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12 Myths Every Photographer Should Know
Actually has 11 myths, but does explore pretty common ones and offers explanations for each
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Cheap Android Phones Could Cost Telcos Billions in Repairs | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
Highlights the perils of android being an open platform with very little control over the hardware & end user experience. And it’s not just the users getting affected in this case.
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Platform fragmentation: It’s shorthand for saying that multiple devices — all boasting different internal components and screen sizes — are loaded with a wide variety of OS versions. In the world of Android phones, all this variance from device to device can cause problems for engineers who must perfectly match hardware builds to software builds. In the end, consumers are sometimes faced with hardware that doesn’t seem to work.
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That means pushing out lots of updates to phones that may not be ready.
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When another Android update is released the phone manufacturer must retool its custom UI in order to make the new OS work.
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Android Market Apps Known Issues
Makes for pretty sad reading for an OS that is supposed to be at version 4.0. Problems aplenty for both users & app developers.
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Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
The article (by Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004) is almost 2 years old, but just as relevant after the news of the demise of the Courier tablet. Also makes you wonder whether Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on software is becoming its Achilles heel.
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As the fellow who tried (and largely failed) to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago, I could say this is because the company placed too much faith in people like me.
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Its marketing has been inept for years
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When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
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Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware.
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Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.
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Amazon Launching E-Book Lending Library – WSJ.com
Nowhere close to the physical lending model yet…
“Moreover, Amazon will restrict borrowers to one title at a time, one per month. Borrowers can keep a book for as long as they like, but when they borrow a new title, the previously borrowed book automatically disappears from their device.” -
ifttt / Post diigo bookmarks to wordpress
Posts your public bookmarks on diigo to wordpress along with your description & tags.
ifttt (If this then that) is a handy internet service that lets you mashup different online services and create tasks for them. -
ifttt / Selective diigo bookmarks to wordpress
Posts diigo bookmarks tagged with “forblog” (can be changed to other tags) to wordpress
Also, if you are an internet poweruser, check out the ifttt service that allows you to mashup different online services ranging from facebook to flickr
Category: bookmarks
Bookmarks from delicious
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Pretty convincing, and it blurs out the names & ids if you want
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Generate a Random Name – Fake Name Generator
Handy for times when you don’t want to give away your real details. Could also be used to generate name\addresses for countries that you don’t reside in.
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News from The Associated Press
No surprises here. Anyone with an MBA or even an ounce of common sense could’ve seen that Groupon’s current business model is shaky at best, especially in the long term.
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Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of The Plan – NYTimes.com
If you ever wondered what Tim Cook was doing in the last decade, then this is pretty much the article that defines his role as the COO
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Interesting links (weekly)
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A List Apart: Articles: Organizing Mobile
Focus on content first, navigation second seems to be the mantra
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Focusing on content first, navigation second gets people to the information and tasks they want quickly.
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15 years of Download.com | software-downloads.jpg (620×2667)
Shows you the technological progress we’ve made in 15 years too. Just look at the way the computing power has increased & at the same time reduced in cost.
Most stats show the difference between 1996 & 2011. It could’ve done with an intermediate period circa 2002-03 when Win XP was at its peak, especially for browser share (IE had ~90% of the market). -
by Lemony Snicket – OccupyWriters.com
13 interesting points of which this one sounds ominous:
“11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.” -
A radical development that allows you to focus photos after they are taken. Would require a proprietary format I suppose, but it does take you closer to the way we actually see the world. The image quality didn’t look that good in the gallery, but that’s beside the point for a first gen device.
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Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About…
Many ways of looking at these charts:- Proof that the world is becoming flatter- The wealth for entry level employment is being transferred from US to developing economies- Outsourcing works
On a side note, even Hollywood acknowledged that the entry level wealth is moving east in the Karate Kid remake… -
Definitely not an Android fan. I agree with the bit about the feel of the OS, but not the app variety on the market\app store.
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The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company
A pretty long read
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Bluestacks :: App Player for Windows :: Run apps fast on your PC or tablet
Useful utility to run android apps on Windows
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Steve Jobs: Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer? – Quora
A case of conventional vs alternative medicine\treatment
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My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters | Politics News | Rolling Stone
Sound advice, but who’ll bell the “bull”?
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The Man Who Inspired Jobs – NYTimes.com
Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography, and in many ways similar to Jobs both in terms of taste and in terms of the career path
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Interesting links (weekly)
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A VC: Minimum Viable Personality
How do you make an interesting product that engages the customer and builds loyalty?
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ifttt / Selective delicious bookmarks to wordpress blog
An easy way to post your bookmarks to your blog. This ifttt recipe posts only bookmarks with a specified tag.
In case you have not checked out ifttt already, it’s a really handy service that allows you to program the different online services that you use & even integrate with SMS services. -
Daring Fireball: Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks
Ever wondered why you end up with extra text containing links when you copy text from certain sites? Tynt is the culprit behind. The post includes ways to disable the behaviour.
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If you use Chrome, you can install this Tynt-blocking extension, which does just what it says on the tin. However, you wind up getting a dialog box each time you encounter a different site using Tynt.
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replay your terminal recordings online! (capture shell terminal recording and replay online),
Quite a bunch of screencasts. Plus, you can upload your own.
