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Blame the Equipment – Thom Hogan
Pretty much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for photography
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Very comprehensive for sure, though I doubt the average user will be able to perform most of them.
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The Online Photographer: The Case Against Zooms
A well elucidated case against relying entirely on zoom lenses. Touches upon the importance of learning to visualize.
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An interesting site containing information on Indian politicians. Includes quite a lot of details like assets, status etc. Should be pretty useful come election time.
It’s an initiative by a bunch of IITB students. -
Apple’s App Store shame | ZDNet
I don’t suppose Steve Jobs envisioned that Apple would be making money (the 30% App store cut) through sales of Smurfberries & barrels of cash & the likes…
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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
A very detailed argument that the current touch interfaces are just an intermediate phase before we move on to more tactile systems that make better use of our capabilities:
“With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?” -
Steve Jobs « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
A nice piece on Steve Jobs, and the anecdote on how close he was to meeting Tim Berners-Lee and his demo of what became the www (it was apparently written on a NeXt machine) makes you wonder “what if” that meeting had happened…
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Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers – Businessweek
Supply chain is an area where Apple & Amazon have really capitalized & seem to share similarities.
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File:Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre.jpg – Wikipedia
“The first picture of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show. Note that the image is a mirror image.”
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The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)
The “social” bit of the argument is particularly interesting:
“You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.”-
You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
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It is admittedly annoying to have to re-follow people every time you sign up for something, but it also forces the authors to make the site appealing enough to get us over that hurdle.
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My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
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Uncanny valley – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.
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The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics[1] and 3D computer animation,[2][3] which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.
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Steven Poole: Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?
Two simple laws to remember:
“If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.”
“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”
And, as Apple showed with its MobileMe to iCloud transition, your data may not be safe even if you pay for the service. So, keep your expectations in check – “The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours.”-
If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold
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The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours.
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Anyone who thinks Apple is going to be more careful about or respectful of its users’ stuff in the new “free” service is a dribble-dreaming iTard.
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If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.
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I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages — Scobleizer
It’s really ironic that Google opted to launch one of their mass products minus the “beta” tag when it was clearly incomplete and evolving, and draw so much of criticism.
On the other hand, Apple launched a mass beta (Siri) that everyone’s excited about. How times change… -
Facebook page for the blog. Check it out & do post your feedback.
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The One Chart You Need To See To Understand Mobile
All very good, but it is a very narrow view based solely on the US. The real so called Blue Ocean is actually in the developing markets where the number of mobile phone users makes the US market pale in comparison. That would be the actual chart that you need to understand.
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the understatement: Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support
Makes for pretty sad reading, and the situation with Android updates outside of the US is even worse. I share the exact sentiments with my Galaxy S i9003 that’s still stuck on Froyo 2.2
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Virtual Router – Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2
“Virtual Router turns any Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 Computer into a Wifi Hot Spot using Windows 7’s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology.”
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Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker
Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs, based in particular on Walter Isaacson’s biography. Offers a very different view of Jobs – was he a visionary or a tweaker?
Interesting links (weekly)
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