Archive for the ‘Personal stuff’ Category
Orion graduated
Comments (1)Now all he needs to learn is to listen to Mom and Dad. For the rest all is going fine. Too bad he can’t do his acrobatic stunts at school (they say it’s too dangerous).
We didn’t bring a camera, I forgot it while rushing out. Stupid. But we may get some pics from the other parents.
The teacher gets an F for spelling (Orion v/d Blok?)
The accomplishment:
State of the World
Comments (1)If you want to know more about the state of the world, pay a visit to gapminder.org. Yes, that term comes from the London underground (‘mind the gap’). I remember almost tripping over that gap between the subway train and the platform, trying to understand what the voice on the intercom was saying…
On this website Hans Rosling explains the history of the world by using animated statistical charts. Perhaps you’ve seen these charts as part of Google analytics. In fact, Google bought the Trendalyzer technology for these charts from them.
What stops population growth
What stops population growth? from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.
See also:
The world is in trouble, why?
Filed under: Personal stuff | Tags: economy, financial crisis, Microsoft, Yahoo
Leave a Comment The whole world is in a financial crisis. How did this happen? Here’s my own analysis of the past events.
I believe greed is the key word. When greed comes in, and is not controlled, it behaves like agression. Agression uncontrolled leads to crime, sometimes murder, most times war (which should be a crime, but isn’t).
When greed is not controlled, it leads, usually, to more greed. Capitalism is not too blame, though. The goal of capitalism, as I was told in my first economics class, was not profit. That was a misunderstanding. The goal of any organization is continuation of the business. That’s why usually you don’t see businesses like Apple or Yahoo (!) being purchased and stripped apart for profit. E.g. in the latter case, Microsoft was only interested in Yahoo’s services, not the money they could make of selling it again. At that level, continuation of the business is much more important. And that is what MS is looking at right now, a risk of not being able to compete in the OS market. Well, enough about that side story about Microsoft.
The banks, just like any other business, should be in the system for continuation of the business. However, when the economy is in a surge, going uphill, there is no stopping the banks. They get more and more money, and since they are in the money business, continuation seems only so easy. And since none of their clients really understand that business, they can basically sell anything. Just like it was with IT in the eighties. And guess what, IT also experiences these collapses for almost the same reasons (web 1.0 bubble, web 2.0 bubble).
I don’t have a good solution for this, I have to admit. Some things that spring to mind are to have more regulation, but regulation doesn’t always work well. Perhaps more transparency would be enough. Perhaps when the fine print is actually readable and understandable, and has to pass a readability score, then we’d all know what we be getting into.
Yes, we can!
Yes We Can – Barack Obama Music Video
Normally I don’t post videos on my blog, because it’s done too much already, but I though this one was appropriate to share with as many as possible. It’s not just the lyrics (eh. sorry speech), it’s also a new concept in music…
Yahoo, winner or loser?
If it’s up to Michael Arrington, Yahoo loses, but it’s not clear why. Yes, stock is going down, but that doesn’t define them. Just like your wallet is not your personality. Yes, Jerry Yang looks like a nerd, but so does Bill Gates.
If they go under they fail, of course, but how could they, having been nr 1 on the net for so long… There will always be advertisement money then, it’s simply a matter of downsizing and waiting for better times.
I am almost always impressed by the services of Yahoo, as delicious and even Yahoo Photos (deceased). It’s too bad that they don’t get what they deserve. Google is becoming like MS, they do great things, but always a little too late. Yahoo had autocomplete on their search a looooong time before Google. But when google delivers Google Suggest it’s suddenly something ‘new’. All eyes are on Google, but Yahoo technology stands already. Google doesn’t have BOSS, or YDN, or YUI. Google code is usually a bunch of spaghettiballs, so smart it doesn’t understand itself anymore. Yahoo code is clean, organized.
But inertia happens. It’s hard for such a big company to get rolling in a different direction. At least I hope they stop pursuing the social network dream. Let it go to Facebook and try to improve search this time, for real. Why don’t Yahoo index the dark matter in the web? There are still many new ideas to be tried which can result in a big success. Google is betting everything on keyword search, Microsoft is already in the natural language game (with Powerset), but real indexing done right hasn’t been done yet.
How about the interface? I need to do ‘hum hum hum’ and get the song title on my screen. Like that. I need to be able to sketch a flower and get the word ‘flower’ on my screen. And instead of ‘did you mean’ I need navigtion through association. By the way, I believe it was Excite that had that functionality a decade ago. You would type ‘Gibson’ and it would come up with ‘Mel Gibson (person)’ – ‘Gibson – guitar’, etc. It can’t be that hard if it was already possible ten years a go.
Yahoo, you have my vote.
Open source project management – learn for free
I had heard about open source software, but it didn’t occur to me other stuff could be open source as well. A friend of mine published what was my first acquaintance with an open source book. At http://www.projectmanagement-training.net/ you can learn a lot about project management, and if you’re a project manager yourself you may want to add to it. You can also opt for a training, as the domain name most blatantly suggests.
I must shamelessly admit I have merely scanned over it, and haven’t added anything, although I’ve been a trainer (e.g. MS Project), a project manager, and a writer for quite a while.
Fed up with the TOEFL failures
Web writers should all do a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and people should learn not to hire persons who have no language skill whatsoever. I think it’s the upcoming East part of the world that is now invading the internet with sentences like
New scheme was noticed running in wild targeting those that do money transfers online. Although online banks employ various security measures, they still can be tricked. New “Server Error Messages” scam combines spam, trojans, phishing and a lot of insolence to empty bank accounts of its victims.
If this looks correct to you, grab an “English 101″ book now. The Yoda’s Yodas of the world seem to have united, but I say: if you don’t even know what a definite article is you definitely shouldn’t be writing one. Is there a name for this (like LOLCatz, but this one would be without the LOL)?
update: well I just thought of a name for it – Noartspeak. As in: no article speak. Pronounce it as Nort-speak. I would define it as “writing or speaking English where all articles (a, the, an, etc) are removed from the sentence.
Example:
We all had a great laugh at the show, where the quiz master asked the questions in Noartspeak
becomes
We all had great laugh at show, where quiz master asked questions in Noartspeak
Internet connection is back
Finally we have internet connection at home again, so I can write some more. Sorry about the radio silence, but we have finally moved into our new home.
