Wikipedia First draft of history

Wikipedia

By Craig Newmark

Wikipedia is an accomplishment of major proportions. It’s become the “first draft of history” and gone beyond, since it’s a vital, living repository of human knowledge, much in the manner of a traditional encyclopedia. More importantly, it’s an exemplar and test platform for large-scale, global collaboration. By that I mean large numbers of people working together for common goals. Wikipedia, in that sense, is a major advance for all humanity. It’s also dramatic proof of the supreme effectiveness of collaboration: people work together on Wikipedia to build articles, often in collaboration across the world, and often over long periods of time. The style of collaboration is novel in that it balances expert work with that of talented citizens. That’s the same balance we see emerging all over the Net. It’s also the same balance between representative democracy and grassroots democracy. In that sense, Wikipedia is a democratic system, reflecting the best of what we see in all human endeavors. People also get together to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of material. That’s a slow process, requiring collaborative fact-checking. And that’s because, lately, Wikipedia has become a battleground, where the Wikipedia community develops means to prevent disinformation attacks, often shilled by people in entrenched power. Wikipedians are learning to defuse such attacks, and the methods used to do so will prove applicable elsewhere. The trust issue illustrates a significant, but transient, challenge faced by the Wikipedia community. The work has only begun, however, and the problems will be addressed fairly quickly, on a historical scale.

What Massive Data Consumption Says About America

Thirty-four gigabytes doesn't sound impressive for a new computer these days, but when you realize that's the amount of information a report estimates the average American "consumes" each and every day, it's staggering. If you add up all the words consumed by Americans, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, it would be "the equivalent of covering the continental United States and Alaska in a 7-foot-high stack of Dan Brown novels." The report's authors at University of California San Diego's Global Information Industry Center calculated not only Internet consumption, but all "flows of data delivered to people" from print and TV. Bloggers interpreted the findings in myriad ways, but concurred that it was an impressive illustration of the "information era." Here's what they said the report and the study behind it proved:

• Old Media Still Rules Numerous writers acknowledged their surprise that the study shows the "old-media" sector made up of TV, radio, and print media still dominating the majority of Americans' total media viewing time. CrunchGrear's Nick Deleon voiced a predominant strain among bloggers: 

This may be a dagger through some of your hearts, but 'old media' (TV and radio) make up 60 percent of all consumed hours. The word “Twitter” does not appear in the report at all. Call your congressman…Americans are also on the computer for an average of two hours per day. It’s safe to say that everyone here at [Tech Crunch] isn’t 'average' in that respect.

• Game Time, All the Time CNet's Don Reisinger notes that the study results show Americans are now more than ever a nation of button-pushers: "If bytes are the standard by which American days are judged, it's the video game that takes the top prize. Researchers found that the average American consumes 18.5GB of gaming data per day, representing 67 percent of all bytes they consume daily."

• We're Still Literate, In a Futuristic Sort-Of Way… BBC tech blogger Maggie Shiels makes a clever analogy between rising rates of obesity in the country and our intake of information. However, she thinks that there is a surprising glimmer in the report: "What is more surprising is that while I think I never have time to read books, it seems on average I actually gorge on around 100,000 words of information a day." Andrew Moseman at Discover is heartened by the same bit of news, saying if anything, Americans are getting more literate:
  

The UC-San Diego study reaffirms what we already knew about print media—that it’s steadily losing readership. But words themselves are doing just fine, thanks to the Web…Overall, words are being consumed at a breakneck speed: In the span of five days, the average American consumes more words (via reading and hearing them on TV or radio) than War and Peace contains.

• Drowning in A Digital Tidal Wave Sadagopan Singam, blogging for Enterprise Irregulars, takes the report very pessimistically. He thinks it shows America's increasing dehumanization by way of digital immersion: 

Clearly, in this world, there is just too much of information.…A large fraction of the people one interacts with are walking around with their eyes glazed, seemingly on auto-pilot, speaking a mile a minute about this blog they read, this documentary they Tivo’d, this video they saw on the Net, this new startup company that’s hot.

