Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs' Best Years | Fast Company -
“Think of it this way,” he explained. “If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think our company will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions against. We think a lot of little and medium and big decisions will be made better if all our people know that.”
Steve Jobs
The article goes into how this philosophy failed for Jobs in NeXT, but it actually sounds a lot like how Valve is run.
“I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it.” — Kent Beck
“Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”. “Friendzone” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “no”.” — (via thechocolatebrigade)
(Source: angels-and-angles, via dresdencodak)
“The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement.” — Andy Ihnatko, Heavy Hangs The Bandwidth That Torrents The Crown - on the Oatmeal’s latest comic on torrenting Game of Thrones.
On nearly missing out on Victor Cruz -
Reese said that he got lucky taking a flyer on a local free agent who “kinda looked just like a guy” at a small program; Cruz worked hard, the coaches developed him, and salsa happened. This bit of honesty almost turned confrontational, as if Reese was being asked to justify why he didn’t spend a second-round pick on Cruz instead of finding him in the sofa cushions. The “scouting is an inexact science” storyline probably isn’t very interesting. Reese and Cruz remind us that much of what we perceive as scouting is really development. And development involves both good coaching and good roster management, because players need meaningful reps, and bringing in 32-year-olds with no future can take away from those meaningful reps.
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The LVH can’t win a coin-toss bet. Over the past few seasons, the LVH has failed to turn a profit on a bet that should go its way. The opening coin toss of the Super Bowl is a fool’s bet, a chance to gamble on a true 50/50 proposition without 50/50 odds, as the -101 odds dictate that a $100 bet would only return $99.01 in profit. Assuming that half of the gambling populace thinks the bet will be heads and the other half thinks that it’ll be tails, the bet should return a slight profit to the LVH over the long run.
The reality, though, is that the gambling public does not end up going with a 50/50 split. For some reason, the public favors a bet on heads over one on tails, meaning that the book will usually turn a profit when a coin toss comes up tails and lose money when that same coin falls on the other side. This was backed up by the Papa John’s poll where the public got to pick heads or tails for the coin toss with a free pizza on the line, in which 60 percent of voters chose heads.
You can see where this one’s going. For the fourth straight year, the Super Bowl coin toss came up heads. Vegas lost on the dumbest bet in the book. Again. And that wasn’t even the most exciting story to come out of the coin toss, as New York’s failed call of the coin meant that the AFC won the coin toss for the first time in 15 years. The odds of one conference winning the coin toss 14 consecutive times are 8192-to-1, or +819200 in proper Vegas parlance. Hey! We finally found a bet that made a Bobcats NBA title run look likely.
” — Grantland: Looking Behind the Sportsbook CurtainPostmortem: Days of Wonder's Ticket to Ride Pocket -
The entire thing is fascinating, but some specifics that interested me in particular:
Though rough around the edges and in need of several updates, [Smallworld] was well-received, quickly garnering some 50,000 units sold. More importantly, it increased the sales of the board game by over 30 percent within three weeks of the game’s introduction. Sales have never dropped off since then, making Small World our second most successful board game behind Ticket to Ride.
The gamble quickly paid off. Within three days of launch, we’d already earned enough to pay for all our development fees (both in-house and contractors). Within five months, we’d sold over 180,000 copies of the game and its various maps — not bad for a $6.99 game.
Please Steal These webOS Features
Further cementing this feeling is the fact that we were invited to a private briefing at Apple about Gatekeeper a week before today’s announcement. Cabel was told point-blank that Apple has great respect for the third-party app community, and wants to see it continue to grow — they do not want to poison the well. I think their actions here speak even louder than their words, though.
Nice to hear, although actions speak louder than words. I’m hoping that “continue to grow” doesn’t mean limiting installation to the Mac App Store, which Gatekeeper seems to be hinting at.
On doping in cycling, but I thought this excerpt was particularly interesting:
This is where it gets interesting. It seems that a lot of people love to put their faith in the law and yet are sceptical about science. The law is man-made (and therefore flawless) whereas what we know about science keeps changing (and therefore cannot be trusted). This applies to sport just as it does to many areas of life.
Science is attacked for its greatest strength – the fact that it cannot prove or disprove everything. Science is exploratory. It is open-minded and willing to accept that there may be another possibility, however slim the idea may seem. Science is never so arrogant as to presume it knows everything.
Often the legal argument sounds so persuasive, and the science seems a bit shaky and rules like ‘strict liability’ sound disproportionate and unreasonable. Because sports fans want to believe in their heroes, a third player takes centre stage. Step forward Public Relations.
The court of public opinion is where the phoney war is fought. Over the past 18 months, while science and the law have been carefully preparing their arguments for serious scrutiny, the public are teased along as if they’re watching a Punch and Judy show.
PR is flashy. It comes up with catchy phrases that capture the public imagination and it wins hearts and closes off minds.
It is hardly surprising that most people will be turned off by the idea of wading through pages of legal and scientific argument. It is difficult, it strays well outside our areas of understanding and it makes our brains hurt.
Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It
On low-skill manufacturing jobs in America.
This is much farther than I usually get on a Friday NYT crossword!
How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right -
Andrew Sullivan with an interesting assertion on Obama’s positioning on contraception.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart -
On the dissonance between ultimate frisbee’s concept of “Spirit of the Game” and becoming a more popular sport.