Bob Congdon

[Split screen: showing Krusty with the American flag behind him; for his Democratic opponent, the background was a Soviet flag. Devil horns were superimposed on his head.]

Fox News Announcer: Welcome to Fox News, your voice for evil. Tonight, we'll be interviewing the top two candidates for Springfield's 24th Congressional district. For the Republicans, beloved children's entertainer, Krusty the Clown. And for the Democrats, this guy.

Democrat: Hey, I have a name.

Fox News Anchor: Yes, I'm sure you do, comrade. I do appreciate your being here. You're usually so mired in sleaze, it must be an effort to come down to the studio.

Krusty: May I say something?

Fox News Anchor: Certainly, Congressman.

Democrat: He hasn't won yet!

Fox News Anchor: You make a very adulterous point. We'll now conclude this debate with a Krusty campaign commercial.

• Generics permit classes, structs, interfaces, delegates, and methods to be parameterized by the types of data they store and manipulate. Generics are useful because they provide stronger compile-time type checking, require fewer explicit conversions between data types, and reduce the need for boxing operations and run-time type checks.

• Anonymous methods allow code blocks to be written "in-line" where delegate values are expected. Anonymous methods are similar to lambda functions in the Lisp programming language. C# 2.0 supports the creation of "closures" where anonymous methods access surrounding local variables and parameters.

• Iterators are methods that incrementally compute and yield a sequence of values. Iterators make it easy for a type to specify how the foreach statement will iterate over its elements.

• Partial types allow classes, structs, and interfaces to be broken into multiple pieces stored in different source files for easier development and maintenance. Additionally, partial types allow separation of machine-generated and user-written parts of types so that it is easier to augment code generated by a tool.

Be helpful to someone. It is that simple. It is the single most important thing you can do to improve your score on Google.

Tim: I would never pay to play something like this.

John: I'd sooner jump up and down on one foot. By the way, is this supposed to be tennis or Ping-Pong?

Becky: Ping-Pong.

Gordon: It doesn't even go over the net. It goes through it. I don't even think that thing in the middle is a net.

Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.

John: Tim, how could you miss that? It was going like 1 m.p.h.

So I'd like to suggest an additional feature to those working on spam filters: a "punish" mode which, if turned on, would spider every url in a suspected spam n times, where n could be set by the user.

The huge volume of the spam, which has so far worked in the spammer's favor, would now work against him, like a branch snapping back in his face. Auto-retrieving spam filters would drive the spammer's costs up, and his sales down: his bandwidth usage would go through the roof, and his servers would grind to a halt under the load, which would make them unavailable to the people who would have responded to the spam.

Pump out a million emails an hour, get a million hits an hour on your servers.

Catch cb;
int err = 0;
if ((err = cb.try()) == 0) {
   // normal code path
   // we can pass cb to methods if we need a non-local exit
   // if an error occurs here we can call cb.throw();
}
else (
   // an error has occurred, the error code is in err
}

// Class def
public class Catch {
private:
   jmp_buf m_env;
public:
   inline Catch() { }
   inline int try() { return setjmp(&m_env); }
   inline void throw(int err) { longjmp(m_env, err); }
}

There is no real limit on the number of letters that Unicode can define and in fact they have gone beyond 65,536 so not every unicode letter can really be squeezed into two bytes, but that was a myth anyway.

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffeinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

"His daddy insisted on it because Timberlands were the pride of his wardrobe. The alternative was Reebok," said the 32-year-old nurse, who is now divorced. "I wanted Kevin."

If you're hoping for some super-duper neo-PIM to or super-filter or super-law to come along to make your life easier, spare yourself the agony and just think ahead: it is NOT a sustainable solution if it is still called "eMail". eMail is thirty years old, and we owe it a great debt of honor, but it has been pushed well beyond its design center and it's time to move on. Incrementally, progressively, but most definitely.

Today, MIT is announcing the publication of 500 courses through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. MIT OCW offers free and open access to the educational materials from all 33 of the Institute's academic disciplines and all five of its schools. This milestone represents a significant technical and organizational achievement for the Institute, the first on the way to publishing virtually all of MIT's courses online.

This is what Apple does. This is what they are known for and why their design team is so famous and why they win so many awards and why they engender such passionate devotion from their adherents and why Macs are still far, far superior to PCs and always will be. It's true.

Apple actually cares about this sort of thing. Which is odd. Which is rare. Which is why they deserve gushing adulation now and then. They actually put the time and energy and labor into creating a gorgeous package most people will toss anyway, and why they include a first-time welcome experience, with subtle music, with flowing lush clean graphics, one that will never be repeated, just because.

This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil.