I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff, and thought I’d share it.
There’s also another article by the same people that’s just as interesting, on the interaction of genetic disposition and environment in producing behaviors.
“Be Relentlessly Resourceful”
I disagree with this slightly. I wasn’t “relentlessly resourceful” when I started my first startup — but I was, and am, a very stubborn determined person. When I start pounding my head against a problem, I don’t stop until either the problem breaks or my head does. So far, it has always been the problem.
(Well, almost always. There was one project that I knew was mathematically impossible even before I started it. But the six months I spent on it gave me a good feel for the math involved, and made me a noticeably better programmer, so I consider it time well spent anyway.)
“Scammer shuffles Apple out of 9,000 iPods”
Sometimes you’ve just got to ask yourself what some would-be criminal “mastermind” was thinking. This is one of them. Nine thousand?! I’m the first to agree with the phrase “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” but even I have limits.
And the stupid-stick apparently whacked Apple here too — did no one there notice that they’d sent thousands of “replacement” iPods to the same address before the credit card number was charged (and declined)? Surely there’s at least one human in the chain, even if it’s only the guy who packs the boxes and slaps the shipping labels on them.
(Thanks for the tip-off, Ploni.)
“Boffin builds DIY solar cell from doughnuts and tea”
Not sure if this is a hoax, but if it’s real, it’s interesting. In a similar vein (and more likely to be real), you can apparently develop film with coffee and vitamin C.
“Twitter not yet in ‘late stage’ talks with Google”
For someone like me, who always tries to trace the reasons for human behaviors, there were a couple of very odd interviews on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report this week.
These shows almost always interview recently-published authors on book-promotion tours. The interviews are set up by the authors’ publicists, to get the word out about their books and hopefully generate more sales. But The Colbert Report‘s guest on Thursday night was, puzzlingly enough, one of the founders of Twitter. I speculated to GoddessJ that Twitter is trying to attract a buyer, and what do I see in Friday morning’s RSS feed?
But the one that really has me confused is Wednesday’s guest (in two parts) on The Daily Show: Peter Orszag, President Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He’s ostensibly promoting Obama’s new budget, but to whom? Does the Obama administration really believe that they need the PR, or is Obama just starting his reelection campaign a little earlier than usual?
Blast from the Past
Yesterday was trash-pickup day for our street. Our trash collectors aren’t too careful, so we sometimes get pieces of wind-blown garbage lying around.
While walking to our local store for some cat-related supplies, I saw such an item. It was a 5.25″ floppy disk labeled “Turbo C.” That’s C, not C++. The copyright date in the fine print was 1986… I was a sophomore in high school at that point. It was sub-labeled “Integrated Development Environment,” but when I looked for a disk number (something like “disk 3 of 27”), there wasn’t one. It took me a few seconds to remember that a full-fledged IDE would fit on a single disk back then. I didn’t think to check for a reinforcing ring, but I think it was only a standard-density disk, which only held 360kB — high-density disks (which held 1.2MB) were quite expensive at that point, I paid something like four dollars for a single high-density disk a couple years later, for college.
Ah, the good old, bad old days of yore. 🙂
OpenIPv6
Looks like Microsoft is going to save the world, yet again.
Yes, I’m cynical about anything Microsoft does that supposedly benefits anyone else. They didn’t get where they are through altruism.
But a closer look shows that that cynicism might not be justified here. It is a real improvement to their product, and a valid reason for people to upgrade their copies of Windows (earlier versions of Windows being the biggest competitors to Vista and Windows 7). The fact that it helps the rest of the world too is just an accidental side effect.
Even the “covenant not to sue” on it benefits Microsoft directly, because without that, the world would probably ignore them and adopt a different solution.
All in all, it’s a rare and masterful example of turning a potential technical disaster into both a commercial gold mine (driving consumer upgrades) and an untarnished PR win at the same time.
A tip of my hat to you, Microsoft.
Anniversary: World’s Only Flying Penguins Discovered 1 Year Ago Today
A bonus post, in honor of the day.
“Spam Returns to Previous Levels: 94% of All Email Sent”
We always knew it was inevitable, but the break from it was nice while it lasted.
(No, this is not an April Fool’s joke, much as I wish it were.)
“Failure Is the Highway to Success”
This is a good story. It doesn’t have a happy ending — but only because it isn’t an ending, it’s a continuing story whose end has yet to be written.
Before I started Oak Circle, I had an earlier company (the one that created Project Badger). That was my first successful business, but it was actually the third business that I’d tried to start. Both of my earlier attempts failed for different reasons, and I learned a lot from those failures. They weren’t pleasant, but without them, I would never have succeeded in the end.
The moral of the story: you’ve only failed when you give up. Keep at it, and eventually you’ll succeed.