Your mother was a potato-headed fast-food restaurant worker who worshipped cheese on an uninhabited island

Ris Low on scolding without vulgarity.

I look forward to finding an opportunity to use this one, even if it’s likely to be a long time coming.

Notes from NSC1: When a Web2.0 startup should seek funding

One of the panels covered at some length the unexpected consequences of a teacher sharing her class materials; once her secret sauce was available to others, they improved it. Not a new idea to me, just a new way of putting it.

At some point in the same panel, Joi Ito briefly outlined the putative “typical” financial path for a Web2.0 startup:

• 3 people bang out a prototype in 3 days.
• Seek an angel when you have ~40k users and 20% month-on-month growth. The angel should be providing ~US$100K for 1* full-time salaried developer.
• When you grow to the point of “server-stress” (I took this to mean the point where you can’t optimise your way out of needing a lot more, expensive, server capacity) talk to a VC.

Searching by image

A few months ago I wrote:

Finding things on Google when all you have to go by is the dim recollection of a graphic is tricky

That’s still true, but a substantial step on the path of changing this has just been announced: Google Goggles.

Wow.

The soletta is back…

In the ’90s, Russia experimented with an orbital solar mirror (Znamya) for night-time illumination and Kim Stanley Robinson popularised the idea in his Mars trilogy where it was a part of terraforming Mars. It now appears that California has given the go-ahead to the construction of another for providing 200MW of electrical energy

I love the idea, but can’t help wondering:

• What fraction of the total lifetime energy yield is represented by the launch into orbit.
• How much energy collected in orbit can be beamed to the surface without exacerbating global warming. Granted, 200MW seems pretty innocuous, but so did the first 1000 automobiles.

Mandelbulb: Mandelbrot goes 3D

here

Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale

…and other Hungarian Phrasebook adaptations.

UPDATE 2009-11-17: Hyperlinks work better with URLs in them.

Reddit’s Amazon Web-Services Use

218 Virtual CPUs 380GB of RAM

9TB of Block Storage

2TB of S3 Storage

6.5 TB of Data Out / mo

2TB of Data In / mo

156M+ Pageviews

 

That’s some hosting bill. (source)

XKCD on Death

Google Wave is in Beta

Yes, really:

Design lesson: outages are an opportunity to make users smile, rather than irritated.

Using Gmail as an OpenID Provider

 

• Login to gmail
• At the Relying Party login page (where you’re trying to login) enter https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

What were they smoking when they thought this up?

(Perhaps marketing people saw it as a means to get Google logos alongside other logos that tend to appear beside OpenID? Most un-Google.)

(Thanks)