Saturday, January 25, 2003

Home sales, prices rise The daily Review (Hayward) Jan 25 2003 9:01AM ET [Moreover - Bay Area news] base on the same report as story as below, but the headline comments on the numbers, not the conclusions of the report. 3:22:02 PM

Yesterday, talking with Bill Hambrecht ,... Yesterday, talking with Bill Hambrecht, I asked how they do finance in the movie business, where they routinely raise tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars for highly speculative projects. I remarked that software can't raise that kind of money these days, really never has, yet the western economy is built on software more and more (that's why identity theft is such a pervasive problem). He said that the distribution system is where the money comes from. The movie theaters! Why? Because they need a flow of new products, or their industry dies. So what's the analogy in software? The big software companies. Microsoft. Adobe. Macromedia. Oracle. IBM. Apple. SAP. BEA. Network Associates. Of course. That's the system we all figured we'd be part of in the early 80s. That's the system we started to build. We lost our way somewhere. We've been getting the money from civil employee pension funds and university endowments, which have little stake in the success of our industry, and are highly risk averse. That's why the venture capital industry seems so crazy when technologists look at it. They're backed in a contradictory way. Everything was fine as long as they were delivering obscene returns like clockwork. Hit a glitch, the whole thing falls apart. More to think about. I'll blog it all. [Scripting News] 3:14:37 PM

Bay Area home prices stabilizing BayArea.com Jan 25 2003 9:00AM ET [Moreover - Bay Area news] 3:13:59 PM

TWIRL: Are 1024-bit RSA Keys Unsafe? [Slashdot] 3:04:55 PM

Online primer to Japanese emoticons Fun and extensive guide to one- and two-byte Japanese emoticons. Why can't English ASCII emoticons be this expressive? We have "smiley." We have "smiley with tongue sticking out." They have, "He gets angry internally but he doesn't express his emotion outside," and "here I offer you a cup of steaming pixel-tea as a gesture of hospitality and good will."LinkDiscuss (via buffoonery; thanks Reverse Cowgirl!). [Boing Boing] 1:55:45 PM