The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Giving up on Google

    Rob Sheldon lamenting on his experiences with Google:

    The experience I have with Google every day has convinced me that they’re no longer concentrating on their original mission. Google is now a marketing company, and what was supposed to be their “core competency” has been neglected in favor of rolling out new features and services.

    and:

    Google just isn’t a company that’s concentrating on the problems that I need solved. I didn’t need “instant” search results; I needed effective search results.

    Sheldon is right, there are a lot of instances where I can’t find what I need with Google. The search engine he recommends, DuckDuckGo, seems excellent especially if you search for more technical things. I have already added it to my bookmarks to use more often.

    [via Hacker News]

  • The Commute Map

    Very cool Map mashup that shows you where people in your zip code are commuting to and from.

    [via Flowing Data]

  • Security Advisory for Flash Player

    Adobe:

    This vulnerability (CVE-2010-2884) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against Adobe Flash Player on Windows. Adobe is not aware of any attacks exploiting this vulnerability against Adobe Reader or Acrobat to date.

    Yeah so this is not good at all, turn it off and have some piece of mind.

  • New Kindle Pool Ad

    I love the new ad, but I think this tweet from Corey Thomas (@thecore) sums it up best:

    @gruber By Amazon’s logic, the woman in the Kindle ad should have a woman next to her gloating about a paperback book.

    [via John Gruber]

  • Google Feels the Need to Justify Itself

    I don’t get Google here, why do they feel the need to justify themselves to the ‘media’? This makes no sense, let your product speak for itself, your users know if they are still using your product so what more do you need.

  • Mark Zuckerberg opens up for The New Yorker

    Truly fascinating interviews and accounts of Facebook and Zuckerberg.

  • Exchange “remote wipe” is a terrible, terrible bug

    Did you know that when you setup and exchange account on your mobile device the Admin can wipe it – whereby ‘it’ I mean your entire device? Neither did I.

    [via DF]

  • Rui Carmo on the Samsung Tab

    Rui Carmo:

    A Tab is, physically, almost exactly half the size of an iPad, and although we could go on about specs, features, ergonomics and whatnot, the mere fact that the built-in productivity apps are shameless dumbed-down rip-offs of Apple’s (without addressing functionality gaps or providing distinctive features) kind of sets the tone for the first generation of wannabe competitors.

  • Fraser Speirs On Battery Life

    Fraser Speirs:

    Simply put: if your device doesn’t last for 10 real-world hours of use, your device is no longer competitive in education.

    I think we can expand that to more than just education at this point.

  • dConstruct 2010 Talks

    I just downloaded these over the weekend to listen to on my morning and evening commutes. The first one was great this morning.

    [via Merlin Mann]

  • QoTD: The Single, Most Important Secret to Success

    Running a small business is like flying an airplane. There’s not a single thing that keeps you in the air. It’s doing a lot of things right. But the truth is that whether it’s landing a plane or running your business, you can screw some things up and still be successful. –Mike Taber

  • The Macalope Weekly: Choices

    The Macalope:

    The horny one is confused, though. What exactly is Google’s path to “victory” if carriers can make phones that exclusively use Bing?

    I couldn’t agree more. Be sure to read the last bit about Acer, pure gold.

  • The Microsoft Fake Funeral for iPhones and Blackberries

    I don’t get it, where was Android they are clearly a bigger threat than RIM. Why are they being so cocky when they have yet to prove anything. This may go down has a huge embarrassment for Microsoft next year, but I tend to think they will be embarrassed by this long before then.

  • Here’s a Reason to Switch to a Mac

    Stefan Worthmuller talking about DLL hell on Windows:

    Installers of programs overwrote existing versions of DLLs, leading to the first iteration of DLL-Hell: Installing an application could possibly break other applications (because they were build for a different “version” of the DLL). And even worse, uninstalling an application could remove some DLLs that other applications depended on. Most applications installed their DLLs in the system directory (and many still do) in hope to share them with other programs but there was no way to keep two different versions of a DLL in the system folder as the file name usually remained unchanged.

  • Sean Parker

    David Kirkpatrick talking about Parker’s youth:

    The teenager had been sitting in the family den, all night, drilling deeply into the bowels of a Fortune 500 company, which he refuses to name. Back then he had a hobby, he says, of hacking into different sorts of organizations, keeping a file of .com, .edu, .mil, and .gov Internet domains he had penetrated in various countries around the world. His goal was to break into one of each type in a laundry list of countries. He claims that once inside he usually alerted the system administrator—from his or her own e-mail—to vulnerabilities he had discovered.

    A great read.

    [via I am pretty sure I saw this in John Gruber’s Starred Instapaper items. Just add him as ‘gruber’ on Instapaper.]

  • Daring Fireball-Style Linked List Plugin for WordPress

    I had been using the plugin that Shawn mentions as well, I just switched the blog to this new plugin as it is much nicer. Also there may be some hiccups as I get adapted to it, so bear with me.

    Also please note that in the RSS feed now when you see the Infinity symbol ∞ at the end of a post that is the permalink, and when you see it before the title of the post that means it is not a linked list post.

  • Nokia Makes The Same Mistake Again: Hires A Manager, Not A Product Visionary

    Dan Frommer on Nokia’s new CEO:

    Sounds like another suit, and not the dreamer that Nokia needs to beat Apple and Google.

  • HDR Video

    Now this is very neat, I could see this being a new effect in movies.

  • Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac

    I use it everyday, and every update is faster and better than the last.

  • MG Siegler on the Openess of Android

    I thought the Randy Savage videos I found today were awesome, then I read this from MG Siegler about Android being open:

    Instead, open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.

    and:

    What happens when Verizon won’t update your phone to the latest greatest Android software — not because they can’t, but because they want you to upgrade to a new piece of hardware and sign the new two-year agreement that comes along with it? The game remains the same.

    and lastly:

    “Open” is great until you have to define it or defend it. I’m not sure Google can continue to do either in this situation.