Zenburn v2.4 is released!

Changes: 256-color syntax fixes (in Spellchecker and PMenu). Toggle for forcing dark background (Tim Smith).

Grab it from Vim.sf.net or from the Zenburn page.

Not really! But some people think they do.

Anyway, if you work in IT and haven’t already read this classic book “The Mythical Man-Month”, please do so now. It’s a treasure chest of insight.

If you can’t find the book, check out this slideset.

Can you imagine how the world will change, when people can truly walk around with their personal libraries with them, carrying tens if not hundreds of books, without 1. Internet access, 2. hauling a heavy laptop, 3. hauling any device where the battery dies in approximately 4 hours of usage? Reference books, technical manuals, fiction, non-fiction, comics, you name it, anything can be handily carried in your pocket, as if you were carrying a paperback book.
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The Vice Chairman of the insurance giant American Insurance Group, Mr. Jacob Frenkel, entertains us with this quote about their crisis:

“The left side of the balance sheet has nothing right and the right side of the balance sheet has nothing left. But they are equal to each other. So accounting-wise we are fine.”

AIG already got $85 billion from the Fed, and the total sum might even go up to $120 billion. With that amount of money, I might consider becoming a stand-up comedian as well!

BBC provides us with nice graphical illustrations of the mindbogglingly huge impact of the ongoing finance crisis.

Contrast e.g. the rescue plans of United Kingdom with the annual spending in health and education. With numbers that large, they will need snowploughs to move all that money. Yes, of course nowadays it’s all digital, but I like the mental image.

I have no idea what they were smoking… but the developers of the Wordpress blogging software took a working editor and turned it into something highly unusable.

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It’s usually the case that software projects do not finish on time. There are many, many reasons for this, but we shall not go into those reasons just now.

Inspired by the strange idea-particles floating around the Large Hadron Collider, I shall now offer you an ingenious solution, a magic bullet of magic bullet; the methodology to end all methodologies.
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This Youtube link perhaps explains it… :)

Tony Howlett gave a presentation in Defcon 16 about the “cashless society”; why, what it means and likely developments. It’s a very interesting read, especially the point made about card payments - what happens when there’s no electricity?
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Bell Labs is pulling out of basic physics research. They will focus instead on “networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software”.

It’s like peeing your pants to get warm in the winter. It helps for a short time, but then you’re much colder than before.

And what have the people of Bell Labs invented, then? Well, nothing much, just some obscure and unused things like information theory, the laser, UNIX, C programming language, silicon-based transistors, and so on. And they got only 6 Nobel prizes for research done at Bell Labs too.

Maybe they could continue if they had invented perpetual motion and had managed to get 5000 Nobel prizes. Yeah.