OverMatter

Volunteer Military

"Milton Friedman’s participation on a government commission on the volunteer military in the late 1960s was a kind of intellectual version of the play "Twelve Angry Men." Gradually, through force of persistent argument and marshaling of evidence, he brought his fellow commission members around to the previously unthinkable view that both our national security and our broader interest would be best served by a volunteer military." (The Great Liberator - New York Times)

The Recycling Scam

The Art of the Deal

"Despite early success, the first batch of 4004 chips didn't work--a quick look through a microscope showed the manufacturing team had forgotten a crucial step. The memory still prompts a big laugh from Faggin.

Although the delays angered Busicom, the extension handed Intel its first fortunate twist of fate. Some Intel insiders began to comprehend the power of the invention, assisted by pushing from the three inventors.

Intel founder Bob Noyce, for instance, started to question whether the 4004 had broader implications, recalled Vadasz.

Meanwhile, the calculator business had become more cutthroat. By the time Intel finished the 4004, Busicom wanted a discount. Intel made a counteroffer: It would drastically cut the contract price if Busicom would grant Intel a license to freely sell the chip outside the calculator market. Busicom agreed.

Whoops...

In April 1972, Intel released the 8008, which could process data in 8-bit chunks. Negotiations once again worked to Intel's advantage.

The 8008 chip was designed for Datapoint, a terminal manufacturer in Texas that couldn't pay for it at the end of the contract. To settle, Datapoint granted Intel the rights to the chip, including the instruction set, which Datapoint developed. The instruction set eventually became part of the basis for the X86 architecture behind Intel chips today.

"The irony is that the original instruction set was theirs, and the original motivation was theirs," Mazor said.

The breakthrough moment for microprocessing came in 1974, according to many, with the 8080 processor. Not only did the chip feature a more complex instruction set, it came in a package with 40 pins, two innovations that greatly expanded its capabilities. "With 4-bit processors, the level of complexity is minimal," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "The 8080 was a home run." "

(Intel's accidental revolution | CNET News.com)

The real victims of click fraud

"BusinessWeek uses the example of Martin Fleischmann at MostChoice.com who spends $2M a year in cost-per-click (CPC) advertising and estimates he’s lost $100,000 in the last 3 1/2 years. Of course, BusinessWeek doesn’t do the math for you showing that’s just over 1% of his clicks, barely a rounding error.

This is not because click fraud is just 1% - it’s probably closer to 10% or so, from legitimate estimates I’ve seen. Martin isn’t losing 10% because he isn’t stupid. Using his MBA from finance-heavy Wharton, Martin is surely calculating the value each click brings him in terms of actual converted customers. He runs a mortgage site, and makes money only when he generates a legitimate lead for a mortgage company. If 100 clicks generate 1 lead worth $100, then each click is worth up to a dollar.

If click-fraud causes Martin to get 200 clicks, but still only one lead, then each click is only worth fifty cents. Martin adjusts his bid. He might lose a little money if he didn’t notice for a day or two (thus the $100K loss over many years). After all, what’s the difference between a “legitimate” prospect who doesn’t turn into a lead and somebody who never intended to in the first place?

After adjusting his payment, Martin still pays up to $100 and still gets $100 in revenues. Google and Yahoo still earn $100 in revenues for the clicks. So who is losing?

The real victims are the honest publishers. Every one of those honest clicks sent to Martin is now worth half as much because of the fraud. If you happen to carry Martin’s ad, you earned $1 for a click before, and now only get $0.50. Click-fraud doesn’t hurt advertisers - it hurts the people that carry Adsense.

Furthermore, the ad networks rely on publishers for the traffic they sell to people like Martin. If honest sites stop hosting Google Adsense, Google loses its network. Rather than profiting from it, Google and Yahoo are more motivated than anybody to solve this problem...

Click fraud is a problem, but it’s a problem for publishers, not advertisers, and Google and Yahoo are very motivated to solve it. Publishers are now the ones that should be evaluating alternatives to Adsense, not advertisers.

