Quick links

What caught my attention lately:

• Great idea for walking directions: "At times, we do not [want] the fastest route ... When walking, we generally prefer tiny streets with trees over large avenues with cars ... [We] suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant." ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Cool idea for a drone that autonomously flies a small distance above and behind you while filming in HD ([1] [2])
  
  
• "OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out." ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Amazon’s cloud revenue now runs almost on par with VMware (VMW), which posted revenue of $5.2 billion last year" ([1])
  
  
• Walmart is getting more aggressive about competing with Amazon on personalization and recommendations ([1])
  
  
• It's important to realize that Amazon could have been a small bookstore on the Web ([1])
  
  
• A lot of us thought the Amazon logo was phallic when it was introduced (worse, it was animated and actually grew from left-to-right). Remarkably, it's lived on for 14 years now. ([1])
  
  
• A big problem with layoffs is not only do you lose some of the people you intended to layoff, but also some of your best employees will pick that time to leave. People with good options won't wait around to experience the chaos and fear; they'll just leave. ([1])
  
  
• "A brand-name USB stick [claims to be] a computer keyboard [device] ... [and then] opens a command window on an attached computer and enters commands that cause it to download and install malicious software." ([1])
  
  
• Financial services and poor computer security: "Our assumption was that, generally speaking, the financial sector had its act together much more" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "NSA employees [were] passing around nude photos that were intercepted in the course of their daily work" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Google Cloud googler says, "It should always be cheaper to run in the cloud no matter what your workload" but that the pricing isn't there yet ([1])
  
  
• Details on Google's remarkably large and fast data warehouse ([1] [2])
  
  
• Cool augmented reality game intended to be played as a passenger in a moving car that creates the terrain and enemies you see in the game based on the stores and buildings around you in the real world ([1])
  
  
• "Astronomers of the 2020s will be swimming in petabytes of data streaming from space and the ground ... [such as] a 3,200-megapixel camera, which will produce an image of the entire sky every few days and over 10 years will produce a movie of the universe, swamping astronomers with data that will enable them to spot everything that moves or blinks in the heavens, including asteroids and supernova explosions." ([1])
  
  
• Data are or data is: "'datum' isn't a word we ever use. So it makes no sense to use the plural when the singular doesn't exist." ([1])
  
  
• The "If Google was a guy" series from CollegeHumor is hilarious (but probably NSFW) ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Funny Dilbert comics on a Turing test for management ([1] [2])
  
  
• Cathartic Xkcd comic on defending your thesis ([1])