3 days A 36:1 ratio is actually pretty good- Labor Day recently passed. That means you may have received a shared photo album from a friend or relative. You know the type: It’s usually dozens (or hundreds) of shots of vacation fun.
But you’re not into it. Now, it’s not that you don’t care; It’s fun to peek in and see what happened. But who wants to sort through a glut of 200 photos of someone else’s vacation (or baby photos or whatever)? What actually happens: You wind up deleting the email with the l…(more)
- [Quotable] Robert Stephens, David Pogue, Abraham Maslow, and more
- Training and marketing as taxes
“Training is a tax you pay for a lousy hiring environment…Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”
-Robert Stephens of Geek Squad in A Geek’s Guide to Great Service
Complex UIs
“Why do software designers want their work to appear more complex instead of less? I just don’t get why they don’t get it.”
-David Pogue in It’s the Software, Not You
Choosing between safety and risk
“Life is an ongoing process of ch…(more)
- Preaching to the choir is a waste of time
- Activist, poet, and musician Saul Williams is catching gruff from fans for allowing Nike to use his song “List of Demands” in commercials.
Williams wrote an open letter defending the use of the song.
I received a lot of questions from some about why I would allow my song ‘List of Demands’ to be used in a Nike campaign. Ironically, half of the people now reading this post never heard of me until that commercial aired. That, indeed, was one of my reasons for allow…(more)
- Nuts & Bolts: HAproxy
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A common request we get from readers is to describe in more detail how our server infrastructure is setup. That question is so incredibly broad that it’s hard to answer it in any kind of comprehensive way, so I’m not going to try to. Instead, I’m keeping the general desire for more technical details in mind as I work through day-to-day issues with our configuration, and I’ll try to occasionally write about things that I think might be of interest. The topic for today i…(more)
- How to manage long breaks in your software side projects
- Pablo Corral wrote me an email after I posted this tweet about managing on-again-off-again side projects.
I’m very curious about how to use Backpack to have a better experience on braindumps for side projects.
I switch a lot, and my side project sometimes is off for many days, and some weeks. Can you explain more about this?
It’s hard to find steady uninterrupted time for software side projects. Maybe you only have time on weekends or the occasional free night for your p…(more)
- Just words
- Some great writing by Jeffrey Zeldman. Brief moments artfully exposed though concise, colorful stories.
…(more)
- Listen to Mark on the SA Pro podcast
- Our awesome systems administrator Mark Imbriaco participated in the first episode of the SA Pro podcast recently. You’ll hear Mark talk about how formal education is the only way to become a good sys admin and that Perl is better than Rails.
Just kidding, but still check it out!
(P.S. Mark’s using the awesome Blue Snowball mic to get that clear, Fraiser Crane sound.)
…(more)
- 37signals Affiliate Program Update
- Just a quick update on our new 37signals Affiliate Program.
We launched it about 90 days ago and so far we’ve seen about 1000 new product signups referred by 37signals Affiliates. Basecamp leads referrals, Backpack is second and Highrise a very close third.
Some people are working harder than others. The top affiliate has potential earnings of over $1300 already!
If you’re an affiliate, thanks for representing our product to your clients, colleagues, friends, and family. If …(more)
- Behind the scenes: Redesigning and coding the Highrise sidebar modules
- I’ve wanted to redesign the Highrise sidebars for a long time. They’ve felt cluttered and messy to me, and as we add more features to Highrise the mess will only multiply. So I was glad to have the chance this week to redesign the sidebar modules. The visual side of the redesign was straightforward, but implementing the design in code required a few tricks. Here’s a look behind the scenes at the coding decisions we made for the new Highrise sidebars.
“Subjects” i…(more)
- Activation fees are obscene
- Wanna feel ripped off today? Sign up for an online virtual service that charges a one-time activation fee. It’s a special feeling to hand over $35 for nothing.
I’d almost understand if there was actual work involved. Or hardware was manually set up. Or someone had to climb some stairs and walk down a few halls to flip something on.
But to charge me $35 to “activate” my account by adding a few records to a few databases, well, that feels like… You know what tha…(more)
- Today Sept. 8, 1966: Liftoff for the Starship <cite>Enterprise</cite>
- 1966: Star Trek makes its network television debut.
