“It is extremely unappealing to Microsoft’s management to acknowledge that the company’s dominance is waning and that the shareholder-maximizing course of action is to run the company efficiently, decrease investment in the web and run a desktop software business as profitably as it can for as long as it can while paying out as much cash to shareholders as possible. How much fun would that be? “Killing Google” is much more fun. Except it doesn’t really work.”
—My Friend Who Hates Tech « Five Years Too Late
January 2010
“
The iPad is a 10” computer with a 16GB flash drive and multitouch technology. What makes that so worthwhile? Haven’t we seen this before? How is this better than a Windows tablet or a netbook?
Here’s why. Apple’s not actually selling a computer. Or a flash drive or multitouch. They needed to make those things for their product, but that’s not what the product is. The product is, simply put, a magical screen that can do anything you ever want it to, no matter what that is.
Here you go. It’s five hundred dollars. If you pay me that, I will give you this magical thing that can do anything. You don’t have to read a manual. It will do anything, and it will do it right now, out of the box.
Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?
” —This is why it’s worth learning about advertising, by Rory Marinich
“
If you haven’t been paying attention, over the past couple of years, the web platform has gotten offline APIs, improved caching support, local storage (on Safari, that includes an on-device SQLite database accessible through JavaScript), CSS-based animations, and custom, downloadable fonts. Mobile Safari has support for gestures, Geolocation, and hardware-accelerated graphics…
Ironically, despite claims that not allowing Flash or Java represent a victory for proprietary technologies and a loss for open technologies, they represent quite the opposite. By restricting the web platform on the iPhone and iPad to open, patent-free, technologies, Apple has created a highly desirable market for pure-HTML5 apps. This is, frankly, a win for supporters of open technologies.
” —The Irony of the iPad: A GREAT Day for Open Technologies « Katz Got Your Tongue?iPad = maxi-pod
iPad = iPod with a Boston accent. “This taablet’s retaaaded.”
“The ADE-651 detector has never been shown to work in a scientific test.
There are no batteries and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. Critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod.
Mr McCormick told the BBC in a previous interview that “the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar”.
He says that the key to it is the black box connected to the aerial into which you put “programmed substance detection cards”, each “designed to tune into” the frequency of a particular explosive or other substance named on the card.
He claims that in ideal conditions you can detect explosives from a range of up to 1km.
The training manual for the device says it can even, with the right card, detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills.” —BBC News - Newsnight - Export ban for useless ‘bomb detector’
There are no batteries and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. Critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod.
Mr McCormick told the BBC in a previous interview that “the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar”.
He says that the key to it is the black box connected to the aerial into which you put “programmed substance detection cards”, each “designed to tune into” the frequency of a particular explosive or other substance named on the card.
He claims that in ideal conditions you can detect explosives from a range of up to 1km.
The training manual for the device says it can even, with the right card, detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills.” —BBC News - Newsnight - Export ban for useless ‘bomb detector’
UTC vs Ruby, ActiveRecord, Sinatra, Heroku and Postgres →
pivotallabs.com
Now that I’m starting to use DelayedJob to perform jobs in the future in my Heroku Sinatra app, its important that they happen at the scheduled time. But unless you pay attention, you’ll find that…
“Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate”
—Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate - New York News - Runnin’ Scared
“
If you go back to the 1950s and you look at some of those writings, a lot of it’s about disaster myths—what people say happens in disasters versus what really happens. What these researchers discovered was that the media—even way back in the 1950s and 1960s—approached huge disasters with certain frames. When the media reports on disasters, they’re inevitably going to focus on the dramatic and antisocial, even if it’s one percent of the population committing these acts. And even back then, the looting myth always came to the fore of media reports.
As it has in Haiti.
Yes. For example, the day after this earthquake in Haiti, it was reported that a prison had collapsed and prisoners had gotten away—the presumption being that they had escaped to go and loot. The prisoners didn’t go to check on their mothers or their sisters, they went to loot. And we presumably know this, because they’re bad people, they’re criminals. The bad people frame reached its nadir with Katrina.
” —CampusProgress.org | The Looting Lie
“If you want to keep your checked valuables from being stolen while you fly, just keep a gun in your suitcase.”
— Secure your checked bags — fly with a gun - Boing Boing
“A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).”
— Monbiot.com » The Holocaust We Will Not See
“
Drummond said that the hackers never got into Gmail accounts via the Google hack, but they did manage to get some “account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line.”
That’s because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press.
“Right before Christmas, it was, ‘Holy s***, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems],’” he said.
That, in turn led to a Christmas Eve meeting led by Google co-founder Larry Page to assess the situation. Three weeks later, the company had decided that things were serious enough that it would risk walking away from the largest market of Internet users in the world…
Google’s security team eventually managed to gain access to a server that was used to control the hacked systems, and discovered that it was not the only company to be hit. In fact, 33 other companies had also been compromised, including Adobe Systems, according to several sources familiar with the situation.
” —China: Google attack part of widespread spying effort - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK
“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.” These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
—Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
Why is it so fun to watch dogs play?
Just got a #fitbit and managed to fail to track my sleep last night.
Yet another SFO tweet
“We now have a political system in which a majority of the House, a majority of the Senate, a majority of the electorate, and the president can all agree on a specific policy proposal, but it still can’t become law due to obstructionist tactics from the minority. Ours is the only major democracy on the planet that gives the minority the tools to stop the majority from governing.”
—The Washington Monthly
“What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?”
—The Card Game - How Visa, Using Fees Behind Its Debit Card, Dominates a Market - Series - NYTimes.com
Hot Sauce Lineup @ Magnolia http://yfrog.com/3lauqj
Omelets are pretty http://yfrog.com/3596952450j
