FilterJoe

Young 20s entrepreneur vs. early 50s entrepreneur. Without knowing anything about either person, which startup is more likely to succeed? Even if you have the business plans for both, and you meet both - which one are you going to be more skeptical about as you evaluate which one of them gets funding?

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.

"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."

Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and...

EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.

I made very little money for years and had just about given up until Panda 4.1 and Penguin 3.0. Since then, when I write well, Google is sending traffic my way, and my traffic and income have been steadily increasing by 20%-30%/month. I now have the incentive to keep adding more high quality content to my blog.

Prior to these Panda/Penguin updates (Sep/Oct 2014), I can totally understand why so many attempted to do what the author did. It made more money. Even if Google algorithm changes or Affiliate changes shut you down, jumping to the next thing seemed to work.

Hopefully Google is ahead of the curve once and for all, providing greater incentive to create great content than game the system.

* one or more incorrect facts

* goes on and on about one minor point while ignoring major stuff

* too brief

* reveals spoiler without a warning

Etc.

Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:

Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?

I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.

Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833

All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.

I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8

However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.

Combined with Session Buddy: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

Those who routinely keep 10+ tabs open may be motivated to switch to Firefox or Opera due to slow browser start. The above 2 extensions solve the issue. I explain in more detail here:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...

In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...

Start with the premise that the person you most want to give you advice is someone who is passionate about a topic or at least has done a lot research on it. If you ask them for advice, first they'll give you an overview, which hopefully includes what attributes you should be thinking about. Then they'll recommend a small number of models to consider, based on what you seem to be interested in. If you're doing this with other people around, perhaps a few other people will pipe in with suggestions.

So - for example - if you're looking for 3-4 player board games more interesting than Sorry and Monopoly - so interesting that they have a decent chance of getting your friends and/or family members more into gaming - I prepared a guide on our site that does just that:

http://obviously.com/619/gateway-games

(Note: site styling is incomplete - we're not quite ready to launch)

The essential idea is that if you narrow a topic down enough (i.e. 7200 RPM HDDs that are very quiet and can easily survive a several foot drop onto a hard floor), there's probably somebody out there who's taken a great interest in that narrow niche and can write about it very well.

On the other hand, it's hard to write about the too-broad hard drive category as a whole, and it's also difficult to talk about one hard drive with little context.

Doing the first 2 lessons will not only get your a vagrant powered VM up and running, it will also give you a good feel for normal use. And you'll also be learning Django.

* stock prices often get de-linked from the underlying value of the business (and the starting point for Ballmer was the height of the stock market bubble)

* percentage drop seems far more important that gross amount dropped - quite a number of CEO's have led their companies to bankruptcy, and therefore a 100% drop in stock price.

* business forces outside of a CEO's control are responsible to a great extent for business performance. I would argue that Leanard Riggio (Barnes and Noble) was one of the top performing 50 CEOs in the last century in the face of very challenging headwinds but you'd never know that from the way the business (and its stock price) performed.

* dividends are another form of value returned to shareholders - and Microsoft has paid some over the years.

Also - it turns out that GE's Jeff Immelt presided over a drop of approximately $350 billion (601 billion Aug 2000 --> 246 billion today), and John Chambers even more (557 billion March 2000 --> $125 billion today)

So if the point of the article is to write about the CEO who presided over the largest market drop in U.S. history, the article should have been about Jeff Immelt or John Chambers.

Note: Intel's market cap also decreased more than MSFT during the same period but had more than 1 CEO.

edit: typo, added mention of John Chambers

From what I saw in this review, the new Safari offers much more functionality than the prior version, devoting substantially more pixels to content and offering the iCloud Keychain feature.

I do agree though that the functionality hasn't improved significantly for most of the other apps. I'd be way more excited if the Control Center offered customization. My two most frequent settings (Cellular on/off, Location Services on/off) aren't in Control Center so it doesn't really give me much.

Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my system (2-3x per week).

Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same 21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then reopen the browser every couple hours.

Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.

I too tried the Feedly iOS app and found it didn't suit my workflow and stylistic preferences. But I didn't need it. My favorite way of consuming news over the past couple years has been with Newsify, with Google Reader as back end. Now my favorite way continues to be Newsify, but with Feedly as back end. The transition was seamless.

My only 2 complaints are:

1) I was only able to import 1000 starred items into Feedly.

2) No search - but that's coming.

So - I wish I hadn't had to spend a dozen or two hours over the past few months evaluating alternatives to Google Reader. But I'm quite happy that Feedly stepped up to take Google Reader's place.

20 word summary:

Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.

So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.

If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?

Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider:

Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat.

However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled:

In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:

1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.

2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.

3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.

The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.