Posts – page 56 of 74

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Org charts at major tech companies:

arainert:

You don’t work on an assembly line any more. You work in project world, and more projects mean more chances to screw up, to learn, to make a reputation and to have more impact. When it’s you against the boss, the goal is to do less work. When it’s you against the project, the goal is to do more work.

— Seth’s Blog: When is it due?

This is a video of the Office re-imagined as a 1980-1990’s sitcom.

(by benny2700)

Why to join Google+ (via xkcd: Google)

CASSINI MISSION: pro-tip, watch in full screen with headphones and prepare to be blown away by the beauty of this video made from footage of NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn. (by Chris Abbas)

Claiming clairvoyance. (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Here are a few of my reading highlights from the Foreign Policy article Meltdown, by Gennady Burbulis and Michele A. Berdy, an exciting account of the August coup in Russia, and the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991.

We began to work together on a new union treaty that would transform the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign states with a limited central government. Yeltsin planned to sign the controversial pact on Aug. 20. As we miled about Yeltsin’s living room on the morning of Aug. 19, it was instantly clear to us that the coup was an eleventh-hour attempt to prevent the treaty from being signed the next day. But that was the only thing that was clear. Americans watching the events unfold live on CNN knew more about what was going on in Russia than we Russians did; the news anchors in Moscow simply read a formal statement issued by the coup plotters’ hastily appointed “Emergency Committee.” Information arrived at the dacha in bits and pieces, by phone from friends and colleagues in Moscow and around Russia.

Hidden cameo in Indiana Jones: C-3PO & R2-D2??!?

cepankus:

Broccoli House

brockdavis:

The first weapon made from code.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus (by Patrick Clair)

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1

William Zinsser on what it takes for travel writing to move from a personal narrative into the realm of literature.

The worlds that those restless hermits wrote about were often interior worlds, tinged with mysticism, and it could hardly be otherwise; they achieved their destiny by following trails that weren’t on any map. But what raises travel writing to literature is not what the writer brings to a place, but what the place draws out of the writer.

Hang on Woody! (by nplus1)

Some people don’t mind starting a company without any customers. I’m too conservative for this. I’m happy to even give up equity to get that first customer. 50% of a profitable company is better than 100% of a company that will probably quickly go out of business.

— The Easiest Way to Succeed as an Entrepreneur Altucher Confidential

Map of the World

This map is drawn using data of the connections of 10 million Facebook users. (via Map of the World Drawn Entirely Using Facebook Connections: Geekosystem)

National Geographic has an interesting article about some recent findings in the search for the real Cleopatra.

[M]aybe finding her tomb would diminish what Shakespeare called “her infinite variety.” Disembodied, at large in the realm of myth, more context than text, Cleopatra is free to be of different character to different times, which may be the very wellspring of her vitality. No other figure from antiquity seems so versatile in her ambiguities, so modern in her contradictions.

Judy Bachrach, writing for Obit Magazine has a piece, Death Be Not Chic, on how Hollywood deals with death, in comparison to people’s real experience of it. Some notable quotes:

Death marks us permanently — and not simply because we are all, in another sense, marked men. Death defines who we are now and, inevitably, how we and our accomplishments will be considered at some later date most of us would generally prefer not to think about. At all.

Dear Photograph is a website with a simple premise: take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.

The results are beautiful:

It’s awesome when an entrepreneur is obsessed with his idea. Every great product that I’m aware of came from an obsession of an idea and every great company followed. But for every entrepreneur that shifted the obsession with the idea into an obsession with the execution of the idea, I know many more entrepreneurs who got stuck on the idea, but never focused on building something from it.