512 Pixels

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.

Adobe UI Gripes automatically comes to mind.

Oregon Trail is coming to the iPhone.

AppleMatters:

Every man-hour of a top designer, programmer or designer spent on the Mac is an hour they don’t have to spend on what really matters at Apple. This doesn’t mean that Macs are getting worse, that argument would be difficult to make, but Macs aren’t improving at the rate Mac users have come to expect. Don’t expect that trend to change. While you’re wishing for a new mini or a “true” Mac netbook Apple is working on the tricky question of resource allocation. For Mac fans, the truth is the best allocation of Apple’s resources isn’t the Mac.

It makes me sad to think that this might be true… if not now, one day.

Their bit on the Xserve made me laugh, though:

Word is that an Xserve upgrade is coming the next time someone buys one. Apple doesn’t advertise this but Steve builds every Xserve personally as a hobby. He finds it relaxing. So maybe if you order an Xserve today it will get shipped to you with the i7 Core processor from Intel. Just kidding, the Xserve and the Mac Pro have been updated together in the past so that is probably the case this time.

Time Magazine:

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can’t possibly stand.

[…]

This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It’s also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME’s nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.

The biggest hurdle of pay-for-content online journalism is that we’ve all been spoiled by free news online since the 1990s.

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.

My favorite? The iBook and the vacuum tube.

Excellent shots over at boston.com, but they are real hard to look at when you realize how many people have died or (at the least) have lost everything they owned.

The Consumerist has posted a great chart to help CEOs deal with the new $500k/year price cap put in place for companies receiving funds from the Obama administration:

Did you know anyone can drive a car? It’s true! All you need is a license.

Brilliant stuff.

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!

They’re not going anywhere, which is good. As one of those 120,000 users, I find their service far better than Google’s new one.

Forbes ranked Memphis the #2 most miserable city in the nation:

Sandwiched between Stockton and Chicago is Memphis, Tenn. The home of FedEx has an incredibly high rate of violent crimes, with only Detroit faring worse. The 1,218 violent crimes per 100,000 residents is more than twice the rate in the New York City metro area. The city’s sales tax and rate of government employees committing crimes also fall within the 10 highest in the U.S. Pro sports has been a mess in Memphis in recent years as well. The city’s lone major franchise, the Memphis Grizzlies, has lost 74% of its games during the past three years, the worst in the NBA.

Ouch.

Macworld’s Rob Griffith, on his original 23-inch Apple Cinema Display ( the “Aqua” one), which just turned 6 years old:

The plastic case itself is fine, not showing any scratches at all. When I bought the monitor, it had one dead pixel (thankfully, in an out-of-the-way location and one that only shows on black backgrounds), and as of today, that’s still the only dead pixel.

The monitor’s brightness seems to be right where it was when new, too—I leave the brightness slider in the middle of the range, and I find that makes the display more than bright enough for my eyes.

So given the monitor is still going strong after nearly 20,000 hours of use (and three moves to new homes), I think it’s been well worth the cost. Looked at one way, the monitor has cost me about 11 cents per hour of use over six years, which seems a very reasonable price to pay.

I love those displays.

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.

[…]

For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail contacts and Google Calendar events onto your phone. Sync uses push technology, which means that any changes you make to your calendar or contacts from the browser or phone will be reflected on your device within minutes. For phones that support SyncML, the tool will allow you to get your Gmail contacts onto your phone. For all of these devices, synchronization happens automatically over the air, without having to manually sync your phone. The connection is always on, which means your information is always up-to-date, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Here’s how to set it up on an iPhone or iPod Touch - but there are a few known issues.

This shouldn’t hurt companies like Spanning Sync, (as Google Sync just works Google Cloud <–> Mobile Devices) but Google Sync only pushes contacts to the phone (not back to the Cloud) so NuevaSync still seems to be a better option for now. but NeuvaSync’s team may be drinking.

Update: I set it up on my iPhone, and the syncing seems fast and accurate, but it does not support multiple calendars - all my events are lumped into one calendar. Not cool.

Update 2: Nevermind. This page explains how to set it up. I don’t understand why the service doesn’t automatically sync all calendars, though.

Update 3: I’m back with NuevaSync… I need contacts to sync both ways. Update 4: After several emails stating that Google Sync syncs contacts both ways, I tried it again after lunch, and behold, c ontacts do sync both ways. Sort of. It’s not perfect - Google’s Cloud overwrites the device if there’s a difference. NuevaSync still seems to be the best choice.

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.

What we’re trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.

As expensive as print media is (paper, ink, delivery trucks, etc…), I think paper newspapers will go away, especially in a world where the bottom line always wins. However, I don’t think it will be any time soon - people like the feel of a paper or a magazine.