from The New York Times, a neat infographic:

note how the number of edges emanating from a company is an indicator of its health¹. Kodak has been dying since the commoditization of the digital camera. Nokia started to crumble when the iPhone went global. conversely, HTC is doin' all right—they even split last year.

filing lawsuits is an indicator that you've lost your innovative edge. losing the lead, you're exploiting what's left out of your inventions and legacy until you've finally converted all your integrity into bankruptcy. the news will enjoy adding their spin as well, further complicating things.
whether founded or not, these impressions taint your reputation. they damage your business.

Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?Wil Shipley

who cares if someone took your ideas to build a competing product? that's how the market works. build the better product—it can't be hard if all your competition can only manage plagiarism.

I hope this passes soon so we can get back to creating the future.

look at this url:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/03/toyotas-gas-peddle-fix-not-working-according-to-some-owners/

do these people have editors‽

wait, Matt Burns is an editor—would no one with a grasp of the English language take the job?

as part of my quest to maximise my life's SNR, I've been thinking about email. I don't think any other form of textual communication has so much verbiage.

let's start with an example of a great email:

Subject: Re: Avia Wildflower Triathlons News
From: Joe
To: Keith
Cc: Ken, Cindy, Scott

Oh, don't worry about the beer - that was more an offhand remark than
anything else. If y'all weren't planning to bring any, don't bring one
just on my account.

clean, simple, concise. what's missing? the signature.

this comic by The Oatmeal has a few people I follow nodding, but I disagree that this is the way it has to be.

there's no reason the phone has to be so bad. unlike other things, it's possible to fix with effort from just one of the players.

have you seen Rafaël? look at these demos.

the Rafaël guys claim compatibility with Internet Explorer 6.

no wonder Adobe is scared.

this crawler town has been making its way around the internet, and I have to share it:

look through the set at the detail built into the thing, from the hangar's lights to the vegetable garden, even ongoing construction:

it's truly epic

I've seen a lot of activity on the web about pleaserobme. I use Google Latitude, geotag my Twitter updates, and use foursquare¹, and have some thoughts to share.

I just tried to join battle.net. it's been years since I've used it.

but some problems with my password:

1. Your password must contain at least one alphabetic and one numeric character.

   and? are you saying that this DFA cannot possibly generate a secure password?

   

2. Wrong characters entered. Please enter valid punctuation(!"#$%).

   you're kidding, right? what's wrong with a hyphen? or é?

3. Your password must be between eight and sixteen characters in length.

   I have an idea. how about I type a password, and you hash it and shut up. this is ridiculous.

whenever I run into restrictions like this I question the service's ability to handle passwords securely.

Paul walks through a puzzle in Machinarium.

I love logic puzzles, but it's an extra treat when they're also beautiful. Paul is not only an excellent engineer, he's also a very good designer.

after buying a typewriter for addressing envelopes in 2007 and watching it languish in storage for the years afterwards, I decided to turn it into something more useful—a teleprinter. keypresses are sent over serial, and it prints data received.

short story: it worked, but a project this size isn't without its gotchas.