reblog: The conditions for survival and prosperity

amazing analysis / view / info-graphic almost, on the expected lifespan of personal computers companies.

The conditions for survival and prosperity

Yesterday’s post described the history of personal computing platforms over the past 37 years. It showed a distinct shifting of “eras” between traditional personal computing and the emergent mobile computing represented by device-based platforms.

Underlying these lives (and deaths) of platforms were the growth (and decline) of fortunes of companies

via: www.asymco.com

the chart is potentially good argument against apple-skeptics: they are in the business twice the time everybody else is, surely they learned more about users of personal computers than anyone.

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it’s a huge market – farming

#seedcamp @farmeron making farmers happy again...

Image by paulamarttila via Flickr

I mentored a great startup last year, Farmeron – they are an awesome team, your, hungry and able to produce their own food. I also felt they are trying to bring the second largest market on the planet to the digital age- farming. this news is a great confirmation of the hunch, and I’m looking forward to the future where IT will actually make a difference for the quality of life.

On the Internet of Things IBM Tracks Your Pork From Farm to Fork. Starting with China

IBM has set out to prove it can revolutionize the food industry with data, starting with China. Six industrial slaughterhouses and 100 markets in Shandong Province are part of a large scale test in tracking pork from farm to customer.

via: singularityhub.com

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surviving wikipedia blackout

Wikipedia blackout - January 18, 2012

Image by captsolo via Flickr

a couple of weeks ago i downloaded large part of wikipedia into my chrome. it felt a bit excessive experiment at that point, but, today, as we are experiencing wikipedia blackout, it actually came in extremely handy. feels weird to live in a world where having a local copy of a website is the only way to do business. feels like nineties all over again. fuck you SOPA.

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Hot / Cold

English: Lifted toilet seat reveals compost bi...

Image via Wikipedia

I hate cold. it makes me angry and antisocial. nothing special, just the way I am. I can take cold if necessary, I just know that I don’t like it. I don’t see why I would change that. I’m assuming I’m not the only one, but also expect that there are some cold-lover out there as well.

However, this condition made me specially sensitive to some social phenomena. the latest one, that I really really don’t understand is people’s behavior on public restrooms. They seem to be either specially designed for cold-lovers, or there is much more cold-lover out there than I imagined.

a) more often than not they are without heating. I get that, landlords are cheap and save money on heating. it’s not nice of them, but nobody spends lots of time in public toilets anyway. and I can handle my anger in small quantities anyway.

b) more often than not, there is an open window right behind the toilet seat. again, I can understand the reasons, even though they annoy me – nobody likes the smell of the person before him, and landlords are cheap and save money on ventilation.

c) roughly half of public restrooms don’t offer warm water. again, cheap landlords. however, in the other half that does, more often than not, like 80% of the time, the hot/cold water faucet is turned all the way to the cold one. let’s ponder a bit on this observation:

  • every time you use public restroom, someone else was there before you and you inherit their ‘preferred environment’. this means the water temperature preference is being suggested to you.
  • a lot of public restrooms don’t offer hot water, but those that do are not being used most of the time.
  • there is no way that so many people would be making a mistake in turning the faucet. all the faucets on the planet use the same direction for hot / cold water – all the faucets everybody is using at home, in their own bathroom and kitchen, use the same layout. they should be programmed to instinctively know which way to turn for warm.
Now, the question I have is this: does this experience mean, that 80% of people are actually cold-lovers and prefer being exposed to cold elements? Do they wash the dishes with cold water then? maybe that’s why they invented washing machines – so they don’t have to be exposed to warm water for too long?
I just don’t get it.
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Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr

no other words necessary.

Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr

Many in the United States got the day off work Monday in celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader and minister credited with bringing equal rights to African Americans, and tangentially, many other minority groups. Even after his assassination in 1968, his legacy as well as his moving speeches have inspired p

via: mashable.com 

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Reblogged: 18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011

I’m always excited when I see someone ponder the ‘blogging’ as a phenomena. while technorati is doing a decent job surveying us, not enough second-level interpretors are out there, explaining the findings and focusing us on the most relevant angles. this one is decent:

18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011

Tweet Blogging is a profession and a passion that has been transformational. The feedback has changed and informed me. I have written, travelled, presented and networked. It has allowed me to learn and to communicate with a global audience that has been enlightening, inspiring and empowering. It asks questions of you. Will people appreciate your th

via: www.jeffbullas.com

Related articles

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Reblogged: IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

wow! i find it amuzing how they neatly separate ‘theoretical’ from ‘engineering’ problem here – as if the ‘theoretists’ these days weren’t building complex machines to perform experiments as well…

sigle nano

Image via Wikipedia

IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
Instead of just storing all your songs of a drive, breakthrough also will let you store all your videos
IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms requ

via: www.computerworld.com

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Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App

Image representing Amazon Kindle as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

i always wanted to carry wikipedia with me. i remember japanese started manufacturing small tamagochi-style gadgets with it, but they didn’t catch on. recently i was very happy to receive kindle with whispernet, where one of the key features for me is global access to wikipedia.

so this is just brilliant – somebody put it in a browser:

This application saves and downloads a copy of nearly all of the textual content of the English Wikipedia locally so that it can be accessed without internet connectivity. It downloads and saves a compressed dump file and an index, 14MB for the small version and 1GB for the larger one (you can select which one from the settings). Using WebWorkers and the File API, it seeks to a specific part of the compressed dump, decompresses it with a pure javascript implementation of LZMA and renders the Wikitext as HTML. All of this happens almost instantly.

via Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App.

… and it works flawlesly! can’t wait to be able to download it to my ipad as well.

i like cloud and all, i recently moved all my music collection to it, but when it comes to the sum of all world knowledge, that has to be available always.

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reblog: These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language]

AMAZING!

Every year Lake Superior State University bans a bunch of words and phrases from the English language for good. They just released their list today and, I must say, it is amazing. Oh wait, we can’t say “amazing” anymore.The number one word for removal was “amazing,” which people say is overused but I say is actually quite handy. How can you get ri…

via These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language].

… or should I say, AWESOME!

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reblog: Use a Content Production Line for Fast, Effective Writing

nice stab at important topic for every blogger, i like ‘content production line’ metaphor:

What does your blog-post writing process look like?

For many bloggers, it’s something like this:

Think “I really should write a post today…”

Make a coffee, tidy the desk, check emails, check Twitter

Open up a blank document

Stare at the screen for a while

… and so on. If you’re lucky, you come up with a decent idea and you manage to get a post …

via Use a Content Production Line for Fast, Effective Writing.

… however, it does not apply to me and I suspect there are at least three types of bloggers out there:

  • meditators, described in the paragraph above
  • ants, to whom this proposed method applies best
  • geniuses, who express in form of bursts of witty language
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