Extrapolating Computing
Remember when mainframes did all of the computing? And workstations were dumb terminals docked to the mainframes? The terminals had less power, but were more “mobile.”
Then everyone got a desktop. And the desktop is where you did most of your computing. And you carried around your underpowered laptop, which had to be synced with your desktop, or docked to a big screen, keyboard and mouse to be usable. The laptop had less power, but it was more mobile than the desktop.
Now most early adopters have a laptop as their main computer. And are carrying around their underpowered smartphone, which has to be synced with their laptop on a regular basis. The smartphone has less power, but well, it’s more mobile.
We’ll dock our smartphones to our laptops for a while. But, if we can extrapolate from the history of computing, the laptop is headed for the dustbin.
Which means that Apple will be ok. Google will be ok. But if Windows Mobile is any indicator, Microsoft is in deep, deep trouble.
The Foundations of Cooperation
“The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.” – Robert Axelrod
Mencken on Politics
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ” –H. L. Mencken
New Blog and Feed Address
Please update your RSS readers to my new Feed address:
Users bring you traffic
Duh.
But how?
I only know of four viable methods:
- A simple core built-in feature, where by using the product, users invite / share it with others. This used to be mostly about email address import, although these days Digging, Tweeting, and of course, spreading on Facebook are very popular
- Users embed the product onto their own blogs / pages / sites
- Users create original content that gets picked up by GoogleBot, gets SEO’ed, and then brings in other users via Google search.
- Users actually pay for your content, whether through subscriptions, or much more likely, virtual goods. This, in turn, allows you to buy traffic
If you don’t have one of these four methods in operation, and you’re building a web-based company, you’re going to find yourself begging for traffic a lot.
Charlie Munger on Getting Ahead
We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask,
“How can I become like you, except faster?”;
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, at the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.
- Charlie Munger
Warren Buffett on Effort and Value
Out of school I offered to work for [Benjamin] Graham for free and he said I was overpriced.
– Warren Buffett
Samuel Adams on Freedom
If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
- Samuel Adams
Keynes on the Currency
There is no subtler, surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
– John Maynard Keynes
Tumblr customer service blows me away
When’s the last time that you had an accurate, timely, thorough, and polite response to an email to a free service?
——-Original Message——-
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:05:25 -0800
To: support@tumblr.com
Subject: Migrating from squarespace>I’m abandoning my squarespace blog and moving to Tumblr. I have my own
>custom domain. My old RSS feed is at:
>
>http://www.startupboy.com/journal/rss.xml
>
>How do I set my tumblr RSS feed to be at the same address! I don’t
>want to lose all of my subscribers in the move… Can I map the domain
>to tumblr and then set the feed URL from somewhere inside Tumblr? Can
>I use a third-party service like Feedburner to do it?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Naval
>Hi, Naval. Tumblr doesn’t allow the creation of a custom RSS feed address. You might try burning your Tumblr feed in FeedBurner, using FeedBurner’s MyBrand feature to associate the burned feed with your custom domain, and then editing the Custom HTML of your Tumblr theme to point browsers/RSS readers to the RSS feed from FeedBurner MyBrand rather than to Tumblr’s default RSS feed.
I know MyBrand will let you keep http://www.startupboy.com in your feed address. I’m not sure if it will let you keep /journal/rss.xml. You’d have to experiment or ask the FeedBurner folks.
Info from FeedBurner:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/mybrand
Sorry that I can’t be of more help on this issue. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. Thanks for using Tumblr!
Marc :-)
—
Tumblr Support
support@tumblr.com
