TMZ says it's not true that Ballmer has bought the Clippers. #
LA Times: Steve Ballmer to buy Clippers for $2 billion. #
Nieman: NYT is restructuring its Page 1 meetings to be more digital.#
Farhad Manjoo: The Soylent Revolution Will Not Be Pleasurable.#
A free idea for any publication. Use blog posts about your articles in the LTTE section. Encourages people to write about your stories.#
North Korea driving instructions come to Google Maps.#
Today's image is a delicious plate of oysters with all the trimmings! #
Farhad says: "Soylent is the most joyless new tech to hit the world since we first laid eyes on MS-DOS."#
I haven't laid eyes on Soylent, but I remember very well when MS-DOS was new, and there was plenty of joy to it. We were coming from a world of mainframes, the computers were far away, and owned by big companies, the government or universities. They weren't ours. And the Apple II was grossly underpowered for the kinds of applications we were trying to fit in it, when the PC came out in 1981. #
The combination of all the computing power being ours to use as we pleased -- and the relative simplicity of MS-DOS, made it more than awesome. It was magical. The potential seemed unlimited. And in hindsight, what came from it was nothing less than a transformation of our culture and economy. So it's not fair to say MS-DOS had no joy. It had plenty. #
My current favorite TV commercial is the new Dish commercial featuring a kangaroo with an Australian accent and a helpful but lazy and judgemental attitude. All communicated in a few simple phrases in a car with a mom and two misbehaving kids in the back seat. #
The actress doing the voice of the kangaroo is Rebel Wilson. Here's an interview she did with Conan O'Brien. I love the whole thing, and I also loved the previous Hopper campaign with the Boston family.#
Must be a good agency working on it. #
I now develop in:#
1. JavaScript in the browser.#
2. JavaScript on the server in node.js.#
3. OPML Editor on Mac, for writing code.#
I've become reasonably proficient in #2, that's the new thing in 2014. #
Google self-reports on its racial and gender make-up.#
No doubt there will be a lot of tweets expressing all kinds of feelings about this, but if it's anything like the other times issues like this have come up, not much will be said about what can be done about it, to change the way things work.#
To the extent that there's a problem with Google itself, they are doing something, by owning up to it. This communicates internally that they want to change, and externally, extends an invitation to genders and races that are not well-represented, that Google is a good place for them to seek employment.#
As a programmer, I'd like to see much more diversity in our ranks. I think this is morally the right thing to do, but more important -- it will make our software better. When only a very specific kind of person is developing tech products, they lack balance, they narrowly reflect the point of view of those people. We will do better when the people who make software are more diverse. #
I don't hire people, so I can't do much to help people find jobs. But I am involved in a number of open source projects, and more are on the way, and welcome participation by people of all ages, genders and races. And I don't mean that in a lukewarm, politically correct way. #
BTW, one thing I didn't see in the Google report is an indication of how old their workforce is. We still have some work to do, clearly! #