Gibbon

It doesn't make any sense to me for the author to compare three companies that have nothing to do with each other. One if a all-purpose retailer, one a hardware company and one sells advertising.

That being said, Amazon is the runaway freight train in online retailing. With sales of $24.5 billion, there isn't anyone else even remotely close. Staples is no.2 at $9.5 billion and Walmart is an order of magnitude smaller than Amazon.

Amazon are on a tear this quarter with net sales growing 40%.

Now you add in their position as a leader in cloud-computing, along with the kindle.. and I think their future prospects are great.

"So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat." - John Sculley

If you want to read up on PageRank and other search algorithms, this book: http://www.amazon.com/Googles-PageRank-Beyond-Science-Rankin... goes into more detail.

Larry joked that Sergei just wanted to see how cool he was by measuring how many people were linking to him.

Clearly neither the Mashable author nor the NYMag author actually watched the video or they would have noticed they did NOT send an iPhone into space.

The iPhone was used for GPS tracking on the ground. The camera in the balloon is a Go Hero Pro HD.

-29 days to write an app that can write novels in less than a day.

-1 day to write the novel.

-done.

They sold 70,000 tickets in the first three weeks with $3 per ticket in revenue from Orbitz. A million in funding seems entirely justified.

Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do):

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Dangerous-Things-Should-Children...

Long ago I learned "Do it Right, Do it Right now".. but it's more "don't half ass it" rather than "do it perfectly"

If you're talking about your average glass here on Earth, it's always full.

Either it's 100% full of liquid, or 50% full of liquid and 50% full of air, or 0% full of liquid and 100% full of air.

Any way you slice it, it's always full.

Yes it does. Orange is the complement to blue so orange will also look good on a blue screen.

What's interesting is how little thought seems to go into differentiating web sites through colour palette.

It's a common consideration in other industries to establish a clear colour choice as a method of differentiation. Take Coke red, for example, versus Pepsi blue. Or green John Deere tractors or yellow Dewalt power tools. Any new entrant would be wise to pick a specific colour and stick to it.

Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Likewise, for a blogging host, something in the greens or red/purples would be good.

It looks like the location and social news sites are doing a better job of differentiating themselves.

Also take a look at Google and Microsoft, clearly "rainbow" companies. Apple used to be a rainbow company but has done an excellent job of shifting their palette over to the monochromatics. Not only is it as far away from rainbow as you can get, but the monochromatics are associated with "expensive","premium" and "well designed".

I think rainbow palettes actually kind of backfire when it comes to big companies. It's like they try too hard to say "hey look at us, we're so fun!" while also looking unfocused. However, overemphasis on one colour can backfire too.. just look at Yahoo and all their purple crap. They just seem completely dorky.

For web design, monitors tend to skew towards bluish white light, making blue designs look more appealing.

Indeed, Gates has likely helped create more billionaires and millionaires than anyone currently living.

Think of the ecosystem surrounding Microsoft: all of the hardware companies, peripherals, software, training, education and jobs that would not exist were it not for "a pc on every desktop." Not to mention the millions of people using Windows to run their businesses.

I might add also that Gates billions are not sitting in a vault. It gets invested and that capital is used by others to create their own empires.

Wealth is fractal. A major success can generate an explosion of wealth further down the chain.

Wether you agree with Billy Boy's tactics or not, it's petty to call him "evil".. he's had made an immeasurable impact on the world and done so in a way that directly or indirectly changed the lives of millions of people.

To fault him for giving away his fortune? Well that's just a whole other level of absurdity. He's under no obligation to give it away, and yet he is. One might argue over the efficacy of his plans, but surely humanity will benefit in the end.

The real questions are: Is it better to give away your wealth incrementally or in one lump sum at the end? Is more taxation better or less? Is a monopoly more effective at wealth creation or is a more diverse market better? It's impossible to answer.

Most of the wealthy I know are not against charity or giving away their wealth.. they are against an inefficient government deciding on how that should be accomplished.

I noticed DHH said in the comments his beef was not with the founders selling their companies, but with the Megacorps that let their acquisitions rot.

Google made an aesthetic change to the sponsored ads back in July to better match the new look and feel they pushed back in may. Nothing to do with Google instant at all.

What's funny is if people are only noticing this now, then the ads are obviously totally ineffective.

My local library solved this problem by blasting three different operas at obnoxious levels just outside the doorways.

It works, but it makes me cringe every time I walk into the library.

You can set it back to horizontal if you want: defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

The article assumes that older releases are unavailable due to laziness. This is not always the case.

Recordings can be deleted for any number of reasons including: infighting, copyright issues, legal issues, embarrassment, ego, lack of interest, changing trends.. you name it.

In some cases the rights, once sold to a label, can exchange hands so many times, that ownership can't even be determined.

In particular, if any of the affected parties go out of business, the songs can end up in limbo for eternity.

The minimum "safe" height for skydiving is 2000ft with most jumps between 2000-5000ft depending on the type of jump and experience of the skydiver.

In emergency situations it's possible to deploy at 200-300ft. and survive.

Basejumpers deploy way below 2000ft. with 200 or 300ft. not being uncommon but they have gear and techniques designed to open the chute very quickly.

Skydivers can fall at a rate of ~160 ft/sec. So in a worst case scenario you've got 2 seconds before impact.

Competition is a good thing. It's confirmation there's actually a market there.

You're far better off with a small slice of a big pie than a big slice of a tiny pie.

I actually did start and was able to quit my job about a month ago.. and a week later I was in a drowning accident and ended up in the hospital with heat stroke, dehydration and acute kidney failure.

Now I'm in limbo trying to recover as quickly as possible. I still have lower back pain near my kidneys which makes it hard to sit in a chair.

It's not that bad actually, I'm just finding it really hard to get the motivation to work consistently.

It's actually pretty cool.. I just found it and have been messing around with it.

This is how it works.. Type in a "thought" such as parrots and then click the storm tab on the top or the brainstorm tab on the right.

It pulls in semantically related keywords that are both deeper in your subject and related to your subject. Clicking on any them ads them to your list and you can then drill down ever deeper in each subject.

From there you can click the content button on the right or the pages button on the top and it pulls in content from wikipedia, amazon, flickr, yahoo etc.

Any content you like can then be added to a personalized page about that subject by simply clicking the "+" on each item.

For example here's a page I made with a few random things about parrots and parakeets.

http://pages.primal.com/_domain/3464b4a3-b61a-4227-b501-5a82...

One good use for it would be to pull in content and references for a blog post you're working on fairly quickly.

The search tab also ads your keyword and semantically related words to the top of the search page.

Yeah I was referring to the smartphone market rather than the mobile market.

Smartphones aren't expected to reach 50% mobile market share until Q3 2011.

Apple doesn't even lead the smartphone market (yet), RIM does. I'm sure they will catch up quick but RIM had 40% of the market last time I checked and Apple had 25%.

They have 90% of the mp3 market and 75% of the mp3 player market but that's still not a monopoly.

The only thing they could be accused of is a monopoly on non-crappy web apps. Pretty amusing.

I've got an alias in my downloads folder that auto adds mp3s to iTunes and iTunes auto-syncs to my ipod when I plug it in.

I don't even have to think about dragging and dropping anything.

Note: it was written by a Filipino.. maybe his english wasn't great.

It depends on what you're looking for but if you want Filipino VAs rather than Indian or elsewhere then onlinjobs.ph or bestjobs.ph are the places to look.

I don't recall ever in my life seeing a math equation with an empty parenthesis on one side.

Is this some American method of teaching math? It's bizarre.