• Just the Tip of the Information Iceberg Om Malik, founder and namesake of the blog GigaOm, argues that while the findings of the study and the methodology used are interesting, what is more compelling is the fact that they are only poised to increase exponentially in the coming years:
  

One of the reasons I’m so intrigued by its findings is because I believe that the big growth in data (and information) consumption is not behind us, but ahead of us. Just imagine when there are billions of smart edge points: smartphones, e-readers or entirely new Internet content consumption devices. This is going to be the single biggest challenge — and opportunity — of the coming decades. It won’t be long before zettabyte becomes yet another word we learned on our way to a world that is drowning in data.

12 World's largest webs. Successful webs of world.

12 Characteristics of Successful Internet Entrepreneurs

By Focus Editors

As long as there have been successful Internet entrepreneurs, there have been attempts to nail down what makes them successful. Whether it's a fellow entrepreneur looking for an edge or an interested layperson who is simply curious to know more,  no shortage of people are dying to know how the Internet's business visionaries reached the top. These business success stories aren't the result of a secret formula; rather, each entrepreneur possesses a number of characteristics unique to their pursuits. Here's a rundown of 12 of these traits, the entrepreneurs who have them and the companies they helped create.

The Trait: Determination

The Entrepreneur: Steve Jobs

The Company: Apple/NeXt/Pixar
Perhaps no Internet entrepreneur has exhibited more determination than Steve Jobs. In his now famous speech at Stanford University's 2005 commencement, Jobs explained how he was thrown out of Apple in the mid 1980s by the board of directors. "At age 30, I was out", Jobs recalls - "and very publicly out." The life of an entrepreneur is rarely free from anxiety, but nothing compares to being ousted from the company you founded and watching others run it once it becomes a household name. The book "iCon" reveals that Jobs apparently contemplated suicide following the crisis. While lesser businessmen would have crumbled, Jobs took his fall from grace as a challenge, starting two independently successful companies from scratch (NeXt and Pixar) and eventually returning to rescue Apple from the brink of failure, spearheading its current digital music and media-driven renaissance. Without the determination to remain in Silicon Valley, Jobs may never have returned to prominence or led Apple to the market dominance it enjoys today.

The Trait: Innovation

The Entrepreneurs: Sergey Brin and Larry Page

The Company: Google
In John Battelle's book "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business", readers learn that Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were not money-chasing businessmen, but hackers who truly wanted to build the best search technology in the world. Neither of them had any clue what practical applications any of their work would have when they maxed out their personal credit cards to buy servers and computer parts; they simply knew they were onto something and felt a burning desire to bring superior technology into being. Indeed, virtually every dominant search engine of the mid to late 1990s (Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo! to name a few) passed up the chance to buy Google before its breakout as the Internet juggernaut. It wasn't until the launch of Google AdWords that the company found any substantial or enduring way to capitalize on its mega-popular search engine, and that was just fine with Page and Brin. While they certainly wanted to get paid, innovation was always at the forefront and led to them getting their enormous payday.

The Trait: Frugality

The Entrepreneur: Aaron Patzer

The Company: Mint
One of the biggest misconceptions about Internet business success is that you can't build a "real" company without fancy office space, mahogany furniture and slick corporate attire. Laying waste to this myth is Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com and tireless advocate of frugality. Conceived as a way to painlessly connect consumers with money-saving deals and offer useful insight into their financial lives, Mint.com was itself a model of frugality, growing little by little and taking outside investment only when necessary to expand. This is a sharp contrast from many late 90s Internet businesses, which seemed to regard the business as an excuse for burning other people's money rather than a vehicle for producing its own. Patzer's frugality paid off when Mint was acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170 million.


The Trait: Experimentation

The Entrepreneur: Mark Zuckerberg

The Company: Facebook

Even successful entrepreneurs often find themselves settling into comfort zones and developing tunnel vision about their products or services. Rather than continuously striving to tweak and improve, they grow content with what works now, almost setting it on a pedestal that one fears to fiddle with in any major way. Perhaps no Internet businessman has spit in the face of this attitude more than Mark Zuckerberg. Despite Facebook's status as a social networking giant, Zuckerberg and Co. have never shied away from changing the user interface (sometimes in the face of protests) or shaking things up in the efforte to break new ground. Though not all of his changes have been successful, a surprising majority of them have stood the test of time and boosted Facebook's following.

