Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Feature



Netbooks (Forbes) are pretty cool. Dangerous (Reuters), though.

I have a problem with top-down approaches. Take this one (Reuters). The idea is neat, taking the current patchwork energy grid and making it smarter, so there's less waste and chance of blackout. I doubt if they looked for any other way to achieve it, though. There's something that rankles me about private contractors bidding for government contracts with cost-plus schemes. Probably the horrendous waste.

I guess I should stop staying up so late, because it messes with my metabolism (Lifehacker). Yay for Provigil (Techcrunch).

Brazen Careerist has a way of phrasing her findings and a conversational tone which is quite appealing to me. And she's hot. Her post on finding a mentor by being annoying is also pretty on the mark, from how i've gotten mine.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Winding Road


Socwall.

Lots of interesting news these days. Microsoft building a personal virtual assistant (IHT) capable of scheduling appointments, flights, etc.

More compelling, however, is Laura's ability to make sophisticated decisions about the people in front of her, judging things like their attire, whether they seem impatient, their importance and their preferred times for appointments.


Cool. Now they just need to work on personalizing it enough to incorporate the cool thought-based controller (NYT) and your past habits, to build an avatar of you that can live online and answer messages and such.

An interesting IHT article on expanding broadband access to fight the depression. Ridiculous idea, it'll probably work. Not that it will for the reasons they suggest, or anything reasonable like that, but I'd bet it'll work.

Also a hilarious article on businessweek about how twitter wasn't taken in by Facebook's idiotic valuation games. Just because your company is privately held doesn't mean you can value it differently for different purposes. Really, guys? Really?