I need to buy a new laptop, so Mark Evan’s post on Are MacBooks Just Trendy? really resonated with me. I think the answer is yes they are trendy, but also they are good.

It is great sadness that I learned today that Russell Shaw has died. Russell was a talented writer, and a blogger for ZDNet. May he rest in peace. Here are some other reactions to Russell’s death:

Dan Farber

Dan York

Andy Abramson

UPDATE: Here’s the ZDNet Post from Larry: Rest in peace Russell Shaw; We’ll miss you.

On March 17th, in Mountain View, it’s Mashup Camp. I’ve known David Berlind (the organizer of Mashup Camp) for many years. We both worked together at ZDNet where David was a blogger superstar, and I’m still in charge of engineering.   I even modestly contributed to the success of Mashup Camp by setting up the wiki for it. Now, David had moved on to CMP, and the event has gone with him. It’s still a great event, though, and a must for serious web developers. If you are interested in mashups at all,  and you ought to be, you should attend. I will be, and I’ll be blogging about it also.

In a sign that the Web 2.0 bubble may be about to burst, people are actually starting to ask startups how they intend to make money? One of the first victims: WordPress.com. In this blog post, Matt is called out for opposing advertising, and he is asked how then, Automattic will ever make money? We can expect a lot more of these kind of questions going forward in 2008.

Three sentence version: Hey, Ruby on Rails is cool. The guys who invented it are so arrogant and cool. And, they don’t care if you don’t like it. If you really want, you can read the original here.

So, the stock market rallied today based on S&P’s affirmation of MBIA’s AAA rating. What was their justification for affirming the rating? That MBIA was able to sell notes at 14% interest to raise $2.6 billion of capital. Name me any other AAA rated institution that is forced to pay 14%. Guess what? You won’t be able to find one. 14% is what junk bonds pay, not AAA rated bonds. Read the details at The Big Picture.

Hey, if you are a PHP coder who is looking to work at a hot startup, check out these jobs at OpenDNS. This is a great company that provides a really great service.

I never thought that I would ever say this, but Dan Farber is wrong and the New York Times and Henry Blodgett are right. Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars, and many years, trying to succeed on the web. Buying Yahoo won’t help them get better. Instead, as Blodget writes, they should swap their internet division for a stake in a combined web company, and concentrate on the enterprise market. Yahoo won’t fit into Microsoft, but a combined unit could be a competitor for Google.

UPDATE: Scavo thinks buying SAP would be a mistake. He’s probably right, but I still say it is a smaller mistake than buying Yahoo.

I ran across Waldemar Hansens’s The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India in the Palo Alto library, and decided to re-read it. The majority of the book is about the later years of Shah Jahan’s reign. I think that’s the right emphasis, because it was the failure of the tolerant Dara Shikoh to succeed Shah Jahan that led to the destruction of the Moguls. It’s amazing how quickly Aurangzeb was able to bankrupt and destroy the richest empire in the world. There’s a lesson there for everyone who believes in the “too big to fail” theory of world politics.

If you are a blogger, and want to get a real idea of your significance, then add that Feedburner badge that shows the number of your RSS subscribers to your blog. My ego really took a hit when I went from 8 subscribers to 6. It’s going to be tough to recover.