Ulevitch postulates that more than the revenue brought in from Firefox searches or the potential market share lost to Bing, Google wants to protect itself from the antitrust watchdogs as Chrome continues to grow.
[And the mess continues to grow.]
NYC Photographer Jamie Livingston shot a Polaroid photo everyday for 6,000 days, or, roughly, 18 years.
[Looking for inspiration for the new year? Doesn’t matter what you do. Do it like you mean it.]
Now imagine you had a good 3D printer, like a polished version of this: MakerBot.
Imagine a lost Lego piece… Now imagine that it could scan in 3D as well. If I have one, but need two, no problem. Scan the original I have, and churn out a new one. Or anyone in the world who has that piece could send me the data that would allow me to recreate it. Or Lego themselves could set this up with some nominal charge per replacement. Or sell whole kits. Or…
That would be cool.
Recently my parents broke a knob on their oven. You can only buy replacements as a set and the company wants an incredible $100 (Six plastic knobs. $100? Seriously). Or. They take a whole knob. They place it in their 3D printer. It scans it, and creates a replacement in an hour.
That would be cool.
And as just one parting example of why this stuff’s exciting, I loved this video from The Verge, showing how Microsoft’s hardware group (long one of the company’s undersung overperformers) makes smart use of 3D printing in their everyday work:
Related Reading
- Recognizing the Maker Movement
- Make the Revolution
- Obliquely related, from six years ago, recommendations on Beating the iPod and iTunes
Source: Anil Dash
I’m interested in asking sincere questions which could actually be posed to candidates on television, and am trying to predicate my questions on actual positions held by actual candidates.
[Why limit these to the GOP? You think the current administration has good answers to these?]
Source: Anil Dash
There’s nothing wrong with this codebase that a time machine and an automatic weapon wouldn’t fix.
[I know the feeling. Feel free to substitute for the “codebase” and your weapon of choice.]
InfoQ: Can you talk about some limitations about the Riak databases and what use cases it’s not the best solution to use?
Basho: Applications that require ad-hoc querying and heavy analytics tend to be less of a good fit for Riak. Since we are a key/value store at the core, applications that require ad-hoc queries and/or heavy analytic processing can be difficult to implement on top of Riak. Our main focus is predictability and scale, and there are some tradeoffs that have to be made with data model and queryability to stay faithful to this focus.
That said, we plan to enhance Riak in various capacities to address these use cases in 2012. Riak already exposes deeper query possibilities via our MapReduce, Secondary Indexing, and Search components, and we’ll continue to make these more robust in future releases.
It should be obvious that one conclusion respects people and one doesn’t. It should also be obvious that the first conclusion is correct and the second is incorrect, cynical, and low.
I can’t prove that good software respects people, but I can look at good software and show how it respects people. I can look at bad software and show how it doesn’t respect people.
“Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them.
And it makes bad software.
[Just because something feels like a game doesn’t mean that you should make it more like a game.]
Source: inessential.com
I think there’s a TCO argument to be made against the proliferation of the App Internet. The more companies build their own apps, the more maintenance work they’ll need to do, the more employees they’ll need to maintain their apps and the further the innovation drain. I know this is a harder concept to quantify and intellectualize but I’ve seen it first hand in 20 years of working with large corporation on “legacy” IT projects. The App Internet opens the door to many more legacy apps.
This argument never features into any young developers mind because it takes years to see the decaying effect of legacy infrastructure in corporations (plus, many app developers prefer the sexy world of consumer apps).
To be clear … I think that the App Internet won’t disappear overnight. I also think certain apps will always be more effective built natively. But the same is true of today’s non-mobile computing. Still, most apps need not exist. Long live the Mobile Web.
[I agree.]
There’s not a lot of details about what we’re going to include in Rails 4.0 yet as the primary purpose for bumping the major version number is to drop Ruby 1.8.7 support.
[Well, that’s gonna rile some people…]
Trying to get a straight answer to one of life’s simplest questions
The facilities at the top of these stairs are off limits.
One of the great public services Apple (AAPL) offers in its flagship stores — besides free repairs at the Genius Bars — is bathrooms for its customers.
So when Apple was getting ready to open an enormous new store in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal — its fifth retail outlet in a city notorious for its lack of public facilities — I made a point of asking whether there were toilets in the store for customers.
Here are the answers I got:
[Funny.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0
turnings :: daniel berlinger 