Ajit K

Google about Knol (edge)

Nick Carr talks about ad free wikipedia and ad-abled knol.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/calling-all-developers-10m-android.html

http://www.ferg.org/projects/python_gotchas.html

http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/python_pitfalls.html

“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about
programming, is not worth knowing.” - Alan Perlis

An interesting point. As Robert Scoble points out in his post:

Apple II? Didn’t have switches on the front.
Macintosh? No tape drive. No cursor keys.
Next? No disk drive.
iMac? No floppy drive.
iPod? No on/off button.
iPhone? No keyboard.

A must read. Snippet from Nikola Tesla’s autobighaphy:

There was another and still more important reason for my late awakening. In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes which I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety. None of the students of psychology or physiology whom I have consulted, could ever explain satisfactorily these phenomenon. They seem to have been unique although I was probably predisposed as I know that my brother experienced a similar trouble. The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed. To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-wracking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all my efforts to banish it. If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations. I am convinced that this wonder can and will be accomplished in time to come. I may add that I have devoted much thought to the solution of the problem.

!!

http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/the_volkswagen.html

Microsoft is Dead

…and counter arguments

seems to be a shallow argument by Paul !

Some pros and cons about it (a cons actually might be a pros, depending on the perspective).
+ points:

Portability.

Allows protection of intellectual property (IP).

Support for publishing scientific media (mathematical notations etc.).

Efficient packaging of content (less memory and high quality).

- points:

Difficult to edit and add comments without installing Acrobat Professional.

Difficult to Copy & Paste

Difficult for collaborative editing and publishing. It is more like an end product rather than a material to be worked upon. Probably, PDF wasn’t meant to be for this purpose at all.

References:
http://weblog.404creative.com/index.php/2007/02/24/a-few-reasons-not-to-send-files-in-micorosft-word-format/
http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/choosingsoftware/a/pdfsharing.htm
http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw060604
http://www.its.monash.edu.au/staff/web/slideshows/accessibility-pdfformat/

As the writer, adventurer, artist, and aeronautical engineer Antoine de Saint-Exupry once put it, writing about the design of airplanes:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien enlever.

It means: “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove”.

Taken from ESR’s writing available here.