Written by Josh Tyler

The title of this story is of course, a gross generalization. There are indeed people out there who do care about the new X-Files movie. In fact all ten or twenty of them are rushing to this website right now and plotting ways to send me death threats.

Yes it’s a generalization to say no one cares about the X-Files movie, but like all good generalizations, it’s one that rather accurately reflects the sort of non-buzz there is out there for this movie. X-Files: I Want To Believe opens this very weekend, and it currently has the kind of pre-opening excitement around it that’s usually reserved only for should-have-been direct-to-DVD movies like Space Chimps. It’s a shocking state of affairs for a franchise that a mere decade ago completely ruled the geek world. Maybe things will turn around, maybe audiences will show up in droves this weekend and somehow knock The Dark Knight out of the top spot, but a long slow look around right now reveals a world in which no one seems to remember X-Files even exists, much less care enough about it to see Mulder and Scully’s new outing.



Why are things going wrong? Where’s the interest? It’s simple really. I’ve broken it down into five easily digested reasons:



5. The Dark Knight

It’s the same reason Hellboy 2 only made around $30 million opening weekend, even though it received stellar reviews and a monster marketing blitz. People have one movie and one movie only on their brains right now, and it’s about a guy who likes to dress up as a flying rat. Those who haven’t been able to see it because of sold out showings are planning to see it this weekend. Those who have already seen it are planning their second, third, and fourth sojourn into The Dark Knight world. Yes, the hype really is that out of control. Opening a movie in any sort of proximity to this sort of record-breaking phenomenon is suicide. Here comes X-Files, ready to commit hara-kiri. The Dark Knight is officially the biggest movie of all time, and for the next couple of weeks everything else will be stuck living in its shadow.



4. Bad Marketing

We’ve started seeing a few advertisements over the last week or so, but it was too little too late. By the time Fox got around to really trying to raise awareness on this thing, most potential moviegoers were already focused on something else. Meanwhile, the marketing they have done hasn’t been particularly exciting. The little plot nuggets they’ve dropped all seem to revolve around Mulder and Scully kissing or getting all romantic, a plotline that the X-Files series laid to rest years ago. It’s a dead subject. Hey moviegoers! Who wants to buy a ticket to see a tired old will-they-won’t they gimmick rehashed?



3. Stifling Secrecy

The production of X-Files: I Want To Believe has been wrapped in utter and total secrecy. Even now, a mere few days before the movie is released, 20th Century Fox still hasn’t handed out a proper plot synopsis. Worse, during the production they put out fake news items to trick whatever fans they have into thinking the movie was something it wasn’t, and then pulled the rug out from under them over and over and over again. I know a lot of the most hardcore X-Files fans are still excited to see this thing, but it’s hard to imagine a world in which at least a few of them might not feel a little burned by the mess. For the more casual fans, at some point they got tired of the bait and switch game and simply started ignoring not only whatever X-Files news has been floating around out there, but by extension the existence of the movie itself. I understand the need to keep the specifics of a plot on a movie like this under wraps, but there’s a way to do that without lying to and shutting out your supporters. X-Files: I Want To Believe never seemed to figure that out.



2. No One Cared About The First Movie

Even the first movie was met with somewhat lukewarm reception, and it was released a full decade closer to the epicenter of X-Files popularity. It made money, but it never really burned up the box office and people seemed to forget it as soon as it was gone. A mediocre, moderately well received film is hardly the sort of launching point to carry a fandom through a decade dry spell and keep them energized enough to support a new entry in the franchise when it finally pops up ten years later. The whole franchise has already been wrapped up pretty tightly. Fans haven’t spent the last 10 years wondering what if. They’ve moved on. Which brings me to number one….



1. The World Has Outgrown The X-Files

We’ve outgrown The X-Files. All of us. That includes the cast. David Duchovny has gone on to more interesting projects which allow him to hang around beautiful naked women on cable television, and Gillian Anderson went where all overrated geek obsessions eventually go: out of sight out of mind. As for the X-Files faithful, well they’ve moved on to better shows which have arrived to fill The X-Files void. People like JJ Abrams have stepped in to do what Chris Carter once did, and done it even better. The whole mystery thing has turned mainstream, and at best Chris Carter’s tired old show is retro. It was great in its time, but its time is long past. The world has changed, we’ve changed, and the creepy mystery of the X-Files world is nothing more than old hat. Been there done that.

