Little Big Tomatoes

article from John Gruber on macworld.com

This is how the designers and engineers at Apple roll: They roll.

They take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity. At an anticipated media event, Apple reveals this core product as its Next Big Thing, and explains—no, wait, it simply shows—how painstakingly thoughtful and well designed this core product is. The company releases the product for sale.

Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they’ve got a snowman. That’s how Apple builds its platforms. It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement—so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.

This is how Apple rolls.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The web is a generally free place, but some sites and services want to make it annoying to navigate and enjoy. Stream any video you’d like, see the sites you need, and get at services you thought were down with these tips.

Tips to help you to watch streams, pages for us in the EU.

from Lifehacker.com

Popularity: 7% [?]

The Real Science Gap: It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.

from The Real Science Gap

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Very good article, Here is the gist of it:

1. Limit your friends. Not real-life friends, but social network and blogging and forum friends.
2. Limit your feeds. Blog subscriptions, newsletters, other updates and news subscriptions and so on. Limit them to a handful of essentials, and let the rest go. The more you have, the more attention they require.
3. Limit your communication time.
4. Give up on news. It’s a never-ending cycle. And if you’ve paid attention to the news as long as I have (I’m a former journalist), you know it’s all the same, year after year.
5. Be brief. Write brief emails, tweets, updates, blog posts.
6. Give your attention to the important. This is the crucial part: choose what you give your attention to, and do this choosing carefully. What is important to you? Writing? Photography? Design? Coding? Creating a new business that helps others? Your kids? Figure this out, and give this the majority of your attention.
7. Become conscious of your distractions. Once you’ve decided to focus your attention on the important, become more aware of distractions as they come up. Make note of them, and as you get the urge to be distracted, learn to pause, breathe, and return to the important.
8. Surround yourself with the positive.

Zenhabits – How to Reclaim Your Attention

Popularity: 10% [?]

Long Term investing

Look at a stock as a portion of a business you expect to do a certain amount of business each year and produce a predictable amount of profit. Think about it like buying a farm. Don’t look at day-to-day stock prices which are irrational and emotional. Look at the produce it will create at harvest.

The right way of thinking about stocks.

Predictions

Lowering the expectations is easier than delivering results.

Energy

Charlie says he never misses an opportunity to put solar panels on his roof. Too expensive and he’s gotta think about the long term payoff since he’s 86. He does, however, believe that prices will fall and humans ingenuity will solve the future energy needs of the species through solar energy, enhanced power grids, and things we can’t imagine yet.

Valuehntr.com

Popularity: 5% [?]

A parable about how one nation came to financial ruin. By Charles Munger.

In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island "Basicland."

The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient trade, and ample loans for credit-worthy businesses while strongly discouraging loans to the incompetent or for ordinary daily purchases.

Moreover, almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property. The one exception was the widespread presence of secured, high-down-payment, fully amortizing, fixed-rate loans on sound houses, other real estate, vehicles, and appliances, to be used by industrious persons who lived within their means. Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small. There was no trading in options on securities or in derivatives other than "plain vanilla" commodity contracts cleared through responsible exchanges under laws that greatly limited use of financial leverage.

Article on what happened to the US in the recent times by Charles T. Munger,  the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Read the original article from Slate or discuss the article on BasicallyMoney.com:

What investment strategy would you deduce from the latest article from Charles Munger?

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CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates – Keeping America Great

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We are beings capable of limitless love towards each other.

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A very good visualized explanation of the credit crisis. From CrisisOfCredit.com

Part 1.

Part 2.

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I am putting out a list of modules, that I am planning to implement for Shuriken, the launcher. If you have a good idea that would make a good module, please either leave a comment or write me an email and I will put it on my list:

iTunes module.
This module would let the user to issue commands that would allow them to control the player, the following actions would be implemented:

• Play/Pause
• Next Song
• Previous Song
• Volume Down
• Volume Up

Windows Media Player and/or Zune module.
This module could do exactly the same as the iTunes one would be. It would allow the user to control the player with the same commands. Stopping and starting songs and moving back and forward between them.

Date and Time module.
This module would let the user to bring up the current date and time on the computer as its default action and it would also act as a world clock making really easy to get the time and date in any city in the world.

Google Calc module.
This module would allow the user to enter queries against the Google Calculator from Shuriken. The results would be displayed by the app somehow, so no need to open up a browser window.

What other kind of modules would make sense?

Popularity: 28% [?]