Tag Archives: humor

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Domain name speculation goldmine

2007/08/12 – 01:03

Hmmm, I wonder if The Simpsons is a goldmine for domain-name speculators. In a 1999 episode, Homer is picking through the Sunday newspaper looking for something he cares about, and reading the names of the sections aloud:
“Now to trim away the fat: Outlook [tosses in trash], Vista [tosses in trash], Spotlight [tosses in trash], Mosaic [tosses in trash]”

Though I’m sure the writers only intended it to be (partly prescient) commentary on bloated software, a smart speculator could have looked at that list and predicted the name of two future popular packages and grabbed up all the good domains, ya know, *.com, *-help.com, *-for-dummies.com, *-sucks.com, a-*-ate-my-baby.com, *-forums.com, viagra-and-*-for-fathers-day.com, learn-*.com, learn-*-underwater.com, that kind of stuff…

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“Wikipedian Protester”

2007/07/04 – 02:57

I’d love to see this toon spark a political movement:

Wikipedian Protester

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Remembering a name

2007/03/04 – 14:08

Funny the things one remembers. I’ll probably never forget the name of a mythical COM interface from a project I worked on: IWendyPointerToGuts. This was a name for, let’s say, an anti-pattern that we wanted to avoid in the project. I’ve long since left that project and have no need for the name any more, but it still sticks.

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Bad math again?

2006/10/09 – 09:14

I wonder who’s really, really bad at math: me or George Gilder and the Wired editors:

“To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.”

(From page 2 of a Wired story).

I’m willing to concede that there are things I don’t know about Google and/or Gilder’s calculation (not to mention his penchant for big numbers), but according to my calculation, that’s off by a factor of about 20 million. What a big number _that_ is! I’m impressed! I can’t think of any junk I could add to my calculation to get anywhere near that.

For your reference, since you care enough to read to the end of this article, my calculation was thus: I did a Google query and added the 5kB page to the two 5kB images (which are usually cached for me, but we’ll assume they never are) plus 1kB up for the request, to get 16kB per query.

16kB * 8b/B * 100e6/day / 24hr/day / 3600s/hr = 148Mb/s

3e15b/s / 148Mb/s = 20e6

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General

Euphemism for bug

2006/09/14 – 10:56

Listening to a NASA briefing, I heard a great phrase for ‘bug’: “a software feature that we hadn’t intended to utilize”. I’ll admit that the bug in question was not big, but I’d still call it a bug.

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“Price Tag for Lost Productivity”

2006/08/22 – 00:18

Ya know, I was going to construct a list of all the ways in which this sort of study is wrongheaded, but then I thought, you have to get it to get it, and if you don’t, my arguments won’t help… So, I guess there’s no point to this post, but still:

Price Tag for Lost Productivity: $544 Billion

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General

Produced IT humor

2006/01/31 – 23:47

Huh, it’s pretty cool what the Brits can do with their low-budget TV ways. Spreading the money around lets them explore farther out-there.

I’ve watched the first episode of “The IT Crowd” online, and I have to say that it was pretty darn good, with actual production values and real scripts and actors and stuff. Not world-class, but British-class for sure. Easily one of the best IT-focused bits of comedy television I’ve seen, but then, well, you know… it’s the only bit I’ve seen. The Dilbert cartoons don’t count cuz they weren’t really IT-focused.

Anyway, I can’t tell from the site whether this is an ongoing concern or whether there are just the two eppies, but in any case, hit these if you can:
The IT Crowd.

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