DavidAdams

I'm glad somebody mentioned this, because World Go Boom was the first thing I thought of when we started a discussion about mashups. DJ Earworm is a master of the art.

A friend of mine was just as bad of a game addict when it drove him to drop out of graduate school and become a deadbeat. He's now a successful game designer at Blizzard.

My favorite forgotten tech is the Garmin iQue, which is a PalmOS-based handheld GPS unit. Because of its color screen, its battery life wasn't great, so it wasn't suitable for backcountry use, but as a dash-mounted GPS is was great. While other GPS units at the time required you to navigate through confusing menus to enter an address or find a point of interest, the iQue allowed me to use Grafitti handwriting recognition, which was a lot faster.

http://www8.garmin.com/products/iQue3600/

My friend Phil Jacobsen has worked for several years in Antarctica at McMurdo, starting as a dishwasher, and moving up to better jobs in subsequent years. He wrote a very interesting account of a side-trip to the South Pole here: http://www.salon.com/2003/01/23/bigchill/

Harry Harrison was the first author I was really obsessed with. By the time I was 16, I'd read his entire body of work. I haven't read anything that he's written in the past 15 years or so. I suppose I ought to find one of his newer novels as a way to commemorate him. Any recommendations?

I spend a lot of time here with my kids: http://nickelmaniagames.com/

My 10 and 12 year old boys like playing the old games just as much as I did when I was their age 30 years ago.

A friend of mine who buys and restores old houses deals with a similar issue. Buyers hire inspectors when they want to buy a house, who are supposed to alert them to major liabilities that might be lurking. But those inspectors aren't well trained and also have a need to appear to be "useful" to the people who pay them, so if you're selling a house that doesn't have any obvious flaws, such as a broken furnace or crumbling foundation, then they will entertain themselves by pointing out trivial items that dont' really affect the house's suitability, but can often scare buyers away or cause headaches for the seller. (For example, cracks in the foundation of an 80 year old house that likely appeared within months of the house being built and haven't budged since.)

To counter this, my friend purposely leaves 3-4 fixes that he intended to complete all along un-done for the inspector to notice and fixate on. Then the inspector gets to look useful, the buyer gets a good house, and everyone's happy.

You just can't please some people. Yes, that gift horse's mouth is a little dirty. :-)

Saying that something has a "Soviet" design aesthetic isn't a slur against Russia or Russians. Maybe it's an unfair characterization, but goods from the USSR era have a reputation for being utilitarian, and even "severe" in their design. In contrast with many contemporary consumer products, for example, which often stress form over function.

From the article: "Microsoft's Hotmail was the most popular Internet-based email service globally as of May, with about 325 million unique visitors. Yahoo's service ranked second, with roughly 298 million users, while Google's Gmail garnered about 289 million users."

Notice the problem here? Maybe it's just an error on the part of the author, but if they're comparing "unique visitors" of hotmail.com to the published number of users of the other services, that's an apples to oranges comparison.

Also making this survey a little useless is the fact that many people are like me: I have a hotmail account from the olden days, and several years ago, I set it to forward to my Google Apps account, and it's probably going to stay that way until Microsoft goes out of business. So I'm listed as a hotmail user, even though I rarely give it much attention, and use Google Mail as my everyday tool.

Nevertheless, it's a catchy headline, and a good example of a platform long tail. Even though hotmail's sexy days are a decade or more in the past, it remains relevant because it's sticky, and even trend chasers like me continue to "use" it because my old hotmail address is still out there and continues to get mail.

I suspect that they commit suicide for the same reason that anyone does. As another commenter pointed out, the suicide rate among Foxconn workers is similar to the rate for the Chinese populace in general, which probably tracks pretty well with the rate of depression. Not all seriously depressed people will commit suicide, but people who are depressed are more likely to commit suicide if they are under especially acute stress and don't have a good support system to help them deal with their current bout of stress and depression.

Rural people who come to the big city to work in harsh conditions away from their families probably meet those two criteria especially well. They're overworked and lonely, and even though they're probably better fed, better paid, and maybe even better rested then they were home on the farm, psychologically they're under more pressure, and there really isn't anyone to keep an eye on them. So they have a day where the harsh conditions or pressures seem too much, and they jump off the building. And once the first person did it, people with a predisposition to suicide have that option hanging there in the back of their mind, and eventually do the same thing.

My company went to a trade show recently, and instead of brochures, we made up a little business card with some summary information on the front, and a big QR code on the back. When you scan the QR code, it puts the summary and contact information into your phone as a contact. (It's labeled, so people know that scanning the code will transfer the card's information to their phone's contact list). I think this is pretty darn useful. It's nice to have something physical to hand to someone, but nobody wants to re-key contact info. And we want to make it easy to get the info from the card into their phone. You can use vcard or MECARD format. http://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/BarcodeContents

I don't know why more people don't use the scan-to-transfer aspect of QR codes.

On the other hand, one of Covey's habits is "sharpen the saw." Which is just another metaphor for Lifehacking. If you take a few minutes to optimize your tool, your work will be easier. On the other hand, if you spend your day sharpening the saw, at some point it's not going to get usably sharper, and you're just wasting time. You've got to find a way to strike the balance.

I tried one of mailchimp's new templates and it was a disaster. It was all jacked up on Outlook. So beware. Mailchimp is great software, but I don't think their QA on the newest templates was up to the standard.

+1 on the Elk M1 Gold. If you're a hacker, you should definitely buy the haker's security system. You can then choose what kind of monitoring you'd like. I go with a local independent security monitoring company that costs about $8 per month. You can also set it up for self-monitoring. I wrote a review of the Elk M1 a while back: http://www.osnews.com/story/22206/Building_the_Wired_Home_El...

