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Transparency Life Sciences | drug development you control
Interesting idea, but will it fly?
“Transparency Life Sciences is the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation. Our goal is to develop medicines for significant unmet medical needs by acquiring promising drug compounds, designing studies via crowdsourced methods, and conducting those clinical studies with unmatched productivity.” -
Comparing today’s computers to 1995’s | Relatively Interesting
My first PC was a 286 with 1 MB RAM, a 40 MB HD, 5 1/4″ floppy drive, CGA monitor, no mouse, no sound, no CD-ROM.
Also used a dB Spectrum before that – it used a cassette recorder for storage, had 64K memory, and used a TV as display. -
Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions
Handy website that provides you with links to the app settings pages of different online services like facebook, Google etc. Good to visit these pages from time to time & revoke access of any suspicious or unwanted apps.
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Right versus pragmatic – Marco.org
Well summed up:
“Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.” -
The Death Star Is a Surprisingly Cost-Effective Weapons System | Mother Jones
Turns out that it is indeed very cost effective, given the size of the empire. Also, don’t miss out on the comments picked out by the author.
Author: Aditya
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Transparency Life Sciences | drug development you control
Interesting idea, but will it fly?
“Transparency Life Sciences is the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation. Our goal is to develop medicines for significant unmet medical needs by acquiring promising drug compounds, designing studies via crowdsourced methods, and conducting those clinical studies with unmatched productivity.”Tags: transparency, development, medicine, opensource
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Comparing today’s computers to 1995’s | Relatively Interesting
My first PC was a 286 with 1 MB RAM, a 40 MB HD, 5 1/4″ floppy drive, CGA monitor, no mouse, no sound, no CD-ROM.
Also used a dB Spectrum before that – it used a cassette recorder for storage, had 64K memory, and used a TV as display.Tags: computers, history, technology
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Start 2012 by Taking 2 Minutes to Clean Your Apps Permissions
Handy website that provides you with links to the app settings pages of different online services like facebook, Google etc. Good to visit these pages from time to time & revoke access of any suspicious or unwanted apps.
Tags: privacy, permission, socialmedia, apps, tool, web
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Right versus pragmatic – Marco.org
Well summed up:
“Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.”Tags: copyright, Business, piracy
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flyte impressions: Finally a mainstream Indian MP3 store
It took its time, but we finally have a mainstream Indian MP3 digital store, thanks to flipkart. We did have the saregama store, but it was nowhere near as convenient as what the likes of iTunes & Amazon have offered outside India since times immemorial. I’ve already bought a bunch of tracks from the store, and I’m just getting started.
Here are some of my initial observations about the store and shopping experience:
Track naming: Not exactly named very nicely, but at least the ID3 tags are in place, so they work well with the usual music players.
Album fragmentation: At least for Hindi & Bengali albums. This can lead to a bit of confusion, and also means that you might need to download tracks from multiple albums though they should be clubbed into one.
New Digital Wishlist: While there’s a separate link to your “Digital cart”, the wishlist link is still the same. However, it’s been split into a Digital & Non Digital section.
Downloading files: The MP3 Library gives a convenient list of purchased tracks (wonder when they’ll start a cloud player service). Best of all, there’s a “Not Downloaded” section that makes life easier. You need to download each track separately unless you use the Flyte Download Manager which can download multiple tracks simultaneously. There’s also a counter that shows you the number of times a track has been downloaded – overall limit is 4.
The download manager is not fool proof though, as you can see below. I was able to fix this issue by letting the successfully added files finish downloading and then grabbing the Not Downloaded files once again from the site. It also seems that the download manager is getting updated frequently and notifies you if there’s an update available.
One limitation is that you can’t select the download location till the files start downloading. So, only files added after this setting change are downloaded to the new location.
Price: The prices start at Rs 6 per track, which is for mostly oldies (there are some costing Rs 9 too). Most of the new Indian tracks and the International ones cost Rs 15. The highest I’ve seen so far is Rs 45 for some of the longer International tracks (Star Wars tracks for ex.). Entire albums, as expected, turn out to be cheaper than purchasing every track separately. Most tracks are also available in 3 different bitrates – 320, 128 & 64 kbps (not all oldies have 320 kbps versions though) which gives you flexibility in the bandwidth, storage and quality department.
What’s missing: The catalogue is pretty comprehensive, especially from the Indian music standpoint considering that even small labels are available. The International scene also seems pretty good, but there are some notable omissions for the time being – Disney and The Beatles. Then again, even Apple took time to get The Beatles onto iTunes.
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The Death Star Is a Surprisingly Cost-Effective Weapons System | Mother Jones
Turns out that it is indeed very cost effective, given the size of the empire. Also, don’t miss out on the comments picked out by the author.
Tags: weapons, economics, starwars
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Particularly for knowledge centric organizations:
“For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.”
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#A VC: The Management Team
Particularly for knowledge centric organizations:
“For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.”Tags: management, startup, leadership
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Interesting links (weekly)
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8-bit Prince of Persia takes on the real world | The Verge
Prince of Persia in real life… easily the best thing I’ve seen all week. Video: http://t.co/EKsPzMfw
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Weekend Diversion: Fighting on the Internet : Starts With A Bang
Quite a lot of interesting graphics, and as Calvin said “As far as I’m concerned, if something is so complicated that you can’t explain it in 10 seconds, then it’s probably not worth knowing anyway.” – explains trolls pretty well.
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Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Interesting piece on usability & situations in which each is applicable:
“Apps may remain better for tasks that are intensely feature-rich applications, such as photo editing — whereas mobile sites will be better for design problems like e-commerce/m-commerce, corporate websites, news, medical info, social networking, etc. that are rich in content but don’t require intense data manipulation.” -
Will Deaths By Social Network Spur Calls To Ban Facebook? – Forbes
Will Deaths By Social Network Spur Calls To Ban Facebook? http://t.co/itSuSL64
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Microsoft was running Windows on ARM two years ago | The Verge
Microsoft was running Windows on ARM two years ago http://t.co/EvzAVxAh
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