Aza Raskin on a realization he had while behind China’s ‘great firewall’:
The idea is very simple: every time you access a site which is procrastinatory it gets randomly slower. The first time in the day it goes at full speed, but by the fourth time you’ve looked at it, the site crawls sporadically like it’s behind the great firewall of China. Let’s call it the productivity proxy.
Dave Girard:
If you work in 3D or want to play Windows game, this is an essential upgrade.
I have been using Parallels since it first came out for the Mac, I use it every work day to access our Windows only Property Management software. Parallels is for me a seamless solution, and with every update it gets faster and a lot better this update is no different.
Frank Chimero on happiness:
I don’t know how happiness is measured. It seems silly to ask “How happy are you?” On a scale of what to what? “Oh, you know, on a scale between Found Dime and Three-Day Weekend, I’d say I’m about an Ice Cream Cone of happy.”
Charlie Savage:
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
Now this is a good reason to call your congressman (or woman) to complain.
You can’t make this stuff up. On a serious note, my thoughts go out to his family and friends.
Some very neat concept sketches for Atari 1200 & A300.
David Rowan:
Some day you should take time to read those 5,830 words: it’s Facebook that owns the rights to do as it pleases with your data, and to sell access to it to whoever is willing to pay. Yes, it’s free to join — but with half a billion of us now using it to connect, it’s worth asking ourselves how far this “social utility” (its own term) is really acting in the best interests of society.
Yep.
This is amazing, a camera lens that captures infinite depth of field, meaning that you post production you can set where you want the focus to be. This is very, very cool.
These pictures show the possibility of Apple adding a dock connector port on the landscape side as well as keeping one where it is. I love the idea, and would love to have the extra port – what I don’t love is how, well how less than attractive this would be.
Stephen M. Hackett talking about his search for the best task management solution:
For me and my simple needs, Things and OmniFocus are overkill. With systems like this, I spend more time entering tasks than doing them. When I was using Things, by the time I was done going over the day’s to-do list, it was time for lunch. OmniFocus just gives me seizures.
I can say that without a doubt I have had these same problems at times – OmniFocus is amazingly difficult to just ‘use’ instead of tinker with and can be confusing at times. That said, and as I have said before, OmniFocus is killer on the iPad – it is everything I need and more. The perfect solution for me, OmniFocus on my Mac and iPhone for capture and reference, OmniFocus on my iPad for true task management in a way that doesn’t get in my way.
Facebook posted the linked note about their downtime that lasted 2.5 hours for some (gasp!) – the best part though are the comments (on Facebook I always find the comments to be the best part). Here are some choice ones:
Apparently people 814 liked that Facebook went down:
The zigging and zagging:
It really effected me:
The I didn’t read/understand the post guy:
He wants some free cash, and who can blame him?:
The sane one (kinda):
Sometimes (most of the time) I amuse myself.
Sendonaris lists a bunch of little things that he did not expect to annoy him upon getting a MacBook Pro, this tidbit though is by far the funniest (to me):
There is no equivalent of MS Paint. There is Paintbrush, which you can download for free, but it does not have all the features of MS Paint.
Wow, when was the last time you heard someone say “it does not have all the features of MS Paint”?
Sounds harmless, just throw these things out in the Arctic Ocean – no problem, afterall:
“We can guarantee the safety of our units one hundred per cent, all risks are absolutely ruled out,” says Mr Zavyalov.
Mathew Ingram on the Facebook valuation:
In reality, of course, every economist knows that things are only worth what people will pay for them, and since no one has actually paid $33 billion for Facebook, we shouldn’t really say that it is worth that much, or that Zuckerberg is worth $6.9 billion. But then, no one has paid $165 billion for Google either.
Very true, but what I really take issue with is saying that Zuckerberg is worth $7 billion because of it – you are only worth what you have in liquid assets (obviously a matter of opinion). Facebook is anything but liquid.
David Heinemeier Hansson:
Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.
Now this was all fun and games until somebody promised the Newark schools $100 million in stock based on the fantasy valuation of his under-profiting company. But now it’s real. They’re selling the skin before they shot the bear or peeing their pants to get to the hut or whatever you want to call it. It’s just not good, alright?
In the end it’s the kids that get hurt.
[Updated: 9/23/10 at 2:44 PM] Just to be clear I don’t think Facebook is worth this much money. A business (or any other good really) is only worth what someone is willing to pay you for it. I don’t see people lining up to buy Facebook.
This HP Slate video should be all the proof you need that Windows does not make a good touch interface.
Very neat service.
There have been a lot of rumors and rampant speculation about the possibility of Apple shipping a seven-inch version of the iPad. We ((that is everyone not at Apple in the super secret iPad division)) know nothing, except that Samsung (with the Samsung Galaxy Tab) is going with seven-inches and various other Android based tablets seem destined to be the same size.
This small size sounds great if you think about it, surely it will be lighter and more portable. Seven inches is a huge difference though, you lose almost 3 inches off the iPad size and for what? Well you get a smaller device that still doesn’t fit in your pocket and doesn’t have the screen real estate to be really great.
The problem isn’t that tap zones become much smaller, the problem is the onscreen keyboards get much smaller. I can’t type on the iPad keyboard in it’s portrait orientation, it is too small to try and touch type, and far too large to comfortably thumb type. That leaves an awkward and slow hunt and peck method of typing portrait orientation. Everything changes though in landscape orientation, all of a sudden I get a large keyboard that I can touch type with, using about 8 fingers (still too small for pinkies). The iPad keyboard in landscape view is truly the best soft-keyboard I have ever used, and it is quite usable at that.
A seven-inch tablet though, well that would be a massively smaller keyboard in landscape orientation. So much so that I would guess it would be faster thumb typing in the portrait view than it would be trying to cram 3 fingers on the landscape keyboard. Now this of course is pure speculation on my part as I have yet to use a tablet with a seven-inch screen, but here are some things I do know for sure:
At seven-inches then, the scale of the device to the size of a normal adult hand is just wrong. With a seven inch screen it will be far from comfortable to type on. Just take a look at this picture from Endgadget and tell me that you think that keyboard is big enough to type with both hands? In fact I bet you will run into the same problems that you would with the iPads portrait keyboard – you just won’t want to use it.
Everybody who doesn’t have an iPad squawks that iPads are for content consumption only, not for creation, often implying: you silly goose. Everybody who owns an iPad knows that this line of thinking is a load of crap. Yet it would seem these companies ((Samsung, Dell, possibly RIM)) making seven inch tablets don’t own an iPad because they are making devices sized for content consumption only – when there is a lot of people using iPads for content creation instead. ((Though in fairness content consumption still rules the roost for now.))
A seven inch tablet is not for content creation any more than an iPhone is – sure it’s possible, but only if you are a masochist. Q: Why would you limit your device from the start by making it too small? A: Because you bought into the hype that the iPad is a Kindle competitor, not a netbook killer.
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg talking to invective about the iPhone on Verizon and their 4G network:
Hopefully, at some point Apple will get with the program.
Right, because Apple is the one off course, not the fabled wireless industry.