Written by Alex Iskold

The future of software development is about good craftsmen. With infrastructure like Amazon Web Services and an abundance of basic libraries, it no longer takes a village to build a good piece of software.

These days, a couple of engineers who know what they are doing can deliver complete systems. In this post, we discuss the top 10 concepts software engineers should know to achieve that.

A successful software engineer knows and uses design patterns, actively refactors code, writes unit tests and religiously seeks simplicity. Beyond the basic methods, there are concepts that good software engineers know about. These transcend programming languages and projects – they are not design patterns, but rather broad areas that you need to be familiar with. The top 10 concepts are:

1. Interfaces
2. Conventions and Templates
3. Layering
4. Algorithmic Complexity
5. Hashing
6. Caching
7. Concurrency
8. Cloud Computing
9. Security
10. Relational Databases

10. Relational Databases

Relational Databases have recently been getting a bad name because they cannot scale well to support massive web services. Yet this was one of the most fundamental achievements in computing that has carried us for two decades and will remain for a long time. Relational databases are excellent for order management systems, corporate databases and P&L data.

At the core of the relational database is the concept of representing information in records. Each record is added to a table, which defines the type of information. The database offers a way to search the records using a query language, nowadays SQL. The database offers a way to correlate information from multiple tables.

The technique of data normalization is about correct ways of partitioning the data among tables to minimize data redundancy and maximize the speed of retrieval.

9. Security

With the rise of hacking and data sensitivity, the security is paramount. Security is a broad topic that includes authentication, authorization, and information transmission.

Authentication is about verifying user identity. A typical website prompts for a password. The authentication typically happens over SSL (secure socket layer), a way to transmit encrypted information over HTTP. Authorization is about permissions and is important in corporate systems, particularly those that define workflows. The recently developed OAuth protocol helps web services to enable users to open access to their private information. This is how Flickr permits access to inpidual photos or data sets.

Another security area is network protection. This concerns operating systems, configuration and monitoring to thwart hackers. Not only network is vulnerable, any piece of software is. Firefox browser, marketed as the most secure, has to patch the code continuously. To write secure code for your system requires understanding specifics and potential problems.

8. Cloud Computing

In our recent post Reaching For The Sky Through Compute Clouds we talked about how commodity cloud computing is changing the way we deliver large-scale web applications. Massively parallel, cheap cloud computing reduces both costs and time to market.

Cloud computing grew out of parallel computing, a concept that many problems can be solved faster by running the computations in parallel.

After parallel algorithms came grid computing, which ran parallel computations on idle desktops. One of the first examples was SETI@home project out of Berkley, which used spare CPU cycles to crunch data coming from space. Grid computing is widely adopted by financial companies, which run massive risk calculations. The concept of under-utilized resources, together with the rise of J2EE platform, gave rise to the precursor of cloud computing: application server virtualization. The idea was to run applications on demand and change what is available depending on the time of day and user activity.

Today’s most vivid example of cloud computing is Amazon Web Services, a package available via API. Amazon’s offering includes a cloud service (EC2), a database for storing and serving large media files (S3), an indexing service (SimpleDB), and the Queue service (SQS). These first blocks already empower an unprecedented way of doing large-scale computing, and surely the best is yet to come.

7. Concurrency

Concurrency is one topic engineers notoriously get wrong, and understandibly so, because the brain does juggle many things at a time and in schools linear thinking is emphasized. Yet concurrency is important in any modern system.

Concurrency is about parallelism, but inside the application. Most modern languages have an in-built concept of concurrency; in Java, it’s implemented using Threads.

A classic concurrency example is the producer/consumer, where the producer generates data or tasks, and places it for worker threads to consume and execute. The complexity in concurrency programming stems from the fact Threads often needs to operate on the common data. Each Thread has its own sequence of execution, but accesses common data. One of the most sophisticated concurrency libraries has been developed by Doug Lea and is now part of core Java.

6. Caching

No modern web system runs without a cache, which is an in-memory store that holds a subset of information typically stored in the database. The need for cache comes from the fact that generating results based on the database is costly. For example, if you have a website that lists books that were popular last week, you’d want to compute this information once and place it into cache. User requests fetch data from the cache instead of hitting the database and regenerating the same information.

