posts

The Macalope, on new Windows 7 tablets:

The Macalope is constantly amazed by how many of these analysts whose opinions we’re supposed to take seriously have Websites that betray their ’90s thinking. Of course people will pick the Microsoft tablet! Compatibility! A proven market leader! That Chumbawamba song will never go out of style!

Will some IT shops buy these things? Sure. Probably. A lot of them still really hate their users. But a slightly faster crappy solution is still a crappy solution.

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Bruce Bower:

Depression may have an analytical upside. People hospitalized for this mood disorder display a flair for making good choices when many options must be considered one at a time, a new study finds.

Depression may prompt an analytical thinking style suited to solving sequential problems, such as deciding when to stop a house hunt and purchase a property or when to stop playing the field and marry a suitor, say psychologist Bettina von Helversen of the University of Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues.

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Myke Hurley:

What I am enjoying about Grandview is the way that it’s getting me to concentrate on what I am currently writing. I know there is a web browser and a Twitter client behind these HUGE words, but I can’t see them. I mainly get distracted because I see a new tweet pop up or notice a tab I have yet to fully investigate and not having that visual distraction is quite useful to me.

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Ben Brooks:

Microsoft should be searching for a new CEO right now. The Skype acquisition damage can still be mitigated if the proper people are put in place to immediately leverage the Skype brand.

[…]

If Microsoft wants a chance and long term survivorship they need to make themselves appealing to young stars. You can’t appeal to this young crop of talent unless you offer compelling products. More and more job selection for the elite talent is less about money and more about job satisfaction. Microsoft’s best bet here is to start acquiring fresh young companies and keeping the talent that comes with it.

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I can’t wait for this film to come out this summer.

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This is great stuff from a guy who just published a book.

A book, for Pete’s sake!

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“Trojan Kitty,” on blogging and journalism:

So, let’s get this out of the way: a blog is something between a personal diary and a newspaper. It’s, entirely incidentally, published online, as it’s the cheapest publishing mass media available. And it allows anyone to join. That’s good in some aspects, but it also lets too much noise in. There is no filter or distinction between a diary and a newspaper online. And people who have online newspapers get confused, and treat their newspaper as an online diary, and launch into personal fights with colleagues from their company and other media.

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I get emails pretty often about how I added the “Send to Instapaper” link next to the date on single post pages here on Forkbombr.

First of all, there is a great Wordpress plugin named Instapaper Read Later Links that will add a “Read Later” button to posts. This button’s placement can be adjusted via CSS fairly easily.

However, I couldn’t find a place where the button didn’t seem massively out of place with Forkbombr’s design. After digging through Marco Arment’s documentation for publishers and asking around a bit, I got the text links working.

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Fraser Speirs, on replacing MacBooks with iPads in the classroom:

When looking at the iPad, it’s important to break out of the old mindsets. Replacing a cart full of laptops with a cart full of iPads will deliver a worse solution than the laptops. Here’s why:

Let’s call this model “thin slicing”, where each pupil gets to use an iPad for an hour or two a week. That’s how we used to share desktop computers and, with desktops and their multi-user operating systems, that was easy because each user’s files and settings were separated from every other user’s files and settings by the login system.

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Apple sent an engineer; Google sent a lobbyist.

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In a rare interview with the New York Times:

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

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