Continuations

Don’t be evil?

Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s update push of Safari and how easy it would have been for Apple to do the right thing. With Google’s most recent addition to search, “search within a site,” things are a bit more difficult to figure out. At the moment when you search on Google bestbuy you get a site search box in addition to the search results. The same is true for a number of other e-commerce and content sites (e.g. Washington Post). From the merchant’s or publisher’s perspective this is prett...

Of course I do love chocolate easter eggs (my favorite ones are filled with brittle). But I am a huge fan of easter eggs in software. There are several good lists on the web including Egg Heaven and The Easter Egg Archive. It’s great to discover a bit of humor and surprise in something one uses almost every day.

There was quite an uproar over Apple’s opt-out push of Safari via its updater to Windows users. A lot of the rethoric was over the top, including comparisons to spyware. A few folks, such as Bijan, disagreed and argued that it’s not a big deal. I feel the same way, but what a missed opportunity! It would have been so easy to do the right thing. Have Safari show up below a big line and heading of NEW SOFTWARE and make it opt-in. Yes, there would have been a lot fewer installs but those would h...

We have just had one of the periodic waves of articles and blog posts about privacy, touched off by news about Phorm. The typical concern, which was invoked by Tim Berners-Lee, runs something like this: You start reading a lot online about cancer and suddenly find that your health insurance rate goes up or is not renewed. The proposed solution to this problem, is to more clearly give the ownership of private information such as one’s clickstream to the individual. Much as a I like the basic n...

Several of my friends are very successful public market investors. Some of them routinely find opportunities that produce 2x or better returns in liquid assets. But even they are stumped when it comes to trying to predict how the drama in the financial markets will impact prices. There appear to be (at least) two competing theories. The first theory holds that the actions by the Fed will continue to push down the US dollar which will result in inflation due to increasing prices for imported g...

A little while ago I wrote about why the Fed’s lowering of the interest rate did not alleviate the credit crunch. The Fed has now taken two much more dramatic actions. First, it vastly expanded it’s lending to financial firms by including brokerage firms (under a depression era law) and allowing firms to provide a much larger array of securities as collateral. Second, it made sure that Bear instead of failing was sold. Both of these steps get closer to the heart of the matter since they signi...

Battlestar Galactica Streams Into Season 4: bijan:I can’t wait.Same here. Have not been watching TV shows (other than John Adams mini-series on HBO) since Season 3.

I twittered that yesterday and wanted to elaborate. For a startup nothing is as important as watching cash and burn rate. Until recently the only hard part of that was the burn. But as some companies have found out not everything touted as “cash” by their investment advisors. Some companies had part of their cash in so called auction-rate securities. Fred wrote about his personal encounter with these. These provided a great vehicle for the last 20 years or so because you could get in or out e...

As someone pointed out in a comment to my previous post, simply using RAND() in Excel gives you independent random variables. That’s perfectly OK for situations where the risks are not closely related to each other. For instance, the if you are trying to project the cost of bandwidth, the uncertainty in the growth of your traffic is likely to be independent from the uncertainty around the price per TB of data. But in many cases, risk is correlated and ignoring that correlation or relying on h...