If all goes as planned, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," Michael Chabon's 1988 novel that put him on the literary map, will be made into an $8 million to $9 million movie starring a yet-to-be-cast actor in the lead, plus Peter Sarsgaard and Sienna Miller.

Still to be decided, however, is whether the movie in which Pittsburgh is a virtual character will be made in Pittsburgh.

Chabon's Pittsburgh movie may not be filmed here

# In Q1 alone, 24 Oracle customers (including Siebel, Peoplesoft, JDE, and Retek customers) committed to replacing their software with offerings from SAP. In Q1 there were 27 new maintenance contracts for TommorrowNow. To put that in perspective, there have been zero OFFSAP wins, not just in the quarter but to date.

# Oracle’s stated Q3 2006 application license revenue is 35% less than the Q3 2004 combined application license revenues of Oracle, PeopleSoft, Retek and Siebel prior to any Oracle acquisition.

# With Q3 2006 world-wide application license revenue of $269 million, Oracle sold roughly as much software as SAP sold in the Americas alone in our Q1 2006.

Venture Chronicles | SAP Earnings

Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.

I think McKinsey reports should come with a statutory warning. Why? These are the same people who told AT&T back in the day, that mobile phones will be a niche market.

GigaOM : » In McKinsey We Trust.. oh oh

Somewhere between theoretical constructs like finite automata and Turing machines and feature-rich programming languages like Perl and C lives a world of misfits. These so-called esoteric languages frequently employ obfuscation and fustian as central design goals; but that doesn't mean you can't do some neat (useless) things with them.

Programming doesn't have to be easy | MetaFilter

But the damned comment spam just keeps flowing past the CAPTCHAs and onto my pages.

The Internet Axis of Evil wins another round.

A VC: CAPTCHAs Don't Work

Intending no disrespect I assert that those who ask this question... are asking the wrong question. A more useful question would be: why would six honorable men do this at best controversial, at worst questionable thing?

Have the generals forgotten their schooling in our nation’s tradition of military subordination to civilian control? Is their true goal really to compel the resignation of the SecDef? Are they petty men working off petty grievances by thumbing their noses in public at a man they just don’t like? Are they working to get every incumbent up for election this year thrown out of office?

If your answer to any of those questions was “Yes,” then you have assumed these six generals are simple men, incapable of subtlety, whose public actions should be taken at their simple face value.
I‘m telling you this knife-fight ain’t about Iraq: it’s about Iran!

Well written piece based on a strong understanding of military conduct and military honor.

But Iran is the future, and for the soldiers with recent or continuing access to the details of our nation’s military plans and intentions, that elite group of men and women who *know* what is going to happen in the months ahead… the future will always be classified!

The Heart of the Matter: Iran and Iraq

In an effort to take on the Google’s online storage efforts, it seems Microsoft is about to launch a new online storage service. The word of this online storage drive effort is embedded deep in the Fortune magazine story on Ray Ozzie. (Business 2.0’s next issue has an interview with Ozzie by John Battelle. Its a good read!)

GigaOM : » Get Ready for M(icrosoft) Drive

Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized or articles written, adding an extra monitor will considerably raise your output - 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

Multitaskers find that a 2nd monitor beats Alt-Tab - Technology - International Herald Tribune

I spoke with Balaji (our marshalling guru) about changing the element-centric (upper) version to the attribute-centric (lower) version, and it turned out to be a single-line of code change. So my natural question was "why were we using the element-centric version which is much trickier for a programming language to parse?" And the answer was that several people considered the element-centric version easier to read, which I must admit it is - especially once the objects start having many many attributes and as you start having long lists of objects.

This is what puzzled me. Structurally, the element-based system is much more complex, but most people considered it much easier to read. So why is it easier for humans to "parse" one version, and easier for a programming language to parse the other. Both are textual in nature, so it's not like the apples-to-oranges question "why is it easier for computers to understand binary than text while binary is inscrutable to humans?". No, this one is more subtle. The only thing I can think of is that the human brain is sophisticated enough that rather than being put off by the extra structure, it takes advantage of it to more easily chunk the information into digestible nuggets. I.e. the element-based form changes the "person" definitions into something resembling a paragraph rather than just a list of run-on sentences.

IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Building tools to support software developers

I think it's becoming clear now that AJAX enabled applications generate a higher load on an application server than a non AJAX application. I guess customers will have to size their boxes appropriately as a result. The problem is related to the fact that an AJAX enabled pages simply send more requests to the server because of their high level of interaction versus a conventional web page.

High level discussion on whether this is true.

/dev/websphere: AJAX and its impact on servers