The Maya people were wrong. This will be your year!

Enjoy.

Quite interesting. The world’s population is expected to hit seven billion in the next few weeks, and the BBC has an interesting site up to illustrate what an enormous number of people that is. Fun too, you can see what your approximate number you were in the long of people at your time or birth.

Check which one you are here.

As an official member of Generation X I found this post by Mat Honan quite brilliant: Generation X Doesn’t Want To hear It.

The news of Steve Jobs’ death last week was sad and, to some, sudden. It generated (and is still generating) a lot of buzz, a veritable outpouring of articles, blogs, columns, talks, speeches and books along the lines of “what a great man we’ve lost, what are we to do now?”

Let me be perfectly frank: I do agree that Jobs was a great innovator, and to some degree a visionary in the computer, on-line and entertainment business. I do not agree that he was the giant almost god-like superman that he is being portrayed as. In these cases it almost feels as if all writers and responders are one-upping each other in the superlatives used to describe the man.
Let’s not forget the at times abrasive personality and fuck you attitude displayed and the fact that he completely ignored the people and companies that helped Apple through the hard times once Apple had risen again. Yes, I am talking of Adobe, the one major company that kept publishing their products for Apple’s waning platform throughout the slow years, but was shafted by Jobs as soon as he thought himself bigger than anyone. What aggravated me was the fact that Jobs slagged off Adobe’s products and technology while his real reasons were purely commercial. Jobs was the King of Closed Ecosystem Publishing.

Anyway, Steve Jobs’ passing is sad, but not world-ending. So please stop writing the weepy drivel that has been pouring out of my RSS reader for the past week, and maybe spend some time remembering some other greats in our business. Dennis Ritchie died yesterday, and with his passing goes a man that has meant more for the computer industry but who has been doing his work in the background for years. Let’s not forget that Jobs’ OSX runs on a grandchild of Mr. Ritchie’s invention UNIX and is programmed using a version of Mr. Ritchie’s other invention C.
So grieve Jobs but honor Ritchie, publicly and loudly.

Oh snap, the thing that everybody IN THE WORLD predicted would happen, happened.

Some Belgian newspapers sued Google in 2006 because Google was linking to them and the wanted money. Now the courts have ruled in their favor, they got some money and (of course) Google stopped linking to them. And now they’re complaining that they are being “unfairly punished” because Google is no longer sending them traffic.

Well DUH! Einstein, what did you actually think would happen? You bit the hand that feeds you, i.e. sue the site that is sending you traffic, and now they cut you off and you whine like spanked little children? And you wonder why the whole world thinks you’re money-grabbing bungholes who are desperately clinging on to a dying business model? And why Belgians are universally giggled at?

As Mike Masnick put it: “So, let me get this straight. When Google links to them, it’s ‘theft.’ But when they don’t link to them, it’s ‘harsh retaliation.’ How does that work?”

More info at Techdirt.

UPDATE: Excellent op-ed piece by Max Smoley at Hyper Om.

UPDATE 2: Oh. My. God. Google had “talks” with Copiepresse, and has received “permission” to link to the newspapers after all. If I were Google I’d have spit in their coffee, giggled a lot and then gone home. Full info right here.