Caching comes with a cost. Only some subsets of information can be stored in memory. The most common data pruning strategy is to evict items that are least recently used (LRU). The prunning needs to be efficient, not to slow down the application.

A lot of modern web applications, including Facebook, rely on a distributed caching system called Memcached, developed by Brad Firzpatrick when working on LiveJournal. The idea was to create a caching system that utilises spare memory capacity on the network. Today, there are Memcached libraries for many popular languages, including Java and PHP.

5. Hashing

The idea behind hashing is fast access to data. If the data is stored sequentially, the time to find the item is proportional to the size of the list. For each element, a hash function calculates a number, which is used as an index into the table. Given a good hash function that uniformly spreads data along the table, the look-up time is constant. Perfecting hashing is difficult and to deal with that hashtable implementations support collision resolution.

Beyond the basic storage of data, hashes are also important in distributed systems. The so-called uniform hash is used to evenly allocate data among computers in a cloud database. A flavor of this technique is part of Google’s indexing service; each URL is hashed to particular computer. Memcached similarly uses a hash function.

Hash functions can be complex and sophisticated, but modern libraries have good defaults. The important thing is how hashes work and how to tune them for maximum performance benefit.

4. Algorithmic Complexity

There are just a handful of things engineers must know about algorithmic complexity. First is big O notation. If something takes O(n) it’s linear in the size of data. O(n^2) is quadratic. Using this notation, you should know that search through a list is O(n) and binary search (through a sorted list) is log(n). And sorting of n items would take n*log(n) time.

Your code should (almost) never have multiple nested loops (a loop inside a loop inside a loop). Most of the code written today should use Hashtables, simple lists and singly nested loops.

Due to abundance of excellent libraries, we are not as focused on efficiency these days. That’s fine, as tuning can happen later on, after you get the design right.

Elegant algorithms and performance is something you shouldn’t ignore. Writing compact and readable code helps ensure your algorithms are clean and simple.

3. Layering

Layering is probably the simplest way to discuss software architecture. It first got serious attention when John Lakos published his book about Large-scale C++ systems. Lakos argued that software consists of layers. The book introduced the concept of layering. The method is this. For each software component, count the number of other components it relies on. That is the metric of how complex the component is.

Lakos contended a good software follows the shape of a pyramid; i.e., there’s a progressive increase in the cummulative complexity of each component, but not in the immediate complexity. Put differently, a good software system consists of small, reusable building blocks, each carrying its own responsibility. In a good system, no cyclic dependencies between components are present and the whole system is a stack of layers of functionality, forming a pyramid.

Lakos’s work was a precursor to many developments in software engineering, most notably Refactoring. The idea behind refactoring is continuously sculpting the software to ensure it’is structurally sound and flexible. Another major contribution was by Dr Robert Martin from Object Mentor, who wrote about dependecies and acyclic architectures

Among tools that help engineers deal with system architecture are Structure 101 developed by Headway software, and SA4J developed by my former company, Information Laboratory, and now available from IBM.

2. Conventions and Templates

Naming conventions and basic templates are the most overlooked software patterns, yet probably the most powerful.

Naming conventions enable software automation. For example, Java Beans framework is based on a simple naming convention for getters and setters. And canonical URLs in del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/tag/software take the user to the page that has all items tagged software.

Many social software utilise naming conventions in a similar way. For example, if your user name is johnsmith then likely your avatar is johnsmith.jpg and your rss feed is johnsmith.xml.

Naming conventions are also used in testing, for example JUnit automatically recognizes all the methods in the class that start with prefix test.

The templates are not C++ or Java language constructs. We’re talking about template files that contain variables and then allow binding of objects, resolution, and rendering the result for the client.

Cold Fusion was one of the first to popularize templates for web applications. Java followed with JSPs, and recently Apache developed handy general purpose templating for Java called Velocity. PHP can be used as its own templating engine because it supports eval function (be careful with security). For XML programming it is standard to use XSL language to do templates.

From generation of HTML pages to sending standardized support emails, templates are an essential helper in any modern software system.

1. Interfaces

The most important concept in software is interface. Any good software is a model of a real (or imaginary) system. Understanding how to model the problem in terms of correct and simple interfaces is crucial. Lots of systems suffer from the extremes: clumped, lengthy code with little abstractions, or an overly designed system with unnecessary complexity and unused code.

Among the many books, Agile Programming by Dr Robert Martin stands out because of focus on modeling correct interfaces.

