Your Next Desktop Could be a Phone:
Henri Sivonen: This getting interesting: Using an Android phone as an Ubuntu desktop when docked
Definitely Want.
Especially love the idea of sending and receiving texts from my desktop. Would prefer a dock the size of a mac mini with a hard drive, USB and ethernet ports.
[I understand. This is appealing. But in an old school kinda way. (Taking with you vs. it being accessible anywhere)]
iPad improves Kindergartners literacy scores:
“Too many innovative programs don’t prioritize their own research, and even if they collect observations and stories later, they don’t make the effort to do a randomized control trial, like we did,” said Muir. “We wanted to make sure we could objectively examine the contribution of the iPads.”
According to the literacy test results classes using the iPads outperformed the non-iPad students in every literacy measure they were test on.
It’s not just about the test scores, but about the way the kids interact with the iPad and apps that make this program unique.
“We are seeing high levels of student motivation, engagement and learning in the iPad classrooms,” said Sue Dorris, principal at East Auburn Community School. “The apps, which teach and reinforce fundamental literacy concepts and skills, are engaging, interactive and provide children with immediate feedback. What’s more, teachers can customize apps to match the instructional needs of each child, so students are able to learn successfully at their own level and pace.”
[I will keep banging this drum.]
Dean Hachamovitch, vice president of Internet Explorer:
When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from Google with the use of IE9’s Tracking Protection feature. We’ve also contacted Google and asked them to commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.
We’ve found that Google bypasses the P3P Privacy Protection feature in IE. The result is similar to the recent reports of Google’s circumvention of privacy protections in Apple’s Safari Web browser, even though the actual bypass mechanism Google uses is different.
Guess what the answer is. Just guess.
[Google continues to redefine “evil”. They’ve completely lost their way.]
Source: Daring Fireball
And that basically is the business Appe is in, taking advantage of people who employ obsolete ways of thinking. TVs are not ultimately about picture quality. In fact picture quality isn’t even number one. Integration, connections — that’s the first thing. If I can get great picture quality, and you can be sure Apple will give it to us (probably made by Samsung) that’s fine. But first I want to use the tool the way I want to use it.
Source: Scripting News
Daniel Jalkut on Fixing the Sandbox:
I toss all my Mac app ideas that require more than the default sandboxing rules — no matter how cool the idea is.
The sandbox has a chilling effect on at least one developer. I’d be surprised if it were just me.
[This is quite a mess.]
Source: inessential.com
Lists of Note: Thelonious Monk’s Advice:
- Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
- Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play.
- Don’t play the piano part, i’m playing that. don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!
- Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. what you don’t play can be more important that what you do.
- A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
- When you’re swinging, swing some more!
- You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
- Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
- They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
[A picked a few faces. Can’t have enough Monk. Can. Not.]
The illusion of privacy (and what we actually care about):
You probably have very little privacy at all, giving it up a long time ago.
If you’ve got a charge card, the card company already knows what you do, where you go, how you spend your money, what your debt is like. If you use a cell phone or a computer, someone upstream already has access to where you go, what you buy, what you type, and on and on.
No, you don’t really have a privacy.
[This bugged me a lot for years, but the system is rigged against you, and I decided that it wasn’t worth fighting. I’ve nothing to hide. But that doesn’t mean I like it… or wouldn’t change it if I could.]
Source: Seth’s Blog
Just like with Lion, Mountain Lion is evolving in the direction of the iPad. But, just as with Lion last year, it’s about sharing ideas and concepts with iOS, not sharing the exact same interaction design or code.
[Good stuff… interesting spin.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’:
My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.
You could learn more about Steve Jobs’s work by reading Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine piece than by reading Isaacson’s book, but even then we’re left wanting for the stories behind any of Apple’s products after the iPod. Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
[There’s another aspect of all this success. Using UNIX via Next as the basis for OS X was huge in that there was a sudden switch. For years developers looked down their noses at Macs. Whether with good reason ro not I’ll leave aside for now. But there was an explosion of developers buying MacBook Pros (think the titanium era) with OS X. Once they realized that all the favorite tools and utilities, consoles and compilers were there and easily accessible, they all tossed aside their hard to configure (at that time) Linux running on whatever laptop and got Macs. And while the total number might have been small, I feel that the mindshare thing had a significant impact which continues today. If you’re going to talk about Jobs’ work. That mindshare acquisition, which came with Next was huge. Another little known fact. The web was born on a Next computer. The guy who created the web as we know it did it on Next. Not a direct link, but only one degree of separation.]
Source: Daring Fireball
turnings :: daniel berlinger 