Skis / Toys / Fun

Not sure why I’m spending the time on this problem, but it looked interesting.  For starters read a Hacker’s News article that mentioned Python vs. Ruby performance, which in turned liked to a polish blog post.
The core of the blog post was this:
20 threads * 100,000 iterations

Ruby 1.9 = 1.54 s.
Ruby Enterprise = 3.01 s.
JRuby [...]

After giving a few days for the hype to cool down — not the hype around Dark Knight — but around Google Knol.  I think I understand the business and the opportunity and the shortcomings.
In the press, they keep on equating Knol with Wikipedia, which is totally inaccurate:

TechCrunch: Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable WikipediaEach article [...]

Not technology startups, but human startups (aka small business).  At one level you can look around the Silicon Valley and see strip malls full of stores, but if you look closely you’ll see that there is very little variety.  Here’s two examples:

Furniture
Outdoor Gear

In the furniture case, there is almost no variety of stores in the [...]

Can’t be just the high price of gas!  It’s Wednesday and there very little traffic and a pleasant 70 degress outside!  Track was a blast yesterday and not only did I run well (quite a few 75second 400’s) but I’m not sore today and …
 
IT’S A NICE DAY!

It’s really hard to find ski gear in the middle of summer…
REI sucks, not only is 90% of the clothing closeout, but there isn’t anything outside of rain gear to be found.

Found this on a old blog that I’m decommissioning — insight from an old WSJ article.

Tip 1: Don’t slap your name on just anything to make a buck.
Tip 2: Find weaknesses with existing products and fix them. The you can charge more.
Tip 3: But raise prices cautiously; make consumers feel they [...]