In modeling, there are ways you can iterate towards the right solution. Firstly, never add methods that might be useful in the future. Be minimalist, get away with as little as possible. Secondly, don’t be afraid to recognize today that what you did yesterday wasn’t right. Be willing to change things. Thirdly, be patient and enjoy the process. Ultimately you will arrive at a system that feels right. Until then, keep iterating and don’t settle.

Conclusion

Modern software engineering is sophisticated and powerful, with decades of experience, millions of lines of supporting code and unprecidented access to cloud computing. Today, just a couple of smart people can create software that previously required the efforts of dozens of people. But a good craftsman still needs to know what tools to use, when and why.

In this post we discussed concepts that are indispensible for software engineers. And now tell us please what you would add to this list. Share with us what concepts you find indispensible in your daily software engineering journeys.

Image credit: cbtplanet.com

Written by Ernesto

TV shows are by far the most wanted files via BitTorrent, and according to some, it’s fast becoming the modern day TiVo. But what are all those people downloading?

The data is collected by TorrentFreak from a representative sample of BitTorrent sites and is for informational and educational reference only.

At the end of the year we will publish a list of most downloaded TV-shows for the entire year, like we did last December.

TV-shows such as “Lost” and “Heroes” can get up to 10 million downloads per episode, in only a week.

Top Downloads June 13 – July 20

Collected by lolflux

Collected by KaushikK

Located in the city of Dunedin, in southern New Zealand, the Baldwin Street has earned the distinction of being the steepest street in the world. This 350 meters long street begins with a moderate slope and then climbs steeply to reach a maximum slope of 1:2.86 or 19 degrees! The street is so steep that it’s surface had to be laid with concrete instead of asphalt otherwise on a warm day the tar would flow down the slope!

A view of the street with the street level

A sign at the bottom of the street

Sources:
Wikipedia, Flickr

Written by Fabrizio Balliano

A quick resume of what the most important (IMHO) things users will get with the next Ubuntu release: Intrepid Ibex. If you want to check the whole list please visit Intrepid’s blueprints.

1. faster login
The time that ubuntu takes to go from the gdm login prompt to an usuable desktop is too long, it will be faster.

2. better Flash experience
Intrepid will ship improved plugin finder wizard experience, better experience for sites that use the flash detection kit and improved user-experience for selection of available alternatives.

Probably we’ll also have the final Flash 10 shipped with Intrepid.

3. 3G networking
Title says it all, Intrepid will have built-in support for 3G networking with the new NetworkManager.

4. guest account
It is very common to lend someone else a laptop for a quick email check, or having one’s computer play music and be a surf station on a party.

Instead of requiring people to create guest accounts with widely known or empty passwords, Ubuntu will set up a locked down guest account with a temporary home directory by default, where an existing user must authenticate the start of a guest session. This avoids passwordless accounts, which are a security threat.

5. Clean up cruft from system, especially after upgrades
When systems are upgraded from release to release to release, and especially if they are upgraded frequently during development of next release, they gather a lot of cruft: unused packages, old kernels, etc. Intrepid will have a tool to remove cruft, based on what update-manager already does, and extending that.

6. Automatic download of printer drivers through the internet
The printer setup tool of Ubuntu 8.10 and later will automatically download LSB-packaged printer drivers from the OpenPrinting database. This way there will be no need to ship all drivers on the CDs, Intrepid will be prepared for printers being launched after our release or being supported only by closed-source drivers which we are not allowed to distribute or driver updates.

7. font selector
Fontconfig offers a variety of font related settings, which can currently only be modified by hacking a XML file together. Intrepid will have a GUI for this task, taking common settings like font ordering, antialiasing, hinting and embedded bitmaps into account, as those settings vary greatly depending on different users’ preferences.

8. faster installation from desktop DVD
Modifications to ubiquity and apt as well as triggerisation of packages in order to minimize the extra time needed by the installer when dealing with the larger set of packages found on the desktop DVD image.

9. installation from USB stick
An application will be developed to convert and write Ubuntu CD images to USB disks. In addition, Ubuntu’s existing tools will be modified to better handle installing from a removable disk.

