Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie
The book I wrote was called “Liar’s Poker.” It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn’t disinherit me but instead sighed and said “do it if you must?” Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?
This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
Michael Lewis – Princeton University’s 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks
Everything to Everyone
This paralysis of choice is deeply endemic of Microsoft’s design culture (or lack thereof), and doubly ironic because Microsoft’s mantra for Windows 8 has been ‘no compromises’, which is exactly what Windows 8 is full of! It’s reflected again in how applications like Internet Explorer 10 (and other, though not all of course) has two different clients that are as far from one another as night and day. And paralyzed by the very notion of drawing a line in the sand on behalf of its users, Microsoft has left it up to the user to figure out which is the best choice at any given moment, because hey, what if it’s everything to everyone, all the time!?
It would, unfortunately it looks very much as if it’ll be half of the thing to half of the people, half of the time.
Everything to Everyone — Binary Bonsai
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-06-24
- RT @odannyboy: What other piece of land could Larry Ellison have bought for $800m? Detroit? Most of Alabama? A few blocks in SF? A build … #
- RT @beandog76: I'm going to invent new HTTP status codes: 508 NOT MY FAULT and 208 WORKS FOR ME #
- RT @sampsonian: Ryanair exhibit A. Looked up fare yesterday, total £123.00. Returned today and fare is £237.00. Flushed cookies. Fare ba … #
- RT @benhammersley: Launch a product in the middle of the night, without a price or availability date, but with a choice of chipsets. Mar … #
- RT @Cabel: When my phone was stolen in SF last year, they immediately powered it down to stop Find My iPhone. Settings idea: "Shutdown R … #
- So here's a crazy thought: what if MS stops licensing windows and starts building its own boxes? Implausible, yes, but interesting to ponder #
- RT @gruber: Sinofsky: “Now let me talk about availability and pricing.”
Translation: “We’re not talking about price or availability.” #
- It is indeed the age of vertically integrated stacks. I really like what MS is doing lately with Xbox and Surface. #
- RT @mikekuniavsky: Sony's idea for what to do with their "Smart Tag" RFID tags is to use them as macros. See the Using section here: htt … #
- RT @benhammersley: "If we can't penetrate it, we'll disrupt it," says the man needing either funding or therapy. #
- RT @marksiegal: Someday I hope to make an app that's awesome enough to get sherlocked. Twice. For the same app.
/cc @instapaper #
- Folding UI transitions seem to be a new big thing: http://t.co/trd1nPQ5 #
- RT @doingitwrong: An iOS 6 transit app that gives you directions for LA's long lost streetcars. #
- RT @doingitwrong: An iOS 6 transit app that gives you directions for proposed but never built utopian networks. #
- RT @doingitwrong: A psychogeography map linked straight into the iOS 6 transit API. A map to the fey borderlands, updated in unreal time. #
- RT @doingitwrong: !!! @robinsloan points out that Apple delegating public transit to 3rd parties in iOS 6 means map directions can be ab … #
- RT @alaindebotton: Much of the art of living is about arranging inner thoughts to ensure there is always something to look forward to. #
MaKey MaKey
MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween.
By Eric Rosenbaum & Jay Silver. Already funded (very) successfully on Kickstarter.
Satellite Eyes
Satellite Eyes is a simple Mac app that automatically changes your desktop wallpaper to the satellite view of where you are, right now.
Can’t wait to try this on a train. Unfortunately it makes it very difficult to find files on your desktop.
Laptop vs. Surface
Original source unknown.
There are about 16 ways this can turn into a disaster for Microsoft. Their entire business model the past few decades has been built upon software licensing. Now their model is hardware sales mixed with software licensing. With the purchase of Motorola, the big fear in the mobile industry is that Google will make this jump as well. With Microsoft now actually doing it, it’s a bajillion times worse. At least Android is free (sort of — coincidentally, most OEMs pay Microsoft to use it). Windows is not free. OEMs will be paying Microsoft to directly compete with — wait for it — Microsoft.
Cluster, meet fuck.
Hard to disagree.
Feel_UX: Frog Design redesigns Android
The Verge has a detailed overview of Frog Design’s new Feel_UX interface for Android.
I like how they split the homescreen in three distinct parts: Apps, Widgets and Shortcuts. Apps gets rid of the app drawer and functions as one big, consolidated space featuring all installed apps. Overall i think it offers a much more organized and streamlined approach to Android homescreen design.
a/b: A Manifesto
By Dunne & Raby. (via)
Twitter knows when you sleep
For example, waking/sleeping times are relatively constant throughout the year in Tokyo, but the other cities exhibit seasonal variations. We see that Japanese users’ activities are concentrated in the evening, whereas in the other cities there is more usage during the day. In Istanbul, nights get shorter during August; Sao Paulo shows a time interval during the afternoon when Tweet volume goes down, and also longer nights during the entire year compared to the other three cities.
Twitter Engineering: Studying rapidly evolving user interests. (via)
See also: When do they sleep?
