Dru’s Blog

Computer Chronicles > Artificial Intelligence

How far we have come. This video has some shots of old symbolics machines and Dr. McCarthy answering really bad questions on Lisp and AI.

A 2002 essay by Guy Steele, one of the inventors of Scheme, admitting that objects are not a bad concept. It is always good to keep this in mind to contrast with Paul Graham and (many other Lispers) position on this topic.

Paul Graham did one of his essays on how Yahoo lost it.

From my perspective, it is purely about success. Too much of it will kill a company. At that point in time (mid to late 90′s), Yahoo had some really, really smart people. Once a company becomes enormously successful, it is really hard to keep those people. Once you lose the good people, you better have something in place to attract other good or great people. Yahoo did not do that, so here they are. It is amazing how these companies like Yahoo and AOL can continue to have valid businesses for quite some time.

All of this is not a bad thing, however. This is a form of corporate evolution. Those who were successful will go off and start or invest in other new and innovative companies.

This one feature will probably enable google to become significantly more relevant in the social networking space. Address book or contact management innovation here is long overdue.

a little late on this, but good geek entertainment holds up for months

I Use Couch DB from Couchio on Vimeo.

This video has been floating around and finally steve said it was worth watching. He is right. Kind of a cool story told in video of the Atari 2600 ET Creator talking about the creation of some of the games. There are two videos and I recommend watching both.

Just recently, Gmail launched a new feature which I find indispensable. The big new feature is ‘inline images’. This is the ability to drag a picture right into the content area of an email. Prior to this, if you wanted to send an image, you could only send it as an attachment. Inline images are essential when trying to communicate complex information.

They key to this feature was modern browser support. Browsers just didn’t have the ability to allow you to drag a file from your desktop into a browser window and send that information to the site you were using. This is going to enable a lot of great things besides just ‘inline images’ in email.

Anyways, a sample screen shot is below. Just go to the link above and enable the feature. It will really make sending images so much easier.

As far as web-mail goes, I never expected it to get this far from back in the Rocketmail days. This feature is just another nail in the Outlook coffin. Webmail is now nearly as good and nearly superior to desktop mail applications. There are a few other problems still, but the plusses easily outweigh the minuses. Web apps continue to get better and better and better.