10. new graphic for the installer
The visual design of Ubuntu’s installer has remained largely unchanged since its creation, however there are a number of areas where graphical aids will be beneficial.

and maybe (low priority):

• 10 + 1. Identity management and network authentication
• 10 + 2. PackageKit

What about the new graphic theme?
Intrepid alpha releases come with a new graphic theme for the GNOME environment but I couldn’t find a blueprint about that thus it’s not in the list.

UPDATE 1: I’d like to add a task to the wishlist: SOUND!!! In hardy sound it’s a big mess because some softwares (Flash) do not integrate with PulseAudio (this workaround does seem to be stable to me) and I constantly have to close applications to make sound work again 🙁

UPDATE 2: A user told me that I forgot to write an important new feature: support for dmraid from the livecd, he’s completely right, I thought it was not so important to average users but probably I was wrong.

Written by Dan Bingham

One of Bud Light’s funniest ad campaigns to date, the Real Men of Genius commercials made a somewhat smooth transition from radio to television. ‘Somewhat’ in the sense that our imaginations will always be funnier that what is visually spoon fed to us, and mostly because the singer from the ads is better heard and not seen. The following are 10 of the best Real Men of Genius’ which have been rated based on the following criteria:

1. The levels of sarcasm in Deep Voice Guy’s commentary.
2. The vocal quality and lyrical hilarity provided by the Stephen Tyler wannabe.
3. The value of the service/invention provided by the featured “genius.”
4. The urgency with which some of these genius’ need to get the hint.

While some have not made it to television yet they are still worth listening to.

Mr. Silent Killer Gas Passer

Mr. Nudist Colony Activity Coordinator

Mr. Grocery Store Cart Wrangler

Mr. Foot Long Hot Dog Inventor

Mr. 80 SPF Sunblock Wearer

Mr. Really Really Really Bad Dancer

Mr. Stinky Breath Breather Outer

Mr. Pro Sports Heckler Guy

Mr. Edible Underwear Inventor

Mr. Cellphone Holster Wearer

If you enjoyed these, here’s the complete list of mp3s from when the campaign began under the heading Real American Heroes.

Written by Retrevo

Look before you leap before buying the new iPhone. This is the iPhone that all of us have been waiting for. It promised to address the deficiencies of the first generation iPhone, but does it really?



Here are some reasons why not:

1. Too expensive to own.

Apple and AT&T may have shaved a couple of hundred dollars off the price but they will more than make up for it in monthly fees. If you take into account the regular monthly fee, the data fee, the text message fee, which used to be free, and the $99 annual mobileme fee you could end up spending over $1,000 a year to own an iPhone, that’s 200 gallons of $5 gas.



2. Can’t use the GPS like a GPS.

Forget about getting turn-by-turn voice directions in your car from the new iPhone 3G. The iPhone SDK makes it pretty clear it’s not allowed, “Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time guidance.” Yes it will superimpose your position on a Google map, or show you the closest pizzeria but what about getting real-time route guidance? If you read reviews for other GPS devices you never come across a GPS that doesn’t provide some form of guidance. There’s a rumor that TomTom may be developing a guidance application but you have to wonder how they’ll get it past the Apple police.



3. Can’t tether the iPhone to your laptop.

Want to save sixty dollars per month for a 3G card for your laptop and use the iPhone instead? Not going to happen—not allowed. Although there are plenty of phones, including AT&T’s Tilt, that will allow you to use your 3G phone as a high speed modem for your laptop, the iPhone won’t be one of them so you can add the cost of a 3G card for your laptop at $720 a year to your total cost of ownership.



4. Still no cut and paste.

Cut and paste has been around on Apple computers since the earliest Mac Plus computers. What’s the big problem with implementing it on iPhones? Why is cut and paste so important? Suppose you’re browsing a web site and want to capture some text or a URL, or someone sent you an email and you want to grab some text from it and send to someone else. Not possible on an iPhone. Speaking of email, where’s the spell checker? Predictive typing is fine but spell checkers are everywhere else but here.



5. Wimpy 2 MP camera.

In the world of 5 MP Smartphones and 10 MP point and shoot cameras that you can buy for under $200, why is the iPhone still stuck with a measly 2 MP? That’s so 2003. While we’re at it how come we can’t record video, afraid the non-existent SD card might fill up? The iPhone should be able to stream video by now just like many other cell phones can already do right now.



6. No stereo Bluetooth.

We thought the iPhone was supposed to be part iPod. At least they fixed the recessed headphone jack flaw (and called it a new feature) but the A2DP stereo Bluetooth standard has been around for a while and is missing from the iPhone.



