul 2010]
We’re going to do a baseline JIT for Firefox 4. It’s not done yet, and it hasn’t landed in any tree yet, so nobody’s tested it. It’s gonna give similar performance characteristics to Chrome. But we’re also gonna do tracing on top of that. What we discovered, is that for a lot of applications, especially [...] [Posted: 9 Jul 2010]