Month: March 2013

Forecast

Forecast:

Rather than cram these things into Dark Sky, we decided to do something grander: create our own full-featured weather service from scratch, complete with 7-day forecasts that cover the whole world, beautiful weather visualizations, and a time machine for exploring the weather in the past and far future. You can access it from all of your devices, whether it be your laptop, iPhone, Android phone, or tablet.

[Dark Sky has been amazingly accurate. And this looks like the the online weather forecasting service I’ve been waiting for… well worth the visit to Forecast, and dropping it on your phone or browser. For those of you who do stuff in the outdoors this will ease the planning burden… (the open source Skycons is a nice touch as well.]

You know better, this is inexcusable

You know better, this is inexcusable:

If Gruber’s going to call Lynch a bozo, if you’re going to double and treble down on it, then where’s the articles calling Schiller and the rest of the Apple executive team, including Jobs, “bozos” for supporting shitty products like the Moto iTunes Phone? Right.

It’s not just Gruber. Jim Dalrymple, someone else who knows how shit works in a corporation should start checking his kegerator hoses for mold for agreeing with Gruber on this in his piece, “Bozo”:

John Gruber giving his thoughts on Apple’s newest VP Kevin Lynch. There is also an Exhibit B. Like Gruber, it concerns me that Lynch kept beating the Flash drum for so long, even when it was clear it was dead.

Oh come on Jim, it most certainly does not. You’ve been a part of a largeish corporation before, you know how shit works. The both of them do. Kevin Lynch wasn’t doing anything that anyone else in his position, including Gruber wouldn’t have done. He was supporting a major company initiative in public. That’s not the sign of a bozo, and Gruber needs to stop pretending otherwise.

[The latest sign of the apocalypse is holding everyone to a different standard than the one you hold for yourself.]

Source: bynkii.com

Reading devices

Reading devices:

Would I be permitted to be productive at all, or is only consumption allowed? Could I write? Code? Draw? Compose? Run some reports? Reboot a server? Why specifically make an exception for reading with everything our modern devices can do?

Last year, the agency announced that an industry working group would study the issue. The group, which first met in January, comprises people from various industries, including Amazon, the Consumer Electronics Association, Boeing, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Federal Communications Commission and aircraft makers.

Oh. (Emphasis mine.)

[Surprise!]

Source: Marco.org

The Small Town Volunteer Fire Department

The Small Town Volunteer Fire Department:

Unincorporated population centers in a NJ county were often assigned to the nearest township. For Newfield that was Franklin Township, which still exists today. By 1924, the residents of Newfield were very unhappy with the services being provided them through Franklin Township in exchange for local real estate taxes so they petitioned to become a NJ Borough with an elected mayor and six member council, and the state government granted that request.

The residents of Newfield, which had its own bank, school, fire company, grocery stores, carnegie library, etc, felt least government was best. I smile and think of them as Libertarians long before such a movement existed. This was, of course, a bargain the town was making with itself to provide public services with minimal taxes through promotion of volunteerism.

This attitude and tradition has worked well. The School Board, the Ambulance Corps, the Cemetery Board, the Library Board, and the fire company are all staffed with unpaid volunteers. For the essential services of EMS and fire-fighting, these unpaid volunteers also undergo many hours of training to remain certified. In consequence, those essential service organizations are backups for other EMS and fire-fighting services in surrounding towns.

[Amazingly easy to screw things up…]

Source: inessential.com

Taylor Phinney: This Is Not a Story About Last Place

Taylor Phinney: This Is Not a Story About Last Place—Jason Gay – WSJ.com:

He had so many miles to ride. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said. “The race has gone by, and people aren’t really expecting one rider slogging along by himself.” Fans on the side of the road offered to push him up hills. But Phinney remembered a story his Dad had told him about one of his old Tour de France teams, making a pact to decline pushes.

Taylor would do the same. No pushes.

“He never lost his motivation,” said Fabio Baldato, an assistant director for Phinney’s team, BMC Racing, who was driving a car behind Phinney the entire route. “It was unbelievable.”

[Added to the file for my own challenges. No pushes.]

Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader – Marco.org

Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader – Marco.org:

Like it or not, the Google Reader API is the feed-sync “standard” today. Until this business shakes out, which could take years (and might never happen), this is the best way forward.

We need to start simple. We don’t have much time. And if we don’t do it this way, the likely alternative is that a few major clients will make their own custom sync solutions that won’t work with any other company’s clients, which won’t bring them nearly as much value as it will remove from their users.

Let’s get Reeder and NetNewsWire to support the Hostname field ASAP so we can build alternative services to back them. Once they support it, other clients will need to follow from the competitive pressure of checklist feature comparisons. The result will be the easiest, fastest solution for everyone and a healthier ecosystem for feed-sync platforms.

[Seems like a good idea.]

★ Ceding the Crown

★ Ceding the Crown:

Samsung has had a remarkable run over the last few years. They make more money — profit, not merely revenue — from selling mobile phones than Google makes for all of its businesses combined. But by any measurable means other than market share what they’ve achieved is the number two spot, behind Apple. You can reasonably make the argument that they’re on their way to unseating Apple, that the momentum lead belongs to Samsung. (I would disagree, but cede that it’s possible.) But no facts today suggest that it has already happened.

But that’s how news reporters increasingly are treating the state of the industry. The desire for the “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned. It’s reported as true simply because they want it to be true. They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.

[It’s crazy? No?]

Source: Daring Fireball

CBO: ObamaCare Price Tag Shifts from $940 Billion to $1.76 Trillion

CBO: ObamaCare Price Tag Shifts from $940 Billion to $1.76 Trillion:

President Obama’s landmark healthcare overhaul is projected to cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, reports the Congressional Budget Office, a hefty sum more than the $940 billion estimated when the healthcare legislation was signed into law. To put it mildly, ObamaCare’s projected net worth is far off from its original estimate — in fact, about $820 billion off.

[Is anyone surprised? Even by the number? I’m not. I’m sure it’s still wrong to the low side, and the impacts will be worse as well.]

Google: “There has been a shift in our thinking…”

Google: “There has been a shift in our thinking…”:

Above all, despite many examples to the contrary, Google appealed to manifest impartiality: its search results were algorithmically derived, untouched by human biases and thus fair. The list of grandiose promises and statements made by Google that turned out to be false and hypocritical is uncomfortably long. Unfortunately for the rest of us, regulatory capture being what it is and the rare penalties being laughable for a $275 billion company, there isn’t much of a black cloud left over Google to worry about, especially under the current U.S. administration.

[Shifting reality is ok. Making sure that everyone’s awareness remains in sync seems to be slippery slope toward evil.]

Source: counternotions