7. The list goes on.

Still no Flash player for rich media content (what grudge does Steve Jobs hold against Adobe). Still can’t send pictures in MMS messages, still no native voice dialing, no mobile TV, no replaceable battery, no flash memory card, and on and on.



Okay, now that I got that off my chest, I feel better and what the heck, so it’s not perfect but it’s still the coolest smartphone out there (other smartphones) and I still want one. I look forward to seeing you on the line.



Enjoy your new iPhone (and here are some accessories while you are at it).

Written by Athlists

I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my grill flaming. I’m as red-blooded American as they come, and one of the biggest sports fans you will ever meet. I consider myself a human database of football stats, basketball trades, baseball figures, NASCAR victories, and even the current cricket standings.

There is one sport, however, that has always taken a back burner here in America . . . despite being the most popular game in the world.

Soccer, the beautiful game, futbol, football, or whatever accepted term is used to describe it will never be embraced in America. It’s a sad truth, but it’s a conclusion that’s inevitable and can be completely explained.

Admittedly, my passion for soccer was born my junior year of college while playing FIFA 06 with some roommates. Being junior varsity lacrosse and basketball players, we wanted to test our skills against the best of the best just to find out how tough the game really is. Our competitive intramural team name was FIFA 06 (With Multi-Tap), and we got our asses handed to us in the playoff semi-finals.

So after playing “the beautiful game” on the field, on all gaming consoles, and in arenas, I decided I would take a shot at watching a couple of games on the television. I hate to say it, but I just couldn’t take it. HD didn’t even help.

Although the majority of readers will take offense to this article, just hear me out. There are 7 reasons mainstream America will never embrace this game, and they are absolutely undeniable.

1. Americans don’t have the Attention Spans.

Soccer is a continuous game that is heavily influenced by a team’s endurance and stamina. Unfortunately, Americans do not understand that concept. While one of the most popular sports in the United States involves watching a car go around a track for 600 miles, soccer is players running constantly for 90 minutes. Unlike soccer, however, NASCAR also involves the elements of horrendous crashes, pit stops, and fan favorites. Football also stops after every play, and during the four quarters of the game. The same goes for the innings of baseball, and the quarters of basketball.

2. Low Scores.

Because soccer is such a competitive and trying sport, the scores remain relatively few and far between. Americans like scoring, in all ways, forms, and meanings. Look at every other sport and their average scores, and then compare them to a high scoring soccer affair involving 5 – 6 goals. While scoring a goal is exciting, you have to remember spectators endure 90 minutes of passing balls and running in order to witness the goal.

3. Americans are Fat.

The average weight for American men is 191 pounds, which is 20 pounds heavier than men 40 years ago. The childhood obesity problem doesn’t help either, with nearly 20% of children between the ages of 6 – 12 being overweight. Simple logic will tell you that being overweight means being unhealthy, which probably means you can’t perform well in stamina sports such as soccer. Other sports, however, rely on the big man to take the post, block and tackle, or mash a bomb out of the park. Soccer’s not a big man’s game . . . and a nation’s sports interest that is fixed in an unhealthy lifestyle will likely focus on sports that don’t require healthiness or losing weight.

4. There are no Individuals in Soccer.

Although there are players like Henry, Ronaldinho, and Ronaldo the majority of great players and teams rely on teamwork more than any other sport in existence. Football, baseball, and basketball can all stand to have a weak link during game play. Although the weakest link can be exploited in these sports, the offense does not suffer from their mishaps and great players can more than make up for them. Players like Peyton Manning, Lebron James, and Randy Johnson can single handedly take over the game and produce a win. However, soccer requires extreme teamwork and patience. One weak link could mean a collapse in offense as well as defense. Americans like a hero . . . and it’s hard to be a hero on the soccer field without losing it for the team.

5. The Lack of Stats.

In all athletics, stats are crucial for the sports junkie. Being able to rattle off batting, FG, or QB ratings bring joy to millions of Americans. In soccer, the only real stats are passes, tackles, goals, and saves. Of course there are the occasional corners and cards, but the stats simply aren’t as meaningful nor interesting as other mainstream American sports. I could not tell you the passing percentage of Spain in the UEFA Cup, but I can tell you the ERA of most NL pitchers. The same goes for most of Americans that follow any sport closely.

