Via Dave Winer:
The best way to get ideas is to suffer with something that doesn’t really work
Category: Technology
-
Ideas
-
Google Video Quality Report
This is fascinating. After Netflix briefly blamed certain ISPs for bad performance, Google (YouTube) is now just offering a clear report card on your video quality and that of other ISPs in your area.
Making the decision to move from Time Warner to FIOS look really good…
-
Startup Ethics
A good discussion of startup ethics or lack thereof, in reference to ReservationHop.
Ethics? Didn’t really occur to me
-
Amazon v Hachette
I haven’t followed this debate too closely. There was plenty of press discussing big bad Amazon but Amazon was being totally quiet. So I was reserving any judgment.
I still am, but this blog post from the co-publisher of The Permanent Press, a small literary fiction publisher, is an important data point in my overall opinion:
I give Amazon a four star review for not only their efficiency and work they do, but for leveling the playing field, and here are the four reasons why.
1) When you send orders to a store, distributor or wholesaler, publishers can count on returns of 20 to 80%. If Amazon orders books (which they do in increasingly larger numbers) it’s rare to get more than one or two percent returned. They are masters at this and consequently enable us to cut-down on our print runs.
2) Amazon makes it easy to post reviews of our books, whether they are online or print reviews. Nor is there any discrimination, space-wise, between the coverage we get for individual titles or Hachette gets. Additionally, when one of our books is ordered, they list other titles of ours that might be of interest, proving themselves to be great marketers.
3) Earnings from Kindle sales are excellent as both publisher and author find more profit (especially when we, as publishers, split eBook income on a 50:50 basis with our writers) with virtually no production costs. I’ve heard that most of the bigger houses don’t do this, writing contracts giving most authors only 25% of electronic income. Perhaps some of the authors complaining about Amazon on social media, would be better served if they complained to their publishers, like Melville or Hachette, if they are not getting 50% of this pie.
4) Amazon generally pays us within 30 days, with wire transfers to our bank. Nobody else in the industry come anywhere close to them and enables us to keep up with printing costs and salaries.
Point (1) is something I never would have considered, but must be a big deal. As a small business owner, point (4) is huge. No big companies pay within 30 days. Stalling beyond 90 seems to be standard corporate practice these days.
-
Vanishing Water
One of the more amusing What If posts in a while.
What would happen if all the bodies of water on Earth magically disappeared?
The quick answer:
As is often the case with these questions, everyone would die.
Now I read stuff like this via RSS. He must have edited the post after the feed went out. Here’s the Titanic paragraph in the post:
The Titanic sank in about two miles of water. After it disappeared beneath the surface, the two halves of the ship took between 5 and 15 minutes to reach the bottom.[2] Without the ocean there, it would have reached the bottom in about 30 seconds, striking it at airliner cruising speed.[3]
The RSS feed adds this to that paragraph:
Although no one has ever dropped a cruise ship from a high altitude,[citation needed] their terminal velocity at the surface is probably a little below the speed of sound.
Citation needed! That’s the funniest part of the whole thing.
-
Anonymizing Data is Really Hard
On Taxis and Rainbows, a fascinating piece about how a huge anonymized data set of NYC taxi data was released and how clever folks can reconstruct the data:
A cryptographically secure hashing function, like MD5 is a one-way function: it always turns the same input to the same output, but given the output, it’s pretty hard to figure out what the input was as long as you don’t know anything about what the input might look like. This is mostly what you’d like out of an anonymization function. The problem, however, is that in this case we know a lot about what the inputs look like.
-
If everyone understood this…
A nice one from Dave Winer:
Reality can be so complex that equally valid observations from differing perspectives can appear to be contradictory.
-
Where Is Everybody?
Via Wait But Why, One of the best descriptions of the Fermi Paradox I’ve read.
-
Modern Extortion
I stay on top of a variety of subjects via RSS feeds. I used to be a Google Reader guy and when Google shut that down I moved to Feedly. Feedly became very popular with Google Reader gone.
So now someone is trying to extort money from them. There’s a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack currently going on. If you don’t know what that means, hackers have a network of machines they’ve hacked flooding Feedly with so many requests that the site can’t handle it. The Distributed part is important because that makes it harder to fight. You can block traffic from specific addresses, but if there are a ton of addresses that keep changing it’s difficult to fight. So Feedly is down at the moment.
The attackers want money. It’s an old fashioned shake down. Nice little web site you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 