Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor whose final lecture inspired millions, has died of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Pausch, 47, who turned the lecture into a book, said that no one would have been interested in his words of wisdom were he not a man in his 40s with a terminal illness.
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
Via Digg (via TechCrunch)
Today Google has launched Knol, its Wikipedia alternative that holds authors accountable for the articles they write. Each article is created by a team of authors, who receive attribution, and are allowed to take part in a rev-share for AdSense ads on their page.
I’m not entirely convinced that Knol will become that popular. This day in age, being first has a lot to do with a product’s success. While Knol address the one main criticism of Wikipedia, article integrity, that alone doesn’t look like enough to chip away at Wikipedia’s popularity and sheer volume of information. That being said, I do believe that the open editing of Wikipedia has held up better than most would expect. I’ll be interested to see how the perception of Wikipedia changes (particularly in academia) over the next several years.
Everyone’s favorite procrastination tool is due for it’s 2nd major makeover. I’ve been playing with the new version for a little while now and evidence of other social networking sites have made their way into Facebook’s new design. The look and feel is mostly the same; the single largest change is the merging of the newsfeed with the wall reminiscent of Twitter or Pownce. You’ll also notice the ability to clean up your profile by using tabs to organize all your content; applications no longer dominate the page. With these changes, emphasis is being put more on social interaction. While I like the direction Facebook is taking, most Facebook users will probably immediately oppose the change espescially given the fact that the Twitter-like concept of the new Facebook is still largely unfamiliar to most people. I fully expect hundreds of “Petition to change Facebook back to the way it was” groups to pop up.
Continue reading ‘The new face of Facebook’
Why so serious?
I went to see he midnight showing of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight. Remarkably, the film far surpassed the hype the marketing team built around the film. I left the theatre throughly impressed and the general response seems unanimous in the film’s favor. The Nolan brothers certainly have their work cut out for them for the next Batman film, but even if it doesn’t turn out as phenomenal as Dark Knight, they still deserve huge props for bringing critical legitimacy to comic book adaptations. One of the highlights of seeing the film at midnight was seeing people dress up.
It’ll be interesting to see if The Dark Knight can retain it’s 9.7 rating and current #1 spot on IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time. Any bets on the next Batman villain?
Today, I was chatting with an Apple Rep with a few questions as I am looking to up the RAM in my MacBook Pro to 4 GB. She directed me to this page.
Crazy expensive apple memory.
As much as I love Apple products, this does not help their image of being overly expensive. Apple in fact isn’t nearly as expensive as people thin and in fact in many cases even better priced than other manufacturers’ similarly configured machines. RAM hasn’t cost $200 for a long time now. So the bottom line is that I’m still looking for some cheap PC2-5300 RAM. Anyone know some good deals?
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