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  • Why You Should Still Quit Facebook

    Dan Yoder: Tens of millions of people provided personal information to Facebook with the understanding that this information was being shared only within their social network. Then Facebook changed the rules and this information was unexpectedly shared with perfect strangers. That is, simply stated, a profound invasion of privacy. In the United States, the Fourth…

    Dan Yoder:

    Tens of millions of people provided personal information to Facebook with the understanding that this information was being shared only within their social network. Then Facebook changed the rules and this information was unexpectedly shared with perfect strangers. That is, simply stated, a profound invasion of privacy. In the United States, the Fourth and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution, along with numerous landmark Supreme Court cases, have established privacy as a fundamental right.

    I am getting closer and closer to leaving Facebook. We will see, if all my friends used Flickr and Twitter it would be a no brainer. I only have one friend that does though (our of a possible 3 friends that I have).

  • The AT&T / Apple Contract [Updated]

    MG Siegler (best TechCrunch Reporter) has a great read about speculating on the AT&T contract with Apple. Basically it is believed that at the end of 2010 no more iPhone exclusivity, but maybe getting Apple products first. I have no clue. However I still stand by the fact that the iPhone on Verizon would be…

    MG Siegler (best TechCrunch Reporter) has a great read about speculating on the AT&T contract with Apple. Basically it is believed that at the end of 2010 no more iPhone exclusivity, but maybe getting Apple products first.

    I have no clue. However I still stand by the fact that the iPhone on Verizon would be less than stellar. If you can’t get simultaneous data and voice on the iPhone, then there is no way I switch from AT&T, even though I dropped 3 calls already today.

    Updated [5/10/10 @ 6:57pm]:

    Engadget seems to think that it is still until 2012 unless they cancelled or modified it. The only reason this would happen is if Apple got out of it because of service quality issues, I doubt AT&T would want to shorten the deal.

  • Bionic Arms, Now with Bluetooth

    Miran Pavic: The i-Limb Pulse is customizable with software. Doctors and users can tweak i-Limb Pulse’s behavior, programming it with specific grip patterns to fit the customer’s needs. They then beam the new patterns to the hand with Bluetooth. Looks really cool, and it is great to see advances made in this field given the…

    Miran Pavic:

    The i-Limb Pulse is customizable with software. Doctors and users can tweak i-Limb Pulse’s behavior, programming it with specific grip patterns to fit the customer’s needs. They then beam the new patterns to the hand with Bluetooth.

    Looks really cool, and it is great to see advances made in this field given the elongated wars our country is involved in.

  • Ars Design Awards 2010

    Chris Foresman: Ars decided that if Apple was too preoccupied with mobile devices to recognize noteworthy software on the Mac, then we would pick up the torch. As such, we are announcing the first ever Ars Design Awards. We are giving you, our readers, the opportunity to nominate your favorite Mac OS X applications to…

    Chris Foresman:

    Ars decided that if Apple was too preoccupied with mobile devices to recognize noteworthy software on the Mac, then we would pick up the torch. As such, we are announcing the first ever Ars Design Awards.

    We are giving you, our readers, the opportunity to nominate your favorite Mac OS X applications to receive an award in one of five categories: Best New App, Best User Experience, Most Innovative App, Best K-12 Education App, and Best Student-created App. We will accept nominations until Friday, May 21.

    Very cool.

  • Software Developers Let Users Choose the Price

    Ernesto for TorrentFreak.com: Not only can downloaders choose the amount they want to pay, they can also decide whether they want the money to go to the developers, charity or any combination of both. The minimum amount required to get a download link is a penny. Thus far the project has been a great success.…

    Ernesto for TorrentFreak.com:

    Not only can downloaders choose the amount they want to pay, they can also decide whether they want the money to go to the developers, charity or any combination of both. The minimum amount required to get a download link is a penny.

    Thus far the project has been a great success. The games have been downloaded more than 80,000 times and have raised $683,090 at the time of writing. Linux users have been the most generous with an average donation of $14.01, while Windows users are stuck at $7.31.

    Very interesting that even though all you have to pay is a penny, there are still a lot of people pirating the software. Also it is very cool how well this model is working for them.

