Microsoft’s stock performance has been relatively flat for the past 8 years (check out the chart). Does that mean that they’ve penetrated the OS market as much as they can?

That doesn’t seem right for two reasons:

1. the world population is expanding
2. computers are becoming cheaper meaning more people can afford computers

Given that, how can MSFT have maxed out it’s value?

A brief list of movies which feature McGuffins in their titles where said McGuffins are replaced with “McGuffin”:

Lord of the McGuffins
Raiders of the Lost McGuffin
The Maltese McGuffin
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s McGuffin
Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy McGuffin
Too Wong Foo Thanks for the McGuffin, McGuffin
McGuffin McGuffin McGuffin McGuffin (Eat Drink Man Woman)

There’s a new text-to-speech voice with Leopard that is really good:

• open the control panel
• open “speech”
• select “alex” as the voice

Now, this doesn’t work with Firefox, but it does with Safari. to use it:

• go to a webpage you want spoken (news pages work well).
• select the text you want read.
• go to the “safari” menu
• go to menu item “services”
• go near the bottom for sub menu item “speech”
• select “start speaking text”

It’s not perfect, but if you need to do something else and still catch up on blogs, news, whatever, it’s good enough that the point will get conveyed.

(Listen to this post through the voice)

I’ve watched this skit three times now. Granted, Hulu doesn’t have full SNL episodes, but the skits they’ve been releasing are pretty good. Perhaps a new era for the show?

And let’s not forget the gardening tips from a man who is scared of plants:

Wired has a piece on a newly created electrical component: The memresistor. Originally conjectured in the 70’s, HP has finally created one and this component will join the transistor, the capacitor and the resistor as a basic component of electronics. As the memresistor remembers how much charge has gone through it, it can be used for fuzzy computing applications that require more than 1/0, on/off binary. My knowledge of physics is not highly advanced, but it seems this will provide a revolution in computing… this would be perfect for neural nets which heavily use summations.