Ramblings about entertainment and other things
Aaron Swartz makes a very interesting blog posting called The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids on this blog Raw Thought.
From the posting:
“It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls. Do everything so that they never have to grow up and learn how to live life on their own.”
Here’s a link to a video comparison of Windows Vista and Mac OS X run by David Pogue at the New York Times, along with a written review.
Think that Vista is a ripoff of OS X? David has some opinions on that too…
Just a reminder: “24” starts again in one month, with a two hour premiere and another two hour episode the following day.
Be sure and hit Dave Barry’s blog those night and join in the fun while we blog along with the show!
OK, this is just too weird. A pet food dish that speaks a recorded message back to your pet when the sensor inside the bowl detects motion. Ubergizmo
Lost has been nominated for two awards for writing by the WGA. Other nominees include “The Simpsons”, “30 Rock”, and “Battlestar Gallactica”.
Lost was nominated for Best Drama, and will be up against “24”, “Deadwood”, “The Sopranos” and “Grey’s Anatomy”. It was also nominated for Best Drama Episode, along with “The West Wing”, “Battlestar Gallactica”, “Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King”, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” and HBO’s pilot for “Big Love.”
Frankly, I think “Studio 60″‘s nomination is really stretching it, especially for a show that came really close to getting canceled after a couple of episodes.
Peter Boyle, probably best known as the father on “Everybody Loves Raymond” and as the monster in “Young Frankenstein” passed away today. He was 71.
I’ve always liked Legos, and I really like the LEGO Mindstorms Robot kits. If you’re looking for Christmas present for your kids (or your kid at heart), you can’t go wrong with Legos.
Here’s one of the projects someone did recently… A Self-Parking Car:
Over on the Official Google Blog they have a posting about transferable stock options which they intend to implement soon.
From the posting:
Typically, employees get value from stock options by exercising them after vesting, and then selling the stock they get from the exercise at a higher price, provided the company’s stock price has appreciated since the time of grant. With the TSO program, employees will also be able to sell vested options to the highest-bidding financial institution, which may be willing to pay a premium above the difference between the exercise price and the market price for Google stock (even when the exercise price is higher than the market price). The premium paid is for the time value of the options.
Via Google Blog
Google released their code for the Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license.
The interactive applications you’ve seen from Google, like GMail, use this. It allows you to write programs in Java, and then deploy them as Javascript applications and HTML. There are a few demos of applications available on the site, plus tips on how to get started.
A few years ago, Graham Hamilton announced Java 6 at the Alumni Fireside Chat at the JavaOne conference, and now it’s been released.
What is there to look forward to in Java 6?