Thirty-one.
That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.
Category: General Tech
‘Fiddling’
I wrote a guest post over at Frictionless, and I think you might enjoy it:
Many will say that friction is bad, and that we must do everything we can to eliminate it from our workflows, our setups and our lives.
Of course, fiddling for fiddling’s sake is bad. It introduces unjustified friction.
But sometimes, the friction is worth it. If the end result was worth it.
The Pinboard Cloud
At the start of the year I decided move Pinboard from the rented servers it was running onto my own hardware. I’ve written before about the tradeoffs of various hosting strategies and my reasons for avoiding virtual servers, so I won’t repeat my rationale here. But I’d like to stress that nothing about these posts is prescriptive. In fact, I have no idea what I’m doing. I do it, I write it up, and then wisdom pours down from the Internet.
Speaking of NSFW Videos...
The video for Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild” is epic.
Darth L. Jackson
What if Samuel L. Jackson had voiced Darth Vader?
(NSFW language, as you’d imagine.)
In Which Ben Brooks Prepares for the Zombie Apocalypse
The Phantom Vibrate
Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld:
It turns out that the phantom cellphone vibration syndrome is fairly common. Ask around. See if you can find someone who believed the smartphone in their pocket was vibrating but found when they checked, there was nothing new. No call. No text.
There’s a growing body of research on phantom vibrations and many of the other problems associated with technology obsession, all of which is explored by Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, in his new book, iDisorder.
HP To Lay Off 27,000
Earlier last week, rumors hinted that the HP would lay off 10,000 to 15,000 employees, but today the company revealed that 27,000 of HP’s 349,600 employees will be cut by the end of 2014. According to Bloomberg, Hewlett-Packard CFO Cathie Lesjak said no unit of the company will be spared cuts, but the enterprise services group will take the hardest hit.
It’s a post-PC world…
‘Click Vegetables’
As pointed out by rabbis and attendees, the ultra-Orthodox community has weathered a similar storm before. There was a generation that adopted TV with little question, before it was recognized as a potential evil. The rabbis convened, and decided that it was a detriment, and almost any Hasid worth his salt these days doesn’t even own a TV.
The hope is that the rally this weekend could spark a similar shift, encouraging the faithful to shun the internet except when entirely necessary. But that’s really the whole problem: there’s no necessity to TV, but the internet is already considered much more than a modern convenience. It’s needed for work, to pay bills, to communicate, and to look up knowledge that someday won’t even be found in paper alternatives. Can it be truly avoided?
Get Frictionless
To really see what Aaron is up to, check out the manifesto. It’s pretty awesome.
The Story Behind Toy Story 2’s Deletion
After the deletion and restoration of Toy Story 2, the team was likely hoping for an uneventful path to release, but it was not to be.
In the Christmas of ’98, after the release of A Bug’s Life and the promotional tour was done, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and legendary story man Joe Ranft all came to the production team to take a look at Toy Story 2.