Yostivanich

“So when it comes to edu­ca­tion, I start rolling my eyes when peo­ple sug­gest edu­ca­tion is the magic bul­let. Let’s get real, please. As hereti­cal as it is to say in our soci­ety, “edu­ca­tion” is not the panacea for per­sonal finance. That’s a sim­plis­tic throw-away answer that does noth­ing to address real solutions.”

“What you’ll expe­ri­ence are ridicu­lously good designs. Mil­lions of iter­a­tions are folded into what you see. Every­thing is the prod­uct of a mil­lion suc­cess­ful tries. The col­ors and shapes and struc­tures and tex­tures are man­i­fes­ta­tions of sur­vival. If it’s alive it’s good design.”

“The first one above shows the growth of data traf­fic on AT&T’s mobile net­work. It is 50 times higher than it was just three years ago. I added two arrows to show when the first iPhone launched in June, 2007 and the iPhone 3G in July 2008. The chart over­lays the first 20 quar­ters of user growth for each prod­uct. Only eight quar­ters after launch, the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than twice as many users (57 mil­lion) as imode (25 mil­lion), five times as many as Netscape (11 mil­lion), and eight times as many as AOL (7 mil­lion) at a com­pa­ra­ble points in their histories.”

Is all that we need to explain the super­nat­ural human laziness?

“A UN rights expert says the food sit­u­a­tion in North Korea is des­per­ate, with aid from the World Food Pro­gramme reach­ing only one-third of the hungry.”

“Hav­ing two adja­cent screens will cre­ate nav­i­ga­tional con­fu­sion. A lot of peo­ple will try to touch the e-ink dis­play out of con­fu­sion, a bad guess, or ingrained habit and be slightly frus­trated every time. Dis­play­ing some inter­ac­tive ele­ments on the e-ink screen, includ­ing dialogs and input boxes, adds to the con­fu­sion. It’s a touch-screen device, but only in one area. You touch the things that you inter­act with, except those.” The worst com­plaint brought up, which does make sense.

“Today we’re intro­duc­ing Rain­drop, an explo­ration in mes­sag­ing inno­va­tion being led by the team respon­si­ble for Thun­der­bird, to explore new ways to use Open Web tech­nolo­gies to cre­ate use­ful, com­pelling mes­sag­ing experiences.”

“On Fox News’ Han­nity, Karl Rove sug­gested that a Wash­ing­ton Post/ABC News poll that showed broad sup­port for a pub­lic option was skewed because “the word­ing of the ques­tion” didn’t make clear that the pub­lic option would include gov­ern­ment involve­ment. In fact, the Wash­ing­ton Post/ABC News poll ques­tion asked about sup­port for “hav­ing the gov­ern­ment cre­ate a new health insur­ance plan to com­pete with pri­vate health insur­ance plans,” and its results mir­rored those of other recent pub­lic opin­ion polls that asked about sup­port for a government-administrated pub­lic option.” When­ever Rove gets out his white­board I have to ques­tion it.

“A woman in the US who said she was kid­napped, raped and tor­tured in a racially-motivated attack in 2007, has now said she fab­ri­cated her story. Seven peo­ple pleaded guilty to the attack on Megan Williams, now aged 22. Six are serv­ing prison sen­tences. But Ms Williams’ lawyer now says she invented the story to get revenge on her boyfriend for hit­ting her. Pros­e­cu­tors have ques­tioned the move, say­ing the alleged cul­prits were found guilty on the basis of evi­dence.” Um okay?

“These argu­ments run from the lit­er­ally inco­her­ent (#1) to the sub­limely unper­sua­sive (#3), with #2 some­where in between. Yet, they are, appar­ently, the best argu­ments that the Yes on 1 folks can muster — the ones they’re using to close out their cam­paign. The fact is that the over­whelm­ing major­ity of peo­ple who dis­like gay mar­riage do so for one of two rea­sons: either their reli­gion has a taboo against homo­sex­u­al­ity, or they find the prac­tice gross.”

“It showed that, even in a mar­ket like this one with very few play­ers, col­lu­sion is dif­fi­cult to main­tain. There are tremen­dous incen­tives for one or more par­ties to cheat and move the mar­ket toward a com­pet­i­tive out­come. Unfor­tu­nately nobody has ever gone as high as the pre­dicted equi­lib­rium bid of $17.50.”

“But the hip replace­ment scam is even worse than Steve real­izes. Because who, you might ask, pays for hip replace­ments in Amer­ica? The answer: Medicare pays 63.8% of the cost, Med­ic­aid 6.8%. That’s right, the U.S. gov­ern­ment pays for 70% of hip replace­ments in this country.”

“The Amer­i­can Book­sellers Asso­ci­a­tion, which rep­re­sents inde­pen­dently owned book­stores, has sent a let­ter to the Jus­tice Depart­ment ask­ing it to inves­ti­gate what it describes as “preda­tory pric­ing” by Ama­zon, Wal-Mart and Tar­get. The price war began last week when Wal-Mart announced that it would offer Walmart.com cus­tomers who pre­ordered any of 10 of the com­ing hol­i­day season’s biggest poten­tial best sell­ers the chance to buy the books in hard­cover edi­tions for just $10. Typ­i­cally new hard­cov­ers sell for $25 to $35, although some dis­count­ing is com­mon.” Unfor­tu­nately for them it’s most likely not ille­gal, as long as the large com­pa­nies didn’t col­lude together.

“I won­der how much of this comes down to seman­tics. The vast major­ity of peo­ple I know have no prob­lems stor­ing their email in the cloud. And that’s prob­a­bly the biggest cache of per­sonal data most aver­age users have.”

“Only have a 10 minute cof­fee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called “magic” that re-orders items in the feed based on your per­sonal usage, and over­all activ­ity in Reader, instead of default chrono­log­i­cal order. Click “Sort by magic” under the “Feed set­tings” menu of your feed (or folder) to switch to per­son­al­ized rank­ing. Unlike the old “auto” rank­ing, this new rank­ing is per­son­al­ized for you, and gets bet­ter with time as we learn what you like best — the more you “like” and “share” stuff, the bet­ter your magic sort will be. Give it a try on a high-volume feed folder or All items and see for your­self! ” Can you say so cool.

Read Kin­dle books on your Win­dows PC.