Blue Sky On Mars

The Guardian brings us The Seven Wonders of the Web which goes from Google to Blogger. Fairly decent choices, in my opinion.

Eric Sink has written about the failure of open source. He says that as a concept, you can’t throw it out, because there is a lot of good quality open source. But, as a business model, it hasn’t worked. He calls open source the lowest margin of software businesses, and low margin businesses are indeed quite difficult.
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I posted a message on Joel’s discussion area about pair programming. A good bit of discussion that followed. Of course, there are no real “answers”, because every environment is different and you really just need to figure out what works for you.

The Year in Internet Law - NY Times: The Year in Internet Law [Scripting News] As you can see from this article, most of the significant cases this year did not turn out well for Internet citizens. We’ll see what we get in 2002 as some of these things are appealed.

CD prices set to take a plunge - Whether it’s piracy, a receding economy or simply supply and demand, sluggish CD sales will probably result in lower prices in the near future. [ZDNet] The article quotes an analyst predicting that CD prices may permanently drop to $9.99. After years of selling CDs at higher prices than cassettes (because CDs are “new technology”), perhaps we’ll start seeing a bit better value. As long as I can continue to rip CDs to put on our server at home, $9.99 is not too bad a price. I’d really rather just by individual songs in MP3 format at $1 or less.
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Here are two articles that have essentially the same content and refer to the same research report: Dot-com failures up from last year and Dot.com failures easing. The headlines paint different pictures. This is why it’s always good to be able to see some unfiltered data and make up your own mind.

CNN’s tech folks have come up with a list of 20 coming technologies that will impact PCs. Some of these are several years out, but they’re talking about affordable 400GB hard drives in 2003, new display technologies, and annoying websites that are controlled by voice.

Someone has set up a site to celebrate Japanese Engrish. I haven’t scoured the site yet, but the “Pocari Sweat Refreshment Water” and “Pumpkin Poo” show the kind of high-caliber site that this is.

Wall St.: From bad to worse [CNN Money] The article talks about the market losing value two years in a row for the first time since the ’70s. Hopefully, next year we won’t be looking back at three losing years for the first time since ‘41. (One thing that’s always worth remembering: if you invest for the long term, these kinds of drops won’t cause a problem.)

Google has an interesting page showing what people were searching for in 2001. Unfortunately, the link doesn’t look like a permalink. They really should archive it, because it’s interesting. I noticed that they didn’t have an overall Top Queries list, they just had top gainers and top decliners. I find it interesting that the top woman was a 20 year old pop singer (Britney Spears), and the top man was a guy who died more than 300 years ago (Nostradamus).