On a related note. Which python library would you recommend for text-based interfaces? I have never used ncurses, so I don't know how complex it is. What I would like to achieve is having a user launch my script from the command line, use the text based interface to select a source and destination folder, set a few parameters and show a progress bar.
I am quite sure that by "scaling" he meant the scaling of their business activities and not software.
"... Google offers to bring that scale to us. For me, ultimately building great products is key....
...you have to look at markets outside of the US. We are doing very well in the US and Canada but we need to get to Europe and around the globe. Just getting to UK has taken up a lot of time and energy and when you look at Europe, there are many countries and many opportunities. It is an atoms-based business and a lot goes into getting it to scale — legal, physical distribution and even localization are time consuming and need new kind of scale."
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is not a howto guide. It's not a list of 101 tips and tricks for drawing charts, where one would wish for 200 tips instead. It's a framework, a theory, of how to think and reason about visualizing information. It is something you can take and apply in many different situations. Then the question really is, is there anything wrong with the theory it conveys?
As a matter of fact, I do speak the language. A lot of things feel weird to me when I come to visit the city. I have this uneasy feeling about things like the Hungarian Guard [1][2] - a paramilitary group having a rally on the most most important square in Budapest. Or having a fascist party, as the 3rd biggest, in the Parliament [3].
Yet, there is an incredible amount of gifted people, who are the exact opposite of these jerks. I guess a lot of people here admire undertakings like Prezi, LogMeIn, ArchiCAD/Graphisoft, or Ustream, all coming from Budapest.
I can't help myself, but Twitter seems to me like a subset of Facebook. Something like ICQ, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger is to Facebook Chat or Skype.
It came at the right time in the US, but it takes some time for these things to get abroad. While it arrived to Central Europe, Facebook had enough users and introduced features like Followers etc. Today, Twitter is solely used by a marginal tech/hip/geek community here.
And advertising goes where people go. The question is, whether this evidence suggests that the Twitter of today can't compete directly with Facebook, and it's success is based on acquiring users before FB matched it in functionality. How stable this user base is? Is it a similar case as with the chat applications?
Anecdotal evidence - a friend of mine just asked, whether one should invest in Twitter... on Facebook.
Fair question to ask! Although would agree with 'subset of Facebook' argument but therein also lies its beauty. If we look at Facebook today and filter marginal things away its used primarily to 1) Share updates and 2) Share pics. Twitter took the first point and made it better. Instagram took 2nd point and made it better. Both did well. So sometimes (in fact most of the times) its about taking only one feature and doing it extremely well and I will give credit to Twitter for this. As for the question related to a stable user base is concerned it feels people will find usage for both kind of platforms, general ones and very specific ones!
At the risk of stating the obvious, Twitter is a directed graph (one-way follow), while Facebook is (mostly) undirected (two-way follow), I have to friend you and you have to agree.
Twitter is more for the digerati, Facebook is more for the masses.
Facebook has more of a mission to capture and monetize all your social/personal info, Twitter is a little more narrowly focused.
Thats probably more money than the size of the whole European self-storage industry. I'm really curious, why are these services so popular in the US? What do you store there? When? E.g. when I have something I don't want to get rid of just yet (furniture, spare parts...), I put it in the basement of our apartment house. Although, I can imagine using self-storage when moving.
New York apartments can have very little storage space when I was looking for a studio some had one small closet and no bathroom storage at all. People I know use them for out of season sports stuff and clothes, especially couples where two people are sharing one small closet.
Tom Litton, for example, still keeps four storage units himself, at two facilities, all of them 10-by-30 units. I asked what’s inside... “I’ve got some of my old clothes that I probably wouldn’t wear anyway,” he continued, and some trophies from college. “I also have some old cassette tapes that I produced.”
The cassettes are like audiobooks, he explained — tutorials on how to get into the storage industry and succeed. He made them before the storage-facility building boom ended a couple of years ago. “They didn’t sell,” Litton said, “so they’re all in storage now.”
I found an interesting figure [1] for those of us who could name a few, but are not as well versed in the geography of Britain. It compares British cities to similar European cities by population. The scale is unnecessarily skewed, though.
Software is eating the world. For real now. And it is eating hardware. This is such a strong force that even old time franchises like Microsoft and Motorola can't do anything about it. And apparently "pure software" companies don't mind venturing into it. They know it's software, for the most part, and believe vertical integration is worth the trouble with the messy hardware parts.
How deep is the integration anyway? Did Google and Microsoft end up owning the manufacturing plants? Apple is known to outsource the manufacturing itself.
