Yesterday Facebook announced Messages, a mix between email, chat and SMS. The attempt at redefining communication is a somewhat similar thought that brought Google Buzz (which didn’t get the adoption they hoped for).
Ray Sun explains what is wrong with this approach:
[They] designed this feature to abstract away texts vs. email vs. chat. But 99% of real humans don’t care about this, and won’t experience his “relief” because this was never a problem in the first place. Teens always text each other, because they always have their cell phones & this is the way to reach them. And to reach your grandma, you use email. Simple. No mixing up grandma with your girlfriend.
With +500 million users, Facebook had every opportunity to grab a huge piece of email, but they seem to have overcomplicated things.
With growing privacy concerns, giving Facebook even greater access to your communication seems like a really bad idea.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
Andy Denzler does remarkable paintings in oil on canvas that looks like badly compressed JPEGs or stills from an old video tape. A fascinating crossover from digital to real.
There’s been much talk about the version control system git,
in great part thanks to github. At the office, we put almost everything
under version control (either explicit or implicit through Google docs).
It just makes sense when more people are working on the same files.
To make git work for us, we need it to work a little bit more like svn than it usually does.
Specifically we want a central, shared repository on a server to commit our individual changes to.
It turns out this is very easy to do:
Initialize a new repository on the server. This will create a bare repository (not a checkout)
shared between users of the same group. We added ourselves to a new developers group.
git init --bare --shared=group projectname.git
Make sure the group is correct so all developers have access. Replace $group with your group name.
chgrp -R $group projectname.git
After cloning the repository and making a few changes, pushing the changes to the shared repository:
git push origin master
This is only needed the first time. After that a git push is enough, as long as there is only one branch.
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.
Be sure to watch the video on the intricate proces.
The internet is a funny thing. The endless stream of pointless status updates and silly youtube videos makes us look rather stupid as a race. On the other hand, the enormity of it also reveals how the extraordinary happens all the time. It’s a matter of where you look.
It’s wonderful being reminded of the creativity we’re capable of. There are some truly remarkable things in this technology-focused collection.
The automated computer systems that trade stocks at high speed is a disaster waiting to happen. New York Times now has an article about how a 600 point drop of Dow Jones in minutes back in May was the result of these programs.
The mutual fund started a program at about 2:32 p.m. on May 6 to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts, using a computer sell algorithm that over the next 20 minutes dumped 75,000 contracts onto the market, even automatically accelerating its selling as prices plunged.
Steve Yegge’s Whirlwind Language Tour from 2004 is one of the best posts on programming languages I’ve read in a while.
All of computing is based on abstractions. You build higher-level things on lower-level ones. You don’t try to build a city out of molecules. Trying to use too low-level an abstraction gets you into trouble.
