Yostivanich

“So with that caveat, here is my list of ten traits I see in great com­pa­nies. This is aimed at web/tech com­pa­nies but I believe it can and should be applic­a­ble to all companies.”

“We ana­lyzed over 500,000 first con­tacts on our dat­ing site, OkCu­pid. Our pro­gram looked at key­words and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when intro­duc­ing your­self online.” Be lit­er­ate, have spe­cific inter­ests oh and athe­ism wins you points.

“This is his­tory through the veil, again. It’s vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to be a black per­son and believe that Amer­i­cans were some­how more hum­ble in the past. Our very exis­tence springs from an act of immod­esty. I can’t even begin to imag­ine the Native Amer­i­can read on this one.” Excel­lent point.

“The Dubuque effort stands out not only because it is in the United States, but also because it marks I.B.M.’s most com­pre­hen­sive approach to these dig­i­tally enhanced pub­lic ser­vices — water, elec­tric­ity and trans­porta­tion. “We’re try­ing to make Dubuque into the first inte­grated, smart city,” said Robert Mor­ris, vice pres­i­dent of ser­vices research at I.B.M.”

Funny photo.

Another cus­tomer sup­port tool.

“The adver­tise­ment com­mits to greater invest­ments in Sun hard­ware and Solaris soft­ware, but has absolutely noth­ing to say about MySQL. Is this a nec­es­sary omis­sion to appease Euro­pean reg­u­la­tors, or is it a sign of Oracle’s inten­tions?” Noth­ing about MySQL or Java.

“And for each eight years you age, you dou­ble your chances of dying. That’s the Gom­pertz Law of human mor­tal­ity, which is actu­ally sun­nier than you think. If you’re 24 today, you stand a 0.3 per­cent chance of dying in the next year. That chance dou­bles, to just 0.6 per­cent, by the time you’re 32. But the com­pound inter­est of your cor­po­real decay mounts quickly. By the time you’re 89, your chances of expir­ing before the end of the year rise to 86.4 percent.”

“As the pro­posed Google Book Search law­suit set­tle­ment is debated, I’ve read calls from var­i­ous crit­ics that every­thing should go back to “square one” for a solu­tion. Would Google be will­ing to do this? Google CEO Eric Schmidt says he’s open to ideas, but none of the crit­ics are putting for­ward new solu­tions that would resolve the legal case that was filed against his company.”

“The House ethics com­mit­tee said it would put off for now an expanded inves­ti­ga­tion into whether Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jesse L. Jack­son Jr. of Illi­nois or his rep­re­sen­ta­tives tried to buy Pres­i­dent Obama’s for­mer Sen­ate seat. The com­mit­tee acted at the behest of fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors who already are inves­ti­gat­ing for­mer Gov. Rod R. Blago­je­vich of Illinois.”

“As of today, Face­book now serves 300 mil­lion peo­ple across the world. It’s a large num­ber, but the way we think about this is that we’re just get­ting started on our goal of con­nect­ing every­one. We’re also suc­ceed­ing at build­ing Face­book in a sus­tain­able way. Ear­lier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow pos­i­tive some­time in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this mile­stone last quar­ter. This is impor­tant to us because it sets Face­book up to be a strong inde­pen­dent ser­vice for the long term.” Awe­some news for Facebook.

“Yes, Linux servers have been bro­ken into man­u­ally. There is not, I repeat, is not, any mal­ware that auto­mat­i­cally con­vert Linux desk­tops or servers into virus-spreading boxes. All that has hap­pened is that some­one, as many oth­ers have in the past, has busted into improp­erly secured Linux servers.”

“The peo­ple who make desk­top soft­ware are mak­ing them­selves obso­lete. When you start devel­op­ing on the web, your default is to be smart, to inter­act and to be open (with other soft­ware and with your users). Desk­top soft­ware (like Word) is insanely unaware of what I do, why I do it and who I do it with. Right now, the desk­top folks have the momen­tum of the incum­bent. Not for long. Time to hurry.”

“Find fric­tion and embrace it, don’t ignore it.” Indeed.

Love in almost real time.

“The next time you find your­self using pro­fes­sional text, or pro­fes­sional stock images, con­sider the value of this “pro­fes­sion­al­ism”. Is it legit­i­mately help­ing you com­mu­ni­cate? Or is it get­ting in the way? ” I’m totally in favor of less cor­po­rate atti­tude for a small business.

