Scott Yang's Playground

Via Reddit, Who Killed the Software Engineer? “One of the most ill-considered steps that universities took was to adopt Java as the most widely used language in introductory programming courses…” Why are the universities replacing Miranda/Haskell/Modula-2 with Java/C#? Because that’s what the IT industry uses, but not necessarily because they are good languages to learn [...]

SMH: Worst day in Australian stock market in more than 18 years, where All Ordinaries fell 408.9 points, or 7.26 percent. Tomorrow is probably going to be ask bad, if not worse, after US starts trading this week. It was RED on the trading screen throughout the day. “Don’t panic!!!” the analyst said. I don’t [...]

Bought a new toy today off eBay. Yes, the ASUS Eee PC 701 with 4GB SSD and 512MB RAM, for a bit over 400 bucks second hand. First impressions: Small. Not tiny, but very small. The above picture shows its size comparing to my Dell Latitude D630. Booting up and shutting down is fast. Very [...]

Via Jason Calacanis, thanks to Mahalo Daily for compressing Steve Jobs’ 2008 MacWorld Keynote into 60 seconds, I have just saved 89 minutes of my life! Yes, it is better and better.

Big news today. Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for around $1 Billion, in $800 million cash and $200 million options. Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world’s fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 [...]

All right. I guess everyone has seen the new MacBook Air when Mr. Stevie pulled it out from the brown paper bag. Wow, it is thin! According to the Apple website, MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. [...]

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post, where I looked at Network Solutions’ domain tasting practise. It has long been warned on various Internet forums that you should not make WHOIS queries on registrars’ web interface if you do not intend to buy straight away. Your queries might be logged by the dodgy registrar [...]

Gizmodo: Microsoft’s Children’s Book on Windows Home Server. Don’t expect to find that on Anna and Elsie‘s bookshelf though! Basically the story is: Servers bores the adults working in the boring office. Although many servers live in data centres… But the Windows Home Server is fun! Hopefully more fun than that dreadful Windows Vista! Daddy [...]

Network Solutions is the best because they registered Scott-Yang-Rocks.com even before I asked them to! All I did was making a WHOIS query on their website to check the availability of this domain, and they have registered that domain without me going to the checkouts! How can I say bad things about a company that [...]

High Availability on the new search engine startup Blekko competing against Google, and uses Machiavelli as analogy to the search engine business. “Google is the Ottomon empire. Allegiance is given to Google because people are getting paid. Defeating Google will take total war, assuming the prince has not turned the people against him, but once [...]