  • Hurricane WebOS Tablet to be Made by HP

    Boy Genius: According to an HP insider, by way of The Examiner, HP will be releasing a webOS-based tablet in Q3 of this year. Presumably featuring better hardware than the poorly reviewed HP Slate — recently scrapped by HP — the webOS tablet is said to be codenamed “Hurricane.” As noted in the report, try…

    Boy Genius:

    According to an HP insider, by way of The Examiner, HP will be releasing a webOS-based tablet in Q3 of this year. Presumably featuring better hardware than the poorly reviewed HP Slate — recently scrapped by HP — the webOS tablet is said to be codenamed “Hurricane.”

    As noted in the report, try to remember that the acquisition has yet to be finalized. And as Boy Genius says:

    …unless HP is already working hard on the Hurricane — or simply believes it wouldn’t be all that hard to slap together a decent tablet in a few month’s time — we find this whole “Q3″ business a bit hard to believe.

    Agreed. More likely a year from the acquisition being approved.

  • Twitter Bug Lets You Control Who Follows You

    Mashable: Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands – one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz emailed us the details this morning, writing “[tweet] accept [username]” then the [username] immediately starts following you.” Twitter has more or less fixed this bug now, but this is very disturbing.

    Mashable:

    Twitter has an embarrassing bug on its hands – one that allows users to make anyone follow them. Mashable reader Ozan Yılmaz emailed us the details this morning, writing “[tweet] accept [username]” then the [username] immediately starts following you.”

    Twitter has more or less fixed this bug now, but this is very disturbing.

  • Computer Trades Are Focus in Wall Street Plunge

    Graham Bowley and Edward Wyatt for the New York Times: After a weekend of analysis, many specialists at the major exchanges no longer believe that a single large sell trade in one stock, like that of Procter & Gamble, was the trigger, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Instead, they suspect that a…

    Graham Bowley and Edward Wyatt for the New York Times:

    After a weekend of analysis, many specialists at the major exchanges no longer believe that a single large sell trade in one stock, like that of Procter & Gamble, was the trigger, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Instead, they suspect that a mismatch in rules between the older New York Stock Exchange and younger electronic exchanges set off a frightening sequence of events.

    It is not known exactly what caused the initial sell-off in the blue chips, but investigators say the earliest sign of trouble they have found was a sudden drop in the value of a futures contract on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, based on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. That pushed down a broad array of stocks in that index, all of them traded on the New York Exchange and other major exchanges, and sent many stocks on the New York Exchange into slow mode.

    Now it wasn’t a typo, but rather a much larger problem. All the exchanges are not in sync, which can cause quite a ripple in stock prices it would seem.

  • Sony Vaio P (Kinda Like an Odd iPad)

    Charlie Sorrel: In fact, you can even wander down the street and use the Vaio P as you obliviously bump into fellow pedestrians, just like you can with a cellphone, thanks to an optical trackpad and mouse buttons either side of the screen, for “two-handed operation while standing or walking.” The cellphone/iPad comparisons fall down…

    Charlie Sorrel:

    In fact, you can even wander down the street and use the Vaio P as you obliviously bump into fellow pedestrians, just like you can with a cellphone, thanks to an optical trackpad and mouse buttons either side of the screen, for “two-handed operation while standing or walking.” The cellphone/iPad comparisons fall down with the battery life. Sony claims just five hours, which should be halved to get the real time. You can, if you like, pop on a bigger pack for double the life.

    Yeah, don’t waste your money.

  • iPhone Gaining Market Share

    Antone Gonsalves: The iPhone accounted for 16.1% of the market in the quarter, compared to 10.9% the same period a year ago, IDC said in releasing its quarterly report Friday. In terms of shipments, Apple shipped 8.8 million units, a 131.6% increase from the 3.8 million shipments a year ago. RIM, meanwhile, saws its share…

    Antone Gonsalves:

    The iPhone accounted for 16.1% of the market in the quarter, compared to 10.9% the same period a year ago, IDC said in releasing its quarterly report Friday. In terms of shipments, Apple shipped 8.8 million units, a 131.6% increase from the 3.8 million shipments a year ago.

    RIM, meanwhile, saws its share drop to 19.4% from 20.9% a year ago. Nevertheless, the company shipped 10.6 million units, a 45.2% increase from the 7.3 million units shipped a year ago.

