Showing posts tagged technology
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Leaving aside the work of Ada Lovelace - the 19th century countess who devised algorithms for Charles Babbage’s never-completed Analytical Engine - computer programming has existed as a human endeavor for less than one human lifetime: it has been only 68 years since Konrad Zuse unveiled his Z3 electro-mechanical computer in 1941, the first working general-purpose computer.
from Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel (via mundanity)
(Reblogged from mundanity)
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Three attributes of the typical hacker are laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall from Scripting on the Lido Deck

The Verge interviews

All of the interviews on The Verge in one convenient place. Brilliant.

(Source: theverge.com)

Sparrow takes flight: how a startup built the Gmail app Google couldn’t

Leca’s language is user interface design, and he communicates through software that seems inherently more comprehensible than what you’ve used before. Sparrow has caught on with more than 100,000 daily users because it’s simple, inspired, and most of all, practical. Sparrow for iPhone is no different, an inspired piece of software that’s near perfect.

This is the story of Sparrow.

Sparrow is one of my favorite pieces of software on the Mac (and now iPhone). A well written profile of the developer and the story behind the software.

Two decades of productivity: Vim's 20th anniversary

Ars Technica does a great writeup on Vim for it’s 20th anniversary:

The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.

Research, no motion: How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market. With Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone gaining market share, the Waterloo, Ontario, company finds itself in a battle for relevancy. The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end.

An excellent article outlining the rise and fall of one of RIM, makers of the venerable - and once highly sought after - BlackBerry.

Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than all the Macs it sold in 28 years

Holy shit…

Tumblr's 'highlighted posts' feature lets your work stand out, for a price | The Verge

If you were wondering what those silly banners were on the right side of your dashboard.

Neil Young on music and Steve Jobs: 'piracy is the new radio' | The Verge

Neil Young being interviewed on stage at the All Things D Dive Into Media conference:

On the distribution side, Young isn’t particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists, he’s more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality:

“It doesn’t affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. […] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around. […] That’s the radio. If you really want to hear it, let’s make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.”

He gets it.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan

Happy Birthday Carl. The world misses you, even if they don’t know it.

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OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
Steve Jobs (his last words)

Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, the President of the United States, and others react to Steve Jobs’ death

This is My Next has a great rundown of reactions to Steve Jobs’ death from various business and political leaders. I think this sums it up best:

…he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. -President Barack Obama

Name me another super nerd and business leader who would warrant a response from the President of the United States upon his death. There is no other.

It’s amazing to me; it was said that he continued working as CEO until he was physically unable, but I never realized it was quite literally true - he left just a little over one month ago.

I never knew Steve, but I will surely miss him. He quite literally changed the world.

Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

I was recently in Vancouver Canada for a week, considering moving there, when my friend Ariel Hyatt said, “You have to meet this amazing guy Tom Williams. He got hired by Apple when he was only 14. I think the company had to, like, legally adopt him to do it. He’s a go-getter like you. Plus his wife, Jessie is an awesome country artist.”

A nice little story about a 14 year old Canadian being hired by Apple on almost no real basis.

This is really fascinating. Amazon is truly embracing cloud computing, and changing the way a browser works. I was just thinking about predictive page loading the other day, and that’s just one of the intriguing features of Silk.

I hope that Silk makes its way to the traditional computer realm at some point, I’d love to try it out on my laptop. I feel like that could be something Opera would go for; perhaps an Amazon / Opera collaboration of sorts?

Amazon creates first viable non-iPad tablet by not copying the iPad

As usual, Ars Technica is wonderful:

One by one, Android vendors have failed by selling tablets the same size as the iPad, for the same or higher price, but without an app store that could rival Apple’s.

“I don’t think this is really an iPad competitor,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg tells Ars. “This isn’t an iPad-killer. The Kindle Fire can be very successful without killing anything.”

Amazon gets it, why does no one else?