Buying Polonium 210

Apparently you can buy Polonium in potentially lethal quantities on-line.

Making Jeans

It takes 12 minutes and 50 seconds to make a pair of jeans.

Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0

People rarely know what they really want.

Google VP Marissa Mayer just spoke at the Web 2.0 Conference and offered tidbits on what Google has learned about speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction.Marissa started with a story about a user test they did. They asked a group of Google searchers how many search results they wanted to see. Users asked for more, more than the ten results Google normally shows. More is more, they said.So, Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html

The Parable of the Two Programmers

The Parable of the Two Programmers

Plus ca change...