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Enough with the April Fool’s Day!
Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I hate hate hate April Fool’s Day. You have to put up with no end to stupid press releases from humorless company drones who think it’s the height of cleverness and wit to announce a fake product (oh, you got us again Google!), lame jokes from coworkers, fake news […]
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It’s a pity humans don’t come with digital audio inputs…
I’d been having such a good time messing with GarageBand, that I decided to buy Logic Express, which is a watered down version of their professional music production software. It’s a remarkable tool. For about $300 you have what amounts to an unlimited rack of instruments at your disposal, including some really rare models of […]
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The Mother of all Funk Chords
This is pretty fantastic: It’s hard to stay mad at YouTube for too long when you find things like this.
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Should we blame the pilot for the Buffalo crash, or bureaucrats and trial lawyers?
Sometimes the only difference between anarchy and government regulation is paperwork. Recognizing this is helpful. Once you lose the blind faith, you realize that your safety is in your hands.
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E*TRADE to liquidate all proprietary mutual funds this week to raise capital
E*TRADE just sent a letter out to all mutual fund holders to the effect that they will be liquidating their entire family of index mutual funds this week. All funds will be cashed out by Friday: After long and serious consideration, E*TRADE Securities has made the decision to discontinue our family of proprietary index mutual […]
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Accelerating code using GCC’s prefetch extension
I recently started playing with GCC’s prefetch builtin, which allows the programmer to explicitly tell the processor to load given memory locations in cache. You can optionally inform the compiler of the locality of the data (i.e. how much priority the CPU should give to keep that piece of data around for later use) as […]
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The other other shoe to drop: big government in-the-loop?
This depression is historic in many ways, but one way that doesn’t get talked about a lot is that it’s the first time America has had a credit-based downturn with a government that is a major existing factor in the economy. Before the Great Depression, in the 1920s, government spending at all levels was around […]
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Classic Atlantic article on the diamond scam
One of the more useful things to be aware of as an American is the surprising ruthlessness of Madison Avenue’s manipulation. Nowhere is that more evident than in a classic Atlantic story from 1982 exposing how the public was fooled into thinking diamond rings are an integral part of marriage custom. I’d read it a […]
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Investment gains may become harder to find, long or short.
I had an interesting discussion with some folks last night. The question was whether it is possible for all investments to go down in the short term if things get bad enough. One conclusion was that it’s a harder question to answer than you might think. Do you consider perceived value, or just market price? […]
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Running Real’s Rhapsody in Linux
Every once in a while I have to put something actually useful up here. I just spent a while trying to get Rhapsody to work in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu 8.10. Having an entire music store at my disposal is one of the things I miss most from my Windows machine when I need to […]