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The world’s oldest running car up for sale
Way back from 1884, and steam powered at that.
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Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind
Just the beginning, but a start nonetheless
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Things Apple is Worth More Than
Not all are Apple to apple comparisons, but does have some interesting stats nonetheless. It uses Apple’s market cap for comparison.
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“Joke” Conversation Thread in which the 🙂 Was Invented
The thread that started it all
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On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study
“…certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.”
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certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
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Smart meters reveal TV viewing habits – The H Security: News and Features
Now, that’s something radical. However, I wonder how much it depends on a TV set being “standard”. After all, the power consumption is very different for an LCD vs CRT vs LED, not to forget screen sizes & TV settings.
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10 things to remember about Netflix while scratching your head about Qwikster – SplatF
Very valid points that make sense of the Netflix decision to split the DVD & streaming business.
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a Tablet | Epicenter | Wired.com
Bottom line is that you need a strong business model backing your products. Apple has one, and Amazon is just pushing into the new space, while Google is still not sure what to do.
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Was Marx Right? – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
So, Marx had something in his diagnosis of capitalism. Now, if we could only find a suitable prescription for the economy.
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America’s largest private employer is Walmart. America’s second largest employer is McDonald’s
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while Marx’s prescriptions were poor, perhaps, if we’re prepared to think subtly, it’s worthwhile separating his diagnoses from them
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Coming to terms – WWW.THEDAILY.COM
Proposed redesign of the iTunes agreement. One aspect that Apple has not been able to simplify thus far.
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What makes someone leave a website? [Infographic]
Nice bunch of tips to consider for your website design
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Capitalism is dead! – Our weekly editorial cartoon: KAL’s cartoon | The Economist
More relevant now than ever before
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Jobs Will Follow a Strengthening of the Middle Class – NYTimes.com
Communism didn’t work that well, and neither does unrestrained capitalism it seems…
The infographic on top is particularly enlightening-
Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits.
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Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread.
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Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that’s almost dead in the water.
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ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up
It makes you wonder how startups manage to even survive, much less grow to become Apples, Microsofts & Googles, once such “mangers” come into the picture.
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What really sent him over the edge, as far as I can tell, was when I related my response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied “like watching a group of nursery school children who’ve stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off”).
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Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker
All the tools do is to make the weak ties more accessible, but that’s not going to lead to too many revolutions outside of slacktivism & clicktivism. Unless of course, the internet is turned off. That would be the real stimulus to get people off the armchair.
Time to revisit the high context & low context culture definitions too-
Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all?
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In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.
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“Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
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Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
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The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life
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By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.
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In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.
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No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
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Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.
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A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.
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Sheeple – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Are we people or “sheeple”?
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Slacktivism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And so we have a proper definition & wikipedia page for it
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posits that people who support a cause by performing simple measures are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change
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the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair
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Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth – Adrian Slywotzky – Harvard Business Review
It’s not enough to just have a vision & supreme taste. You need to be able to really refine them & make them a reality.
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But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.
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And, oh, the marketing: brilliant marketing. No one is better at creating attention than Apple. But attention without fulfillment is a straw fire. The magicians say “Presto!” and we gasp in delight. But they deflect our attention from the back-breaking labor that goes into assuring a perfect customer experience, hundreds of times a day, at 300 stores around the world, and countless conversations on the phone.
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Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple has done 10 times the amount of relevant homework of most companies — internal competitions, supply chain training, endless deal-making, endless recruiting, training, and generating and sustaining employee excitement that you just can’t fake.
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Draw a curve & have Google find query terms matching a similar search frequency
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Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain? – NYTimes.com
So, it’s more important to give your eyes a break every 20 min or so, than to bother about e-ink & LCD displays.
“The new LCDs don’t affect your eyes,” Mr. Taussig said. “Today’s screens update every eight milliseconds, whereas the human eye is moving at a speed between 10 and 30 milliseconds.” -
Chrome 13 on Windows & Safari 5 on Mac OS X
Firefox 6 remains a decent performer on Windows too
IE9 has its strengths on some hardware accelerated stuff, while Opera is an erratic performer – poor memory management & javascript conformance, but decent page load reliability. -
Falser Words Were Never Spoken – NYTimes.com
“But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all. “
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The Elusive Big Idea – NYTimes.com
“This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Steve Jobs’s Patents – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com
Quite a varied bunch including the iPod, iPhone & the likes. Also include the notorious hockey puck mouse.
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Coconut Chutney: The Chetan Bhagat Plot Generator
I haven’t read any of his books yet, but the ones generated by this do seem really interesting. Then again they are only 1-2 para summaries.
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namebench – Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility – Google Project Hosting
Handy little tool to benchmark the DNS servers locally & thus choose the best one
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Key points:
– You could actually use a TV as the monitor
– The function of the scroll lock key was a mystery even then
– BASIC (stored in the ROM) came before DOS
– Esc, Alt + Del was the reboot combo
And from the review in a nutshell:
“This is probably the most professionally put-together system I have seen. The only thing missing at the moment is a wide selection of packages, but I rather feel that the whole world and its grandmother will be frantically trying to fill that particular gap.”
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