parameter.space

If everyone designed products with this sort of discipline...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:11:00 -0500

If everyone designed products with this sort of discipline...:

Q: What are your goals when setting out to build a new product?

A: Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.

Q: Why has Apple’s competition struggled to do that?

A: Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us — a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

… then maybe, FINALLY, I could drop the label of fanboy. It’s easy to tell when someone’s pushing and asking what the device is about, and when someone’s running off with a successful form factor and adding some marketing taglines.

I feel you.

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:27:00 -0500

I feel you.:

/turns TextEdit up to 11.

THIS IS SO COOL. Multi-dimensional data, presented with such...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:26:00 -0500

THIS IS SO COOL. Multi-dimensional data, presented with such clarity. It’ll be fun to see how these shape up for individual players, and how they compare to your “average” NBA player, etc, etc.

The unbeatable iPad.

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:07:11 -0500

The unbeatable iPad.:

The other potential scenario, though, is far less optimistic for Apple’s competitors. It’s the iPod model. In this story, Apple begins by releasing a novel, category-defining product. Then, as rivals scramble for some way to respond, Apple relentlessly puts out slightly better versions every year, each time remaining just out of reach of the competition. Meanwhile it lowers its prices and expands its product lineup, making its devices more accessible to a wider audience. Then, to finish the game, it finds a way to boost its position through network effects and customer lock-in. (In the iPod’s case, it accomplished this through the iTunes software and built-in music store.) Put it all together and you have a device that’s unbeatable.

It’s becoming harder and harder to see how this isn’t the most likely outcome. The only other tablets to move at any volume are being sold AT A LOSS. That’s not going to fly, not with the margins Amazon and the like hold in the content world.

Wake me up when someone can move units AND make some money while they’re at it.

Why We Gloat

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:38:17 -0600

parislemon:

5 years ago, I made a bet. Two bets, actually.

The first was with myself. I bet myself that if I devoted serious time to it, I could become a great technology blogger. It wasn’t an easy bet to make. I knew it would require upending my life at the time. And it did.

The second bet was related to the first. I knew that to become a key tech blogger, I would need a focus. As a relatively new Mac user myself, I decided that focus would be Apple. Yes, I was coming later to the party than some, but Apple was still a company at the time that was scoffed at by many. But drawing from my own experience, I truly felt that the company was on the cusp of changing the world. Again.

Read More

More Than Half

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:50:05 -0600

More Than Half:

Man, that 4S was one hell of a bust, guys!

parislemon:

Tom Krazit for paidContent:

In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless was on board with Apple for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones, accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that its customers purchased in the fourth quarter.

We already knew the massive 4.2 million number. What we didn’t know was Verizon’s overall numbers. Now we do.

Every single Android phone that Verizon sells — dozens of models — combined could not outsell the iPhone last quarter. When you consider that Verizon sells plenty of BlackBerrys (and a few Windows Phones here and there) as well, this is even more incredible.

Yes, it’s just one carrier in one country. But it’s the biggest carrier in the key battleground country.

The only thing not looking good about this post from June of last year is the incorrect assumption that it would take the iPhone 5 to reverse the Android surge. It “only” took the iPhone 4S.

These numbers aren’t based on analyst checks. They aren’t based on store traffic guesses. They aren’t based on units shipped. These are Verizon’s stated quarterly sales numbers. And the iPhone dominated.

That reminds me.

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:54:48 -0500

This post reminded me of my time wrestling with dissertation project ideas, and the one idea that had me spellbound, but was totally unfeasible. Perturb every known miRNA (up or down, drawbacks aplenty either way) and generate full mRNA and miRNA profiles for each condition.

Putting aside the very real issue of off-target effects, the advantage to this over the Califano method would be a far cleaner signal of what modulating this one molecule does to the genetic makeup of a cell.

Would it be worth it?

It’s about time someone devised a good method for...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:43:30 -0500

It’s about time someone devised a good method for integrating existing transcriptome and miRNAome collections into a network of functional predicted functional interactions, as well as miR-mRNA target prediction based on sequence and anticorrelation.

Which makes it even more unfortunate that they pulled an “Pujols-on-a-hit-and-run”-esque whiff on presenting their results. Yes, the complexity is staggering, but the the manuscript, and especially some of the early figures, were borderline impenetrable.

"Solving Problems", part II

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:54:00 -0500

Regarding this post, thanks to some feedback from some of the GenePattern team, both scripts are both available as GenePattern Modules at the GParc! Consider yourself integrated.

TCGA.Merge RXCtoGCT

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:50:01 -0500

PANTS.

I LIKE SOLVING PROBLEMS

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:45:13 -0500

Had a labmate come by and ask for help with TCGA Level 3 expression data. Its distributed as one file per sample, which when you have several HUNDRED specimens, isn’t really the kind of thing you can or want to re-format by hand if you want to make comparisons across samples.

“How Hard Can it Be?!” I said. Oh when will I learn…

Two days and several infinite loops later, I present two dainty perl scripts for:

a) Take n many sample files and corral them into one flat file, probes x samples. (TCGA Merge)

b) Take a tab delimited text file with x probes and y samples and turn it into a GenePattern-friendly .gct file. (RXC to GCT)

Comes with no warranty, yadda, yadda. Would love to know if this is useful for anyone else, and remember, WATCH YOUR LINE ENDINGS!

Still the neatest thing I’ve seen in 2011. Take whole...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:05:59 -0500

Still the neatest thing I’ve seen in 2011. Take whole blood from a person, isolate the intact cells, label and then sort into hundreds of discrete populations. Then, map SIGNALING CHANGES INSIDE THE SAME CELLS back onto the population maps. Still trying to wrap my head around the potential for this in drug development, development and blood cancer biology.
Single-Cell Mass Cytometry of Differential Immune and Drug Responses Across a Human Hematopoietic Continuum

Sean C. Bendall,
Erin F. Simonds,
Peng Qiu,
El-ad D. Amir,
Peter O. Krutzik,
Rachel Finck,
Robert V. Bruggner,
Rachel Melamed,
Angelica Trejo,
Olga I. Ornatsky,
Robert S. Balderas,
Sylvia K. Plevritis,
Karen Sachs,
Dana Pe’er,
Scott D. Tanner,
and Garry P. Nolan

Science 6 May 2011: 332 (6030), 687-696. [DOI:10.1126/science.1198704]