“Five cur­rent and for­mer direc­tors of Bank of Amer­ica have been sub­poe­naed by the office of New York Attor­ney Gen­eral Andrew Cuomo, accord­ing to sources. Ear­lier this week, a US fed­eral judge ruled the bank would have to go to trial to set­tle alle­ga­tions it mis­led share­hold­ers about bonus payments.”

“Com­puter engi­neers topped the list of those pro­fes­sions mak­ing the most acci­dent claims in the last three years, accord­ing to fig­ures from Churchill Car Insur­ance.” The agent quoted attrib­utes it to stress­ful jobs as well as work­ing in more urban areas.

“And for some­one who has often been accused of play­ing fast and loose with facts, he seems to have an almost patho­log­i­cal pre­ci­sion about dates and spe­cific inci­dents, fram­ing sen­tences with, “The first reports came across the wire on Sat­ur­day morn­ing in Tra­verse City, Michi­gan” and “Dana Mil­bank wrote about this on Page 10 of The Wash­ing­ton Post … .””

“Fast Flip is a new read­ing expe­ri­ence that com­bines the best ele­ments of print and online arti­cles. Like a print mag­a­zine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequen­tially through bun­dles of recent news, head­lines and pop­u­lar top­ics, as well as feeds from indi­vid­ual top pub­lish­ers. As the name sug­gests, flip­ping through con­tent is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find some­thing inter­est­ing. At the same time, we pro­vide aggre­ga­tion and search over many top news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, and the abil­ity to share con­tent with your friends and com­mu­nity. Fast Flip also per­son­al­izes the expe­ri­ence for you, by tak­ing cues from selec­tions you make to show you more con­tent from sources, top­ics and jour­nal­ists that you seem to like.”

“Mak­ing sure the door isn’t locked if users choose to leave a ser­vice is a required, if less excit­ing, part of the data porta­bil­ity move­ment. Just as impor­tant as a bulk dump of user data is the option for users to eas­ily and securely port data online from ser­vice to ser­vice for imme­di­ate per­son­al­iza­tion based on past activ­ity at a legacy site. Google is a mar­ket leader in that kind of data porta­bil­ity as well.”

“As of 10:30 a.m. EDT today, Sep­tem­ber 15, the Kin­dle edi­tion is ahead of the hard­cover edi­tion in Amazon’s own hourly-updated sales rankings.”

“The World Food Pro­gramme says US curbs are in part behind its move to shut its Somali feed­ing pro­grammes for more than 100,000 acutely mal­nour­ished chil­dren. The US restric­tions affect fund­ing for areas con­trolled by groups des­ig­nated as ter­ror­ist. Wash­ing­ton has imposed sanc­tions on the hard­line Somali Islamist group, al-Shabab. But the WFP says it is doing all it can to get the aid through with­out it being con­trolled by the Somali insurgents.”

“In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique tech­nol­ogy improves the process that con­verts scanned images into plain text, known as Opti­cal Char­ac­ter Recog­ni­tion (OCR). This tech­nol­ogy also pow­ers large scale text scan­ning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Hav­ing the text ver­sion of doc­u­ments is impor­tant because plain text can be searched, eas­ily ren­dered on mobile devices and dis­played to visu­ally impaired users. So we’ll be apply­ing the tech­nol­ogy within Google not only to increase fraud and spam pro­tec­tion for Google prod­ucts but also to improve our books and news­pa­per scan­ning process.” Great news for an awe­some product.

Pretty much says it all.

“We’re grow­ing at a rate of over 400 new users and 1000 new repos­i­to­ries every day and these rates are only increas­ing with time. We need to take dras­tic action now to put in place the kind of infra­struc­ture that will allow us to pro­vide you with a top-notch user expe­ri­ence.” Awe­some news for con­sumers and GitHub.

“
My advice would be to com­pletely ignore this poll. There are poll­sters out there that have an agenda but are highly com­pe­tent, and there are poll­sters that are non­par­ti­san but not par­tic­u­larly skilled. Rarely, how­ever, do you find the whole pack­age: that spe­cial poll­ster which is both biased and inept. IBD/TIPP is one of the few exceptions.”

“Has the time come to kill the “Remem­ber me” check box and just assume that peo­ple using shared com­put­ers will sim­ply logout?” No.