Kenny Dalglish was appointed Liverpool manager because he represented permanence and he was sacked last week because he couldn't change.

Dalglish waited 20 years to return to the club and when he did, he swiftly united it. Yet everything unravelled last season. Liverpool were unlucky too often and even an FA Cup final victory wouldn't have saved Dalglish.

Okay, coming from a life-long, born and bred in Liverpool fan.
General History
During the 60s, 70s and 80s, Liverpool FC were far and away the best team in England, and were very often the best in Europe. Winning the League 13 times (and none since) and the European Cup (Champions League) 4 times. And ever since the 90s Liverpool have remained a force to be reckoned with, but never regained their former glory. The odd cup here and there, the most significant being the 2005 Champions League.
Important People
...

GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline 12.02

Microsoft is toast because we're moving to a post-PC era;
HTML5, the new web standard that allows to make interactive web pages, is going to revolutionize the media and advertising industries;
Social is "done", it's now a feature, don't go do a social startup.

For the Mac using sqlite3:

Cut and paste  this into a Terminal Window (you can modify it as you like, here I'm exporting only Wikipedia browsing history)

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History > history.log <<EOF
select visit_count, url from urls where url like 'http://en.wikipedia.org%' order by visit_count;
EOF

"In twenty years everything has become Linux. I have a music system that is entirely Linux-based. I have a video streaming and TV watching system that is entirely Linux-based. I wouldn't be surprised if every flat screen television I have is also Linux-based. The laptop and the desktop my wife uses to do her online banking and email is Linux. My phone is Linux, and my son's tablet PC is Linux..."

"We won and we didn't notice."

Keeping a version history of your configuration files is every administrator’s dream. Knowing that you have a complete history of all of your configuration files makes it really easy for system administrators to sleep well at night knowing that if anything goes wrong, they can simply roll back their configuration to an earlier date.

This is all possible with a program called EtcKeeper. EtcKeeper is a revision control system for your /etc directory using bzr, git, hf, or darcs as a back-end. EtcKeeper will allow you to make commits, like any other revision system, that will keep a version history of all your changes to the /etc directory. If configured correctly, you can also use EtcKeeper to check who made configuration changes and at what time, which can be useful for troubleshooting and auditing purposes.

Music is one of humanity’s oldest and strongest forms of social glue, yet our collective memory has retained precious little of music’s communal history outside the Western tradition and before the days of rock concerts. Collected here are some fascinating archival images of music-making from around the world and across time, culled from several excellent Flickr sets compiled by musician Sam Bennett.

Amazon.com today is approaching 40,000 employees. Seventeen years ago, Shel Kaphan was No. 1.
GeekWire Interview: Shel Kaphan, Amazon.com’s first employee

Part 1: The forgotten founder?
Part 2: Meeting Jeff Bezos
Part 3: Building Amazon.com
Part 4: A larger mission

Long before Amazon turned into a multi-billion dollar online retailing powerhouse, and technology giant, it was just a few people working in a converted garage in Bellevue. Kaphan was its first employee. A computer industry veteran and former Whole Earth Catalog employee who moved to Seattle from Santa Cruz to take the job in 1994, he’s an important character from the region’s technology history whose story has never before been told.

There is no denying that Angry Birds is a culture phenomenon, but one thing it’s not is an “overnight success”.

Did you know that the guys at Rovio spent 8 YEARS working on other games before they finally caught a huge break? That takes dedication. For almost a decade they didn’t have any big wins. Sure they had some small to moderate success early on, but nothing massive.

Pele or Maradona? Real Madrid 1953-60 or Barcelona 2008-11? As one of the football world’s universal debates, rating and ranking the greatest of all time is nothing new. But we hope that our approach is. By attempting to quantify the stats and apply a properly relevant formula to each separate discussion, we hope to present objective lists of the greatest clubs, players, countries, managers and so much more over the coming months. While we do not pretend to settle any debate, we hope our lists encourage it.

Van Gaal inherited a team which included much of the players from Cruijff’s tenure: Stanley Menzo, Danny Blind, Sonny Silooy, Aron Winter, Dennis Bergkamp, John van 't Schip, and new faces that emerged later Frank and Ronald de Boer, Wim Jonk, Michel Kreek, Bryan Roy, Stefan Pettersson and Edwin van der Sar. The first few matches under his tenure were rough, his new approach wasn’t resulting in much wins and to his displeasure the fans began chanting for the return of Cruijff. Van Gaal slugged it out and began to turn things around.

