After briefly becoming more valuable than Dell on January 13, 2006, Apple is once again more valuable than Dell. As of last night’s close, Apple Computer, Inc. is worth $60,166,590,800 in market value vs. Dell’s $60,061,881,440.
Not altogether surprising – we’ve bought somewhere around 50 Macs in the last 6 or 7 years, versus 1 Dell notebook!
Interestering article on the BBC site about games to train your brain – especially if you have a Nintendo DS – which ideally we all would : )
Extract: Activities include solving simple maths problems, counting people going in and out of a house, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touchscreen, and reading classic literature aloud into the device’s microphone.
Players are given a brain age reflecting their performance. Over time, your brain age should get younger as you achieve better scores.
Marc at O’Reilly has listed some of the development practices common to Web 2.0 companies.
In his essay ‘Taste for Makers’, entrepeneur and essayist Paul Graham outlines:
Good design is simple, timeless, suggestive, often slightly funny, and hard. Good design looks easy, uses symmetry, and resembles nature. Good design is redesign. Good design can copy. It is often strange, happens in chunks and is often daring.
Readers’ eyes roughly follow the shape of the letter “F” when reading a web page, reports Jakob Nielsen in this Alertbox column. He draws his conclusions from a study of 262 users.
Dr. Edward Hallowell has coined the term ADT. “It’s sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving.”
It’s difficult to tell from this headline, ‘AJAX: Making the HTML User Experience Almost As Pleasant as Flash’, whether the author is praising or damning his subject.
The Boeing Italia site, built from the ground up by Deepend, jets along the internet superskyway faster than a Roman downs her espresso. All the ancillary navigation areas are now in Javascript include files, which once downloaded stay in the client browser’s cache. Among these is the hierarchical pulldown menu, which previously was dragging each page by a couple of kilobytes.
None of these new Javascript includes contains any of the page’s content nor layout, so the page does not fall out of the sky if Javascript is switched off; only some helpful navigation is lost.
For example, the latest news release page comes in at only 15k once all the Javascript include files have been cached after a view of the homepage (12k for the HTML and 3k for the topic thumbnail)—see the page’s speed report. Yes, many other news release pages have one or even two photos, each about 50k, but the visitor is getting all of that data onscreen.
Fasten your safety belts.
An internal stock market of ideas is itself a great idea, this nytimes story reports (link via tompeters.com). The gist is captured in a nice paraphrase from Tim O’Reilly: Creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling “architecture of participation.”
Just happened to check on the status of this legendary project and see that one smart boy has netted himself the full million!
Page sold out a few weeks ago now – but his site is still getting 20,000 visitors a day…
Seen worsely designed homepages : )
