An interesting article in The Ecomist - drug dealing analyzed just as any regular industry. More entertainment, than a real business case.

If you are really interested, here is the full 2007 budget speech, given by Gordon Brown on 21st of March 2007

In this my eleventh Budget, my report to the country is of rising employment and rising investment; continuing low inflation, and low interest and mortgage rates; and this is a Budget to expand prosperity and fairness for Britain’s families - and it is built on the foundation of the longest period of economic stability and sustained growth in our country’s history.

I am quite disappointed with the knowledge demonstrated by wannabe C++ programmers today. Hardly anyone knows what

#x

and

x##y

preprocessor directives do, and only few can explain the danger in preprocessor macros with parameters. If the things keep going this way, in 5 years no one will know what

extern "C"

means.

Have a look at the new project - Burstsort .

Quoting from Wikipedia:

Burstsort and its variants are cache-efficient algorithms for sorting strings and are faster than quicksort and radix sort for large data sets.

If you have any experience with the new library - please share your opinion with the general public.

The sums are getting bigger and bigger .

If we want to be more environmentally friendly, we should consider reusing our glasses in pubs. When you order the same type of beer/wine/whatever, there is no need to use another container for your drink - simply handle over the empty one to the bartender and ask him/her to refill. This will save quite a lot of resources, wasted on dish washing, and your health won’t be compromised.

Empty

A friend of mine told me an interesting story. A trader in bank X tried to make a profit, building a private portfolio with some new financial product and using bank’s money. Apparently, he abused his position and connections within the firm in order to do so. The sad part of the story is, that he ended up playing against bank Y and loosing half of the cash. Obviously, he wasn’t an exceptionally bright trader and also no proper pricing model was available for that particular product/portfolio.

Apparently, JD Whetherspoon shares fell , after the company issued a profits warning. The pub management firm is worried, that the smoking ban, to be introduced in Britain this summer, will reduce earnings in the short run.

I think it’s probably a great opportunity to buy, since Whetherspoon’s pubs are extremely popular and the ban will apply to all, so their pubs won’t suffer more than others. And as long as no drinking ban is legislated in this country (chances of that are much lower than me winning all lotteries on the planet on the same week) people will go to pubs to drink a pint or two.

Some time ago Microsoft released a free sample - an HTTP server, written completely in .NET and able to host ASP.NET applications. It has been extended and improved by some other company, which now makes it available for download .

The new server will be most useful for demonstrations or embedding, but probably won’t be deployed in environments, where speed and stability are required.