brandondawson.org

The news that Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt had made a verbal commitment to work together for two decades struck me as interesting, because it implies that they indeed have a roadmap for much of those two decades already thought through. [link]

Certainly, Google’s made some acquisitions and embarked on other projects that don’t fully mesh with their known intentions as of now, and have been grounds for near constant speculation since.

From a purely-business perspective, it’s also good to see that they so clearly have a plan for continuance of the business after they’re gone, which is a problem that I’d expect to hit Microsoft very hard indeed in the coming two years.

In astronomy, light pollution refers to the fact that typical city lights happen to drown out the night sky, since they often share the same wavelengths, and the proximity of the polluting city light is much closer.

This picture demonstrates the phenomenon very clearly: [link]

In the wake of Google’s announcement of changes to AdSense that would discourage “Domain Tasters” comes ICANN making a decisive move and ending the practice once and for all.

One more step in the right direction, and hopefully it’ll shake some decent domains that nobody intends to ever develop back into public availability.

Here is an excellent video I found via dmiessler.com that gives a profoundly stirring demo of Compiz Fusion running on Gentoo on the desktop: [link]

This, more than anything I’ve seen in a couple months or longer, gives me some motivation to finally ditch Windows for good. Now if I could just learn GiMP…..

For the first time, astronomers have gotten an idea of how black holes can propel stars entirely out of galaxies.

Continue reading…

Chris Lamb shows how to give cp a progress bar like wget: [link]

This might seem like some very minor hackery, and it is. But of such things are real advances made, eh?

This guy has brightened every single working day of the rest of my life. Thanks, Chris.

Well, it looks like the free tunes ain’t gonna start streaming right now, after all.

The Big Four ducked out of, and disavowed any agreements with Qtrax just prior to the service’s much-ballyhooed beta launch.

I’m guessing they mainly wanted to show Qtrax that it ain’t Apple, and it’s CEO ain’t Steve Jobs. If he wants in the music game, he’s gonna do it as their boy.

Georgia Pacific, you got some ‘splainin’ to do: [link]

A retired fella named Leo Hill noticed that the TP in his rolls seemed to run out quicker when he bought a 12-pack as opposed to a 4-pack. This odd scatalogical cognitive dissonance led him to count the number of sheets in his rolls of TP, coming up some forty-sheets short per-roll across a nine-roll average.

While The Denver Post tried –and failed– to replicate the results of the experiment, I submit that they’re beholden to the Toilet Paper Lobby and I would like to take this opportunity to call upon Toiletry’s noted authorities, The Toilet Museum, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, to plumb this matter more deeply so that the sitting public can know relief.

The Brawny Lumberjack was unavailable for comment. He was last seen hollering for a spare roll at the outhouse.

According to the DomainTools blog, Google is set to put an end to it’s involvement in Domain Tasting. [link]

This would help put an end to the myriad sites out there that are being used as nothing but Google Billboards with little-to-no content on them. And since ICANN has proven singularly unable to reach an intelligent policy regarding such practices, it represents the most effective way for market forces to prevent this hyper-commoditization of the online advertising market.

Sounds like a strong move from Big G.

For those of you waiting for an e-book copy of Joomla! Cash, Packt has finally released one.