February 2012
10 posts
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The Guts of a New Machine →
I just read this article from 2003 about the iPod. Fascinating to see what has changed since that time, and what still hasn’t. Here’s a passage that I felt accurately represented how competitors thought about overthrowing Apple, and how Apple thought about itself.
Glaser says he admires Apple and likes Jobs, but contends that this is simply the latest instance of the company’s tendency, once...
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“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the...”
– Jonathan Swift
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“I don’t really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple.”
– Apple CEO Tim Cook talking to Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro about the new OS X Mountain Lion.
Times change.
(via parislemon)
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The Moon, Politics, and Competition →
astronomyandspace:
Amy Teitel writes an overview of the realities of Newt Gingrich’s plans for the Moon. Despite the difficulties of Gingrich’s plans coming to reality, she draws attention to the underlying feeling of competition:
That statement evoked cheers from the crowd and sent shivers down my spine. The way forward is cooperation in space, not competition; the research station at the...
The iPad’s split keyboard has phantom buttons →
Attention to detail.
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In Praise of Cheap Labor →
These improvements have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done anything to help—foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to virtually nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and rapacious local...
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January 2012
3 posts
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“The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower.”
– The WebKit Open Source Project
December 2011
17 posts
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“As 2011 draws to a close, I remind us all that in life and in the universe, it...”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
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You Guys Are Millionaires Right? →
Shouldn’t all software be free? How can you live with yourself for charging for it?
No. Very few bits of software ever written were not funded by someone. People have to eat, they have to sleep somewhere and feed their families. Take Android for example: it’s free, and open-source, yet every Google engineer working on it is paid, likely far higher than you are. They are able to not charge...
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Inside the mind of the octopus →
Didn’t realize that octopuses were this interesting. The fact that they have a complex nervous system, even extending into their tentacles, absolutely amazes me.
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The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction →
Hilarious, but accurate and in-depth look at how destroying planets works for the economy of the Empire.
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Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert →
So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person’s views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case.
Wikipedia is a sign of the opening up of knowledge. Experts in a field are now becoming people who can help guide us more rather than holders...
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“I laugh only at the naiveté [of the proponents of quantum theory]. Who knows who...”
– Albert Einstein defending his enjoyment of watching quantum theorists struggle.
Via How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser
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The Talk Show #71 →
One of the best episodes of the Talk Show so far. A great and long discussion that reminds me again why I love this show.
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On the TextMate 2 Public Alpha →
Nice overview of the alpha release of TextMate by Kevin Lipe. The best part of the release for me, as Lipe echoes, isn’t actually part of the software; it’s knowing that my favorite text editor hasn’t been abandoned. (And still loving that new icon!)
It’ll be familiar to you and still feel new and exciting. It’s not ready for primetime yet. It crashes weirdly. Stuff breaks. But, more than...
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Definition of an ‘Apple fanboy’ and those that use... →
Extremely well put.
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The Apple Blogs Vs. Brooke Crothers →
I’m a fan of Apple’s work because it’s great. I suspect my peers he would criticize would say the same thing. I’ve been a fan of Apple’s products for about 6 years now. Before that, I didn’t own one. You could even say that I hated Apple products back in the 1990s when I was going to midnight launches of Microsoft products. Why did that change? It’s not some spell or some bullshit marketing....
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Facebook Raids and Kills Geo-Social Networking... →
Without something that can act like a great digital passport, I doubt that I’ll be using any location social networks anymore. I also doubt that Facebook is going to be offering a replacement that came as close to a digital passport as Gowalla did for me.
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Facebook Buys Gowalla →
Well, that sucks.
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November 2011
19 posts
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Moving mirrors make light from nothing →
Seriously, quantum mechanics always blows my mind.
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The Pummeling Pages →
It was like angry fruit salad on meth.
That analogy for many content producing websites is perfect. I think burying content in tons of flashy advertising and analytics methods is a disturbing trend. It makes the reading experience terrible, and more importantly it lowers the value of the content itself.
On a personal note, a I try make the reading experience on my Astronomy and Space blog...
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Speed matters: how Ethernet went from 3Mbps to... →
Detailed overview of the history of Ethernet over at Ars Technica. All the little anecdotes, like the following, make it a very enjoyable read.
I once saw two telecom company guys hammer on a couple of thick coax cables that went through a wall in order to bend the cables downward. This took them the better part of an hour. Another one told me that he keeps a nice big piece of the stuff in his...
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Gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em →
The Macalope remembers being roundly lectured, five years ago, about how operating systems would soon be dead because the Web was the new operating system and soon we’d all be connected all the time and it’d all happen in the browser, dude, and Apple and Microsoft would be swept away by this new paradigm. And yet here we are in 2011, and the biggest name in doing it all on the Web is not only...
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Unfrozen →
Interesting article in the National Geographic Magazine detailing the investigative work about the Iceman found in Italy.
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“Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, as in the feel...”
– Stanley Kubrick
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Hands and Manipulation in the Future of... →
Great post by Bret Victor discussing the importance of not being limited by current paradigms computer interaction to design tomorrow’s computer. Currently, the best we can do is manipulate items directly under a piece of glass. But that shouldn’t govern what we can do in the future. Touch and manipulation is very important in our daily lives, and we should expand our imagination to help augment...
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“Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any...”
– John Gruber on Daring Fireball
This is the right way to think about it. Everyone benefits from this. Even Adobe should focus on what they did best, creating great software that helps creativity, instead of holding onto an old and inefficient platform.
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Details and Being Geeky
I really like how Marco Arment put it on one episode of Build and Analyze a few months ago. He defined being a geek as caring about a set of topics much more deeply than the average person. I truly identify with that: to care for details that most pass over. There are a ton of little things that I am passionately worried about getting right. Things like what type of lead I’m using in my mechanical...
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On Scrolling →
Popularity is not maintained by marketing or hype, but rather the experience.
People buy things because of hype, marketing, and word of mouth. But nobody keeps a product because of those things. When the time comes to think about replacing a phone or a tablet, the commercials aren’t the first things that come to your mind, if they do at all. The experience is what sustains the happiness...
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Siri And The iPhone’s Physical Keyboard →
I’ve come to realize that most people don’t realize that we are currently in the midst of a revolution in computing or how large this shift actually is, and I think they probably won’t until it is over. MG Siegler points out the latest example: Voice and Siri.
October 2011
31 posts
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“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go...”
– Carl Sagan (via astronomyandspace)