Given the cultural impact and enormous franchise spawned by the original Star Trek series, it's hard to believe that the show lasted just three seasons -- 80 episodes -- and was canceled by NBC in 1969 because of low ratings.
But if network numbers-crunching and the short-sightedness of advertising sponsors doomed it, Star Trek's long-term survival, evidenced by its ongoing syndication, not to mention the numerous TV spinoffs and feature…(more)
- Today Japanese Schoolgirl Watch: Transform Yourself in a Dressing Room for Hire
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Many Japanese gals lead double lives: Mild-mannered students in plain-Jane uniforms by day; French maids, furries, and goth Lolitas by night. Legions run around Tokyo, wheeling suitcases full of makeup and costumes. But Superman had a phone booth — where are schoolgirls supposed to suit up? Luckily, Japanese company COS-Pa has introduced tiny dressing rooms for women in the trendy Shibuya district, where 500 to 700 yen (roughly $5 to $6) buys 30 minutes of private mirror time, free W…(more)
- Today Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science
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A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler -- a game academic at the University of Wisconsin -- was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.
But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they'd dump all the informati…(more)
- Today Wired.com Photo Contest: Portraits
- For our photo contest this week, we want you to put your best face forward and show us compelling portraits. We're not talking yearbook. We're talking gritty, glossy, glam and good.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best portrait photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Don't make us angry with Christmas cards and plastered-on smiles, vacant looks and bland haircuts. Instead, delight…(more)
- Today Gallery: Wired.com Photo Contest Winners
- : Our photo contests have become so popular that we thought we'd take a minute to look back at our favorite winners so far, from Holga, to Summer, to Transportation. The winners were selected by readers' votes over a two-week period of grueling competition. Enjoy!
Out next contest is Portraits. We want to see those soul-stealing photos we're always hearing about. Check out the contest page for more info.
Left:
Eye of a Tokay Gecko, winner of the Macro contest.
Submitted by Alan M
Ph…(more)
- Today Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos
- Tesla coils, superconductors and hilarious music videos are great reasons to be excited about physics. Here are some of our favorites.
…(more)
- Yesterday The Democratic and Republican National Convention Speeches, as Seen Through Wordle
- The national conventions are over and done, and what remains are the words that the politicians spoke (or didn't). To re-cap those words, we thought we'd create a Wordle gallery of the most notable candidates', spouses', and supporters' speeches.
…(more)
- Yesterday Metallica: Master of YouTube?
- Over eight years after Metallica raised the ire of fans by delivering a list of unauthorized file sharers to Napster's headquarters, the band has launched a YouTube promotion featuring fans covering its songs as part of its ongoing repentance.
…(more)
- Yesterday Cassini Detects Partial Rings With Saturn's Moons
- The latest images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show faint, partial rings orbiting with two of Saturn's small inner moons.
…(more)
- 3 days Google Reigns as World's Most Powerful 10-Year-Old
- Ten years ago, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc., the internet powerhouse was little more than a pipe dream. But, today, Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.
…(more)
- 3 days Jason Fried
- Less is more. Web application company 37signals is founded on the principle of keeping things simple and clear – and more than three million account holders prove them right. Oliver Lindberg talks to 37signals’ founder, Jason FriedContinues...…(more)
- Scalable graphical navigation
- Craig Grannell shows you how to bring a little visual flair back to your navigation bars, and ensure that everything remains flexible when text is enlargedContinues...…(more)
- Q&A: Tom Watson
- Back in 2003, he was the first MP to start blogging. Now he’s Gordon Brown’s web Tsar. Tom Watson talks about the failures and successes of the government’s online strategyContinues...…(more)
- Top of the bots
- If you could own a fictional robot, which would it be, and why?Continues...…(more)
- WDTV Episode 22
- Rollover effects in Fireworks. In this episode Paul Wyatt shows you how to create a menu bar in Fireworks, and gets to grips with slicing images, using frames, and mastering behaviours.Continues...…(more)
- Today RealNetworks Lets You Copy DVDs to Your Hard Drive — And Keep the DRM
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As anyone with a lick of tech knowledge knows, ripping a DVD onto your hard drive is, well, frowned upon by the “Powers that be” in the motion picture industry. Realizing that, RealNetworks has launched a new solution called RealDVD, which lets users copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles. Even better, it only takes about 20 minutes to do so. Sounds great, right? There’s only one catch: it keeps the DRM.
