stack overflow +1

http://stackoverflow.com/

If you haven’t been there yet, please visit. It’s a pretty good concept. It builds on the concept of digg, blogs, and wikipedia. It’s a site for posting questions and answers and users can build reputation by the questions and answers they post.  As you get more points, you can do more things, such as vote posts up or down, edit them, and if you have a lot of reputation: delete them. You can also “bounty” some your points to get people to answer a question you have - you give up points to the “best” answer to your question.

It a great idea because it creates a community for sharing information while giving people credit for their work - to some degree.

A lot of more difficult and niche questions seem to go unanswered though. No one has incentive to answer a question if there is no bounty and the question is hard. It’s much easier to answer the easy questions, or no question at all.

There’s also a superuser.com and serverfault.com (and more) - for super computer users and system-admins, respectively.  It’s good they made these other sites but why not just make sub-sites, like reddit does?  The way it is I had to re-register for each site. It would be nice to just say: ” I’m interested in A, B, and C” and be done with it.

(via edgotecho)

IPod touch

I’ve been using the IPod touch for about 6 months now. I’ve got a few pages of apps, so far the most useful one in the email app. I’ve got some games too.

Pros: It’s cool having a small palm-size computer to take around. I like checking my email and stocks. I love using the pandora app to listen to music - not the same old stuff I have. It has amazing performance for such a small machine.

Cons: For some reason it decided to stop working with my home wireless one day and I can’t get it to work again. It works fine at work though. Also, its battery drains fast if you do anything interesting, such as use Pandora. The games are addictive

Let me know of any apps you like…

(via edgotecho)

House Prices will still fall further

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the “subprime” housing crisis and how it will effect house prices. This is especially important to me because I’ve been thinking about buying a house. In order to attempt to forecast how bad/good a house purchase would be, a major concern is will the value of the house plummet further, or is it done falling? This is important because if one sinks a large amount of money into something, especially the most expensive purchase of one’s life, it’d be nice to know what return to expect (or lack there of).

Based on the theory (based on the historical trend) that house prices over time tend to follow a smooth upward line, due to inflation I looked at a chart of home prices from 1987 to June, 2008 (from publicly available data):

I’ve drawn two trend lines (dotted-lines); one optimistic, one pessimistic. Then I extends the graph into the future assuming a parabolic return to the underlying trend-line (a.k.a. what the average price should be without all of the sub-prime mortgages).

In conclusion, there are two possibilities, both have prices falling further from here: prices bottom in late 2009/early 2010, or prices continue to slowly fall until around 2014.  This is a 30-40% drop from today’s prices. Note these are average prices, so prices in your neighborhood could very well have a different outcome.

Of course, with all of the chaos in Wall Street, and the government’s proposed bailout schemes, anything could happen; but I really don’t think anything like that will change the overall trend. There are way too many houses for sale, and not enough people who can buy them. Simple supply and demand. Yes, fluctuations of mortgage rates, lender’s rules on who can borrow, and other factors effect house prices to some degree, but the overwhelming facts of the market are greater, in my opinion.

Please let me know if you agree/disagree/don’t care:

To be clear, I’m not for housing prices falling further.  Some people I know and care about own houses, have mortgages, or live in houses.  In fact, I wish this whole debacle had never happened in the first place.  I just think that, because of the incredibly stupid practices of sub-prime lenders, housing prices were inflated way beyond anything sustainable and there must be a correction.  In fact, if I found a house at a reasonable price (based on the historic trend) today, I’d probably buy it.  Unfortunately, that probably won’t happen because that would be a 30-40% discount on the current going price.

Disclaimer: Of course, I’m not an expert in economics, I don’t claim to be, this is only my opinion. I will not be held responsible for anyone’s decisions made based on this post

(via edgotecho)

House Prices will still fall further

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the “subprime” housing crisis and how it will effect house prices. This is especially important to me because I’ve been thinking about buying a house. In order to attempt to forecast how bad/good a house purchase would be, a major concern is will the value of the house plummet further, or is it done falling? This is important because if one sinks a large amount of money into something, especially the most expensive purchase of one’s life, it’d be nice to know what return to expect (or lack there of).

Based on the theory (based on the historical trend) that house prices over time tend to follow a smooth upward line, due to inflation I looked at a chart of home prices from 1987 to June, 2008 (from publicly available data):

I’ve drawn two trend lines (dotted-lines); one optimistic, one pessimistic. Then I extends the graph into the future assuming a parabolic return to the underlying trend-line (a.k.a. what the average price should be without all of the sub-prime mortgages).

In conclusion, there are two possibilities, both have prices falling further from here: prices bottom in late 2009/early 2010, or prices continue to slowly fall until around 2014.  This is a 30-40% drop from today’s prices. Note these are average prices, so prices in your neighborhood could very well have a different outcome.

Of course, with all of the chaos in Wall Street, and the government’s proposed bailout schemes, anything could happen; but I really don’t think anything like that will change the overall trend. There are way too many houses for sale, and not enough people who can buy them. Simple supply and demand. Yes, fluctuations of mortgage rates, lender’s rules on who can borrow, and other factors effect house prices to some degree, but the overwhelming facts of the market are greater, in my opinion.

Please let me know if you agree/disagree/don’t care:

To be clear, I’m not for housing prices falling further.  Some people I know and care about own houses, have mortgages, or live in houses.  In fact, I wish this whole debacle had never happened in the first place.  I just think that, because of the incredibly stupid practices of sub-prime lenders, housing prices were inflated way beyond anything sustainable and there must be a correction.  In fact, if I found a house at a reasonable price (based on the historic trend) today, I’d probably buy it.  Unfortunately, that probably won’t happen because that would be a 30-40% discount on the current going price.

Disclaimer: Of course, I’m not an expert in economics, I don’t claim to be, this is only my opinion. I will not be held responsible for anyone’s decisions made based on this post

(via edgotecho)

Google Chrome is one huge leap forward - Top 10 reasons

Google Chrome has just been launched for windows. They actually did a great job explaining (in cartoon form, no less) the thinking process behind it and how it’s different from other browsers.

Here is my list of top 10 reasons it’s a huge leap forward:

1. Each tab is a separate process so failures are restricted to one tab only.
2. Javascript is compiled to Machine code - so it’s way faster than any other browser, which interpret a mid-level language.
3. The browser GUI is made so small, it’s almost invisible, so you can focus on the web-application or page.
4. You can drag each tab and create a new window with it. (Or drag it back into the original window)
5. You can create short-cuts to your favorite web apps (such as gmail, google maps, basecamp, etc.) These go on your desktop. Then when you start them, it’s as if they are a separate application.
6. Bookmarks are super easy to use. Just select the star next to the URL. Organizing is easy, and you can open them in a new tab or window.
7. The URL (or Omnibar) has autocomplete, and also does your Search automagically. duh!
8. Opening a new Tab doesn’t take forever, and it shows you a “speed dial” page (like Opera), but also has your most recently viewed pages and most recently closed tabs. Genius.
9. Unlike other browsers, such as Firefox, it doesn’t have Memory leaks - when you close a tab, since it was a separate process, all of its memory gets freed up. So no more rebooting every day, or more!
10. Since each tab is a process, it’s possible to determine which tab is using up tons of CPU or memory!

Sure, Firefox is still great; it has tons of plugins that Chrome may or may not ever have. Also, Chrome is in beta infancy; but so far it shows great promise and demonstrates a complete leap forward beyond all the other browsers: IE, Safari, Opera, firefox.

(via edgotecho)