More quick links

More of what has caught my attention recently:

• The first Kindle was so ugly because Jeff Bezos so loved his BlackBerry ([1])
  
  
• "Sometimes it takes Bad Steve to bring products to market. Real artists ship." ([1])
  
  
• "The Mac sleep indicator is timed to glow at the average breathing rate of an adult: 12 breaths per minute." Beautiful example of attention to design. ([1])
  
  
• "A one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue" ([1])
  
  
• Facebook games, rather than try to be fun, try to be addictive. They feed on the compulsive until they give up their cash. The most addicted spend $10k in one game in less than a year. ([1])
  
  
• "The Like and Recommend buttons Facebook provides to other Web sites send information about your visit back to Facebook, even if you don't click on them ... Facebook can find out an awful lot about what you do online." ([1])
  
  
• A new automated attack on CAPTCHAs that can break them in an average of three tries. Even so, paying people to break CAPTCHAs is so cheap that that is probably what the bad guys will continue to do. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Online backup and storage is now basically free. I expect this to be part of the operating systems soon (nearly is in Windows and Ubuntu) and all profits in online backup to drop to zero. ([1])
  
  
• Prices for Netflix acquiring their streaming content appear to be going way up. Netflix just paid $1B over eight years for some CW network shows, and Starz rejected $300M/year -- a x10 increase -- for their movies. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Someone spun up a truly massive cluster on Amazon EC2, "30,472 cores, 26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space." ([1])
  
  
• "Google's brain [is] like a baby's, an omnivorous sponge that [is] always getting smarter from the information it [soaks] up." ([1])