via Comically Vintage

Google and Verizon Near Deal on Pay Tiers for Web

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.
Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.

Remember when everyone used to talk about how the Internet was a level playing field? Where a website by John Q. Public was as easily accessible as a website by Corporation X?
Well, it looks like those days are over.
Don’t be evil, right Google? Fuck you. And fuck you too, Verizon.

NPR: Light, Fuel-Driven Car Goes For 100 Mpg X Prize

Warehouse space was cheap, so the retired race car driver hired a team of winners from the world of racing and set up shop to build a car that gets the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. The team, called Edison2, entered its vehicle, dubbed the Very Light Car, in the X Prize competition, and it’s the last remaining four-seat sedan in the competition.

I have to agree with my father. I’m always amazed and excited, not by new technologies that emerge, but by the refining and perfecting of existing ones. Do we have to move beyond fossil fuels? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean stories like aren’t exciting.

I understand that when transitioning from any one technology to a new one, there’s bound to be ideas from the former that get absorbed into the latter. Sometimes these ideas are valid and logical and sometimes they’re intended to be temporary, a bandage, to be used until something better is thought of.

Sometimes we get comfortable with our bandages and never take them off. I won’t go through all the ones we’re familiar with in the computer world (folder, page, desktop, below-the-fold). To the defense of these bandages, they do a pretty decent job most of the time.

But some ideas just feel olde tyme-y.

Case-in-point: the page-turn effect.

In 2009, Microsoft filed a patent for the page-turn gesture in digital interfaces. It’s the same gesture Apple currently uses in their e-books on the iPad.

Then last week, Gizmodo posted a video from a UI firm demoing a page-turning Windows 7 interface for tablets.

People, we’re better than this. If we’re going to move beyond the printed page, we need to move beyond the printed page. It’s important we preserve certain aspects of the analogue world in computer technology. This is especially true for the multi-touch world we’re jumping into right now. The inertial scrolling on the iPhone and iPad aren’t just there for show, they make the interface.

Thirty years ago, we went from analogue to full, digital abstraction on the desktop computer. Now we’re at a point in computer evolution where we’re bringing the analogue back into the interface. We’re physically interacting with our machines beyond mouse clicks and keyboard taps. The danger in this is taking too many of the inefficiencies of the physical with us into digital.

Buttons that de-press, lists that rubber band when you reach the end of them, screens that smoothly transition between zoom levels – these are all welcome effects in digital. But with page-turning, there’s no value add when you shoehorn it into digital. It’s like giving cars a clip-clop horse trotting sound effect when you drive.

I actually hope Microsoft enforces their patent and makes Apple remove it from iBooks so that Apple can create a better gesture.

1951 Jaguar C-Type:

2004 Bugatti Veyron:

(featured on the end credits of Mad Men, S4 E1)

via Apple:
The Apple Battery Charger sets a new industry standard: It has the lowest standby power usage value – or “vampire draw” – of any similar charger on the market. That’s the energy most chargers continue to draw after their batteries are fully charged. But the Apple Battery Charger senses when its batteries are done charging and automatically reduces the amount of power it needs.

via MacRumors

Nokia continues to bleed like a stuck pig (multiple ‘pig’ references this week is unintentional).

This from Electronista:

Nokia shareholders began raising their voices late Thursday in a second call for company CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to resign. Investment groups such as Pictet Asset Management, analysts at Argus Research Corp., and others are frustrated once again that the executive has remained onboard despite the company losing about $77 billion in US stock market value since the mid-2007 debut of Apple’s iPhone, which also arrived just a year after Kallasvuo took the CEO position. Those involved have accused the company of sheltering its leader from the consequences of his actions, allowing him to stay no matter what happens elsewhere in the company.

Nokia was in bad shape last September when I wrote about them on the cover of Fast Company.
This is what happens leaders of company’s don’t heed to design.

Infoworld on Windows Phone 7:

But that was just the lipstick. Now, in Microsoft’s in-depth demo this week at the Mobile Beat conference, there’s no mistaking the big pig behind the gloss. Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is — I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess. A pig, in fact.

Sure, we won’t know the truth until full reviews start rolling in, but awkward UI? Unsophisticated design? It sounds like the Microsoft I know and love.