Yostivanich

“Today, we’re rolling out a search fea­ture that does just that by enabling you to search and more eas­ily dis­cover mil­lions of songs, all via a sim­ple Google web search. If you’re search­ing for music, “time to result” is really “time to music.” Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio pre­view of those songs pro­vided by our music search part­ners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. When you click the result you’ll be able to lis­ten to an audio pre­view of the song directly from one of those part­ners. For exam­ple, if I search for [21^st cen­tury break­down], the first results pro­vide links to songs from Green Day’s new album. MySpace and Lala also pro­vide links to pur­chase the full song.”

“If you have a friend or a fam­ily mem­ber whose pro­file should be memo­ri­al­ized, please con­tact us, so their mem­ory can prop­erly live on among their friends on Facebook.”

“But if you dig a lit­tle deeper into that dat­ing site, you start to under­stand how dif­fer­ently Li thinks, and how that think­ing reflects an aspect of Chi­nese con­sumer Web sites that West­ern­ers fre­quently miss. Where Chi­nese Web entre­pre­neurs shine is in tak­ing an exist­ing busi­ness idea – rip­ping it off, if you like – but then com­pletely rethink­ing and rein­vent­ing that idea’s busi­ness model and process. This not only makes the com­pa­nies more prof­itable faster, it’s a big rea­son why home-grown Chi­nese ver­sions con­tin­u­ally beat US com­pa­nies try­ing to expand into China.”

“The body said it that it was final­is­ing plans to intro­duce web addresses using non-Latin char­ac­ters. The pro­posal — ini­tially approved in 2008 — would allow domain names writ­ten in Asian, Ara­bic or other scripts.”

“UI that looked sexy in Pho­to­shop almost always looks overde­signed when we try it for real in the browser. Here’s a hypoth­e­sis. Sim­ple and use­ful designs just don’t seem good enough when they are dead pix­els. They need to be brought to life before they can be appre­ci­ated. Until that hap­pens we over­com­pen­sate with gar­nish.” I totally agree.

“I don’t expect the ebook-reader mar­ket to be the next hot thing. But it’s also not a fad, and it’s not going away. These are great devices for read­ing, even if you need to use one before you’re con­vinced, and any objec­tion to their cur­rent soft­ware lim­i­ta­tions is likely to be temporary.”

“Microsoft keeps burn­ing cash online. Today, for the fif­teenth straight quar­ter, it reported a big oper­at­ing loss in its Online Ser­vices Division.”

“The US mil­i­tary in Afghanistan is to be allowed to pay Tal­iban fight­ers who renounce vio­lence against the gov­ern­ment in Kabul.”

“The Leg­is­la­ture gave final approval Wednes­day to a ban on tex­ting and using hand­held devices behind the wheel. Pro­hib­ited activ­i­ties include email­ing, watch­ing DVDs, fool­ing with MP3 play­ers and video gaming.”

“Shares of nav­i­ga­tion device mak­ers sunk Wednes­day after Google Inc. (GOOG) upgraded its smart­phone soft­ware to include a free nav­i­ga­tion fea­ture.” Google is going to just kill in this mar­ket space.

“Claim­ing that the pres­i­dent was prey­ing on the public’s fear of con­tract­ing a fatal dis­ease last week when he declared the H1N1 virus a national emer­gency, Repub­li­can lead­ers announced Wednes­day that they were offi­cially endors­ing the swine flu.” Another one of those times when you won­der if The Onion is real news.

“
A war? When did Apple start a war? I dis­tinctly remem­ber Steve Jobs say­ing he wanted 1 per­cent of the phone mar­ket. I don’t remem­ber any rhetoric about invad­ing Poland. Do you?”

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“There is one area in which Google Groups con­tin­ues to shine: Pri­vate, or restricted, mail­ing list dis­cus­sions. How­ever any attempts at using it for a pub­lic dis­cus­sion medium are com­pletely futile.” I totally agree, Google Groups as a pub­lic dis­cus­sion medium is totally broken.

“Seri­ous stu­dents of health care have known for a long time that the magic of the mar­ket­place doesn’t work in health care; the United States has the most pri­va­tized health-care sys­tem in the advanced world, and also the least effi­cient. The pale reflec­tion of this real­ity in the cur­rent dis­cus­sion is that reform with a strong pub­lic option is cheaper than reform with­out — which means that as we get closer to really doing some­thing, rhetoric about social­ism fades out, and that $100 bil­lion or so in pro­jected sav­ings starts to look awfully attrac­tive.” Though I will admit it would be nice if Krug­man started cit­ing more often.

“Ice­land is the coun­try that has made the most progress in clos­ing the gen­der gap — knock­ing Nor­way off the top spot — a World Eco­nomic Forum sur­vey said.”

“Per­son­ally, I think good writ­ing doesn’t have to be edu­cated or well sup­ported or even gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect. It does have to be inter­est­ing enough that other peo­ple want to read it. Much of what comes out of high schools and uni­ver­si­ties fails this test, not because our stu­dents are inca­pable of say­ing any­thing inter­est­ing, but because a well-meaning but flawed aca­d­e­mic sys­tem has taught them a lot of bad habits.”

““This dance itself was a suc­cess­ful event.” –West Con­tra Costa Uni­fied School Dis­trict spokesman Marin Tru­jillo looks on the bright side after the bru­tal gang rape of a 15-year-old girl out­side of her high school’s home­com­ing dance.” Fuck you indeed.

“Cyber­war­fare ana­lysts argue that while most com­puter secu­rity efforts have until now been focused on soft­ware, tam­per­ing with hard­ware cir­cuitry may ulti­mately be an equally dan­ger­ous threat. That is because mod­ern com­puter chips rou­tinely com­prise hun­dreds of mil­lions, or even bil­lions, of tran­sis­tors. The increas­ing com­plex­ity means that sub­tle mod­i­fi­ca­tions in man­u­fac­tur­ing or in the design of chips will be vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to detect.”

“Israel is deny­ing Pales­tini­ans access to even the basic min­i­mum of clean, safe water, Amnesty Inter­na­tional says. In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restric­tions dis­crim­i­nate against Pales­tini­ans in the occu­pied West Bank. It says that in Gaza, Israel’s block­ade has pushed the already ail­ing water and sewage sys­tem to “cri­sis point”.”

“Chrome OS is a brand new free oper­at­ing sys­tem built around the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Google Chrome browser.”

“The company’s new pub­lic source optical-scan vot­ing sys­tem, called Fron­tier Elec­tion Sys­tem, will be sub­mit­ted for fed­eral cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and test­ing in the first quar­ter of next year. The code will be released for pub­lic review in Novem­ber, the com­pany said, on its web site. Sequoia’s pro­pri­etary, closed sys­tems are cur­rently used in 16 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia.” That’s awe­some news.

“Aside is now accept­able to use for sec­ondary con­tent, such as a blogroll, groups of addi­tional nav­i­ga­tion and even adver­tis­ing if that con­tent is related to the page. When used within an arti­cle ele­ment, the con­tents should be specif­i­cally related to that arti­cle, for exam­ple a glos­sary. When using aside, please be aware of these changes of context.”

“Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan pres­i­dent and a sus­pected player in the country’s boom­ing ille­gal opium trade, gets reg­u­lar pay­ments from the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer Amer­i­can officials.The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a vari­ety of ser­vices, includ­ing help­ing to recruit an Afghan para­mil­i­tary force that oper­ates at the C.I.A.’s direc­tion in and around the south­ern city of Kan­da­har, Mr. Karzai’s home.”