It seems that I’m not the only one who thinks that Many Eyes’ new-ish URL is completely insane. If this is supposed to be advertising for IBM, it’s not working. How is it even possible to get such a horrible URL in 2010 (when they moved from the slightly less crappy alphaworks)?
Amazon to Release Ad-Subsidized Kindle for $114
Bizarre:
Ads will appear on the device’s screen saver and show up as a banner on the homepage, but will not appear inside books.
It’s only a $25 savings from the normally-$139 Kindle 3. I’m sure they can find buyers for it, but at what cost to Amazon’s (and the Kindle’s) image?
I don’t think this is about ads: it’s about lowering the initial cost and making people pay the balance later. If anything, the ads only pay for the interest on the owed money.
I doubt Amazon will make serious money on these ads. They’re mostly there to annoy you into paying the $25 to remove them. And that’s why the difference is such a small (and “nice”) number: it’s small enough for somebody to just pay it at some later point. Lowering the price to $99 would make the later payment $40, which looks like a lot more, and is almost half the original price; so it appears to be a lot more.
That is also the reason why Amazon won’t give the Kindle away for free (like a lot of people have suggested): they don’t want the ads, they want people to buy it so they can pay the difference later. Nobody will pay $139 to remove ads from a free Kindle.
Evan Suma, who got his Ph.D. at UNC Charlotte and is now a post-doc at USC, created this very clever response to Google’s Motion-Controlled GMail April Fools joke. At the time of this writing, it has been viewed over 420,000 times, and it’s only been online for about four days. Very impressive.
Reblogged from theatlantic|309 notes
What a terrible chart in The Atlantic! The labels make no sense: why put the numbers in the chart, rather than the country names? The numbers mean nothing to most people, so why even bother? Or at least not make them the main feature, the countries are clearly more interesting.
The choice of colors is also bad. China and “Other” look the same, it’s not at all clear which is which. You can tell from the order in the legend, but it takes some work.
A much better choice would have been to label the slices with the countries, then the poor choice of color would have been much less of an issue. The “Other” category is a good idea to reduce the number of slices, but when “Other” is the largest slice, that should tell the chart maker something. A different chart (bar chart, sorted by amount) would have worked better and provided the information in a more useful way.
Like many others, I started running using Nike’s Nike+ GPS app on my iPhone. It’s been a great ride for the last three months, but I am now feeling its limitations. The app isn’t self-contained at all, and the website is slow and buggy. So I’ve decided to use RunKeeper instead, but what about all that run data Nike has locked up on its website?
While looking around, I found a forum discussion where somebody had figured out how to coax the GPS data from the Nike site in a JSON format. Obviously, RunKeeper can’t import that directly, but it does accept GPX (GPS Exchange Format). So I wrote a little conversion script and make it available. It’s written in Python and available on github:
The process how to download and convert the data is described in the README. It has to be done manually for every single run, and you’ll have to then manually import the data into RunKeeper (or whatever you want to use). But it works, and it’s great to have my entire running history available on the new site.
Reblogged from thedailywhat|1,435 notes
Reblogged from blua|2,253 notes
I took this over five years ago while staying at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin. Nice to see it getting some attention: it has been liked or reposted almost 2,000 times on tumblr and fav’d on Flickr almost 60 times.
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