6. No Rivalries in America.

The MLS boasts an unimpressive 16 teams in 16 cities here in America. There are only 2 conferences, and their marketing has done little to focus on city rivalries. In other sports we have Carolina v. Duke, New York v. Boston, USC v. UCLA, and so on. In the MLS, there is hardly any gut wrenching rivalries to partake in. No, Houston vs. Dallas does not count . . . does the nation stop to watch these two teams battle? I think not. In Europe it is the complete opposite, where hundreds of teams have city rivals, as well as their country rivals. Until there’s some flare, American soccer will remain on the back burner.

7. Americans love exactness.

When a player drops a football, fans scream. They also do the same for dropped baseball, pucks, basketballs, or even when a NASCAR driver misses his line and falls behind. We love perfection and our team never turning the ball over. Which explains why Americans could become very frustrated while watching a game of soccer. Because the soccerball is handled by the feet and can be extremely hard to control, precision is hard to come by during a match.

Written by Shilpan

Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule. No. 1 – Warren Buffett

Photo courtesy of Trackrecord

Are you sold on the fake notion that owning possessions is the touchstone of your self-worth? Have you felt jealous and self-pity when a neighbor bought a new Mercedes or a new Yacht that you always wanted to possess? We all have.

If your paycheck is not keeping up the pace with your cravings for the new iphone, why not learn the secrets of simplicity from the richest man on the earth who still lives without a cell phone? Before you sink your money for the latest gadget what if you were to know that the Oracle of Omaha still has no desk computer in his modest office?

In this world full of the rich and famous, Warren Buffett remains the greatest investor ever born not due to his acumen for the wise investments that he has made during his life but more for exemplifying the greatness with simplicity. He’s full of wit and happiness and this is at the core of everything that he does.

Secret # 1 : Happiness comes from within.

In my adult business life I have never had to make a choice of trading between professional and personal. I tap-dance to work, and when I get there it’s tremendous fun.- Warren Buffett

This is the man who truly does what he loves. The battle between Productivity and anti-productivity blogs stems from their convoluted chains of frequently twisted rational to substantiate their claim that productivity is a force of an external demand – from an employer or a competitor. In reality, productivity comes from within. It comes from doing what we love and loving what we do. When we start trading time between our professional and personal life, we wage war in our own mind to justify our passion in terms of a personal benefit. In my business I have felt more stress and angst when I haven’t given all of my talent, hard work and passion to help others on a given day. The myth of working hard to make more money to buy more things throws us in the vicious circle of hallucination. Our happiness always remains imprisoned when we do work that we abhor yet justify doing it to pay bills for those things that we don’t need. I used to work even after buying my first hotel for many years to justify the fake notion that I needed additional income to pay bills. What I needed was to change my lifestyle to free myself from this never-ending rut chase.

Secret # 2 Find happiness in simple pleasures.

I have simple pleasures. I play bridge online for 12 hours a week. Bill and I play, he’s “chalengr” and I’m “tbone”. – Warren Buffett

If the man richer than God can find happiness in the simple pleasure of playing bridge online with another billionaire, I have to learn to be happy with the simple pleasures of playing cards with friends or playing with my children or taking a walk in the wilderness. All of these simple pleasures do not need extravagant spending. I used to go play golf with other businessmen when the local chamber of commerce sponsored an event. I never found happiness in those events as they were centered on generating more business and exchanging business cards than on truly enjoying the moment. I was allowing myself to be run ragged by trading business cards after hours in a vain hope of making more money whereas that time deserved a dinner with my family.

Secret # 3 Live a simple life.

I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat. – Warren Buffett

The sad truth is that our ever-sophisticated advertising industry has conditioned our mind to find happiness from consumption by spending our hard earned money on the possessions that never bring us lasting happiness. We spend our life-energy on those possessions that we seldom use. We worry about making payments for a luxury car that sits in our garage collecting dust only for the right to brag about it in an occasional social gathering. Keeping up with the Joneses is the worst epidemic among those who should never contemplate that notion in the first place. If a man who can possibly buy a nation with his cash never espouses the mantra of “more the better”, I need to learn not to spread my legs beyond the reach of the blanket. We are conditioned to spend money before we earn it. We are sold on the fake happiness of “Buy now, pay later dearly” – It’s nothing more than buying possessions that we cannot afford. I have my share of insanity when it comes to mindless spending, but lately I try to pay for most of my purchases with cash. It creates awareness towards the impulse buy when I pay by cash. I have also started red lining items on the credit card statement that I consider useless spending. All of these efforts have built my awareness towards my impulse purchases. I have been using mantra of – “less is more” to simplify every aspect of my life. It’s a work in progress but the results are astounding.

