Category: General Tech

Facebook’s new Terms of Agreement include this little jewel:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

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Apple’s MobileMe service has several limitations, but one got removed this week: iDisk file sharing:

We’re pleased to announce that you can now use your MobileMe iDisk to share files with others simply and easily. Instead of attaching a large document to an email and hoping it’s not too big to be received, you can place the file in your iDisk and use the new Share File command in the iDisk web app. It lets you send your friends, family, or colleagues a link they can click to download the file directly. You can password protect the link if you choose to and even set how long it will be available.

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Safari140 - a Safari plugin that adds simple tweeting to Apple’s browser - was released last night. It’s activated using Control+T and automatically fills in the title of the current page and a shortened URL, using the is.gd service.

After using it this morning, I do like how much smoother SAfari140 makess sharing a link, but I don’t see this replacing Twitterrific on my Macs. Go check it out - the price is right, at least - $0.

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Macworld looks at what is in store* for Microsoft Store customers:

The store will have six different entrances: Starter, Basic, Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. While all six doors will lead into the same store, the Ultimate door requires a fee of US$100 for no apparent reason.

The whole list had me laughing.

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*Haha. Puns are awesome. Right?

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Ars Technica on a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study:

Overall, Pew observes that Twitter users engage news and technology at roughly the same rates as everyone else, “but the ways in which they use the technology—to communicate, gather and share information—reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction.”

No big surprise here.

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The boys and girls on the Adobe “Adobe Installation and Licensing” team have started a blog:

In addition, we want to hear back from the Adobe community about your out of box experience. We’re under no delusion that the world of installers, updaters and licensing is just peachy. Some of you experience problems installing or updating Adobe software, particularly in enterprise environments. Likewise we have a few problems with the licensing technology for some customers. We want to hear about the problems you face and, hopefully, help to solve them. In addition, the information we get from you all through this blog will help us prioritize your needs so that we address the most important issues first, so please do respond in comments to the posts. We’ll do our best to keep up with you.

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Oregon Trail is coming to the iPhone.

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A friend of mine tweeted about “ Radiology Art” today. Here’s a bit from their “About” section:

Scans are acquired as DICOM images using a GE CT scanner, then processed in Osirix software on a Macintosh iMac computer. Colors are assigned based on the varying densities of materials present throughout the object. Depending on the spread of densities within a particular subject, black or white backgrounds are chosen. Images are further processed in Adobe Photoshop for proper contrast and balance.

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From Nuevasync’s blog:

We wanted to develop really solid sync server software and Google was picked as a data source back in 2007 when work began on our ‘demo’ service. Google had a decent calendar application and a usable API. The plan was to attract a few hundred users and fix any bugs they revealed in the code. There are 120,000 users today so we over-achieved a little on the plan but we’ve also fixed some very obscure bugs!

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As soon as I do my bring write-up of using Google to replace MobileMe, Google goes and makes things a whole lot easier:

Today, we’re offering more people easy access to their information on the go with two-way calendar and contacts sync for iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, and two-way contacts sync for mobile devices that support SyncML. This will be a particularly handy improvement for people who regularly use Google tools, like corporate employees, university students, and busy families.

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Alley Insider:

…we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

[…]

Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues and also, not everyone loves the Kindle.

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Wired has an interview with Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Here’s some of what she has to say:

Our society right now is filled with lovely distractions — we have so much portable escapism and mediated fantasy — but that’s just one issue. The other is interruption — multitasking, the fragmentation of thought and time. We’re living in highly interrupted ways. Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. Of course that’s what we have to do to live in this complicated world. […] In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn’t have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we’re doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

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