Category:Technology

My Aunt Judy is whipping my ass at Words With Friends time after time and it's fucking pissing me off.

The problem is, I'm not playing her on the inside as much as I should. When I say 'inside' I mean playing tight combos in between existing words, not extending new words out vertically or horizontally into the void. Every time I even come one block short of a double or triple word block, she takes it.

I'm an educated man. College degree. I've read John Updike. I can parse XML.

My lexicon can't be that much smaller than hers, can it? "It's not the words, Mike, it's how you use them. I mean, look at Hemingway." Yeah, yeah. Spare me.

I feel like Fredo in The Godfather II, “It ain't the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect!”

A few years ago I watched a 60 Minutes episode where they interviewed Tiger Woods. He said no matter the activity, he hates losing.

I know how he feels.

Let's do this. Enough already.

Sad this is becoming a necessity, but handy.

via The Brooks Review

From Business Insider:

The Kindle Fire Is The Fruitcake Of Tablets

The best headline of the year so far.

*If you know who the Jerky Boys are, you understand my title.

Shawn Blanc says his iPad is now is laptop. Patrick Rhone of Minimal Mac agrees and even wrote his latest book all on an iPad.

To be clear, Blanc used to be a print designer and now writes full-time on his own site. I understand how it's possible to be a writer and use just an iPad for work.

For me, I'm a web designer and rely heavily on my laptop to be productive. When I travel, it's with 3 devices - my iPhone, my iPad and my MacBook Pro. While I am more senior at this point in my career and don't find myself doing as much heavy lifting in Photoshop and Illustrator, I still need to use them.

I would love to reach a point where I just need to carry my iPad, but I still work on the farm and I need a truck (see also here).

MacNN: Liquidmetal inventor says Apple 'years' away from casings

Dr. Ataka Peker, one of the inventors of the new class of metallic alloys known commercially as Liquidmetal and the founder of the company, says he believes Apple would have to spend "three to five years", and "$300 million to $500 million" to develop the alloys to the point where it could be used on a large scale, such as for an entire computing casing. He believes the company will continue to use Liquidmetal on a smaller scale until a "breakthrough product" comes along.

I wonder if Dr. Peker felt like Dr. Evil after he proclaimed Apple would have to spend, "Five hundred meellion dollars....."

Apple is only sitting on over $100 billion in the bank now.

And that 3-5 year window for development? Who says they're not already working on it?

It's now over 5 years since the introduction of the original iPhone and this is what RIM's response is?

Multitouch smartphone with on-screen keyboard. An email program that resembles something like those found in iOS and webOS and to round out the 'sneak peek' - the ability to stream video content from your phone to your TV. Like Apple TV.

My favorite Darwin quote comes to mind:

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

A 5-year response time is not being adaptable enough, RIM.

Android Police gives us A Definitive History of Android Version Adoption (via Daring Fireball):

That's right, it's not your imagination, Ice Cream Sandwich adoption is going very, very slowly. You'll notice update percentage gets progressively slower with each new version, but keep in mind the Android ecosystem is also getting progressively larger. Ice Cream Sandwich has to deal with many, many more models than Éclair did.

Updates are getting slower.

Eclair? Ice Cream Sandwich? *burp* Let's not forget the other Android versions: Cupcake, Donut, Gingerbread, Honeycomb.

It's obvious what's going on here. Android is getting fat.

It's time Android threw on some Richard Simmons Sweatin' To The Oldies and burn some calories! Stop inhaling every new phone Samsung and HTC come out with!

Android, you can't eat away your fragmentation, eating only makes the fragmentation worse.

Technology Review on how Android device makers are 'mutinying' and forking the code to their liking:

Google's Android device makers aren't happy. They're tired of making commodity devices that are merely vehicles for Google's Android OS, each indistinguishable from the other because of Google's rules about how Android can be implemented on them in order for them to qualify as "compatible."

These makers have seen the success of devices with custom OSes built on forked versions of the still kind-of open-source Android operating system, primarily Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, and they're itching to release their own.

Makes sense to me. Why would anyone want to be one of hundreds of different smartphones with the same OS?

The problem is, while device makers are solving the problem of differentiation in the marketplace by forking Android, they're requiring developers to make the extra effort to customize their applications to run on their custom 'flavor' of Android.

This Alan Kay quote keeps making more and more sense each day:

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Everyone is bugging out about the original 'Google Phone' presented in 2006 that have come to light in the current Google-Oracle trial.

Any gadget geek should recall Engadget posted pictures of the actual phone -- not the rendering -- back in 2007.

As I started reading this Co.Design post on the Nest thermostat, the first paragraph reminded how slippery the area of product attribution is:

When we first sat down with Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest and the inventor of the Nest Learning Thermostat, we asked him what made Steve Jobs so great. Fadell is, perhaps, one of the best-qualified people on the planet to answer. He's the one who first pitched the idea of an iTunes/iPod ecosystem. He's the one who Steve Jobs hired to bring the iPod to life.

Depending on what you're reading and where, you will hear different named given to an inventor, designer, creator or "father" of a product. With the iPod, sometimes it's Steve Jobs, other times it's Jony Ive and in this case it's Tony Fadell.

It's important to understand all these answers are correct and all these answers are wrong. Jobs, Ive and Fadell (among others) are all responsible for bringing the iPod to market. The iPod would not be the classic, easy-to-use, iconic, digital music it is if any one of those men were removed from the equation.