The massive 1,000-point dip in the market today was reportedly caused by a typo.
…numerous sources said that a trader entered a “b” instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a Dow component. The trader reportedly placed a sell order of $16 billion, instead of $16 million, worth of e-minis, futures contracts tied to equity indexes.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Beautifully Banal, posters of classified ads. The tasteful interaction design of the page is stunning, let alone the posters.
A pattern by repeatxrepeaty.com
Repeat-x Repeat-y: tessellations by various artists.
Ever wonder why Internet Explorer are such jerks about implementing web standards? This is why.
My students will definitely be watching this.
Google launches iPad-optimized Services.
I have a feeling web apps—in the AppCache, local database sense—will be a much bigger deal on the iPad than on the iPhone. The barrier to entry for building an app with web technologies is much lower for many companies; it’s just Javascript performance on the iPhone has been too slow for complex applications to flourish.
Update: so it turns out the Google Services apps suck. Let’s hope this isn’t some harbinger of general web app suckiness.
Clay Shirkey on how complex business models emerge, ossify and finally collapse:
In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. ”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”
In regards to large media companies being upset by the internet:
“If you want something to be 10 times cheaper, take out 90% of the materials.” Making media is like that now except, for “materials”, substitute “labor.”
Superb.
Holy mackerel! Photos of sleeping bugs, covered in morning dew. Bugs… sleep?
Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems.
— Birkshire’s 2009 Letter to Shareholders (.pdf)
That’s just one gem among many. Buffet seems a sure, sane man in the middle of a corrupt industry.
The Opera community has kindly published everything you need to know about <audio> and <video>, including the javascript DOM APIs.
Today, the W3C published every one of the HTML5 Working Drafts.
A funeral service for IE6 will be held later tonight. I will be attending.
The future is looking bright.
Sagmeister’s Answers for Design Students. I love these learn from my experience-type features.
How many times should you have to revise a design? As many times as necessary. Sanjay Patel shares color studies from his book Ramayana: Divine Loophole during an interview with Grain Edit.
A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.