The Trait: Eccentricity

The Entrepreneur: Tim Ferris

The Company: FourHourWorkWeek.com
Read the biography of virtually any successful entrepreneur and you'll find that they might not act quite like the general population. This trait is known as eccentricity, and few contemporary Web entrepreneurs exemplify it more than Timothy Ferris. In his perennial best seller "The Four Hour Work Week," Ferris advocates cultivating a radically new mindset about work. Rather than seeing work as something to be begrudgingly endured for the sake of weekends and holidays, Ferris recommends molding work to the life you wish to live. Primarily, this consists of building systems to produce wealth without ongoing struggle and using the 80/20 principle to identify where your efforts produce the most and least results. Properly executed, such actions enable one to travel and live as one pleases while keeping work in its place. Ferris has utilized these eccentric behaviors to escape the 9-5 grind forever, both via book sales and his own online businesses. His story is a needed reminder that different outcomes require different behavior. Put another way, what got you here won't get you there.

The Trait: Simplicity

The Entrepreneurs: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim

The Company: YouTube

Engineers have an old saying that drives the field to this day: KISS, or "keep it simple, stupid." YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim understood this better than most when they created a site that existed to do nothing more than let the average Joe upload his own videos. Without any delusions of grandeur or pretense about changing the world (which it has arguably done anyway), YouTube rose to Internet stardom by simply creating a cool, useful service that people would enjoy using daily. The fact that YouTube links are shared over IM, text, and Facebook all day long is a testament to the value of simplicity in business, and explains why Google snapped up the video sharing site for over $1 billion in 2007.

The Trait: Consumer-focused

The Entrepreneur: Paul Graham

The Company: Viaweb

No one has written more about Internet business success than Paul Graham, co-founder of seed capital firm Y Combinator. Before he invested in startups, Graham built and sold his own: Viaweb. It was during that time that Graham learned (and applied) the lesson he now preaches to new entrepreneurs: make stuff people want. Unlike so many far-fetched companies of the time, in 1995 Viaweb was focused on a single goal: enabling non-tech savvy individuals to build and run their own online stores. By zeroing in on a need for which there was very much obvious demand, Viaweb was virtually assured of being successful so long as it came up with elegant solutions to sell. It did, and was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 1998 for around $45 million in stock. As an investor at Y Combinator and essayist at PaulGraham.com, Graham now advocates making sure your idea has demand before lifting a finger on development. Without this, he persuasively claims, all the bold press releases and product launches in the world wont save you.

The Trait: Iconoclastic

The Entrepreneur: Niklas Zennstrom

The Company: Kazaa/Skype/Joost

It might seem that iconoclastic is just another word for eccentric, but they are not actually the same. Eccentricity is simply violating behavioral norms. An iconoclast, however, generates conflict with his eccentricity by disrupting and changing the way things are done within entire industries or societies. In founding Kazaa and Skype, Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom exhibited iconoclastic behavior par excellence. Widespread use of Kazaa's peer-to-peer technology helped put the nail in the coffin of tightly controlled and centralized media downloading, while Skype (despite a recent slowdown) stuck it to the telecoms by introducing P2P telephony. His latest venture, Joost, is attempting to revolutionize online video in much the same way. It hasn't always been easy for Zennstrom (who stayed out of the US for years to avoid lawsuits from record companies during Kazaa's heyday) but in true iconoclastic fashion, he has never seen this as a reason to stop or slow down.


The Trait: Ambition

The Entrepreneur: Jeff Bezos

The Company: Amazon.com


The most talked-about Internet entrepreneurs have almost superhuman ambition. Not content to merely have a nice little business, these titans of Web industry set their sights on building epic enterprises that become part of history itself. Surely Jeff Bezos displayed ambition in founding Amazon.com, a Web portal that retails virtually any book, video game, or consumer electronic a buyer could wish to find. It took awhile for Amazon to become profitable with such a wide focus, but today it is one of the most celebrated Internet companies, and with recent product launches like the Kindle e-book reader, it figures to remain a dominant force for years to come.

The Trait: Focus

The Entrepreneur: Max Levchin

The Company: PayPal

Even prosperous businesses can be dragged under by failure to address their biggest problems head-on. When Max Levchin (above right) founded PayPal, it would have been very easy for him to neglect the rampant fraud that threatened to suffocate the company's profit margins, turning his attention instead to how great it was that PayPal was growing at a phenomenal rate. Instead, Levchin utilized the timeless entrepreneurial characteristic of focus, making security priority number one at the fledgling online payment service. Within a couple of years, according to Jessica Livingston's excellent book Founders at Work, fraud was largely reigned in at PayPal and the company was acquired by ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002. The lesson here is to confront (rather than rationalize away) your company's biggest problems, no matter how well the rest of the business may be doing.

