Beans Beans, who found this leaked corporate video, where a group of dorky Cool-Aid sloshed employees sing along, gospel style, to ‘O’ Happy Day’, puts it well: “Ernst & Young teambuiding video – holy shit I nearly pissed myself” Corporate accountants singing Soul; once more with feeling. I’ve just watched it 5 times in a row and cannot stop, each time there’s one more priceless gem to notice. Effing hilarious.
The real buuble. Four words: Hedge Fund Private Equity. I hear these too much. I don’t really understand hedge funds and private equity, but more frighteningly I get the impression that some of the people involved don’t either. My one theory about the rise of Private Equity, is that its a natural reaction against the increase in communication due to things like the Internet, and the reduced arbitrage or spread that it creates as more people have access to information, more quickly. One way of countering this and the recenty tightened financial regulation in the US is to deal in private companies and investment, where the information is more opaque. James Simons, hedge fund manager, earned $1.7 billion last year…. (kottke.org)
The Limits of Computing Lecture 5 notes I found the above notes on Information Theory as applied to the limits of computing in my never ending quixotic and pretentious quest to look for a possible physical law of natural selection. They are from a series of lectures at the University of Florida by Michael Frank, and are of staggering clarity. Its worth reading the whole lot. Amusingly, the most interesting lecture seems to have been the one that students were most reluctant to hear. “When I handed out the student information sheets, I asked you all to point out the particular topics you were most and least interested in. I tallied these ratings, adding 1 for each “most” rating, and subtracting 1 for each “least” rating, with no change if the item was unrated. All of the topics received positive scores, ranging from 5 (for physics-based theoretical models of computation)…
The excellent One Good Move beats everyone to the punch with a clip of Dawkins on OReilly. Except there were no punches and the whole thing was rushed along as if it were a Gong Show skit. onegoodmove: Richard Dawkins – Bill O’Reilly
Microsoft’s Live Search Is No Longer Live ResearchBuzz has found this hilarious gem. Apparently Microsoft couldn’t create a way (huh, as RB suggests – what about captchas after repeated queries?) to stop data mining of their advanced live search – so they killed it. Live Search’s Statement
Richard Dawkins will be interviewed by Fox’s Colbert style, fake, sensationalist newscaster, Bill O’Reilly, on Monday, April 23, at 8.00pm EST on FOX. The program will be rebroadcast at 11.00pm. Should be fun. Bill O’Reilly | The O’Reilly Factor – FOXNews.com
If I were a VC this is a startup I would back. If the money in a gold rush is made from selling picks and shovels, then Openfount are selling stainless steel Web 2.0 tools for the price of plastic ones. They have built value-added products upon Amazon’s excellent S3 storage and EC2 pay as you go grid computing. The most interesting is the distributed file system product. They give you a disk image to load onto S3. From that you can instantiate as many clustered machines as you want and have them share the same disk, with infinite capacity. Simple and elegant. Stuff that used to cost six figures for a grand or so. Enabling web 2.0 where the metal hits the meat | openfount
An excellent paper: ev: Evolution of Biological Information
Trains Planes and Ruby on Rails – Is speed the most important thing for a successful startup? Twenty years ago, I was reading a Graham Greene novel on a painfully slow train ride in Italy. In the book, he pointed out that your mood as a train traveller was directly proportional to speed. Evan posts today about how the mood a Twitter HQ is directly proportional to the speed of the site. I’ve noticed that many people running startups seem to have moods that are directly proportional to their Alexa rank. I’d argue that fast response time is the unwritten golden rule of successful web apps. A site that is slow is like wading through mud. Before Youtube I could watch video on the web, but before Youtube, my expectation was that it would splutter and stall. I suspect that focusing on speed is much healthier than traffic or, dare…
The Day Web 2.0 Died. Google release a completely obvious but great new product – saveable personal maps. On the same day, Techcrunch review an enterpise mashup service, Rearden Commerce, with $100M of funding. This wouldn’t appear so ironic, (since they currently and sensibly have their feet firmly in the ‘stupid money’ enterprise camp), if it weren’t for the fact that they are announcing a move into the consumer space. Talk about a day to pick for that announcement. To add insult to injury, Rearden have an hilariously meaningless ‘long tail’ graph and are apparently going after the services market: “services are roughly 60% of the worldwide economy.” Oh yeah, are Rearden gonna run the Bosnian police force (like Computer Sciences Corporation) and hook up tourists with Bangkok Ladymen? Going after the ‘services market’ with a mashups startup is like going after the global arms trade market with a paintball…
Someone on CNN called me a ‘Dirty Jew’ Imagine that Iran decided to invade Mexico in the face of near universal international condemnation, because it claimed Mexico had weapons that it turned out it didn’t. And that it then waged war for several years, de-stabilising the American continent and causing Mexicans to stream across the border into America. Imagine that Iran had the audacity to setup a Pensicola prison, actually in America but controlled by Iran. Here they could put people that they captured and not have them subject to the Geneva Convention or domestic law. Then imagine that Iran had its navy patrolling the area and inspecting fishing boats, just off the coast of Texas. Imagine the Americans decided the Iranians were messing too near their border, like with the Russians and Cuba, and captured several Iranian seamen and showed them on TV looking unharmed physically and possibly much…
Its pretty amazing when you come accross something you actually know a little about, how you discover how naive a supposedly slick PR machine is. Today Bush cited ‘Iraq the Model’ as an example of success in Iraq – because there are bloggers you see. Some time ago I added 20 or so Iraqi Bloggers to my RSS reader. About a third of them have since fled the country, a third have disappeared and the remainder are a woeful tale of human misery and sufffering, leaving a sample of 1 – Iraq the Model. In fact Iraq the Model is the potential online equivalent of ‘Mission Accomplished’, something championed too soon that could go the other way. Carl Rove is not so much a genius (an incumbant Republican sock puppet would have won after 911) but a rather out of touch ‘spinster’. Bush Cites Upbeat Bloggers From Baghdad