    Guess RIM was right, no one likes those ‘funky’ touch screen keyboards.

  • Gigabit WiFi Speeds?

    New frequency in the 60ghz range is going to be used to deliver some serious speed to WiFi. The drawback? Line of sight is needed for connects. Yay for Infrared!

    New frequency in the 60ghz range is going to be used to deliver some serious speed to WiFi. The drawback? Line of sight is needed for connects. Yay for Infrared!

  • Imagine YouTube for Traders

    David Carr: So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available…

    David Carr:

    So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.

    Interesting approach. This is a 50/50 swing here, either it will be a home run or a strikeout.

  • Art Selling Itself – Constantly

    Rob Walker: Even if Spies won the object, created by a young artist named Caleb Larsen, his ownership would be tentative: the technical innards of “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” carried a program that would relist the thing on eBay every week, forever. Indeed, the terms and conditions for submitting a bid clearly stipulated…

    Rob Walker:

    Even if Spies won the object, created by a young artist named Caleb Larsen, his ownership would be tentative: the technical innards of “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” carried a program that would relist the thing on eBay every week, forever. Indeed, the terms and conditions for submitting a bid clearly stipulated that the device must be connected to the Internet, constantly trying to resell itself at a higher price to someone else.

    Very neat, if this is still on display I might have to go take a gander.

  • In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back

    Joseph Plambeck: In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are…

    Joseph Plambeck:

    In many ways, the quality of what people hear — how well the playback reflects the original sound— has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce a crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well.

    Mark this down as “it is only a matter of time, until it changes”.

  • The Death of Files

    Dustin Curtis: The concept of a “file” as a container to hold a piece of content is dying. The contents inside the files are becoming the central actors for creating user interactions. Computers are becoming more human, and part of the evolutionary process requires them to more closely complement the human brain’s built-in systems for…

    Dustin Curtis:

    The concept of a “file” as a container to hold a piece of content is dying. The contents inside the files are becoming the central actors for creating user interactions. Computers are becoming more human, and part of the evolutionary process requires them to more closely complement the human brain’s built-in systems for interacting with the world.

    Agreed.

  • The Lost Tribes of RadioShack: Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home

    Jon Mooallem: Recently, RadioShack has been forcefully rebranding itself, trying to shed its image as a temple of transistors, parts, and cables. Polished executives have parachuted in from the boardrooms of Safeway, Kmart, and Coca-Cola to turn the iconic American retailer around after years of underperformance and uncertainty. (In 2007, The Onion summed up the…

    Jon Mooallem:

    Recently, RadioShack has been forcefully rebranding itself, trying to shed its image as a temple of transistors, parts, and cables. Polished executives have parachuted in from the boardrooms of Safeway, Kmart, and Coca-Cola to turn the iconic American retailer around after years of underperformance and uncertainty. (In 2007, The Onion summed up the brand’s decline with the satiric headline “Even CEO Can’t Figure Out How Radioshack Still in Business.”)

    The plan? The new bosses want to turn RadioShack into a hipper, more mainstream place for “mobility” — which is what they insist on calling the cell phone market. (In an interview, RadioShack’s marketing chief used the word mobility an average of once every 105 seconds.) Selling phones is central to the new RadioShack. And so far, it seems to be working. Per-store sales are up, and corporate profits jumped 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009.

    My last year in college in the senior capstone course, I with two other people wrote what basically amounted to our thesis (for lack of a better word) on RadioShack. At that time we recommended that RadioShack seek to acquire or merge with a GameStop type retailer. Our thought was that the small size of RadioShacks combined with the sheer number of them (5,800 or so stores) would make for great video games sales locations.

    Now that did not and will not happen at this point. RadioShacks problems stem even deeper than most people think, they have a severe identity crisis as is apparent in this article. It used to be that all RadioShack salespeople knew how to fix stuff, they were very knowledgeable about the technology of the day. And while that may be more difficult to do today, it does not make up for the fact that most of their employees are clueless (based on my own experience).

    Trying to stay profitable with mobile phones is stupid, almost as stupid as calling them “mobility”. RadioShack should go back to being a repair shop, leverage brains and expertise. There are tons of people who make money repairing water damaged phones and computers. Replacing iPhone screens and so on. I would go to RadioShack if they had a new back cover for my iPhone and could replace it for me right then and there, wouldn’t you?

