The New York Times compares Facebook’s $104 billion valuation against a number of other IPOs. The second graph is the most visually shocking representation of how it stacks up on day one. The fifth graph is interesting due to the vast number of failed companies, and how they compare to the few that have been enormously successful three years later.

Ryan Holiday, for Forbes:

People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google. People go to Google to find something they need, possibly ready to buy, which a good percentage of the time can in fact be solved by someone’s ad. Facebook ads, on the other hand, annoy users. They yield no real value, and thus no profits.

Jim Dalrymple:

A blog isn’t about the feelings of the company, but rather a personal look at the writer. You can’t assign a blogger a story and hope the audience doesn’t get the fact that they have no idea what they’re talking about or worse yet, they don’t really care.

A-goddamn-men.

Andrew Cunningham, for Ars Technica:

Preinstalled trial versions of useless software have been slowing down new PCs for years, and Microsoft is finally offering a solution: bring your PC into a Microsoft Store and pay them $99 to install a clean copy of Windows.

Isn’t this a little like paying a car dealership to wash a mud-caked car after they sell it to you? A hundred bucks to remove things that shouldn’t be installed in the first place.

Yahoo may not be doing Flickr any favours, but at least they’ve kept some of the team on. The giant photo pages look great. Put your browser window into fullscreen mode and give it a try.

This change also ensures that photos on the new iPad look really crisp.

Starting today, you can discover the best of Twitter in a weekly email digest delivered to your inbox. This summary features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter.

If only there were another way to keep up with Twitter, other than via email.

The fact that both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting this with their own sources is enough to lend credence to it. This will be the biggest form-factor change since the iPhone debuted.

Of course I have to link to today’s xkcd. I think Apple’s solution is simple: they can call OS X 10.9 “Cougar”, and it will only install on the youngest Macs.

“Mads Christensen made a number of inappropriate and insensitive remarks about women. Dell sincerely apologizes for these comments,” Dell wrote Monday in a post to its Google+ account. “Going forward, we will be more careful selecting speakers at Dell events.”

This obviously shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but it’s much better than the non-apology they offered earlier.

Shawn Blanc:

When it comes to pixels I can’t get enough. Ditto my need for a huge desk. I want a lot of pixels on my screen and I want a lot of space on my desk.

It’s not because I want to use these spaces to store application windows and external hard drives. Quite the opposite: I want to use this space for nothing. I work well when I’m sitting at a large and oversized desk that has little on it beyond a big glowing screen and a clicky keyboard. The same goes for my computer monitors. I like a lot of pixels available so that I can not use them.

Mat Honan takes a look at how Yahoo destroyed “almost certainly the best” photo sharing site:

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

I like Flickr a lot, but it used to be better.

Peter Nguyen:

The home release of the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured DVD art that resembled a bootleg disc. This was to pay homage to Lisbeth Salanders’ hacker background.

So clever. Tools 4 Movies has a high-res photo of the DVD package.

Molly Wood got an official statement from Dell about Christiane Vejlø’s story:

We contacted Dell for comment, and here’s what Kelly McGinnis, Dell’s vice president of global communications, had to say about the matter:

We can tell you that the moderator’s attempted humor does not reflect Dell’s values, or its strong record on and commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.

Then why did you hire him?

Christensen, meanwhile, clarified in the Danish press that he thought IT pros should be saying “shut up, bitch” to their wives, not female co-workers.

Why did Dell ever think this misogynist should speak at a conference that they sponsored and organized? Via Jim Dalrymple.

I agree with everything Marco Arment wrote, especially this bit:

I’m not sure I’d want a Retina MacBook Pro yet. I suspect that adoption of Retina assets among Mac apps will be slower than we saw with Retina iOS devices, and more importantly, Retina graphics for websites will likely take significantly longer.

Since non-Retina graphics look worse on Retina screens than on older screens, Retina MacBook users would have significantly worse-looking web browsing for a while — probably years, not months. So I don’t think I’d rush out to get a Retina Mac, but I wouldn’t necessarily avoid a Retina screen when it comes time to upgrade for other reasons.

Nilay Patel at The Verge has apparently “confirmed” the Retina display and Joanna Stern is corroborating that statement.

This is the most glaring problem I’ve noticed with the new iPad that isn’t as obvious on the iPhone: graphics look dismal on such a large, high-resolution display. I’m going through the slow process of upgrading the assets on the websites I control to high-quality versions, but these things take time. Even after I’m finished, I suspect I won’t have upgraded all of the graphics, but rather just the global images.

I think Arment is right: this is going to be a transition period measured in years.

