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Linked List: April 19, 2007

Thursday, 19 April 2007

Profits and revenue are both way up from a year ago. This, to me, is amazing:

During the quarter, Google continued to add workers at a brisk pace. The company ended the quarter with 12,238 employees, up from 10,674 on Dec. 31.

And then there’s the stark comparison to Yahoo:

Google’s strong growth stands in sharp contrast to that of Yahoo, which announced this week that sales jumped 7 percent, while profits dropped 11 percent.

Methinks Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s days are numbered, and the number isn’t very high.

BBC to Support Macs ★

Their “iPlayer” service, which is currently Windows-only, is going to be “re-engineered” to support Mac OS X and other platforms. Kind of funny that something named iWhatever is only available for Windows.

Security Update 2007-004 ★

About two dozen bug fixes, including three of the issues from MOAB.

The New Upcoming ★

Nice update to my favorite event-tracking site.

Mike Davidson: Pagination and Page-View Juicing Are Evil ★

Mike Davidson:

Over the last several years, many publishers have convinced themselves that breaking up stories into sometimes as many as ten pages is an acceptable way to present content on the web. The realistic ones at least admit that it’s a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard.

It’s a lack of respect for the reader, pure and simple.

MSFT, Xbox 360, and Japan: Failure-in-a-Box ★

Microsoft has lost billions of dollars on their Xbox division, and doesn’t seem poised to turn that around anytime soon.

Pogue Reviews the Wi-Fi-Enabled Sansa Connect Music Player ★

The gist: It’s a great idea but a poor implementation.

MarsEdit Markdown ★

Just in case you didn’t realize that MarsEdit works well with Markdown-formatted weblog posts.

Paul Ford on the Launch of the Harpers.org Redesign ★

Many sites, including DF, use the word “archive” to describe the previous content available on the site. In the case of the new Harper’s web site, it’s a very big archive indeed: every issue from the last 156 years.

The navigation Paul Ford designed for this is interesting and clever. One big problem with the web compared to print is the lack of implicit context. You can tell how big a book is by holding it in your hand, and you know where you are in the book based on how many pages remain to be read. In a physical archive, like, say, a library, you can get a sense of how much is available by looking at the shelves. The three-level navigation at Harpers.org — decade / year / month — gives you a clear sense of where you are in the magazine’s 156-year history. Bravo.

Jens Alfke on Twitter, Rails, and SQL as the ‘Universal Hammer’ ★

I think the whole “11,000 requests per second” thing with Twitter is a myth. I mean, I know they’re growing like crazy and the server is busy as hell, but my (admittedly only somewhat informed) guess is that they do a few hundred connections per second, tops. Maybe things get backed up to the point where there are 10,000 active connections, but not thousands of new connections per second.

Arno Pro ★

New text face by Robert Slimbach “in the tradition of early Venetian and Aldine book types”. A little too fussy for my taste, but very well-done. (Via Existential Type.)

Thomas Phinney on Hypatia Sans Pro ★

Thomas Phinney writes about his new typeface, Hypatia Sans Pro. He mentions something that I completely overlooked the other day when I linked to it — the italics aren’t yet available.

There’s also a tidbit on Adobe’s interpretation of U.S. accounting laws, which shows that they agree with Apple regarding the need to charge at least a nominal fee for feature upgrades.