Very cool map and visualizations.

From Akamai.

Broadband adoption trends:

Uses Adobe Flash.

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No big surprise, but Oslo, once part of a giant wave of convoluted functionality, new languages, and other assorted pieces, is changing. Not that you’ll actually get a better understanding of what it is by reading the post – just know that the teams are merging.

Maybe they’ll figure out what it they’re building eventually, and just maybe, they’ll consider that there’s more than 2 types of applications out there that should be considered (photo viewers and RSS readers).

I still won’t be shocked if it further disappears from the technology stack.

What’s your take on Oslo’s future?

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Why is that people feel that when asked a question like:

“How do I convert my large MP3 files into a lower bit rate file so I can fit more songs on my smaller MP3 player?” that they respond with far too often useless opinions:

• “You’re destroying the quality of the music.”
• “Get a bigger music player”
• “Just sync less music to your player”
• Etc., blah blah blah.

Many times, they’re not even anonymous users or voices. What’s worse is they rarely actually answer the question because they must honestly believe that their rationale is so sound that there’s no need to continue address the original question, as they’ve handled it sufficiently: “You are a moron for wanting this your way, do it my way.”

It’s like going to the store and looking for some orange juice.

“Which brand of orange juice should I buy?”

• You shouldn’t buy orange juice, instead buy oranges and make it fresh every day. Otherwise, your children will hate you and likely have scurvy, you slimy bastard.
• You don’t want orange juice at all, you really should make your own pomegranate juice every day – it’s full of blah blah blah.

Further annoyance – these aren’t like big life decisions that we’re talking about here where hearing out multiple opinions is terribly useful, certainly not to the degree that many take their arguments.

You’re more than welcome to offer an opinion (as I’m doing here), but consider tempering that with something that actually addresses the actual question. Maybe they don’t have time to make fresh squeezed orange juice every morning?

You see, I was looking for an answer to the MP3 problem above. I found far more useless dribble than I did actual help. Google may index zillions of web pages – but there are many that they should leave out. Arrgh.

To answer the MP3 question above and what I’ve tried, I’ve tried a few different solutions all with different degrees of success. We have 53GB of MP3s right now – which is too large for my wife’s iPod Touch. She wants most of the music on the player, so we reduce the bitrate and she is somewhat picky-and-choosy about the songs.

I’m currently watching MediaMonkey (a shareware app) convert the songs. It generally works, but I’ve had to kill the process a few times as it’s gone haywire on me (with errors that make no sense). The UI of MediaMonkey is terrible though overall – I really don’t care for it (but we did pay for a lifetime subscription as it had a few features we found useful, but I wouldn’t use it as my every day player).

We tried the MP3QualityModifier from here, but it crashed and was also hard to get it to started with a large set of files.

I tried Foobar2000 with the converter plug-in, and that crashed after a while as well.

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Harry Potter Hangover

(Spotted while driving through southern Wisconsin a few weeks ago).

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I was forwarded this video after suggesting to someone from work that it would be such a great job to work on the committee that had to come up with this:

http://www.unece.org/trans/conventn/Conv_road_signs_2006v_EN.pdf

(some of the 226 pages of the actual road sign document …. sigh!)

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Read it here.

Thus our test: We ask ourselves, “Would I be willing to teach my Grandma how to use this over the phone?”. If the answer is “Definitely”, we know we’re doing well; if the answer is “Maybe”, we know we can do better; and if the answer is “No”, then it’s often time to rethink the whole thing.

Definitely a smart way to consider the usability of many features.

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“Alumna sues college because she hasn’t found a job”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/03/new.york.jobless.graduate/index.html

On July 24, she filed suit against the college in Bronx Supreme Court, alleging that Monroe’s "Office of Career Advancement did not help me with a full-time job placement. I am also suing them because of the stress I have been going through."

In her complaint, Thompson says she seeks $70,000 in reimbursement for her tuition and $2,000 to compensate for the stress of her three-month job search.

I’m sorry she hasn’t found a job after 3 whole months of job searching. That’s got to be so rough. Right. When I started years ago, it was normal to not have a job lined up right after graduation. I started about 3 months to the day after graduation. It was stressful for me and my parents. But, did I think about suing my college for me failing to get a job? No freakin’ way.

The article goes on to say that she had a 2.7 out of 4.0 for her GPA, and a solid attendance record. Wow, be still my heart. Clearly a superior GPA. Wait, not so much. (I’m not a big believer in the GPA system, but I can recognize that someone with a higher GPA may be a better candidate than one with a 2.7 GPA, and in the world economy and job market, every thing counts).

I’m skeptical that the school signed an agreement with Miss Thompson suggesting that they were obligated to find her an employer after her graduation.

She’s suing for the entire amount of her college degree – so here’s what I’d suggest the Bronx Supreme Court does:

Give her the money back and take away her diploma, as she clearly doesn’t need it.

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Take a look at the 428+ ways you can write the classic C “Hello World”  at the Hello World Collection.

There’s C#

// Hello World in Microsoft C# ("C-Sharp").

using System;

class HelloWorld
{
    public static int Main(String[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
        return 0;
    }
}

Python

# Hello World in Python
print "Hello World"

Good old QuickBASIC:

REM Hello World in QuickBASIC
PRINT "Hello World!"
END

XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- Hello World in XSLT -->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text>Hello World!</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

And even Commodore-64 assembler:

; Hello World for 6502 Assembler (C64)

ldy #0
beq in
loop:
jsr $ffd2
iny
in:
lda hello,y
bne loop
rts
hello: .tx "Hello World!"
       .by 13,10,0

Do you know any languages that aren’t listed (non-proprietary of course).

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