The Trait: Opportunism

The Entrepreneur: Tom Anderson

The Company: MySpace

Some of the biggest Internet fortunes have their origins in shrewd opportunism like that displayed by Tom Anderson. In founding MySpace, Anderson saw a gap between what social networking users wished to do and what inferior Web sites like Friendster allowed them to do, such as simplified photo uploading, graphical customization and music sharing. Upon amassing over 500 million registered users, MySpace was acquired by media empire News Corp. for $580 million (a figure that now appears to be a bargain in light of what YouTube recieved and what has been offered for competitor Facebook). While many have criticized MySpace for being too "messy" or "unprofessional", Anderson's genius was in recognizing that this was irrelevant to his target audience of teenagers, singles and musicians who simply wanted an outlet to set up their pages however they wanted.



The Trait: Flexibility

The Entrepreneur: Jimmy Wales

The Company: Wikipedia

Paul Graham put it well when he said that some goals (like winning an Olympic medal) require unswavering dedication to a fixed plan while startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads. A shining example of this trait - flexibility - is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. As a completly member-driven, collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has grown in a myriad directions, usually at the prompting of users rather than sweeping declarations from Wales or his team. The result has been a robust and ever-improving resource shaped by those who use it rather than those who wish to tell users what they "should" use. New Internet entrepreneurs would do well to learn a thing or two about flexibility from Wales, even if their business is not explicitly collaborative a la Wikipedia.

The size of our earth in universe.

It is amazing to know that our world is nothing in this universe but most of people between us thinks that Sun is very huge in universe but see what is the sun size in the universe you will have to think once what is your size in this universe what are you ?

           

Don't Tell Any one that you dont know any thing about computer.

The Google Guys

Brin and Page

Paul Sakuma / AP

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Rollerblading math whizzes who launched Google, may not look like your average business tycoons, but they stand firmly in the tradition of the great American industrialists of the last century. They’ve brought the ethic of speed, automation, and efficiency—the ethic of Henry Ford’s factory—to the work of the mind. What is Google but a lightning-quick assembly line for knowledge? Before the two Stanford buddies invented their miraculous search engine, finding facts and other information was drudgery. You traipsed through the corridors of libraries. You pored over journals and magazines. You read books. Now research is a breeze. Three billion times a day we ask Google for advice, and 3 billion times a day Google replies with a neatly arranged list of suggestions. It takes about a second. How could we live without Google? The fact is, we couldn’t. In just a decade, the Internet search engine has become as deeply embedded in our personal lives and in society’s routines as the internal-combustion engine. But has Google made us any wiser? Probably not. As we zip between snippets of information online—click, click, click—what we sacrifice is the kind of deep thinking that comes only to the calm, attentive mind. Unlike old-fashioned libraries, the Googlized Web offers no quiet corners for rumination and reflection. An assembly line exists to be in motion. Page and Brin brought the Internet economy back to life after the dotcom disaster. Their intellectual legacy will likely be equally momentous, if less laudable.