For nearly 3,000 years people have been making potent spirits for medicinal and recreational purposes. In recent history, worldwide distribution has made it possible for us to taste beverages from around the world. What follows is a surface-level overview of the evolution and classification these products.

Wikileaks has shown the world that it’s entirely possible to hold governments accountable to their citizens. (A novel concept!) That numerous public servants have expressed outrage as a result of their actions being made available to the public they claim to represent perhaps speaks to their worth as public servants. The all-hands-on-deck reaction to the leaks can mean only one thing: they worked.

Which is to say that Wikileaks has worked.

And if Wikileaks is shut down—who honestly expects the Wikileaks organization to emerge from all of this completely unharmed?—then you can be certain that other organizations or entities will take its place. Maybe Wikileaks 2.0, or TwitterLeaks, or whatever form it takes, won’t have such a public face.

Welcome to The Pac-Man Dossier! This web page is dedicated to providing Pac-Man players of all skill levels with the most complete and detailed study of the game possible. New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game.

Mario's Bike

A deleted Cartier-Bresson picture. Could anyone believe that?

We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itself.

The Real TiFrère Jean Alphonse Ravaton, alias Ti Frere, was born on April 29th, 1900. His father was Madagascan ( Ravaton is a Madagascan surname) and a sega artist too, the art form being characteristically passed on from father to son, and groups often made up of members of the same family.

When you click your shutter, you're done. Period.

You aren't distracted from the next photo by wasting your time-on-station looking at what you've already shot.

This is much more deeply significant than you think. When I shoot film, my mind is on the next photo, and not on looking at what just came up on the LCD. Staying focused on the subject leads to better photos.

Shooting film lets you see more because you're never distracted after the shot looking at settings and playback wondering "what if." Since your head is always paying attention to the scene and shooting, 100% of your concentration is on the subject, and not on jacking with your camera.

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

This infographic exhibits pioneers in the field of programming, along with the history and current statistics of various programming languages. Also included are some random facts and algorithm diagrams to make the infographic more visually appealing.

Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.

However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

Measuring Worth Is a Complicated Question
Intrinsic things are priceless. The love of your life or a beautiful sunset. There is no objective way to measure these, nor should there be.

The worth of monetary transactions is also difficult to measure. While there is a price, wage, or other kind of transaction that can be recorded at a precise price, the worth of the amount must be interpreted.

The price of a hamburger is probably worth more to a starving homeless person than to a very wealthy one. An allowance of five pennies a week was worth more to a child in 1902 than it is to a child today.

Well, here it is! This is the first edition of the PC Games Programmers
Encyclopedia. The PC-GPE as it currently stands is a collection of text
files, each covering a different aspect of programming games for the PC.
Some files were obtained from the net, others were grabbed off Usenet, quite
a few were written for the PC-GPE.

Pablo Picasso created 'Bull' around the Christmas of 1945. 'Bull' is a suite of eleven lithographs that have become a master class in how to develop an artwork from the academic to the abstract. In this series of images, all pulled from a single stone, Picasso visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form. Each plate is a successive stage in an investigation to find the absolute 'spirit' of the beast.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music | New Home on Techno.org

With the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh computer coming up on January 24th, 2009, we’re taking a look back in time at the evolution of Apple products.
Most have been notable leaps forward, while some were famous flops. Whether or not their inventions were accepted by the marketplace, Apple has consistently put out products that raise the bar for the computer and telecommunications industry.

Apple ads really came into their heyday during the 1990s, with the “Think Different” campaign, which became very popular as they featured a number of famous people.
Here’s a stunning compilation of some of Apple’s most notable advertisements from the 70s until the present day, including a few videos ads.

The Voyager Golden Record is a phonograph record included in the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. It contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. It is intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, that may find it. The Voyager spacecraft are not heading towards any particular star, but in about 40,000 years Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation.

Although most of Dijkstra's publications began life as EWD manuscripts, the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work. To alleviate both of these problems, the department has collected over a thousand of the manuscripts in this permanent web site, in the form of PDF bitmap documents (to read them, you'll need a copy of Acrobat Reader). We hope you will find it convenient, useful, inspiring, and enjoyable.

Based on nearly eighty hours of interviews with fifteen all-time great programmers and computer scientists, Coders at Work provides a multifaceted view into how great programmers learn to program, how they practice their craft, and what they think about the future of programming.

This is an historical summary and commentary of Nikon DSLRs. Click the links to individual reviews for details and comparisons.

