“”According to most studies”, says Jerry Seinfeld, “people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
Bearing this in mind, perhaps a guide to making great presentations would be useful?
All part of the service.
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
VMware, a company recently known only to hard-core technologists, debuted as the darling of Wall Street on Tuesday, with an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.
Stock of the Palo Alto maker of “virtualization” software soared 76 percent, eclipsing Google’s 18 percent first-day gain. VMware’s value at closing was $19.1 billion – ranking it as Silicon Valley’s third-largest home-grown software company after Oracle and Adobe Systems. It was the largest initial public offering since Google achieved a $27 billion valuation.
As if that wasn’t enough, Citrix announced that it was paying $500m for Xensource, a fascinating virtualisation outfit that emerged from the Cambridge Computer Lab.
Nice polemical essay on the sub-prime crisis by Tony Curzon Price…
In a system-wide crisis, no one wants to trade. There is no price at which anyone can be convinced to hold a contract, because no one knows what its value is. In this circumstance, a fund manager is a helmsman in a storm: aware of every danger of his position but powerless as wind, then waves, batter him here, then there. But unlike the helmsman, the storm is made worse if another ship in the vicinity goes down. If a bank actually faces bankruptcy, all the contracts and obligations held by that institution will be bad, thus infecting trust in every part of the financial system.
The central banks bail out the funds in order to stop anyone seeing a ship go down, as a way of stemming contagion. That is the defence. This is why we, as citizens and voters the owners of the central banks, lend money in conditions in which no banker would lend. And the argument is strong: contagion and system-wide crisis will have a real impact that will cause hardship: when firms and households find borrowing is hard, demand drops, jobs go … recession. There is a real case here for us to bail the hedge-funds.
But the metaphor of the storm is misleading. Meteorology is not caused – at least not predictably – by the decisions of the helmsmen it affects. Financial crises are. It is because we can be counted on to be lenders of last resort that traders and managers can discount the risks of system-failure and therefore behave imprudently with increasing ease and frequency. The pattern is familiar from the libertarian critique of welfarism: while a safety-net for the deserving poor is good, the existence of the safety-net will create a class of idle, undeserving scroungers. It is hard to be good without encouraging others to be vicious.
Fund managers have been enjoying a one-way bet for six years or more. A credit-worthy institution could borrow very cheaply and lend on without any concern about becoming systematically over-stretched. In the extreme case, the Japanese central bank has been lending money almost for free. Those with access to free money could lend it on to those without such privilege and pocket not just the difference, but, through gambles, multiples of the difference…
Interesting snippet from a Tech review interview with a guy from Linden Labs.
TR: What’s the nature of the property people hold within Second Life?
JZ: When we say “land,” it sounds like property, but it’s not physical property. It’s intellectual property. People don’t have property rights in Second Life because there isn’t any property.
TR: What about the emotional value of these words? Even if the land is virtual, don’t people get attached because it’s called “land”?
JZ: I think virtual worlds can have a very emotional impact on people. The more time I spend in Second Life, the more I view my office space in Second Life as a real place. In that way, Second Life is having a profound impact on how people think and how people feel. The fact that it can seem so real to people is exactly what makes me most excited about working here.
I’m finding Facebook a bore. I resent the ‘walled garden’ approach which lures ‘friends’ to send me messages inside FB — which then prompts an email from FB telling me that so-and-so has sent me a message which can only be seen by logging into FB — when all along s/he could have sent me a perfectly good direct email. The only feature I really like is the status updates of my friends — but I could just as easily get that from something like Twitter. (Later: hang on — I can get the status updates via an RSS feed. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?)
The other irritating limitation of FB is the fact that one exists only in a single context. In real life, I have friends and acquaintances in a range of different — and only barely overlapping — worlds. If FB could accommodate this complexity, then perhaps it would be more useful. But it can’t.
I’m not alone in thinking like this — see this blog post pointed to by Bill Thompson…
I lost control over my MySpace ages ago. I have long since given up responding to private messages on most SNSes. I had to quit LinkedIn after I got lambasted for refusing to forward requests from people that I didn’t know to people who are so stretched thin that I am more interested in hugging them than requesting something of them. I don’t know how to be “me” on Twitter because I can’t figure out how to manage so many different contexts. I find it funny when journalists ask me what SNS I use. I’m on most of the English ones, but they always grow to push me away. Each had an initial context for me, but each one grew and lost that context…
As the Telegraph puts it…
Karl Rove, the man credited by many with winning George W Bush the last two US presidential elections, will resign at the end of the month, it was revealed today.
Mr Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff, said he would leave his role in late August to spend more time with his family…
Wonderful obituary of Fr. Sir Hugh Barrett-Lennard, Bt. Straight out of Evelyn Waugh. Sample:
Young Hugh’s father was a soldier and colonial judge who, on returning from his honeymoon, was said to have forgotten that he was married and tried to climb into bed in his old chambers, now inhabited by another judge.
Hugh went to Radley, and converted to Roman Catholicism with his mother in the 1930s before becoming a master at St Philip’s prep school, Kensington. He was on the brink of entering the Oratory when war was declared, and joined the London Scottish as a private; he was then commissioned and switched to the Intelligence Corps before transferring to the 2nd Battalion, Essex Regiment. Arriving at brigade headquarters on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in 1944, he recognised the soldier carrying his bags as a waiter who had once spilt soup down the dress of his dinner guest at the Dorchester and had been immediately fired.
They don’t make ’em like that any more. Thanks to James Cridland for the link.
Lottery winners form an orderly queue here to pre-order the personal JetPack.
Details:
Estimated Flight Time: 19 minutes
Estimated Distance: 27 miles
Estimated Speed: 83 mph.
Estimated Max Height: 250ft
Max Pilot Weight: 180 lbs.
Fuel: Jet-A fuel
Fuel Capacity: 5.0 gallons.
Power Plant: T-73 turbine engine
Retail Price: $200,000, includes training JPICProduct Details:
Currently being updated. The T-73 is currently set for release December 11th 2007. Pre-Orders being taken.
Please check back soon for more details.
Semi-informed comment here.
Rats! Registration for BarCamb has closed.
As Groucho Marx observed, you have to get up early if you want to get out of bed.
Interesting piece in the New York Times. Facebook is being sued by the founders of ConnectU, who claim that Mark Zuckerberg nicked the idea from them.
The Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narenda, another ConnectU founder, contend that Facebook’s founder stole the idea from them. In a suit filed in 2004, the ConnectU founders accused Mr. Zuckerberg of lifting their site’s source code and business plan when he worked for ConnectU as an unpaid programmer. They are asking that Facebook’s assets be transferred to them.
Here are the facts that are not disputed: In 2002, when the Winklevoss brothers were juniors at Harvard, they conceived what was initially called the HarvardConnection, which was to be a social network for the college. In November 2003, they asked Mr. Zuckerberg, who was studying computer science at Harvard, to develop the site’s software and database, promising to compensate him later if the venture prospered.
Mr. Zuckerberg abandoned the project in February 2004, a month after registering the domain name thefacebook.com. By the end of that February, his new site, also a social network for Harvard, had registered half the college’s undergraduates. By April 2004, it had spread to other Ivy League schools.
Very quickly, Facebook expanded to serve other universities, then high schools, then organizations as varied as McDonald’s and the Marine Corps, and finally the general public. By contrast, ConnectU never really got started: it didn’t open until May 2004, and, overshadowed by what became, simply, Facebook, today it has no more than 70,000 registered users…
Sadly (for the brothers), there was no written contract. And, as lawyers say, documents win cases.