Mini book review: Foundation Trilogy

The foundation trilogy was written by Isaac Asimov around 1950. It consists of the three books called Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. There are also a bunch of other books related to this narrative which as a whole are called Foundation Series.

The trilogy – it has to be said – is not a milestone in feminist science fiction. Even thousands of years in the future, women are responsible for cooking and war is for men. But that and some repetitions in the three books aside, the (short) trilogy consists of a unique story line which I rather enjoyed.

3 out of 5 manly psychologists

Amazon Reviews and how they can be exploited by companies

Matthew Garrett blogged about how the review system on amazon can be exploited by companies via free or discounted products.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Amazon’s review model is broken, but it’s not obvious how to fix it. When search ranking is tied to reviews, companies have a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to obtain positive reviews. What we’re left with for now is having to laboriously click through a number of products to see whether their rankings come from thoughtful and detailed reviews or are just a mass of 5 star one liners.

The whole blog article contains a lot of interesting details.

Windows 7 Review

Windows 7 Review

Quelle: xkcd.com

KDE year 2008 review

Aaron Seigo reviews the year 2008 in terms of KDE activities.

2008 will undoubtedly be remembered most often as the year we moved from the era of KDE3 into that of KDE4. The 4.0 release was made in January with an accompanying release event at Google’s HQ in California, USA. While 4.0 was a widely misunderstood release, it was also the release that set the pace for the rest of the year … and what a pace it was.

But he does not only looks backwards, he provides insight to the future of KDE

We’re still a technology project, of course, and 2009 will see the release of both 4.2 and 4.3. KDE 4.2 is already shaping up to be a truly remarkable release, quite possibly the best KDE we’ve ever put out there. KDE 4.3 will undoubtedly be yet another leap up the slope towards user interface greatness, and that should be happening right around the time of Akademy this year. Such timing!

Read about more details of the technical, the marketing and the art side of the year 2008 of KDE.