  • Reflections on the iPad's Screen

    (aka The most loved and hated screen) One of the most beautiful aspects of the iPad is its screen, glossy, large, beautiful, vibrant color. It is a sight to behold and one of the first things that draws people to the iPad. As gorgeous and wondrous as it is, the screen is also one of…

    (aka The most loved and hated screen)

    One of the most beautiful aspects of the iPad is its screen, glossy, large, beautiful, vibrant color. It is a sight to behold and one of the first things that draws people to the iPad. As gorgeous and wondrous as it is, the screen is also one of the most hated parts of the iPad. Yet there isn’t much anyone can do about it, yet.

    Glossy screens give deeper blacks and more saturated colors (just think back to those laptops of 5 years ago with the anti-reflective coatings and how amazed you were the first time you saw a glossy screened laptop), the consumers have spoken and glare is an acceptable trade off for these beautiful glossy screens. Besides who really computes outdoors?

    I do, or tried too.

    I work from home on Fridays, I live on the top floor of a southwest facing condo with a large balcony. Now in Seattle that means I get sun (if there is sun) all day long, which is great. Since I have a Macbook Pro with a glossy screen I can’t take it outdoors. In the past on Fridays I had spent lunch on the balcony reading my Kindle. Now I have the iPad (wife took the Kindle) and so I went out to the balcony on this beautifully sunny day. Guess what?

    I could not see the screen at all.

    I tried dozens of positions and angles to try and make the device usable. I found a few, but none that were comfortable enough to use for an extended period of time. I came inside and started writing this.

    If you want the bottom line on the iPad here it is: the iPad’s worst feature is also one of it’s biggest marketing features, it is the screen. It is a fingerprint magnet, it is a glare monster, but it is amazingly clear, crisp, vibrant, and beautiful.

    Even with all it’s drawbacks, I would not want a matte screen, nor will I put on an anti-glare film. It is too pretty to mess with.

    I hate this screen for so many reasons, but the good far out weighs the bad.

  • On the Android Flash demo at FlashCamp Seattle

    Jeff Croft: Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site’s progress bar filled in and…

    Jeff Croft:

    Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site’s progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed. Ryan said (paraphrasing), “Whoops! Well, it’s beta, and this is an intense example — let’s try it again.” He tried it again and got the same result. So he said to the audience, “Well, this one isn’t going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they’d like to see running?” Someone shouted out “Hulu.” Ryan said, “Hulu doesn’t work,” and then wrapped up his demo, telling people if they wanted to try more sites they could find him later and he’d let them play with his Nexus One.

    Oh Adobe blew that one.

  • iPad vs. Paperback

    Michael Grothaus: In my flat, I enjoyed reading the novel on the iPad more than in any other location (why, I’ll get to in a moment). One thing I love about ebooks on the iPad is the in-text dictionary look-up feature. This is something the iPad will always have as an advantage over traditional paperbacks.…

    Michael Grothaus:

    In my flat, I enjoyed reading the novel on the iPad more than in any other location (why, I’ll get to in a moment). One thing I love about ebooks on the iPad is the in-text dictionary look-up feature. This is something the iPad will always have as an advantage over traditional paperbacks. I sometimes come across a word I don’t know while reading a book. It’s much handier to be able to look up the word on the same screen as the text as opposed to having to grab a dictionary or my iPhone to look it up while I’m reading a paperback. I also like the bookmarking feature. Though bookmarking has long existed in paperbacks (when you dog-ear a page), bookmarks excel on the iPad’s ebooks because they allow you to do two useful things: highlight a word or block of words (much like you might highlight or underline text in a paperback), but the iPad also displays a bookmarks Table of Contents that list all your bookmarks and the date you bookmarked them.

    Great read for all you readers out there.

  • The Tell-All Generation Learns When Not To, at Least Online

    Laura M. Holson: In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what…

    Laura M. Holson:

    In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

    Social networking among people over 35 is supremely annoying. Add to that they share everything and don’t care to make it private – they are setting themselves up for disaster. We all need to be a little more vigilant about protecting out privacy.