A quote on a financial crisis (via 37signals):
The financial crisis in America is really a moral crisis, caused by the series of proofs which the American public has received that the leading financiers who control banks, trust companies and industrial corporations are often imprudent, and not seldom dishonest. They have mismanaged trust funds and used them freely for speculative purposes. Hence the alarm of depositors, and a general collapse of credit.
—The Economist, 1908
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Tim O’Reilly on the global economy as a Ponzi scheme:
Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it’s worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely.
I recommend the article. It’s not as crazy as it might have sounded a few months ago.
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The Rails and Merb web frameworks merged recently and following the announcement, DHH wrote an interesting blog post on his blog, Loud Thinking.
You can’t and shouldn’t try to make everyone love you. The best you can do is make sure that they’re hating you for the right reasons.
Another good quote on the Rails/Merb merger surfaced on Hacker News:
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Posted December 17, 2008, under
Iceland
The image above is from this week’s Economist and shows one of the demonstrations that take place every Saturday in Iceland’s main square. The paper published a briefing about the country’s situation and it’s one of the most level headed I’ve read.
The Sunday Times’s AA Gill also covered the situation and as usual, he’s on good form:
Icelanders react to bad news the way they always have. It’s the same way they react to good news: they get hammered. Properly Valhallaed. The bars and clubs are full, the booze is expensive, and they toast each other with a grim irony.
A fresh scandal broke yesterday when it was revealed that an unknown party had pressured a local newspaper to silence one of its journalists who was writing a story about how the former CEO of Landsbanki, Sigurjón Þ. Árnason, still seems to be on the bank’s payroll.
There’s not much of a tradition for resigning over such issues (or any issues for that matter) in Iceland, so the editors are still hanging on to their job. For now.
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The Silicon Alley Insider has a very interesting take on the $1 Billion the VC firm Accel recently raised:
Did Accel Just Raise Money For A Facebook Bailout? Facebook needs cash and soon as revenues continue to miss expectations. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted CFO Gideon Yu continues to try to raise money at the valuation Microsoft set last fall when it bought 1.6% of Facebook for 240 million.
Since Facebook had trouble finding a revenue model in the kredit-laden, champagne days of ’06-’07 it could find the next year or two pretty tricky. Surely, it’s only a matter of time until they are acquired by Microsoft? Hopefully for MS, it’ll be at a more reasonable valuation than when they bought the 1.6%.
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Oleg Ivanov, a web guru from Cyprus, recently posted:
Time to time I help my friends with system configuration and other “wtf? it worked yesterday!” kind of issues.
Ah yes, good old “wtf? it worked yesterday!”.
The post is an interesting “who-dunnit” for techies and system admins.
Oleg’s post reminded me of a joke: “Q: What are the three secrets to French cooking? A: Butter, butter and butter.”
Oleg’s secret to scalability however, is: Cache, cache and cache.
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At the Future of Mobile conference today the most revealing, and at the same time boring moment, was when a panel of representatives from Google, Microsoft, Symbian, LiMo and Purple Labs were discussing the future of smartphones.
Five panelists from five companies representing five different operating systems with five sets of competing interests – and one goal: Dominate the mobile market.
The result for the end-user?
Ewen Macleod, from The Mobile Industry Review summed it up nicely at the bloggers’ panel talk:
All this “isn’t the future of mobile great” talk – let’s take a reality check: It’s an absolutely shit experience. The mobile industry right now? Piece of shit.
People are frustrated with the fragmentation of the mobile industry. Multiple operators, operating systems and handset manufacturers, none of them cooperating properly, make starting or running a business that is based on mobile applications a royal pain.
So what is the future of mobile? How can this be fixed? Dare Obasanjo put it nicely in a recent post:
Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket?
Just as it did for the personal computer, the web will bring the fragmented mobile phone markets together. The mobile web is dead, long live the web!
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Seth Godin writes about how most successful blogs lead tribes:
The number one secret of the great blogs. Every one of them leads a tribe.
This reminds me of the excellent “22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al and Laura Reis. Their number one rule?
The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope
In other words: Focus.
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Posted November 12, 2008, under
Media
AA Gill wrote some excellent commentary in this week’s Sunday Times on the Ross/Brand affair and why they should stay at the BBC.
On his motives he writes:
if you think I’m only writing this because I’m part of the cosy, metropolitan, liberal, intellectual elite, well, of course I am. What else would I be? Who else do you think works in the media? What do you want? Your papers and TV made by provincial, draconian, philistine nonentities?
If you haven’t heard of the Ross/Brand scandal; never mind and consider yourself lucky.
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According to Om Malik, the BBC iPlayer is massive:
during the Olympics, the iPlayer accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total broadband traffic in the UK, and at present has garnered about 10 percent of the total UK broadband audience
Forget about Joost or Hulu (which isn’t even supported in the UK yet), all the action is over at good old Auntie Beeb’s place.
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