September 2011
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If you ever want to fall off the grid and divorce yourself from your digital life, change your name to Michael Jackson.
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Fingerprinting Images using Digital Camera Noise →
Every digital picture you snap includes some pixels of noise. Apparently, these elements are unique to your camera and could be used to trace a shot of yours. 33 Bits goes into detail:
First, for each image, a denoising filter is applied, and the denoised image is subtracted from the original to leave only the noise. Next, the noise is averaged across all the reference images — this way the...
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Apotheker's Exit Is Cheaper Than Expected For HP... →
chartier:
Appalling. His yearly salary was $1.2 million. Who on earth thinks it’s a good idea to promise someone a gift of nearly 30x their annual salary if they do nothing but fundamentally screw up the company and get fired in just 11 months?
“The Producers” for 2011.
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“What a day for Android. It was just pushed behind the scenes as the thing that...”
– MG Siegler
Couple this with the earlier news that 2/3rd’s of Google’s mobile search is from iOS devices and we have quite a tangled web.
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Questions about Amazon's Silk browser and the...
Will websites that run or partially live within Amazon Web Services see a performance boost in Silk? For example, Tumblr images live in Amazon’s S3. I’d guess that those images will load like lighting on the Kindle Fire, as Amazon’s existing transfer rates between S3 images and EC2 instances are quick and free. Update: In minute three of this video the team implies that AWS...
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Amazon is Now the 2nd Tablet Company
Android had one thing going for it in the mass market: price. And often, they didn’t even had that edge. Sales have been atrocious, nothing has stuck, and the iPad is running wild.
Enter Amazon who now has a tablet for $200 and Kindle’s starting at $79 fueling their funnel. The Kindle is their iPod, a perfect entry product: price wise and offer wise. Do not underestimate a reputable...
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There's a New $79 Kindle →
$79. Stunning. This is impulse buy territory for many people I know weighing their gadget options.
This will sell ridiculously this Holiday season and lay a nice foundation for Amazon to start putting some muscle behind Kindle Singles and other exclusives. Which sounds like the plan…
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“Please withdraw the free-update offer. We will not hold you to it.”
– Marco Arment’s open letter to TextMate2 developer Allen Odgaard (via chartier)
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“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
– Jeff Mangum’s response to an audience member who asked if he had ever played the Neutral Milk Hotel video game that involves Mangum going back in time and killing Hitler at a Baltimore show last night. (via pitchfork)
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“The study rated every U.S. county for their manufacturers’ exposure to...”
– [A new study by David Autor, Gordon Hanson, and David Dorn](a new study from David Autor, Gordon Hanson, and David Dorn) confirms common sense.
It’s a vicious feedback loop: we demand WalMart prices, which puts pressure on corporations to outsource US jobs to cheaper regions, cutting our own...
British Documentary Presents Game Footage as "IRA... →
Rock, Paper, Shotgun writes:
Hey, everyone, please join in with the rest of the internet and laugh at ITV. They’ve only gone and made a documentary about Gadaffi’s links with the IRA, and then used footage from Arma II to illustrate it. “IRA Film 1988″ it says over a dodgy Frapsing of Arma II. No, they actually did that.
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“The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to...”
– Scott Jenson, Frog Design’s creative director.
He’s onto something, he just doesn’t know it: we aren’t going to go to as many websites as we once did. A handful will be gateways to the larger web. This is the threat Google knows too well.
For average users, typing a...
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“Have a conversation with me about the ‘73 Packers.”
– My former boss, Gary Stein, reacts to iPhone voice control rumors by wondering when we’ll begin casually conversing with our technology.
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By Pageviews, Tumblr is Bigger than Wikipedia →
Staggering. But unless you’re in the CPM business (and thank god they’re not) it’s timespent that matters. They’re good there, too. (Via TechCrunch)
transpondster asked: One attribute of tumblr that you don't mention is its emphasis on 'interests' versus 'relationships' (FB) or 'celebrity' (twitter). Relationships matter, a lot. But interests evolve and leap and grow and change, and tumblr lets you move with those changes, like a really good, unpredictable dance partner who's with you wherever you go, whatever you do. FB is...
UX people take note: A circle with clothes tumble-drying inside is a much more relevant metaphor than an hour glass.
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“At the heart of what we are doing is our belief that Yahoo!’s core strengths are...”
– From an all-hands email from Yahoo chairmen Roy Bostock, Jerry Yang, and David Filo.
This does not bode well. If Yang, Bostock, and Filo intend to build upon these strengths, they’re going to fall prey to Loyal Customer Myopia. Again.
How to Price a Cocktail or Why Your Manhattan is... →
Michael Neff, bartender at Ward III, explains the economics. (BTW, I’ve had Neff’s Manhattan and it’s worth $12)
“If stung by another man’s bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but...”
– A medieval Irish law code, as cited by David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber feels the Irish codes are so ridiculous, “one has to assume they were simply jokes.”
I just sent this book to my Kindle for an upcoming pan-Atlantic flight. Can’t wait. Years ago,...
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“I insisted we do the music the way it was remembered instead of the way it was.”
– George Leonard, of Sha Na Na, on the band’s Woodstock performance.
The Atlantic has a very nice piece on music nostalgia.
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On Facebook Timeline: Teaching Data to Speak...
Yesterday, Facebook unveiled their new “Timeline” design. Largely imagined by Sam Lessin and Nicholas Feltron, the design coaxes personal actions recorded by Facebook into a humane, emotional, interface for a given history1. Users can delve into their content not as images, notes, and actions, but in a timeline interface that is more natural for humans.
After exploring the interface...
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Modern dilemma: trying to deduce what email made Gmail think you’d be in the market for piano movers.
Chris Ware made an iPad app called "Touch... →
Of course he did.
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CERN Records Particles Moving Faster than Light →
Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics centre on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy.
“We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them,” he...
What’re the odds that future history books will use the Leno/Conan debacle as a lens to examine youth unemployment and rising retirement ages during the Great Recession?
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“U.S. antitrust enforcers are investigating whether Google Inc. illegally...”
– The FTC is investigating crimes against Microsoft. Strange days. (Via Businessweek)
Apple Stock Price Is Too High for Dow Industrials →
Despite being the #2 company by market cap, you won’t find Apple in the DJIA. Adding it now would effectively break the index.
While an impressive Apple tidbit, this news is really more an indictment of the Dow than anything else. Dow companies are ranked by stock price not market value. In a world where companies spilt, buy back, and issue new shares this is a vast oversite.
The...
“In Greek mythology Procrustes or “the stretcher [who hammers out the...”
– Procrustean is my new favorite world. If you’re in a workplace that deals with design, development, or media you could use “Procrustean” 15 times a day, easy. (Via Wikipedia)
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