DPL Reading List – July 31, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Why the Great Glitch of July 8th Should Scare You (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “The big problem we face isn’t coordinated cyber-terrorism, it’s that software sucks. Software sucks for many reasons, all of which go deep, are entangled, and expensive to fix. (Or, everything is broken, eventually). This is a major headache, and a real worry as software eats more and more of the world.”
What 3D XPoint Says About the PC of the Future – “With 3D XPoint’s DRAM-like speeds, there’s potential for a PC of tomorrow with 1TB of 3D XPoint to have a computing experience as though everything on your SSD or hard drive was loaded into main system memory all the time, without a power cost. Think about the ramifications of that for a second. You’ll never have to wait for anything on your PC, laptop or tablet to open. The CPU won’t have to load the picture from the SSD or hard drive. With 3D XPoint it’s already there, in a state as though you had it open already.”
Top Ten Lies from Entrepreneurs – from Guy Kawasaki (Thanks to Todd Guenther for recommending this article) – “In a typical day an investor meets with two or three startups and sees another four or five executive summaries. Each company claims to represent a unique and earth-shattering opportunity with a proven team, proven technology, and proven market. No company claims to be a bunch of losers who don’t know what they’re doing. For the sake of investors who are tired of hearing the same old lies and for the sake of entrepreneurs who hurt their cases by telling them, here are the top ten lies of entrepreneurs. Study them so you can at least tell new lies.”
3 Ways Leaders Accidentally Undermine Their Teams’ Creativity (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about where creativity comes from and how to nurture and grow it in a team. As a result, even well-meaning leaders can end up killing the creativity of a team when they need it most. If your team is in the midst of solving a problem or generating a new product or project idea, you might be killing their creativity without even trying.”
Facebook Info Security Chief: ‘Death to Adobe Flash’ – “Stamos’ execution plea begs the question: Does the Internet really need Adobe Flash? Security analyst and blogger Graham Cluley, for one, says no: ‘The truth is that the company would probably gain a lot more respect from the internet community if it worked towards this ultimate fix for the Flash problem, rather than clinging on to the belief that it might be able to one day make Flash secure,’ he wrote on his blog. ‘As it is, the only people who truly seem to love Adobe Flash these days are the criminals themselves.’”
Bridging the Gap Between Actual and Reported Behavior (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “One of the hardest lessons to learn in UX is that researchers can’t always trust what test participants tell them. People don’t always behave rationally, and this means that research participants are sometimes unable to give accurate answers to even the simplest questions. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, it’s backed by decades of research on the difference between reported behavior (what we say we do) and actual behavior (what we actually do).”
How Startup “Joiners” Are (and Aren’t) Like Founders (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “A paper published earlier this year provides insight into what makes “joiners” tick. In terms of things like risk-taking, they’re sort of hybrids between founders and traditional employees. But in the type of work they want to do they differ sharply from entrepreneurs. For anyone running a startup, understanding the joiner mentality is essential.”
