Year: 2002

Cute letters to Einstein from kids.

Dear Sir,

I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought that you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time…

Tyfanny

Dear Tyfanny,

… I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however. …

Einstein

via MetaFilter

Does education really pay? An interesting article on Forbes arguing that education does not cause higher salaries, but is merely correlated with it. The logic sequence is broadly:

• Labour markets want smart people.
• Smart people tend to want education.
• Hence labour markets appear to want educated people.

Microsoft (2002) vs IBM (1982). An article on whether Microsoft will go the IBM Way.

Microsoft’s ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust.

Gates beats Stallman in India. via RobotWisdom

Stars of Amazon — Anita’s article on book reviewers at Amazon. via Anita

Interesting article on the Kelkar report on tax reforms. The point about simplifying tax and removing exemptions reminds me of a statement by George Winston in Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders:

The purpose of taxes is to provide revenue for the country’s government so that the government can serve the people. But along the way we’ve created an entire industry that takes billions of dollars from the public. Why? To explain a tax code that gets more complex every year, a code that the enforcement people themselves do not understand with a sufficient degree of confidence to undertake responsibility for getting it right.

Well, frankly, I thought Clancy was being naive.

But then, I should also keep in mind that Mozilla is open source. So they’ll keep coming out with cool stuff like Mozilla’s Bayesian spam filter and type ahead find. via Boing Boing

101 things you can do in Mozilla and not IE. But apart from 1. Tabbed browsing and 2. Popup blocking, I don’t quite use the other features. Mozilla (and Opera) still need some catching up to do. via New Architect

Nice strategy, Microsoft. Users aren’t upgrading to your new products. So you decide to focus on security and force upgrades. And, in the meantime, sue open-source competitors and spend lots of money to beat Linux.

Omar Zabir’s portal. Let’s you use Windows XP without having Windows XP. Well, actually, it’s just a tour of Windows XP features, but you pretty much get to “use” XP. Quite a piece of programming! via MetaFilter