Events

Reader AT actually met Tom Shanks, the chief programmer behind the ACS Atlases, and corrects my understanding of how the ACS team put it together: Contrary to what you assume in your post, Tom Shanks did not hack his atlas into an Apple II. ACS was rather professional in their IT. The worldwide city database with longitude and latitude they had licensed from on of the big atlas (map atlas) publishers, if I remember correctly Rand McNally. The timezone history data they had collected from numerous...

I've now set up the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ at Digital River, a software-distribution company. You can now buy developer, commercial per-server, and non-commercial per-site licenses for reasonable prices. Check out the overview and SDK (reg.req.) pages for tons o' info. You can also check out the no-nonsense license agreement before you buy.

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ has had support for the tzinfo database for several years now. Weather Now uses it; so do a few of my clients. Like the lazy software developer I am, however, I never put up a decent demonstration of the code, which might, you know, make someone want to buy it. Well, the documentation, she is here. Licensing, you will be shocked to learn, is available for a modest fee.

The U.S. government is an insurance company with an army: The vast bulk of its spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt. But what about recent deficits? They’re caused mainly by a fall in revenue and a mostly automatic increase in spending on safety-net programs. Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers. And if you want smaller government, either you’re...

To better understand the facts behind Astrolabe’s stupid trolling quixotic lawsuit against the guys who coordinated the worldwide time-zone database (tzinfo), I bought copies of the Shanks Amercian and International atlases that Astrolabe claims to own. (I went through the secondary market, so I didn’t actually give Astrolabe any money.) First, an update. According to Thomas Eubanks of the IETF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken over Arthur Olson’s legal defense. Mazel tov. I expect to see a...

Despite tons of research that support the anthropomorphic climate change theory, some people persist in the belief that the data does not support it. And yet, this week, there's more data: [A] new study of current data and analysis by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature...estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what its head, Richard...

A British plastic surgeon recently announced his findings after a months-long investigation of a particularly British institution: It sounds almost like parody – a top consultant plastic surgeon spends three months studying models appearing on Page 3 of a bestselling British red-top newspaper. Later this month he reveals his findings: the mathematical proportions of the perfect breast. This year [Patrick Mallucci, Consultant Plastic Surgeon at University College London and the Royal Free Hospitals,]...

Yesterday the Tribune reported on Groupon scaling back their IPO, from which they had hoped to raise the equivalent of Norway's GDP. Today's Economist has more: Groupon created a new market. This is a boon to consumers, but confers no lasting “first-mover” advantage on Groupon. Its business model is unpatentable and simple to replicate, so there are already more than 20 copycats. Groupon aspires to be global, but the markets it serves are intensely local. Internet selling is best suited to “experience...

The Tribune is reporting that Groupon, one of several thousand companies that strikes deals with vendors, has scaled back its IPO: The size of the sale, expected to be completed in the next two weeks, could be $500 million to $700 million under plans to be disclosed in advance of the company's roadshow beginning in the next few days, the people said. The size is meant to cut the amount of stock being sold at what may be a knock-down valuation, in hopes that more shares can be sold later at higher...

I can't think for a moment what those odd folks at #OWS are protesting. It couldn't be crap like this, could it? Buoyed by one-time gains from accounting changes and the sale of assets, Bank of America reported a $6.23 billion profit for the third-quarter Tuesday, even as weakness on Wall Street hammered underlying results and the firm surrendered its position as the country’s largest bank by assets. The other major commercial banks that have reported earnings in recent days posted profits of around $4...