Jinn of Quality and Risk

What if Apple started a subscription music service, similar to the mobile phone subscription model? Sign up for one year, buy a discounted iPod, and pay a monthly $10-20 fee for unlimited access to as many songs as you can download and listen to on your iPod (or a limited number of songs per month, with additional ones at $1 each). They probably don't even need to discount the iPod. They do need access to a very complete, deep catalogue of music. 

/. notes that on 1993-Apr-22 a group of students at the University of Illinois released a little program called Mosaic for World-Wide Web browsing. Mosaic led to Netscape, which was famously eliminated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Before dying, Netscape had opened the gates of the dotcom follies. News.com has a special four-part series on the anniversary. 

Digital Photography Review: At the end of 2002 approximately 23 million U.S. households - nearly 20 percent - owned digital cameras. During the life cycle of a technology, a new product is often considered to have reached the early majority - or the mass market - after achieving 22 percent penetration. 

The relational database was a great invention and is a key element of modern, effective software architecture. NYT: Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retrieved from computers, died on Friday at his home in Williams Island, Fla. He was 79. ... Dr. Codd's idea, based on mathematical set theory, was to store data in cross-referenced tables, allowing the information to be presented in multiple permutations. ... Relational databases now lie at the heart of systems ranging from hospitals' patient records to airline flights and schedules. While working as a researcher at the I.B.M. San Jose Research Laboratory in the 1960's and 70's, Dr. Codd wrote several papers outlining his ideas. To his frustration, I.B.M. largely ignored his work... It was not until 1978 that Frank T. Cary, then chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., ordered the company to build a product based on Dr. Codd's ideas. But I.B.M. was beaten to the market by Lawrence J. Ellison, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who used Dr. Codd's papers as the basis of a product around which he built a start-up company that has since become the Oracle Corporation. In 1981, Codd received the ACM Turing Award, the highest honour (Nobel-equivalent) in computer science. And that same year I started to program, in UCSD Pascal on a Terak machine. 

The Law of Identity holds universally, from the Earth to Alpha Centauri. Douglas Adams: In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. 

Guardian: [St George] was said to be a native of Cappadocia who, according to the Byzantine hagiographer, Metaphrastes, rose to high military rank under the Roman emperor Diocletian (AD 284-305). He is supposed to have been arrested on account of his Christian beliefs, tortured, and executed at Nicomedia in the year 303 after which his remains were transferred to Lydda. ... Whatever their provenance, legends of St George clearly circulated widely across Europe in the post-Roman world and the first definite reference to him in England is in the eighth century. His first connection with the dragon is no less clear. Heroic tales of dragon slaying were the stuff of innumerable legends in the medieval world and it could be that the cult of St George was grafted onto some local myth, such as that of Perseus who was said to have slain at Joppa, near Lydda, a serpent that threatened the city of Andromeda. It was probably the Crusaders of the 12th century who first invoked the name of St George in battle as a warrior of Christianity and in 1222 his festival day was officially established in England. The BBC indicates that: The Red Cross of St George is England's national flag and it also forms part of Britain's Union Jack. ... In the Middle East, Christians invoke his powers to help exorcise demons. 

Search engines are more valuable than labour-intensive directories, CNET explains: Once the primary road signs to navigating the Internet, directories have moved to the shoulder. They are being displaced by algorithmic search tools and commercial services that many people ... now believe do a better job in satisfying Web surfers and advertisers. Being listed in the Yahoo directory has become barely relevant, if at all.