The insights of a Quirky Tech Enthousiast on his journey through the fast paced IT landscape.
You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world.”
http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf
For more info, check out gapminder.org!
This week I was fed up with the recurring issues I have with my MythTV setup. We got used to the long channel changes and accepted that the remote control (actually LircD) acted up on a frequent basis. Yet after having had a lot of issues with my ATI card, I switched to nvidia. This week I did an upgrade to get Lirc more stable, which caused my video to lag… I suppose that some MythTV internal changed as updating/downgrading my nvidia drivers didn’t work.
As the WAF was completely ruined and each “downtime” caused my lifetime to shorten with a few years, I decided to go with my initial hunch to buy a dreambox. Two days later the box arrived and after a bit of googling I flashed the device with the PLI image and I was AMAZED!!! I repeat myself: AMAZED!!!
It’s a linux device underneath the hood, so I can simply manage connectivity to other devices. So it instantly became a small nas server for my other media devices too… Which brings me to another point; what will I do with my old MythTV hardware? 😉
Let’s say you could win 1 million Euro when participating with a lottery. The odds are about 1 to a billion… How much would you pay for this lottery ticket?
Now let’s say that you’re in a lottery where you have a one-out-of-a-billion chance to lose 5% of all your assets. How much would you pay for a lottery ticket which insures you against this?
What you already have is worth more to you than what you might gain. Yet the same math & currency value applies to both gaining and losing. People tend to panic when there is a risk of losing something, despite how small it may be. Every change is seen as a potential loss and not a potential win.
A trader takes several risks on a daily basis, yet (s)he knows/judges the odds of every investement. Let’s say that they have a win ratio of 8 out of 10. When they invest their money into 10 opportunities, they should anticipate that 8 winners exceed the losses made at the two failed investments.
So how do you respond to risks? Do you fear or anticipate them?
We often think that we need to provide products that people need. But actually we need to provide people with products that they want! In essence people only need food & water…
When you take a look at this picture; do you think the person needs this bike or wants this bike? What do you think he wants? You’d might say that he needs the 21 gear model made out of full carbon. Wrong, he wants the experience of riding thru the above scenario. It doesn’t matter for him if the gear shift is 0,1sec slower, or if he has 21 or 28 gears… So a sales person should relate to the experience he wants and not the product he needs for this experience! What if he would have gotten the following sales talk:
This bike weighs less then the 1 pound which is about half of other bikes. With it’s 28 gears you’ll be able to go up the hill much smoother!
What he just “sold” was the Full carbon model with 28 gears, yet the packaging was different…
About a month ago I started my own webdesign agency. So after almost 2 years of kvaes.be I’ve took the step towards entrepreneurship!
We focus on the “local” market, providing quality websites at an affordable price. It’s not “yet another high priced” bureau… The OpenSource world provides the means which enables us to provide a very interesting price.
Starting with four basic questions (that you may be surprised to find you can’t answer), Jonathan Drori looks at the gaps in our knowledge — and specifically, what we don’t about science that we might think we do.
The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.
A while ago I posted about Mozy. As a response to this post, Maya Zarchan contacted me with the following note:
I read your piece discussing Mozy and thought you might be interested in
another vendor, SpiderOak. They provide a free, secure, automated approach for
storing, backing up, accessing, and sharing personal files. SpiderOak is the
only backup software to work across ANY platform (Mac, Linux, and PC) – it
also has unparalleled anonymity, there is literally no visibility into anything
being stored – not even SpiderOak employees have access to the data.
I must admit that I haven’t tried out SpiderOak, but it seems to offer the same kind of service as Mozy. So it’s only fair that I’d give it the same spotlight… 😉
I’m back after two weeks of Island Hopping in the Greek cyclades. We first arrived at Mykonos where we were greeted by very unfriendly prices (read: 6€ for a beer, 14€ for a very simple spaghetti, etc). Yet the island hasn’t goet much to offer, despite that they out themselves as an exclusive Island. They have some big party beaches that can be compared to Ibiza, but that doesn’t justify the negative price/quality ratio. The second island was Paros; a very small & nice island. We toured the whole Island in one day with a scooter! Next up was Naxos… seemly bigger than Paros (about 3 to 4 times). Cruising this island with a scooter proved to be harder due to the hills. Yet it was worthwhile as the island has a lot of nice panorama’s and several different vegetations. We closed our tour with Santorini. It’s essentially what remains of an enormous volcanic explosion, destroying the earliest settlements on what was formerly a single island, and leading to the creation of the current geological caldera. This provides some spectacular physical beauty.
In short
Karim Vaes 