Harry McCracken, for Time:

But the thing is, Digitimes isn’t just wrong some of the time. When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. It’s reported that its sources had said that Apple was going to release MacBooks with AMD processors, iMacs with touch screens, iPhones with built-in projectors and iPads with OLED displays. Those products, and others mentioned in Digitimes articles, never showed up.

Some people will rush to the defence of these rumour-mongers if these things eventually become true. That’s nonsense. Digitimes has a terrible track record, and that’s probably because they print any rumour that comes their way. Via Brian X. Chen.

Peter Kirwan, in a great dissection by Wired UK:

Offloading OS development to Microsoft has saved Nokia a substantial amount of money. But doing this only makes sense if you believe that owning an operating system matters a lot less in the mobile realm than it did in the PC industry. Ben Evans believes that what really matters is getting operators to stock your phones and building up apps. “Nokia and Microsoft don’t yet have an app ecosystem,” he explains. “But as a developer, if you come to them from Android, it feels great.”

It’s a hugely complicated issue for Nokia, because they rely on Microsoft to bake the core features into the OS, something with which they have been struggling. Evans is right, though: a fresh ecosystem on a new operating system is exciting for developers, especially if they know they can make money. However, apps on iOS and, to some extent, Android are making money for developers. What’s the incentive to bet on a very small section of the market?

Liam Spradlin:

SellARing’s ad network essentially allows associated apps to replace the familiar “ring ring” sound you hear after dialing a number with a selection of 10-second audio ads.

Remember: Android’s totally open platform is best for the consumer.

Remember how Adobe wasn’t going to ship a “critical” security update for CS5 and 5.5 customers, because it was fixed in CS6? Even that was too dickish for Adobe:

We are in the process of resolving the vulnerabilities addressed in these Security Bulletins in Adobe Illustrator CS5.x, Adobe Photoshop CS5.x (12.x) and Adobe Flash Professional CS5.x, and will update the respective Security Bulletins once the patches are available.

There’s a pivot I can get behind.

Michael Hiltzik for the Los Angeles Times:

Then there’s its widely publicized corporate mantra, “Don’t Be Evil.” Leaving aside the phrase’s inherent condescension […] Cleland argues that as a moral standard, it’s not nearly as high-minded as it seems at first blush. After all, a company can engage in a lot of activity that’s harmful, craven, irresponsible, meretricious, reprehensible or even illegal without rising to the level of “evil.”

It isn’t just a Google thing: I wouldn’t trust any company with as much information as Google wants, and often collects.

It brings me a slight tinge of pain to know that I will never be able to acquire one of these. It’s beautiful.

Christiane Vejlø:

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. 

It only gets more offensive from there. This was written on April 18, and while I’m surprised it has taken this long to gain traction (this is the first I’ve read about it), Dell deserves to be raked over hot coals for both this atrocity, and for their non-apology within. Via Mike Monteiro (NSFW).

Paddy Donnelly:

Some people would have you believe that you aren’t reading this. Why? Because it’s not ‘above the fold’.

Some print concepts have a place in the world of web design. The fold, though, does not.

Karen Gullo, for the San Francisco Chronicle:

A jury in San Francisco found Tuesday that Google had violated Oracle’s copyrights for programming tools and nine lines of code. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said at this point Oracle can only seek damages on the nine lines, which by law would be at most $150,000.

Yeah, that should set a precedent.

Something of a leak on Apple’s part occurred this morning as an iCloud beta website was discovered, along with a developer-friendly version. Looks like Notes and Reminders are gaining web apps. The developer site is more intriguing to me, though. It suggests that developers will be able to integrate better with iCloud, through iCloud.com, than they can today.

HBO co-president Eric Kessler has said he thinks the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a “temporary phenomenon” tied to the down economy.

People who believe new technologies are just a fad are usually the ones that get left behind.

Pierre Igot installed Adobe CS6, with the expected results. Maybe one day Adobe will grasp the revolutionary concepts of “native controls” and “easy installers”. Not any time soon, though. Via Shawn Blanc, who got it from Federico Viticci.

Marco Arment nails a response to some angry so-and-so in The Verge‘s comment section.

Matt Zanchelli posited this question on Twitter a few days ago:

Which do you feel is more important: Google search or Wikipedia?

It’s an interesting question to ponder, but I think Wikipedia is much more important. The new Bing, or Duck Duck Go, demonstrates that Google can be replaced, but Wikipedia cannot, not even by paper encyclopaedias.

The new Bing doesn’t interest me much, but it gives me an excuse to post that tweet.

An update that costs hundreds to thousands of dollars is necessary to fix a “critical” security vulnerability in Photoshop CS5.5. Shameful.

There is a proof-of-concept linked at the bottom of the bulletin. This feels a bit like Adobe saying “boy, it would be a pity if someone followed our explicit instructions and sent you this malicious TIF file.”