A year in digital cameras is equal to 25 regular years. A camera introduced 2-1/2 years ago may as well be 62 years old. It's completely obsolete. A new D90 for $999 has far better image quality than the old Nikon D2Xs which sold for thousands the year before.

When Apollo 11’s Lunar Module landed on the Moon 40 years ago today, the software that helped take humans to another celestial body was essentially built using paper-tape rolls and thick cardstock that was punched with special holes.
It wasn’t open source in the sense we know today, but it was built for NASA under contract, then was tested, modified and fine-tuned by NASA engineers in ways that are similar to open source projects nowadays.

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.

1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?

1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1.

(a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M

(b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M.

(c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

etc.

I characterized one way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they’re a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there’s a real center and imputed style to how you’re supposed to do everything. Other languages such as PL/I and, indeed, languages that try to be additive without consolidation have often been more successful. I think the style languages appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them.

Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.

Among professional aviators, there's a well-worn saying: Flying is
simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. And
yet, I don't recall too many periods of boredom during my 30-year
career with Lockheed, most of which was spent as a test pilot.

By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966. Jim
Zwayer, a Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems
specialist, and I were evaluating those systems on an SR-71 Blackbird
test from Edwards AFB, Calif.

Before you answer, consider this for a bit more fun: You could answer with your most-favorite or most-used typeface, but let’s make this more interesting. Answer with the typeface whose qualities best resemble your own. Plus, give some good biographical info on the typeface—year, designer, background, etc. Fun and informative!

The following is a list titles recorded from my collection of 78 rpm records. All of them are linked to MP3 files and will play what was recorded. No sound enhancement, just what was recorded.

We'll get closer year-on-year, and we might even go mighty close to a win this year, but one thing's for sure - the longer we stick with the long-term plan, based on RM's teambuilding framework, the better chance we'll have of returning to our rightful pl

Five years ago, at the coaching conference he hosts in Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Alberto Parreira made a prediction that left the room stunned. Discussing how tactics might evolve, the coach who had led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup, suggested that

Despite being written off as a triumph of style over substance, every dance act worth a dab of MDMA in the last two years can trace a direct line back to it.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been MIT's introductory pre-professional computer science subject since 1981. It emphasizes the role of computer languages as vehicles for expressing knowledge and it presents basic principles of abstr

No other airliner (the Russian Tupolev Tu 114 – the Konkordski – was only used on freight runs), looks like Concorde with her pointed nose and sexy delta wings. Wherever she went a crowd appeared, she had that effect.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,

Why did people come to lectures in 1865? Their lodgings weren’t centrally heated and the temperatures in Boston can get down to -10C. Many came to get warm. They had no television, no radio, no Internet, no email, no instant messaging, no mobile phon

LEARN ABOUT 12 CODING LANGUAGES THAT NEVER QUITE MADE IT AND THE REASONS THEY FAILED.

This site lists 8512 languages, complete with 17837 bibliographic records featuring 11064 extracts from those references.

At the dawn of a new era of digital lives in which computers are only part of an expanding consumer-electronics industry, the odds are on Mr Jobs and Apple as the winner.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation.

Having developed in China between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, Go (called Wei Ch'i in China and Baduk in Korea) contends with backgammon for the right to be called the oldest game still played in its original form.

I would have liked to see is an introduction that provides you with enough background information in order to understand the concepts and then gets you going as quickly as possible. (Something like "Lisp for experienced programmers".) Because I haven't fo

Since the company’s inception, the advertising for Apple has been exceptional.

This is a version of UAE, the Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator, with an emulation core largely based on WinUAE. It attempts to bring many of the great features of WinUAE to non-Windows platforms.

Think Commodore is a website about emulating old Commodore computers such as the C64 and the Amiga on your Macintosh.

Here is the Computer Languages History. There is only 50 languages listed in my chart.

This is a simplified diagram of unix history. There are numerous derivative systems not listed in this chart, maybe 10 times more! This diagram is only the tip of an iceberg, with a penguin on it ;-)

NeXT: the company, the products, the operating system and software applications (in French / en Francais)

Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.

At some hot, boring afternoon I got an _Idea_. With the help of public accessible e-mail adresses I asked 10 questions to a bunch of programmers that I consider very interesting people and I respect them for variuos things they created.

This book's target audience was people who themselves have noticed certain weaknesses in Unix at that time... Our goal was humor. Many readers have told us we succeeded in this. Even Eric Raymond liked it (his name is in the acknowledgements).

It is often said that an important advantage of the decimal notation over the Roman one is that makes multiplication of numbers much easier.