After copying the DVD onto your hard drive, y…(more)
- Today Parascale Promises Data Center Heaven: Private Cloud Storage At About $1 A Gig
- <a href=”http://www.parascale.com/”><img src=”http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/20835v1-max-250×250.png” Google’s servers overall process one petabyte of data every hour or so. Google had to create its own Web-scale file system to handle all the data that it processes and stores. As Web-scale computing and the needs of plain-old enterprise storage grow, many more companies are wishing they had a file system like Google’s.
Monday, …(more)
- Today CollectiveX Groupsites 2.0 Makes Group Organization Sexy
- CollectiveX, a bootstrapped startup located in Maryland, will roll out version 2 of it’s year old social network collaboration platform today. Full disclosure: the company is a TechCrunch50 Exhibitor (which is a sponsor).
We first wrote about CollectiveX, founded by serial entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, back in 2005 when it first went into private beta. In May 2006 the service launched, and a year ago (at TechCrunch40) they launched Groupsites, which, among other things, let users create se…(more)
- Today Is Search Really 90% Solved?
- Jessica Guynn has an excellent interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer today about Google’s first ten years (today is arguably Google’s tenth birthday). Good stuff in there - Marissa talks about Google’s accomplishments in search and advertising, and looks forward to a future where cloud computing becomes pervasive. Marissa also says she hopes to still be at the company in another ten years.
But one thing caught my eye. Marissa says search is “90 to 95%” solved:…(more)
- Today No ChaChing For ChaCha Guides
- ChaCha used to be a ridiculous human powered web based search engine that’s best use appeared to be for killing time when bored.
They raised a boatload of money from Jeff Bezos and others and eventually switched to an all-mobile interface. They also began offering their platform to third party marketers.
But now there are indications that the company is having cash flow issues, even after a recent pay cut to guides. As before, the information is coming from their poorly-paid and poorly-tr…(more)
- Today Everyone Needs To Calm Down
- I haven’t had a lot of time to jump into the big fracas this weekend emerging about TechCrunch50 because the team has been busy organizing the conference, working with the Expert Panelists on scheduling issues and spending hours and hours working with the 52 startups that will be launching at the event to make sure their demos properly reflect what they’ve worked so hard to create.
But I do have a few things to say.
First, thanks to Chris O’Brien at the San Jose Mercury News w…(more)
- Yesterday Family Tree Wars Continue: MyHeritage Raises Big Round, Shows Impressive Growth
- It’s been just a few days after our post on Geni’s big growth numbers - and now big news from Israeli competitor MyHeritage.
The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language w…(more)
- Yesterday ContestMachine: A Product Giveaway Widget For Bloggers
- Giving away products can be a logistical pain. For instance, when we give away a T-shirt or laptop, we have to go through hundreds of comments, contact the person, and do a lot of manual processing. A new Y Combinator startup called ContestMachine that just launched makes giving stuff away as easy as putting a widget on your blog.
You create a contest widget by entering all the details of the giveaway: prizes, deadlines, rules. Winners can be randomly chosen by ContestMachine or judged by the b…(more)
- Yesterday The Big Conference Launch: How to Stand Out from the Crowd
- Editor’s Note: This post represents the professional advice of Brian Solis who is not affiliated with TechCrunch50. If you are a participating TC50 company, resident TechCrunch PR expert Sarah Ross is available to share and review the public relations guidelines with you. It is important to work directly with Sarah to ensure you are in compliance with these guidelines to maximize your PR opportunity while also avoiding disqualification.
How do you launch a startup at a big tech conference…(more)
- Yesterday The Push To Cure Spinal Muscular Atrophy
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Gwendolyn DeBard Strong was born on October 4, 2007 and was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1 (SMA1) in April 2008. SMA1 is a terminal genetic disease that results in loss of nerves in the spinal cord and weakness of the muscles connected with those nerves.
Her parents are asking that you consider signing a petition asking Congress to fund research into a cure for the disease. The NIH has said that a cure is possibly only a few years away.
The petition is here. Please read and sign …(more)
- Today Getting ready for Big Bang Day
- If all goes according to plan this week, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva will circulate its first beam on Sept. 10 -- a step that's been compared to "switching on" the machine, but that is, as you'd expect, much more complicated than that. Once the first beam is established, the next steps, taking place later in 2008, will be to accelerate and then collide two beams, producing for an eager physics community whatever new particles they can find.