Inventory of normality

in “The winner stands alone”, by Paulo Coelho
1] Anything that makes us forget our true identity and our dreams and makes us only work to produce and reproduce.
2] Making rules for a war (the Geneva Convention).
3] Spending years at university and then not being able to find a job.
4] Working from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon at something that does not give us the least pleasure, so that we can retire after 30 years.
5] Retiring only to discover that we have no more energy to enjoy life, and then dying of boredom after a few years.
6] Using Botox.
7] Trying to be financially successful instead of seeking happiness.
8] Ridiculing those who seek happiness instead of money by calling them “people with no ambition”.
9] Comparing objects like cars, houses and clothes, and defining life according to these comparisons instead of really trying to find out the true reason for being alive.
10] Not talking to strangers. Saying nasty things about our neighbors.
11] Thinking that parents are always right.
12] Getting married, having children and staying together even though the love has gone, claiming that it’s for the sake of the children (who do not seem to be listening to the constant arguments).
12ª] Criticizing everybody who tries to be different.
14] Waking up with a hysterical alarm-clock at the bedside.
15] Believing absolutely everything that is printed.
16] Wearing a piece of colored cloth wrapped around the neck for no apparent reason and known by the pompous name “necktie”.
17] Never asking direct questions, even though the other person understands what you want to know.
18] Keeping a smile on your face when you really want to cry. And feeling sorry for those who show their own feelings.
19] Thinking that art is worth a fortune, or else that it is worth absolutely nothing.
20] Always despising what was easily gained, because the “necessary sacrifice” – and therefore also the required qualities – are missing.
21] Following fashion, even though it all looks ridiculous and uncomfortable.
22] Being convinced that all the famous people have tons of money saved up.
23] Investing a lot in exterior beauty and paying little attention to interior beauty.
24] Using all possible means to show that even though you are a normal person, you are infinitely superior to other human beings.
25] In any kind of public transport, never looking straight into the eyes of the other passengers, as this may be taken for attempting to seduce them.
26] When you enter an elevator, looking straight at the door and pretending you are the only person inside, however crowded it may be.
27] Never laughing out loud in a restaurant, no matter how funny the story is.
28] In the Northern hemisphere, always wearing the clothes that match the season of the year: short sleeves in springtime (however cold it may be) and a woolen jacket in the fall (no matter how warm it is).
29] In the Southern hemisphere, decorating the Christmas tree with cotton wool, even though winter has nothing to do with the birth of Christ.
30] As you grow older, thinking you are the wisest man in the world, even though not always do you have enough life experience to know what is wrong.
31] Going to a charity event and thinking that in this way you have collaborated enough to put an end to all the social inequalities in the world.
32] Eating three times a day, even if you’re not hungry.
33] Believing that the others are always better at everything: they are better-looking, more resourceful, richer and more intelligent. Since it’s very risky to venture beyond your own limits, it’s better to do nothing.
34] Using the car as a way to feel powerful and in control of the world.
35] Using foul language in traffic.
36] Thinking that everything your child does wrong is the fault of the company he or she is keeping.
37] Marrying the first person who offers you a position in society. Love can wait.
38] Always saying “I tried”, even though you haven’t tried at all.
39] Putting off doing the most interesting things in life until you no longer have the strength to do them.
40] Avoiding depression with massive daily doses of television programs.
41] Believing that it is possible to be sure of everything you have won.
42] Thinking that women don’t like football and that men don’t like interior decoration.
43] Blaming the government for everything bad that happens.
44] Being convinced that being a good, decent and respectful person means that the others will find you weak, vulnerable and easy to manipulate.
45] Being convinced that aggressiveness and discourtesy in treating others are signs of a powerful personality.
46] Being afraid of fibroscopy (men) and childbirth (women).
47] And finally, thinking that your religion is the sole proprietor of the absolute truth, the most important, the best, and that the other human beings in this immense planet who believe in any other manifestation of God are condemned to the fires of hell.

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The Best Free Photo Editing Programs

Photo Editing Programs free, Edit your photos using these programs these are the best. For the average student, college tuition is an unending, unrelenting, nausea-inducing burden. And somehow that big ole pile of money you fork over doesn't even cover all of your college needs. Add in textbooks and you're looking at a couple extra hundred bucks each semester. If you need any kind of computer software, break open the emergency piggy bank because the most basic version of Photoshop rings in at—brace yourself—$700. Ouch. Well, lucky for us all, there is now a plethora of free software out there, and many free photo editing programs are providing a shining light in the darkness that is college financing.
I went through over 50 of these programs, delighting over the gems I've been missing out on and cringing at the crap programs that turned half-way decent pictures of me into something that would provoke tears in small children. Well, I'm here to bring you the best of the best. These 11 made the list because they all brought something extra to the table, be it superior functionality, ease of use, or strong customer support. Many give Photoshop a run for its money, and even the ones that lack some of the more advanced features (but are often easier to use), will often prove to be all you need throughout your college career. If these seem a little too intense for your needs, skip to the top 5 free online editing programs listed at the end.

