Google (where else) develops computer program capable of learning tasks independently, is training it on computer games from the 80s (so far). I’m… really not sure that’s a great idea to start A.I. learning the most efficient methods to get high scores on games that will often involve killing… (nobody say Skynet!)
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia When you think about how many sites around the web are entirely powered off the back of advertising rather than direct money, it’s kind of astonishing something as frequently and widely used as Wikipedia runs without any advertising and serves up dynamic pages as quickly as you can imagine. There’s media and text and an ever-growing reference and resource that has proven invaluable over the years. ...
All mobile OS roads lead back to WebOS: While WebOS is dead, the cards interface has flourished. Windows Phone, Android, and iOS all adopted a very similar multitasking view. In addition, safari and chrome replaced their tab view to a cards view with the same gestures as well. Frankly, it would be a lie to say that these OS’s were not influenced by WebOS. I really wish the Palm devices had been available in Australia, because I thought it looked years ahead of any competition. That the design choices have made it into iOS, Android and Windows Mobile is testament to the fact that - much like Xerox’s OS that influenced Mac OS and Windows on the PC - some ideas are too good to die. Just a shame Palm got swallowed by HP and then booted into the ether. ...
Only 90s web developers will get this: Towards the end of the golden era of HTML, CSS appeared on the scene, promising a world of separating content from style, and we’ve been dealing with that disaster ever since. The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links. Overnight, the entire internet converted into this sludge of a medium where text looked like links and links looked like text. You had no idea where to click, but hell that didn’t really matter anyway because we had developed cursor effects (you haven’t lived until your mouse had a trail of twelve fireballs behind it). ...
Bronte Capital on the ‘Failbook’ IPO: The Wall Street Journal… derides Michael Grimes (the Morgan Stanley Banker) for not standing up to David Ebersman (Facebook’s CFO) and allowing Facebook to sell too many shares at too high a price. This is tits-up-backward. David Ebersman in this context is the client. He paid the fees. Michael Grimes had a duty to act in Ebersman’s interest. Ebersman wanted to sell more shares at a higher price. Michael Grimes and Morgan Stanley obliged even at the cost to their own franchise. ...