Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

links for 2008-04-12

• Sailing into the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch
  12 part documentary about the garbage in the pacific ocean. A must see.
  (tags: environment documentary gyre plastic garbage pacific ocean pollution toxic video)
• Subtext
  Watch the video, the whole thing. Make the time.
  (tags: programming language subtext research languages design dataflow education visual)
• Cleanly Migrate Your Subversion Repository To a GIT Repository
  (tags: programming git scm svn subversion tutorial)
• Google App Engine: Free and still barely worth it
  This blog post is what you get when the guy that runs the IT department for _ rants about Google App Engine. Did you know a $6 web host will give you 15,000 Gb (sic) transfer per month? Pure comedy. In case you think he has a point, read the comments.
  (tags: appengine google hosting scalability fud ignorance comedy .net fail)

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn

Computerworld: Windows is 'collapsing,' Gartner analysts warn

Gotta love this quote:

In 11 months, they captured 6.3% of their market. Apple's market share has gone from 9% in February 07 to 14% in February 08. So Vista captured 6.3% of less than 91% of the total market, less than 5.7%, but lost 5%. In the same time Apple has gained 5% of the total market and kept the 9% they already had.

"5 down, 95 to go" was Apple's slogan when they opened their retail stores. I bet Microsoft thought they were kidding.

According to OmniGroup's software update statistics today, Leopard has 34.1% of the Mac OS X market. Tiger, which is also newer than the OS Vista replaces (XP), has 65.5% of the Mac OS X market. That leaves 0.3% of the market running 10.3 or earlier.

Mac OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001, XP in October 2001. Actually, Mac OS X 10.1 was released a couple of weeks before Vista. Since Vista was released, Apple has also released 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5, each with many incremental updates, and Microsoft has released Vista, but they can't even get 10% of their own market to use it, compared to the 99.7% of Mac users that are using an OS significantly newer and better than XP.

Sssshhhh... it already has been. But don't tell them, they might wake up, do you really want anything else they come up with? Doesn't sound like it.

Regulations: Las Vegas Gaming Machines vs Voting Machines

A couple of summers ago I went to Vegas to discuss some innovative work for a Vegas casino that wanted to improve the customer experience with slot machines. I learned a lot about the regulations they are under, it was quite an eye opener. They couldn't even use Ethernet in the slot machines because its use was not yet approved by the regulatory rules.