You can watch the first attempt to …(more)
- Join GOOD Magazine's Project 012: Once Upon a School
- As part of its new Education Issue, GOOD Magazine is holding an open call for new projects that answer the question: How can you help local public-school children? You can browse some project ideas on GOOD's website, and submit your own great idea for helping local schools.
Then take the next step with your project idea and start it up at your local public school -- and you could win a free pass to TED2009. (Deadline to win a pass is October 31, 2008.) Project 012 is a partnership with Dave …(more)
- Concept: LED light bulb from frog design
- We all know we should be replacing our energy-sucking incandescent light bulbs with CFLs -- but, ugh. As part of its green design program, frog design has conceptualized this lovely light bulb around a high-output LED. The frogLight bulb fits in a standard socket and can be dimmed -- an important ability for both energy-saving and mood-setting that CFLs can't yet manage. And it's projected to last for 30 years.
It's a potential game-changer. Yanko Design, in a blog post this week, calls the …(more)
- The sibling rivalry between TV and the web: Peter Hirshberg on TED.com
- Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, Peter Hirshberg offers an absorbing look at emerging media and tech history. He shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than "better TV." (Recorded December 2007 in Los Angeles, California. Duration: 31:39.)
Watch Peter Hirshberg's 2007 talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 285+ TEDTalks -- including many…(more)
- "RISD is MIT for the right brain," says John Maeda
- On the eve of his inauguration as president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda gave a wide-ranging interview to Dominique Browning in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Among the Maeda-isms:
"I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them. Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology."
"Companies know that they can't get any further with their left-brain processing; they a…(more)
- Taking the next giant leap into space: Peter Diamandis on TED.com
- X Prize founder Peter Diamandis lays out several very good reasons to keep exploring space -- and he talks about how, with the help of the X Prize and other incentives, we're going to do just that. He also talks about the next phase of the X Prize, driving radical breakthroughs in many technologies that benefit humanity. (And listen for the frank and funny story of exactly how the first X Prize was funded.) (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:31.)
Watch Peter Diamandis' 20…(more)
- The immense promise of DNA folding: Paul Rothemund on TED.com
- At TED2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of DNA folding (calling it a process akin to magic). Now, he lays out in clear, adundant detail the immense promise of this field -- to create tiny machines that assemble themselves from a set of instructions. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:24.)
Watch Paul Rothemund's 2008 talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive …(more)
- Squawking at TED2006: Einstein the parrot on TED.com
- This whimsical wrap-up of TED2006 -- presented by Einstein, the African grey parrot, and her trainer, Stephanie White -- simply tickles. Watch for the moment when Einstein, like many other distinguished TED speakers, has a moment with Al Gore. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, California. Duration: 05:48.)
Watch Einstein the parrot's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 280+ TEDTalks -…(more)
- To do this weekend: Vote for Architecture for Humanity
- Via Treehugger: The Members Project, from American Express, is a contest to support worthy projects from a $2.5 million fund. 2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair, of Architecture for Humanity, has submitted a project to help build sustainable livelihoods for artisans in Southeast Asia:
a locally driven social venture that creates an alliance of textile designers and gifted artisans in Southeast Asia to produce luxurious hand-woven fabrics. By providing economic opportunity, we help preserv…(more)
- The making of an activist: Ory Okolloh on TED.com
- In a moving, personal talk, blogger and activist Ory Okolloh tells the story of her life and her family -- and how she came to do her heroic work reporting on the doings of Kenya's parliament. (Recorded June 2007 in Arucha, Tanzania. Duration: 16:37.)
Watch Ory Okolloh's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 280+ TEDTalks -- including many more talks on Africa's next chapter.
Get TED de…(more)
- CSS Sprites2 - It's JavaScript Time
- In 2004, Dave Shea took the CSS rollover where it had never gone before. Now he takes it further still—with a little help from jQuery. Say hello to hover animations that respond to a user's behavior in ways standards-based sites never could before.
Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!…(more)
- Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
- The rise of the social web demands that we rethink our traditional role as builders of digital monuments, and turn our attention to the close observation of the spaces that our users are producing around us. It's time for a new metaphor. Consider cartography.
Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!…(more)
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