“For 24 hours, newspapers, TV and radio stations were legally forbidden to release Stefanie Rengel’s name [a teenage girl in Toronto allegedly murdered by a teenage boy, allegedly at the request of his girlfriend, also a teen], but on the Internet tributes to the slain teen – and the names of her accused killers – sprang up almost immediately, including on the social networking site Facebook.“
My favourite line from the O’Reilly OnLAMP.com article What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on their Christmas Vacation: “A running joke in the Perl 6 world is that we’ll release a stable Perl 6.0.0 by Christmas. We just won’t tell you which Christmas.”
The Coming 2008 Dot-Com Crash. Greg Linden writes: “I am only going to make one prediction, but one with broad impact. We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.”
Back in late 2006, I wrote an article about how they’ve been predicting that for the fourth year in a row, someone has declared that “this is the year RSS will be big!”.
I also wrote:
Perhaps I should start a betting pool on when the pundits will stop predicting that RSS will go mainstream next year. I’ll put money down on 2009. Any takers?
I’m glad I didn’t put money down on 2008, as someone has declared 2008 as the “Year of RSS”. Yes, it was a blog called Enterprise RSS, but still…
I think that “The Year of RSS” is turning into “The Rapture” — always imminent, but never actually coming to pass.
Here’s a list of CERT’s Top 10 Secure Coding Practices. It comes with two bonus secure coding practices (making it an even dozen) and better still, a funny photo that shows that it’s often easier to circumvent rather than defeat security measures.
One lesson that Nathan Weizenbaum learned from Java that makes him a better Ruby programmer: “I learned what I was abstracting. I learned what blocks are, why dynamic typing is useful, what it means to redefine an operator. And I learned it from Java, by doing without.”
Java’s nickname, “The New COBOL”, as a badge of honour: “…considering COBOL’s standing in the industry: It’s not clear that being the ‘new COBOL’ is actually a bad thing. It may not be glamorous, because people see COBOL programmers as being outmoded and uninventive, but COBOL is far from dead.”
