Tumblr just made stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks.
Aspiration vs. Actualization.
This reminds me of @thisfeliciaday’s Dragon Bread episode of The Flog. LOLOL
(via tedr)
Taxing Reasons
I’m working on an exciting “project” right now, so I’m just putting this out into the universe with very little interest in making it a real thing. I just find it amusing to think that a multibillion dollar industry will be (eventually) so easily disintermediated by what amounts to trivial software and rented hardware.
I’m talking of course about tax preparation - taking the IRS handbook and inventing open source software to decode it. That type of thing would suck the wind out of some pretty big whales, and the resulting corporate chaos would be a blast to watch.
Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
I can think of about 5 million reasons why somebody might want to actually attempt to do this.
tedr:
I love the smell of … Napalm in the Morning. I wear it all day.
I had a similar concept with a buddy in high school during a sleepover… called My Butt Crack. Classic.
The Dissection Of A Vintage Mac
Want. (I have the disassembled clock print already.)
This is the sheit
Great profile of Reed Hastings by Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg Businessweek. Three standouts:
The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage space. (In comparison, Facebook uses about 1.5 petabytes to store about 10 billion photos.) Hollywood studios used to send individual films and shows to Netflix on a disc or thumb drive; now they use a Netflix system called Backlot to send encrypted files via the Internet. Netflix then compresses the files and creates more than 100 different versions, each tuned for the varying bandwidth, device, and language needs of its customers. (An hour of video for the iPhone would be about 150 megabytes.) This compressed catalog comes to about 2.75 petabytes.
Wow — also, Pi.
And:
Netflix began to experiment with cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, where Hastings served as a board member. In 2009 he bet his company’s future on Amazon. Up to that point, nothing the size of Netflix had placed so much of its crucial technology on Amazon’s systems. Hastings sent an e-mail to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, announcing his plans. “I asked him if he was comfortable with that idea,” Hastings says. “If not, there was no point going forward.” Bezos gave the go-ahead.
That seems like a pretty large diss of a company where he’s a board member — especially when you consider that Amazon is now a very direct rival.
And finally, the best for last:
Qwikster was a fiasco, but far less threatening than a debacle that preceded it. In August 2008, Netflix’s technology infrastructure melted down. This was when the company was still known for DVDs-by-mail, and for three days it could not send discs because a crucial Oracle database kept malfunctioning. Reporters and customers took notice. Netflix traced the problem to an expensive, third-party storage system that went haywire after a software update. The incident still annoys Hastings. When the subject comes up in the watchtower, Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt, who’s also gathered at the table, suggests they not mention the storage-system vendor by name. Hastings responds, “Let IBM have it, baby.” (An IBM spokesman declined to comment.)
The sonofabitch keeps bringing it. Great distillation by MG Siegler
Innovation Starts With Toys
We’ve all heard people make arguments about new products that feel like toys. I’m sure I’ve done it myself under my breath from time to time - especially if I’ve based my opinion on just a 500 word blog write up. But I think the first step to internet adoption is play.
First time users are hardly getting much value from a consumer service on day-one, so they need some time to play around.
Don’t be afraid to invent toys for play.
Slacker Hacker Code Cracker
YC’s Paul Buchheit explaining why the public doesn’t understand startup economics. (via parislemon)
Wow.
The general public understands risk/reward. What “they” don’t understand is why a few intellectuals decide to bet hundreds of millions of institutional dollars on mostly passion projects with no business models… VC as an industry is like the US congress - massively powerful and mostly dysfunctional & ineffective.
