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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
…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.
This is where the print newspaper and the digital newspaper are colliding. The traditional once-a-day cycle allows more time for reporting and thoughtful discussion about how a story should be framed. What happened in this case is that normal news reporting, in which a story changes in content, tone and emphasis as more is learned, played out in front of the whole world, instead of in the newsroom before publication. In the process, Kennedy took an unfair hit.
ForkBombr reader John H. sent me this link to CNet’s product page for the 400Mhz Graphite iMac G3. Check out the manufacturer’s description:
iMac is, quite simply, an outrageously attractive, surprisingly affordable, and extraordinarily easy-to-set-up-and-use system. It comes fully loaded, but brings along none of the hassle you might associate with the word “computer”. Get ready for the excitement of swift, simple Internet access - your passport to a world of information. And the thrill of playing a game so richly detailed you actually feel like you are in another world. Then consider the fact that iMac delivers significantly more power than you would expect from a computer at such a great price. Whether you are a first-time computer user or a highly experienced one, iMac - with its powerful, state-of-the-art (and beyond) features and simplicity of setup and operation - is the ideal choice. It will let you do the things you want to do with a computer, and many things you may only have dreamt about.
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.
When Apple announced the revamped MacBook Pro line in the fall, arguably the biggest issues people complained about was the glossy display.
Apple argues that many users prefer glossy - for good reasons. The colors are richer, the blacks are darker, and the screen looks sharper.
But as will all good debates, the other side - the matte camp - has some very good points as well. Matte displays show colors closer to how they are in real life. The also look cleaner, since there’s no glass to smudge. Then of course, there’s the age-old issue of glare* - glossy displays have a nasty habit of showing awful reflections.
Douglas Bowman, on the new buttons inside Gmail and Google Reader:
The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior.
It’s a lengthy read, but it provides a fascinating look into the care these guys put into simple buttons.
I’ve been a .Mac/MobileMe customer for 6 years… all the way back when Homepage was the most bad-ass thing I’d ever used. In fact, Homepage is what brought me into the .Mac fold. Since then, a lot has changed with the service - what I need out of it. For years, I used Homepage and Backup - that was it. The online portion - email and contacts - was nice to have, but I didn’t rely on it. In addition, I was a one-Mac man: my trusty old Titanium PowerBook was my only machine.
