Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-30

• Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

  I spent a little while building a side-by-side comparison matrix to make it reasonably easy to see what is going on and what is in each of the three versions involved. I collected my data from the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 new features page which is helpfully split into those from the beta, and the new ones. I merged some subset of the distinctive main features from LibreOffice: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 until I gave up.

  Perhaps the biggest single chunk of the work we've done is hidden behind just a couple of bullet-points: MS Office 2007+ import / export. While all right-thinking people demand ODF, there is a sad reality of people using Microsoft's formats that Free Software users need to interoperate with. Having said that, the LibreOffice team has done some amazing work building other file filters to migrate legacy formats into the ODF future. Other features mentioned are a bit passé, SVG import has been shipping to GNU/Linux users, and many others since around 2008. Anyhow - here it is (also as an odg):

• What They Don't Tell You at Graduation - WSJ.com

  I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the decades since, I've spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy. In particular, I've studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a great deal. And I've found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the Class of 1988:

• Start-Ups Keep Revenue at Zero to Cash In on Acquisition - Disruptions - NYTimes.com

  The gears of Silicon Valley continue to mesh and turn because of money, not necessarily technological innovations. And there are certain things about that money machine that denizens of the Valley would rather keep quiet. First, they’ll never acknowledge the possibility of a bubble. “Bubble? Ha!” venture capitalists often tell me. “Silly reporter, there is no bubble.”

• Kickstarter Sets Off $7 Million Stampede for a Watch Not Yet Made - NYTimes.com

  Pebble is the latest — and by far the largest — example of how Kickstarter, a scrappy start-up sprouted in the New York living room of its founders three years ago, is transforming the way people build businesses.

  Although the site first began as a way for people to raise money for quirky projects like pop-up wedding chapels, around-the-world boating trips and offbeat documentaries, it quickly expanded to include video game production, feature films and innovative new gadgets, like the Elevation dock, a sleek stand for the iPhone, or Brydge, which turns an iPad into a laptop resembling the MacBook Air.

• nicu's FOSS'n'stuff: A history of Mozilla browsers design

  As Mozilla has its roots in the old Netscape, a history of its design must start with Netscape, which in its time was very popular, the most used web browser, but was not very good on the "looks" chapter. It was using its own widgets set, allowing the application to run on multiple platforms, but in none of them looked very good. When Internet Explorer came, it dethroned Netscape on many ways: it was already installed (the monopoly lawsuit on the matter has its own history) and it was "good enough". But it also had a better design, it used native widgets and it looked "native" (on Windows, of course), simple and familiar, while Netscape remained with the antiquated look and feel.

• Is open hardware creating a more open world? | iSGTW

  Open-source hardware is the public availability of designs, mechanical drawings, or schematics of physical technology, such as computer processors or network switches. The Arduino electronics board is one popular example.

  The concepts behind open hardware have been around for decades. But, with the rise of intellectual property in the 1980s and 1990s, open hardware fell out of favor. Today, perhaps thanks to the success of the open-source software movement, open hardware is back, according to its proponents. In 2012, it allows researchers to measure the time-of-flight of neutrinos, enables poor rural communities to communicate freely, and creates new business markets.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-27

• sferik/t · GitHub

  A command-line power tool for Twitter.

  The CLI attempts to mimic the Twitter SMS commands wherever possible, however it offers many more commands than are available via SMS.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-26

• Talent Shortage Looms Over Big Data - WSJ.com

  Big Data refers to the idea that an enterprise can mine all the data it collects right across its operations to unlock golden nuggets of business intelligence. And whereas companies in the past have had to rely on sampling, Big Data, or so the promise goes, means you can use your entire corpus of digitized corporate knowledge. It is, by all accounts, the next big thing.

  However, according to a report published last year by McKinsey, there is a problem. "A significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from Big Data," the report said. "We project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively." What the industry needs is a new type of person: the data scientist.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-24

• The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com

  The question got Thiel thinking. His thoughts are now incorporated into a course he is teaching in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (A student named Blake Masters posted outstanding notes online, and Thiel has confirmed their accuracy.)

  One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

• The rewards of simple code - O'Reilly Radar

  When I look over all the projects that I've worked on, everything I've read in the field of software development, and all my experiences interviewing developers over the years, most of the non-simple code I see results entirely from human factors. Some people say that the tools are making their lives hard — and they often are — but, ultimately, complexity comes down to whether or not the developer writing the code has a deep understanding of both the specifics of his or her job and the fundamental principles of software development.

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Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-20

• Prismatic blog - Prismatic Blog - Clustering Related Stories

  In this post, I’m going to describe the system we built to cluster related stories which is fast, accurate, and scalable. Although I’ve spent years building state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) software in grad school, Prismatic is my first “real” job. Along the way, I’m going to try to convey what I’ve learned about building NLP and machine learning systems in the wild.

• Superfastmatch | Help

  Superfastmatch A text comparison tool

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