The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • McDonalds Wi-Fi Guide

    Classic.

  • Google

    Robert Scoble relaying a conversation he had with Google VP Vic Gundotra about some of the problems Google+ has right now:
    >He says it isn’t about real names. He says he isn’t using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like “god” or worse.

    I find that hard to believe. They allowed whatever name people wanted to use for email addresses — suddenly now they want them to be “real”? I forget, do advertisers like to be able to link data with real names? ((Actually I didn’t forget. They do.))

  • Why Google Cares if You Use Your Real Name

    Dave Winer on why Google cares if you use a *real* name for Google Plus:
    >And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.

    It’s about the greenbacks…

  • When Statistics Are Not Helpful

    Dave Cameron, perhaps my favorite baseball writer, informing readers of his diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukemia:

    >Statistics can be powerful, useful tools, and at times, they can be critical to understanding what to do. Other times, though, they’re useless, and so, for this situation, I say screw the data; I choose hope instead.

    Thoughts and prayers with you Dave.

  • What’s Going on With the Wall Street Journal and Apple?

    There is certainly something going on between the two lately. Whether Murdoch is pulling the strings or not, we can only speculate. It’s sad that in my eyes the WSJ is slowly losing credibility.

    It’s fine to report news and speculation — that’s the medias job (self-appointed as it may be) — but the timing of these reports and the type of reports they were is what concerns me.

  • Microsoft’s Online Business for the Year: Over $2.5 Billion …Lost

    Mg Siegler:

    >And then there is the biggest number of all. For the year, the Online Services Division lost .557 billion.

    He also notes that the division has been losing money for 6 years now and that the losses have been getting worse not better.

    He also notes:

    >Don’t overlook another crazy stat: Microsoft was able to decrease general and administrative expenses by 60 percent for the year, and still lost more than ever.

    That’s crazy. It’s time to cut your losses and walk away Microsoft.

  • AnandTech on FileVault Performance

    AnandTech does a nice job of breaking down the performance hits you get with FileVault. They note a 20-30% hit in performance, but I am hear to tell you that I haven’t noticed any such slow downs and some of their tests seem a bit unrealistic to me.

    Their tests are things that an average to above-average user are likely never to do. ((Unless average users open 42 reply email windows at once. I don’t think I reply to that many emails in a day.))

  • Palimpsest for iPad

    My thanks to Palimpsest for sponsoring the RSS feed for this week, be sure that thank them too by checking out the app.

    If you are a fan of long-form articles then this is the app for you. Palimpsest is a very interesting take on reading — it’s not an app that you curate, it’s an app of excellently curated long reads.

    This is an app for readers. I *am* a reader.

  • Google Says It Rejected $100 Million Java Deal From Sun in Patent Trial

    The more I learn/read about this Oracle-Google spat the more I think Google stands to pay a large chunk of cash to Oracle. Right or wrong it sounds like Google stands to lose this one.

  • Americanisms: 50 of Your Most Noted Examples

    The BBC:
    >50. “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they’re trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

    This one drives me nuts — [Dan Benjamin](http://5by5.tv/) needs to take note of this. The rest are pretty funny (just to see what bugs those silly Brits).

  • Excellent New Slang

    MG Siegler has an awesome new term for some of the ‘individuals’ we find on the Internet.

  • 2011 MacBook Air – Early Benchmarks

    Eyeballing it the 2011 i7 MacBook Air looks about twice as fast as the top of the line 2010 MacBook Air. Damned impressive.

  • Lion Downloads Top One Million in First Day

    By itself this is a respectable number, now take into account [this Tweet](https://twitter.com/#!/trixxy/status/94145791643492352) from Thomas Ricker:

    >In other words, Apple moved over 3.6 petabytes in the last 24 hours.

    Wow.

  • If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault

    Anil Dash:
    >Why are they so cynical about conversation on the web? Because a company like Google thinks it’s okay to sell video ads on YouTube above conversations that are filled with vile, anonymous comments. Because almost every great newspaper in America believes that it’s more important to get a few more page views on their website than to encourage meaningful discourse about current events within their community, even if many of those page views will be off-putting to the good people who are offended by the content of the comments. And because lots of publishers think that any conversation is good if it boosts traffic stats.

    A must read for any web user.

  • Atlantis Makes Final Landing

    The end of an era.

  • TidBITS: Our Favorite Hidden Features in Mac OS X Lion

    TidBITS Staff:
    >Can’t remember which key combination creates an e with an accent agu (é)? Press and hold a key to bring up accented alternatives, a feature introduced in iOS. You can click the accent you want, or, since your fingers are already on the keyboard, press the number that appears below the character you want.

    I actually didn’t know this one and a few others on this list. One thing I do know: `option` is an incredibly powerful key in Lion.

  • Save Sheet Shortcuts in Lion

    Nice tip from Matt Gemmell:
    >It would be unacceptable to invite the inevitable physical slips this would case, so “Don’t Save” is now triggered by Command-Backspace (which is an excellent shortcut, since not saving means your document’s contents will be deleted, in a sense, and hitting Command-Backspace is slightly more difficult than hitting Command-D).

  • Automatic Termination in Lion

    John Siracusa:
    >Lion will quit your running applications behind your back if it decides it needs the resources, and if you don’t appear to be using them. The heuristic for determining whether an application is “in use” is very conservative: it must not be the active application, it must have no visible, non-minimized windows—and, of course, it must explicitly support Automatic Termination.

    Shawn and I were talking about how Lion needs this feature on the podcast we recorded yesterday. I had no clue Lion supported this and the implementation sounds near perfect. ((Likely I had no clue about this because apps must support it, and when you beta test a new OS it is pretty rare to test apps designed for that OS. Good catch by Siracusa.))

    [via Alo on Twitter]

  • The B&B Podcast – Episode 19: Lion

    Shawn and I talk all things Lion.

    Brought to you by: [HipChat](https://www.hipchat.com/) and [Campaign Monitor](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/)

  • User Library Folder in Lion

    Shawn Blanc on how to make the Library folder visible under Lion:

    >The ~/Library folder is now hidden. If you want to see it, a simple terminal command will unhide it:
    >`chflags nohidden /Users/[username]/Library/`

    Also: the rest of his review is excellent.