New Year's Resolution

Do less better = take more time to do things

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Facebook missing a huge opportunity

The BBC Money program recently aired an episode about Facebook.

Users of Facebook like sharing with their friends and the lack of advertising. The company makes it's money from advertising and is somewhat bewildered that it's users don't understand that. Facebook have been looking for a way of leveraging the huge amount of personal information it holds and, in my view, have taken the incredibly stupid step of pestering people with targeted marketing messages. This is such an old fashioned way of trying to sell things to people and nobody wants to be marketed at. I would have expected a innovative company to come up with an innovative approach.

What they could have done is use all that personal information to create something that even I would use. A personal shop, full of all my favorite things: favorite books, music, horse gear, at this time of year, bulbs. It might even pick up that I am looking to buy a bread machine and magically a bread machine shelf appears in my shop.

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Childhood Clothes

Looking through photos of myself as a child and teenager, I realised I remembered almost all the clothes I was wearing.  Not just the look of them, but the feel of them against my skin.  I presume this is because we kept clothes for so much longer way back then!  Will children today remember their clothes?

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New technology for an energy efficient world

Amazing what er can do if want to!  A couple of items that came to my attention today:

Fluorescent paper that glows for 12 years - http://www.physorg.com/news116776284.html

Wind up camera - http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/13/sonys-odo-twirl-n-take-a-wind-up-camera-concept/

Energy efficient server from Dell is referred to in this google tech talk, which is a lot more interesting than the title might suggest - Electricity use and efficiency of servers and data center - about implementing energy efficiency changes and the likely increase in energy demand from large scale computing.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOJoB38OxK0&sdig=1

Play time

This looks fun - too late to look at it now.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

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Obese software

Researchers Fight Computer 'Obesity' Crisis

I like this article - so true!

For reference, here are Lehman's Laws

Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution

Prof. Meir M. Lehman, who worked at Imperial College, University of London from 1972 to 2002, and his colleagues, have identified a set of behaviours in the evolution of proprietary software. These behaviours (or observations) are known as Lehman's Laws, and there are eight of them :
1. Continuing Change
2. Increasing Complexity
3. Large Program Evolution
4. Invariant Work-Rate
5. Conservation of Familiarity
6. Continuing Growth
7. Declining Quality
8. Feedback System

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Some good press for China

I know very little about China but one of the often repeated statistics is that China opens a new coal fired power station every week. But how many are they closing and more importantly, what is their overall energy policy?

Here is some good press for China: http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2007/11/16/china-climate-scapegoat