How much worse is “failed catastrophically” than “failed”, or even “unrecoverable failure”?
Via adobegripes:
Quality of Life Plotted against Log Income
The Future - What Went Wrong?
How VCs should not pitch to a startup
It does seem odd that the VC’s focus is on differentiating them from other VCs, rather than being interested in what they’re likely to put their money in.
Like so many things nowadays, this is just doing a job by a fixed process - crank the handle and the ‘right’ result comes out.
Technologizer assesses Lauren and the 'Apple Tax'
Prompted by the Microsoft ‘Lauren’ advert, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken compares the 17” Mac Book Pro with equivalent models from Dell, HP, Lenovo & Sony. In short he finds that the ‘Apple Tax’ is the same as the ‘HP Tax’, less than the ‘Dell Tax’ more than the ‘Lenovo Tax’, and that the Sony machine belonged in a different category.
What interested me was a comment that asked “What about all the Laurens out there?”, referring to the much lower specification machine that Lauren apparently selects in the ad, and my immediate reaction was “Why get a shoddy laptop just to get a 17 inch screen?”.
Personally I don’t see the point of a 17” laptop - I have made the mistake in the past of buying an overly large laptop, forgetting that the key element of a laptop is portability! So to compromise all the other features to gain a large screen indicates either misguided buying priorities or specialised requirements (i.e. not travelling frequently with the ‘portable’!). Also, my step-daughter got given a Dell Vostro 1000 - a low-end laptop/Vista combination, and it is frankly horrible with a number of niggling issues, which reminded me exactly what those compromises actually are.
Are there a lot of Laurens in reality? Certainly there are a lot of computer purchasers with a misguided view of their priorities, and there is certainly an increasing demographic who buy laptops purely to use at home while slouching on the sofa (I confidently predict an epidemic of back and other posture-related problems in a few years time!).
Ultimately however, the real point of the ad was to find a pricing angle that ruled Apple out of the game. To require a 17” screen and < $1000 dollars was always going to be the best way for the Microsoft to do that. The Lauren character is a creation of the advertising copywriter and in reality the girl is an actress!
Metallica: Blackened - Microsoft Songsmith Version (via drphwoar)
Firefox Overtakes IE (on one site, at least)
The site for developers, W3Schools, has just published the browser statistics figures for January… and more people now use Firefox than all versions of IE put together (including IE8).
It has been coming for a while, but what is particularly interesting is that the numbers for IE7 have been dropping for the last 3 months (and the IE8 numbers nowhere near compensate for it).
Trading stopped for 15 minutes...
The article contains this little note right at the bottom:
“Paulo Sergio Silva, 36, a trader for the brokerage arm of the Brazilian banking giant Itaú, shot himself in the chest during the afternoon trading session of São Paulo’s commodities and futures exchange in an apparent suicide attempt in November. Trading stopped for about 15 minutes.”
Trading stopped for 15 minutes!!! Your colleague violently tries to commit suicide in the office, and you only stop work for 15 minutes.
And they say financial people have no soul…
Loaning of Shares
This article tries to absolve short selling of responsibility for the bank values crash a couple of weeks ago (it does look like institutions dumped their bank stock as soon as they found out that short-selling was being re-enabled).
But the interesting statistic in this article is that over 3 percent of Barclays shock was out on loan, even while short-selling was banned. Which begs a question:
Why would people or institutions want to borrow stock, if they are not using them to sell short?