1. Gimp

Gimp takes the cake with this little competition. It fits all the criteria for the perfect image editor for college students. It's free, compatible with all computers, and satisfies all your editing needs—from basics like cropping and red-eye correction to multiple layers, advanced filters, and GIF animation. The worst you can really say about this editor is that initially it can be a bit overwhelming. It has multiple windows and a wide range of options. But once you get the hang of it, photo editing becomes a breeze. For all but the most professional editors, Gimp even works as an adequate substitute for Photoshop, a $700-$1,000 program. Also, if you have a Mac, this is by far your best option and the only one that made our list.

• Best Selling Point: Overall best functionality and compatible with all computers
• Biggest Drawback: Overwhelming interface with a steep learning curve

Tutorials

1. Official GIMP Tutorials
2. Meet the GIMP
3. Gimpology
4. gimp-tutorials.net
5. GIMP Tutorials
6. GIMPguru.org

Download Gimp

2. Photoscape

This program was a very close second. While it has pretty much the same functionality as Gimp, it has one major downfall: this program only works on PCs. So Mac-lovers, be warned. But for those of you running Windows, Photoscape does offer a more traditional interface than Gimp, with the entire program contained in one window, so it may be a better option for you. It also has a great opening screen that will guide you to the right set of tools.

Best Selling Point: Great functionality  and more intuitive user interface than Gimp Biggest Drawback: Not compatible with Macs

Tutorials

Official Photoscape Tutorials WonderHowTo Associated Content YouTube

Download Photoscape

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and is working to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities.

Why the Archive is Building an 'Internet Library'

Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it's essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.
Many early movies were recycled to recover the silver in the film. The Library of Alexandria - an ancient center of learning containing a copy of every book in the world - was eventually burned to the ground. Even now, at the turn of the 21st century, no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist.
But without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. And paradoxically, with the explosion of the Internet, we live in what Danny Hillis has referred to as our "digital dark age."
The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.
Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages.
The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization.
At present, the size of our Web collection is such that using it requires programming skills. However, we are hopeful about the development of tools and methods that will give the general public easy and meaningful access to our collective history. In addition to developing our own collections, we are working to promote the formation of other Internet libraries in the United States and elsewhere.

What Do you have ability to make?

What Do you have ability to make?

created in an instant out of water vapour, and vanishes just as suddenly, its pattern never to be repeated.

These amazing images were taken, using a special microscope, by physics Professor Kenneth Libbrecht, who has spent the past 11 years on a personal quest to record the beautiful world of snowflakes.

Prof Libbrecht, of the California Institute of Technology, says that the most 'basic' snowflake pattern is the hexagonal prism - a six-sided block with little detail.

 

 

Stunning: As these images show, no two snowflakes are the same

The flakes, which look like six ferns joined in the centre, are called, more poetically, Fernlike Stellar Dendrites.

They are the largest snow crystals (about 5mm) and make the best powdery snow. The simpler Stellar Dendrites (up to 4mm) look like branches and Christmas-tree decorations are often based on this shape.
But the best thing about snowflakes? They all crunch pleasingly underfoot on a crisp winter morning.

Crystal clear: Each snowflake is a miniature masterpiece of nature

  #7

Gates Doubts Google’s Potential

‘Let’s see if they still want to run the business in two or three years.’
— Bill Gates, on Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 2003
The future is hard to see even for the smartest people. The reason is simple: we focus on the wrong things. We look at technology and ask ourselves how it will get faster, better, and smaller. But actually, radical change comes from somewhere else: shifts in consumer behavior. Think about what has happened to the media industry. For the past 50 years or so, media technology has been on a steady path of improvement: bigger screens, more resolution, better sound. Then the unthinkable happened. Rather than buying super-audio CDs, consumers started listening to low-quality MP3s. Instead of upgrading their movie library to Blu-ray discs, they started watching grainy videos on YouTube. People stepped off the traditional product cycle and traded quality for convenience and connectivity. If you looked at Google, as Microsoft did in 2003, you might have simply seen a fast-growing Web-search startup. “These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that,” said Bill Gates that year. “Let us see if they still want to run the buiness in two to three years.” What was harder to perceive is that Google represented not just a process improvement in network technology, but the vanguard of a major shift in consumer action. The Web might have started as a series of documents joined together by hyperlinks, but it was fast becoming something else. Consumers were creating content, storing data, sharing media, and accessing applications—and all of it was taking place in a Web browser. In five short years, the tyranny of the Wintel era had been broken. The Web, rather than Windows, had become the operating system to watch.