Via Dave Winer:
The best way to get ideas is to suffer with something that doesn’t really work
Random thoughts from a random technology guy
-
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
-
Fourth of July Fun
Victoria fishing at a friend’s place in Westchester. That dock was a nice place to watch the fireworks.
-
Misleading Stat o’ the Day
The Atlantic’s “The Misguided Freakout About Basement-Dwelling Millennials” points out a critical issue with the “young people are living with their parents” statistics:
From the Census reports:
It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents’ home.
Well that changes things rather a lot, doesn’t it. College enrollment is at an all time high. Hmm, perhaps you should break out in college, vs. not in college.
Hard to see a frightening trend in that chart.
-
Statue of Liberty
I so rarely see the full poem, you just see the last line. So perhaps a day late…
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
-
Coby
So when we first got our puppy I thought this might turn into a dog blog. But he’s been a good dog and there really hasn’t been that much to say.
He’s 8 months now. Getting big. And super friendly.
The friendly part is a big deal to me. In Brooklyn, you go for a walk and you pass a bunch of other dogs. Sometimes the owner will say, “sorry, he’s not friendly”. I would hate that.
Coby just assumes that every dog and every human is his friend. That’s really what you want from your dog.
-
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.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 