(Venture Beat - Clickers, clickers, everywhere…)

ScreenBites Videos

Grouper

Monster Cable Superstitions

"There is a purely magical belief in the idea that you can hear the difference between different brands of audio cables, for example. You can buy a simple one-meter audio cable with gold-plated RCA connectors at both ends for a few bucks, or you can buy one with "time-correct windings" that the manufacturer claims will "provide accurate phase and amplitude signal response for full, natural music reproduction." Price? $40. Or, if you are especially insecure, purchase a one-meter cable that has "3-Way Bandwidth Balanced� construction for smoother, more accurate sound" for a mere $100 from Monster Cable (http://www.monstercable.com). I've had the fun of testing if people could tell the difference—they couldn't. At audible frequencies small differences in capacitance, inductance, and resistance in a cable will make no audible difference, and there are no significant differences in the pertinent electrical parameters among popular brands. One ad, also from Monster Cable, says, "Choosing the right cables can be a daunting task" (especially if you read the ad copy) and it explains that "Underbuying is all too common." This last claim is true, as far as the marketing department is concerned." (ACM Queue, Jef Raskin)

Good, Bad, and Google Agile

"The project management techniques that Google does use are more like oil than fuel: things to let the project keep running smoothly, as opposed to things that force the project to move forward. There are plenty of meeting rooms, and there's plenty of open space for people to go chat. Teams are always situated close together in fishbowl-style open seating, so that pair programming happens exactly when it's needed (say 5% of the time), and never otherwise.

Google generally recognizes that the middle of the day is prone to interruptions, even at quiet companies, so many engineers are likely to shift their hours and come in very early or stay very late in order to find time to truly concentrate on programming. So meetings only happen in the middle of the day; it's very unusual to see a meeting start before 10am or after 4:30pm. Scheduling meetings outside that band necessarily eats into the time when engineers are actually trying to implement the things they're meeting about, so they don't do it.

Google isn't the only place where projects are run this way. Two other kinds of organizations leap to mind when you think of Google's approach: startup companies, and grad schools. Google can be considered a fusion of the startup and grad-school mentalities: on the one hand, it's a hurry-up, let's get something out now, do the simplest thing that could work and we'll grow it later startup-style approach. On the other, it's relatively relaxed and low-key; we have hard problems to solve that nobody else has ever solved, but it's a marathon not a sprint, and focusing requires deep concentration, not frenzied meetings. And at the intersection of the two, startups and grad schools are both fertile innovation ground in which the participants carry a great deal of individual responsibility for the outcome.

It's all been done before; the only thing that's really surprising is that Google has managed to make it scale.

The scaling is not an accident. Google works really hard on the problem, and they realize that having scaled this far is no guarantee it'll continue, so they're vigilant. That's a good word for it. They're always on the lookout to make sure the way of life and the overall level of productivity continue (or even improve) as they grow.

Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company I've even heard about. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. The result: the whole code base looks the same, so switching teams and sharing code are both far easier than they are at other places.

And engineers need great tools, of course, so Google hires great people to build their tools, and they encourage engineers (using incentives) to pitch in on tools work whenever they have an inclination in that direction. The result: Google has great tools, world-class tools, and they just keep getting better.

The list goes on. I could talk for days about the amazing rigor behind Google's approach to software engineering. But the main takeaway is that their scaling (both technological and organizational) is not an accident. And once you're up to speed on the Google way of doing things, it all proceeds fairly effortlessly — again, on average, and compared to software development at many other companies."

(Stevey's Blog Rants)

Airport Security Theater

"The photo ID requirement is no more than security theater. Its only security purpose is to check names against the no-fly list, which would still be a joke even if it weren't so easy to circumvent. Identification is not a useful security measure here.

Interestingly enough, while the photo ID requirement is presented as an antiterrorism security measure, it is really an airline-business security measure. It was first implemented after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 over the Atlantic in 1996. The government originally thought a terrorist bomb was responsible, but the explosion was later shown to be an accident.

Unlike every other airplane security measure -- including reinforcing cockpit doors, which could have prevented 9/11 -- the airlines didn't resist this one, because it solved a business problem: the resale of non-refundable tickets. Before the photo ID requirement, these tickets were regularly advertised in classified pages: "Round trip, New York to Los Angeles, 11/21-30, male, $100." Since the airlines never checked IDs, anyone of the correct gender could use the ticket. Airlines hated that, and tried repeatedly to shut that market down. In 1996, the airlines were finally able to solve that problem and blame it on the FAA and terrorism."

(Wired News: The Boarding Pass Brouhaha)

Google buying into lawsuits

"Google stood to lose a lot if an independent YouTube lost copyright cases. But now that the giant owns YouTube, it can throw its full weight behind not only fighting lawsuits, but staving them off with deals. In other words, Google bought the lawsuits. And that may be its smartest purchase yet. (Valleywag)

Parakey

"Parakey is an application you download to your PC, which effectively becomes your personal operating system. It turns your computer in a hybrid Web site-hard drive, where you can choose what to make public online and what to keep private. Everything else is seamless between the Web and your desktop, letting you avoid the hassles that come with downloading photos, for example, and putting them up on the Web." (VentureBeat - Firefox Kid Blake Ross to launch Parakey — this could be big)