Yostivanich

“The Labor Depart­ment says the num­ber of peo­ple request­ing rose to a sea­son­ally adjusted 637,000, from a revised 605,000 in the pre­vi­ous week. That’s above ana­lysts’ expec­ta­tions of 610,000.” Isn’t it fun.

“While Nielsen reported 8.9 mil­lion vis­i­tors to Hulu in March, another mea­sure­ment firm, com­Score, counted 42 mil­lion. Exac­er­bat­ing the con­fu­sion, Nielsen’s num­bers for April show Hulu los­ing audi­ence while still man­ag­ing to add video views, also known as streams.” Web met­rics are some of the worst set of data out there, the only ones that work are the inter­nal ones.

“This is the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between what JJ Abrams did with Star Trek, and what George Lucas did with Star Wars. Lucas told us, ‘Hey, you know all that stuff you love so much? That stuff that’s been a huge part of your life? Well, you’re stu­pid for lik­ing it because I didn’t mean it. These are my toys, always have been, and now I’m tak­ing them back. Ha. Ha. Ha. Fuck you, now give me more of your money.’” Wil Wheaton on the new Star Trek movie.

Hub­ble got a new camera.

It’s about time Android let you scan bar­codes to do a prod­uct search.

“An error in one of our sys­tems caused us to direct some of our web traf­fic through Asia, which cre­ated a traf­fic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users expe­ri­enced slow ser­vices or even inter­rup­tions.” Google’s response to the great Google­Fail of 5-13-2009.

When I tried out Amazon’s ser­vice to pub­lish my blog to the Kin­dle, Ama­zon said they would ver­ify I was the owner but looks like they really don’t.

“A Cal­i­for­nia police offi­cer has been caught on cam­era appar­ently aim­ing a sharp kick at the head or neck of a sus­pect who has already sur­ren­dered.” To top it off they high-fived each other.

“Thau joined Twit­ter in mid-January, since then, he said the com­pany has bro­kered about a dozen busi­ness deals with part­ners like mobile ser­vice providers, hand­set mak­ers and even media com­pa­nies.” Good for Twitter.

“If there was any­body who should have avoided the mort­gage cat­a­stro­phe, it was I. As an eco­nom­ics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Fed­eral Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his suc­ces­sor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote sev­eral early-warning arti­cles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mort­gages. Before that, I had a hand in cov­er­ing the Asian finan­cial cri­sis of 1997, the Rus­sia melt­down in 1998 and the dot-com col­lapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curve­balls that the econ­omy can throw at us. But in 2004, I joined mil­lions of otherwise-sane Amer­i­cans in what we now know was a cat­a­strophic binge on over­priced real estate and reck­less mortgages.”

“So what does it look like when 5% of the Inter­net dis­ap­pears on an oth­er­wise unevent­ful Thurs­day morn­ing? The below graph shows aver­age traf­fic across 10 tier1/2 ISPs in North Amer­ica from Google’s net­work (ASN 15169).” Lots of traf­fic gone.

“There was a mile­stone buried deep within the earn­ings tables in this week’s first quar­ter results from Rack­space: the San Anto­nio com­pany has become one of a select num­ber of com­pa­nies that have more than 50,000 servers.” Good job Rackspace.

“The search giant, which until now has pro­hib­ited the use of trade­marked brand terms in ad text on its search-results page, except when per­mit­ted by the brand itself, is now allow­ing the use of trade­marked terms in AdWords copy — under some cir­cum­stances, that is. Those that won’t be able to use brand names include sites that sell coun­ter­feit goods, retail­ers that pri­mar­ily sell a competitor’s prod­ucts, adver­tis­ers that crit­i­cize the trade­marked brand and those that do not refer to a land­ing page with a pur­chase option.”

“The new agree­ment, the Inter­na­tional Con­ven­tion for the Safe and Envi­ron­men­tally Sound Recy­cling of Ships, requires all ves­sels to carry detailed, reg­u­larly updated inven­to­ries of haz­ardous mate­ri­als through­out their years of ser­vice, and for this infor­ma­tion to be pro­vided to recy­cling facil­i­ties. The con­ven­tion calls for work­ers at these cen­ters to be equipped with a wide range of pro­tec­tive gear, for the cen­ters to have dis­posal pro­ce­dures for haz­ardous mate­ri­als and for emer­gency response plans to be prepared.”

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