What Does Google Earth Do Again?

Maybe we should really look for the lost island of Atlantis now?

Jetty 6 with Continuations

Jetty 6's feature list is very tempting:

The 6.0.0alpha3 release of Jetty is now available and provides a 2.4 servlet server in 400k jar, with only 140k of dependencies (2.6M more if you want JSP!!!). But as well as being small, fast, clean and sexy, Jetty 6 supports a new feature called Continuations that will allow scalable AJAX applications to be built, with threadless waiting for asynchronous events.

Wow! I love small, fast and continuation! Gotta try it out!

Jetty was very attractive when Tomcat was big and slow. Then Tomcat 5.5.9 became small enough and very fast. Now here come good reasons to use Jetty again. Can't wait.

One Secret Ingredient of Steve Jobs

Making decisions from the gut, as opposed to by focus groups, is one of the secret ingredients that enables Apple to produce one beauty after another. Original Time article is here.

JVM Performance Comparisons

Here are some performance comparisons between the Sun, IBM and JRockit 1.4 JVMs. I am not so interested in the 64-bit vs. 32-bit angle but relative performance between the JVMs. It's quite interesting to see that JRockit is significantly better than IBM and Sun's. I wish for the same comparisons between the 1.5 series.

Why Microsoft Can't Best Google

Excerpt from Why Microsoft Can't Best Google:

Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day.

This is very true. If you read Mark Lucovsky (a former Microsoft Distinguished Engineer)'s thoughs on how Microsoft ships software, it's pretty clear Microsoft is a dinosaur now. I welcome the sunsetting of Microsoft.

Starbucks in Escher's World

I love Escher's work, particularly this one.

Beauty after Beauty

It's quite interesting to observe while Apple keeps bringing us beauty after beauty (today it's the iPod nano), other companies just keep struggling to break out of mediocrity. Is innovation in Apple's genes or is it just Jobs?