IANAL, but if you cross something out of a contract, sign it, and the counterparty also signs the contract, then the part you struck out is not part of the contract. The trick is getting the other person who's signing the contract to sign it even though you've crossed things out.

In my experience, people and organizations often purposely make their contracts over-reaching just to be on the safe side, and expect savvy customers/partners to cross those overreaching items off.

The title of this article is pure flamebait, but I am a 41 year old former English major, and I've founded several software companies and had several hundred software engineers work for me since I co-founded my first company in 1995. I'm a little bit of a unique case, since what got me started was being hired as a research assistant for a forward-thinking biology professor who wanted me not only collecting information, analyzing it, and writing (my core specialty) but also administering a Gopher server, which turned into a web server, which became a proficiency with 1993-era web design. When I co-founded my company in 1995, I was the only one of the co-founders that really knew anything about the web. I eventually settled into the head of product role, and I've been a jack-of-all-trades product executive ever since.

So not every English major is going to have a similar backstory. But I do know this: research, organization, and strong writing skills got me where I am. It helps also that I was an engineering school dropout and I share many of the proclivities of my engineering brethren. I just decided at some point in college that I liked writing as a way of making things, and switched to English.

As other commenters have noted, no forty year old is an English major anymore. The point worth making is that receiving a good education and being ambitious, hard-working, curious, and embracing new technology is a good recipe for success. And if you think you're going to get anywhere in this new world without strong written communication skills, you're fooling yourself.

Except that the original iPhone launch was gangbusters, and it did cost $600. But Apple had the advantage of absolute novelty and a dose of fanboysim back then. So Ballmer was right in general about the phone market, but he was oh so wrong about the iPhone launch in particular. Apple just needed to pivot to a carrier-subsidized model once the initial enthusiasm wave receeded.

I wouldn't be so hard on this essay. It's a little scattered, but there's some gold in there. Writing a concise, powerful essay is really, really hard, which is one of the reasons that people who are really good at it become famous (Jonathan Swift, Christopher Hitchens, etc).

I've never found a company whose motorcycle coverage came even close to being as cheap as Geico's. So there's your comparison right there :-)

For a brief period after the Sept 11 attacks, the National Guard was posted in airports, presumably to make skittish American passengers feel safer. This was discontinued a long time ago. I remember travelling to a very small, remote airport (SGU) that had 3-4 flights per day during that time and feeling quite sorry for what were apparently the most bored National Guard soldiers of all time standing guard in an empty waiting room.

So true. I move that the expression "beg the question" be stricken from the lexicon. If you use it right, people have no idea what you're talking about. Use it wrong, and people like me get all distracted and discombobulated. Best not to say it at all.

I agree with you that they can, but I think the point of this essay is that startups can't solve these problems on their own, using only technology and chutzpah. In order to solve "health care recordkeeping" you have to get governments and large companies on board with the process. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. There are going to need to be a lot of people at the table, and for the most part a startup isn't going to have the political juice to make it happen.

To answer the question about Salt Lake City's bike market, I live in Park City, and mountain bike with a bunch of SLC guys, and I know the bike market there pretty well. It's about demographics. SLC doesn't have many more urban commuter/transportation bikers than any similar-sized city, and in fact I think that the per-capita rate of casual cyclists is actually below the national average. But it does have a lot of serious cyclists who spend major money on high end mountain and road bikes. So that skews the average.

And I can speak from experience having owned a few Petzl headlamps and some cheapo no-name Chinese headlamps, or even cheapo Chinese headlamps with Eddie Bauer branding. There's a world of difference. I have a Petzl that's 15 years old and works like a champ.

So I can understand them being pissed about counterfeit goods sullying their good name. Now, I'm a little baffled as to why anyone would buy a $5,000+ handbag, but hey, whatever floats your boat. I can also see where designer labels would be desperate to protect their businesses too.

But that's the thing: there's nothing wrong with a company pushing hard to use the law to protect its business. But since lawmakers are supposed to promote the common welfare, they shouldn't just roll over like obedient dogs. The people need to yell about it until the lawmakers wise up.

Oh, and modern surfboards are really a lot better than the ones the Polynesians used to make a long time ago.

My guess is that they were training folks on the safety equipment and procedures that Western mountaineers use, so the Nepalese guides and outfitters don't have a culture clash in an emergency situation. The truth is, modern mountaineering equipment and procedure is really good, even if some aspects the traditional mountain knowledge and ways are timeless and extremely valuable too.

Important to note that the Corporate World won't be touching the Windows app store with a ten meter cattle prod. IT departments determine what gets installed on all those machines. So all of those massive amounts of users will be irrelevant to Microsoft's app store fortunes.

On the other hand, people said the same thing about the telecoms pre-iPhone. The way I see it going down: Apple does an exclusive in the US with DirecTV, and gets a satellite raw feed to a 100% Apple interface. Since most people in the US can switch to DirecTV if they want to, if the Apple TV ends up becoming successful, the cable operators would have to also play ball.

Reminds me of that famous XKCD comic, only someone is doing it as a job: http://xkcd.com/386/. "Duty Calls" indeed. I wonder however whether we should be heeding that great and wise axiom, which I believe it was Sun Tzu who originally said: "don't feed the trolls." Nobody has been able to talk Glenn Beck out of his idiotic ideas, and the fact that there are people out there "engaging" with his fans with true facts doesn't seem to do anything but feed their persecution complex. This could very possible be a waste of time at best, and fanning the flames at worst.