And now for something completely different for this week’s links…

Did you know? Catching the flu now might just save your life.

Game Development

Glenn Fiedler has an interesting piece on fixing timesteps in games. For game developers, this should be worth while to read over!

Software Development

There is a somewhat interesting if not unbelievably misguided article on Five Reasons why Designers Developers are Switching to Mac. At least the poster of comment #28 gets it right: Macs are PCs! The language used in most of the comments is ridiculously incorrect since apparently they don’t realize that PC means Personal Computer. On the other hand, I’ve always been of the mindset that Apple has an incredibly good marketing department–so much so that they’ve effectively managed to sell a PC to individuals who think they’re not purchasing a PC! (And let’s ignore the IBM-compatible argument, because you can run Windows on a Mac.)

Thankfully, there is a really clever counter-point written by Ricardo Bánffy called Five Reasons why this Developer won’t switch to Mac. It’s a smart and insightful post that illustrates in my mind why OS X will forever be the OS of designers, not developers. It makes for a great read. Even if Ricardo is an emacs user, I can find it in my heart to forgive him (although I disagree about the BSD statements).

Stupid Photo-op Goof-ups

On Monday, the Air Force One back-up plane was flying low over Manhattan for a photo shoot under the escort of an F-16. What happened next is something anyone could have guessed: everyone panicked. Ms. Underestimated has a couple of videos related to this story.

Someone wasn’t thinking very clearly about this.

World History

There is an interesting write up on World War II and how it influenced Silicon Valley. I had no idea that electronic countermeasures like this were used as early as the 1940s. It simply isn’t something they teach in the history books.

For those who might be interested in reading the entire series from start to finish, Steve Blank has each of the five earlier parts posted on his blog.