Links for Sunday, October 28, 2007

• Peter Van Roy: The Principal Programming Paradigms – “This chart classifies programming paradigms according to their kernel languages (the small core language in which all the paradigm’s abstractions can be defined).“
• Anne Zelenka: Mold the Virtual Space Not the Office Space – “It’s strange to me that the solution to improved communication in this time of ultraconnectedness is to change the physical space rather than molding and improving the virtual space. There are tons of ways that you can help teams communicate better that don’t take individual team members privacy and quiet away.“
• Alex Bosworth: Google is Destroying The Web And You Don’t Even Know It – “Prioritizing community building features that would bring in hundreds of visits versus Google features that would bring in hundreds of thousands of visits, what choice is there? I’m not really sure, but it seems like there has to be a better way.“
• Tara Hunt: Performing Seals And Other Such Creative Wonders Of Modern Business – “It’s a common misconception that innovation happens in a single moment, when, in fact, it always takes years of experience, the involvement of many others, dozens and dozens of smaller innovations along the way, long periods of concentrating, studying and thinking about a problem, and, often, after all of this is in place, taking oneself out of the environment and thinking about something completely different.“
• Astronomy Picture of the Day: Victoria Crater on Mars – “Visible in the distance in the above mosaic is the far rim of Victoria Crater, lying about 800 meters away and rising about 70 meters above the crater floor.” – Be sure to click through to the full-sized version. Wow!
• Wall Street Journal: Marketers Explore New Virtual Worlds – “A year ago, online virtual world Second Life was being hailed as the next big digital-marketing phenomenon. But it has begun to lose some of its luster. Put off by high costs and uncertain returns, marketers who had rushed to establish a presence in the three-dimensional online computer game are beginning to look elsewhere.“
• Paul Graham: The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups – “Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That’s one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.” – Via Jeffrey.
• Paul Graham: How to Present to Investors – “Practically every successful startup, including stars like Google, presented at some point to investors who didn’t get it and turned them down. Was it because the founders were bad at presenting, or because the investors were obtuse? It’s probably always some of both.“
• Joel Spolsky: Evidence Based Scheduling – “A schedule is a box of wood blocks. If you have a bunch of wood blocks, and you can’t fit them into a box, you have two choices: get a bigger box, or remove some blocks. If you wanted to ship in six months, but you have twelve months on the schedule, you are either going to have to delay shipping, or find some features to delete. You just can’t shrink the blocks, and if you pretend you can, then you are merely depriving yourself of a useful opportunity to actually see into the future by lying to yourself about what you see there.“
• No VC Required: For Your Next Opportunity, Look For Change – “If it’s Monday morning and you’re hunting around for your next big business idea, look for an industry that’s undergoing radical change for big opportunities.“
• No VC Required: Scaling Early Stage Startups – “Slow performance may also turn away visitors who may have become customers. If you’re a viral business, this can break your virality. It can take user adoption below that critical viral threshold.” – Be sure to check out the linked presentation.
• Travis Griggs: Second Life is Smallktalk – “Second Life looks cool, and not because of the little avatars, but for all the same reasons I’ve loved about Smalltalk for years.” – Via James.
• Wikipedia: Green Threads – “*Green threads are threads that are scheduled by the Virtual Machine (VM) instead of natively by the underlying operating system. Green threads emulate multithreaded environments without relying on any native OS capabilities. *“
• Don Dodge: The Eagles Shun Labels, Go Direct with Wal-Mart – “The record labels are failing to adapt to the new realities. They have had 7 years to figure it out and for the most part they haven’t changed a thing. They are still suing their customers, charging high prices for CDs, and giving the artists meager royalties.“