But one day, the company could “open source” the code that underpins the OS—giving it away for free. So says Mark Russinovich, one of the company’s top engineers.
“It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich says. “It’s a new Microsoft.”
From Wired’s An Open Source Windows Is ‘Definitely Possible’. In 2007 I predicted Windows will be Open Source by 2017, we’ll see if I end up being right on that one.
Have you heard of being meat drunk?
It would be nice to imagine your children won’t abuse any substances, but also unrealistic. The question is what to warn them against most strongly.
Aaron Carroll asks Alcohol or Marijuana? A Pediatrician Faces the Question.
As a counterpoint to yesterday’s link to the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, here’s a Washington Post story, Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley.
The CEO of Automattic worked with the co-founder of WordPress directly, mediated by the head of the WordPress Foundation. Matt Mullenweg said the meetings were very productive.
As inside-baseball WordPress-focused April Fools go, this one is pretty funny: WordPress to be bundled in Jetpack with mission to power 50% of the web.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
John Perry Barlow’s classic A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
Fun read by J.D. Andre: What Calvin and Hobbes taught me about mindfulness. I’ve been practicing daily with the Calm app.
Cool distributed work article: Why I decided to go on a cowork vacation in Bali for a month .
To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes.
Ever wondered how to win the U.S. memory championship?
The New Yorker has a great overview as Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty.
Are you in or near Tokyo? I’m going to be in town and doing a meetup this Sunday, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with the local community. I’m told you can read about it on this link: WordBench東京 3月スペシャル『春のマット祭り』 – WordBench東京.
DNSPerf is a cool service that measures the speed of different DNS providers, Cloudflare and WordPress.com rank very well.
Why Remote Work Thrives in Some Companies and Fails in Others, by Sean Graber in the Harvard Business Review.
Why are some organizations reaping benefits but others not? Conditions are seemingly ideal: More and more people are choosing to work remotely. By one estimate, the number of remote workers in the U.S. grew by nearly 80% between 2005 and 2012. Advances in technology are keeping pace. About 94% of U.S. households have access to broadband Internet — one of the most important enablers of remote work. Workers also have access to an array of tools that allow them to videoconference, collaborate on shared documents, and manage complex workflows with colleagues around the world. So what’s the problem?
One of my favorite essays of all time is by David Ramsey in Oxford American on Lil Wayne, called I Will Forever Remain Faithful. I’m used to movies, books, even songs making me tear up occasionally, but not essays, but this one does every time. It’s worth Googling the songs mentioned and quoted in the headings, it gives an interesting soundtrack to the writing and after listening the essay is worth re-reading. I miss that old Lil Wayne, too.
I don’t think I’ve said it publicly before, but Ramsey’s essay was actually the inspiration for my 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number which is one of the most popular pieces of writing I’ve published.
Great talk introducing Grist.org and the state of the environment, including a number of things to be excited about.
The Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center has an awesome ambient sound system that sounds acoustic and full from every point in the 500-seat room.. Hat tip: Niall.
In truth, Medium’s main product is not a publishing platform, but the promotion of a publishing platform. This promotion brings readers and writers onto the site. This, in turn, generates the usage data that’s valuable to advertisers. Boiled down, Medium is simply marketing in the service of more marketing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for advertisers. It is, therefore, utterly superfluous.
and
As a fan of minimalism, however, I think that term is misapplied here. Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth.
and
To get his fracking permit on your territory, Mr. Williams (the multibillionaire) needs to persuade you (the writer) that a key consideration in your work (namely, how & where you offer it to readers) is a “waste of time.”
Matthew Butterick’s essay The billionaire’s typewriter has a fairly complete and scathing takedown of Medium’s rhetoric, promise for writers, and product offering. Hat tip: Edward Aten.
“For every McDonald’s you blow up, ‘they’ will build two. Instead of slapping a wad of Semtex between the Happy Meals and the plastic tray, work your way up through the ranks, take over the board of Directors and turn the company into an international laughing stock.”
Sounds nice in theory. But I knew corporations were more resilient than that. Sabotaging the system from inside was as much a pipe dream as changing it through politics and protest.
From Prada Revolutionaries: Confessions of a Recovering Solutionist.
I’m very honored to be chosen as part of the
World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders class of 2015 alongside some really amazing folks. I spoke at Davos a few years ago and it was a very interesting experience — I think they snuck me in on a media badge, which is why I wrote a post about the fifth estate for them.