Secret # 4 Think Simply.

“I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand.” – Warren Buffett

There lies one of the greatest secrets of simplicity. Warren Buffett invests only in the businesses that he understands. If you ever read research reports from an accomplished Wall Street guru, you’ll find a plethora of details that make you dizzy. The success of Warren Buffett as the greatest investor ever lies in his ability to think simply.

I used to invest in the stock market in the mid 90’s when everyone wanted to make over night millions in an exuberant market. I used to read “Investor’s Business Daily” only to look at the movers and shakers. These were the stocks that made a significant upward move a day before. A few days before Christmas, I made $52,000 in one stock in a matter of a few days. I knew nothing about the company. I created a new reality for my thoughts that I had figured out how the Wall Street works. I was on my way to the riches. I applied the same thought model on the next several stocks. Needless to say, I lost all that I made and much more. I was lacking in a basic human quality that Warren Buffett has mastered well – common sense. It says a great deal about the character of a man who invested a measly amount in Microsoft despite the fact that Bill Gates is one of his closest friends. I learned a valuable lesson of life from this experience – “Not losing hard earned money is far more important than making more money”.

If I apply this rule in my life, I can develop clarity and sanity in my thoughts. Clarity is the mother of simplicity. Life is not a roulette; life is about simple yet profound choices.

Secret # 5 Invest Simply.

The best way to own common stocks is through an index fund. – Warren Buffett

It is astounding to know that the greatest investor in the world is not bragging about intricate financial maneuvering to impress the rest of the world with his financial genius. Instead, Warren Buffett shows us the most simplistic approach to our financial freedom – “Flow with the market rather than pretending to be smarter than God.”

In this world full of so-called financial experts, Warren stands tall by showing us the simplest way to the riches. The stock market has moved upward for the last hundred years despite numerous setbacks. He is using a long historical view to back his argument rather than making a futile effort to predict how we can make a quick fortune. After losing most of my capital in the late 90’s, I have precisely followed the simple advice of investing in the no-load index funds. I’m happier than ever and while my assets have not skyrocketed, they haven’t dwindled either.

Secret # 6 Have a mentor in life.

I was lucky to have the right heroes. Tell me who your heroes are and I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out to be. The qualities of the one you admire are the traits that you, with a little practice, can make your own, and that, if practiced, will become habit-forming. – Warren Buffett

We are worshipers of celebrity demi-gods. All of us have this acute desire to look and live like these celebrities. However, are they truly the ones with character and moral compass to lead us? Having a mentor is as important as having a purpose in our life but having a wrong mentor is as devastating as having a wrong purpose in our life. The mentor has to be someone whom we can trust and have an unwavering faith in his/her guidance. The mentor has to be the one who has made outstanding strides in advancing the greater and guiding purpose of happiness in his/her own life. You’ll find that person in your inner circle if you think hard enough. Write down why you admire them. Try to emulate their traits and as Warren has shown by his exemplary life, with a little practice, you can form a habit to clone the life that you admire the most.

Secret # 7 Making money isn’t the backbone of our guiding purpose; making money is the by-product of our guiding purpose.

If you’re doing something you love, you’re more likely to put your all into it, and that generally equates to making money. – Warren Buffett

How do you rationalize the richest man on the earth still living in a small 3-bedroom house that he purchased fifty years ago? Warren Buffett never travels in a private jet despite the fact that he owns the largest private jet company. His character and way of life speak volume about his greatness. This is the man who spent his personal time investigating a $4 line item on his tax return to hunt down the specifics of it while giving away billions of dollars to Bill Gates foundation. It is rare to find the richest man on the earth living without luxuries that we want to possess even by mortgaging our future. He has demonstrated that while valuing the worth of money is vital for our ingenuity and success, money shall never become the object and end all of our motivation.

I’m an avid admirer of simplicity, but I’m an even bigger fan of the man who has mastered the greatness by living and breathing simplicity amid an ocean of wealth. Do you agree?