Kyle Baxter on building products to last:
The issue is that the computing industry, and especially the mobile computing industry, are developing very quickly, so hardware and software that’s as good as it gets today simply won’t be in a year’s time.
Good point.
Dilbert.
Karen Haslam:
Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak has spoken out about his recent visit to the founder of MegaUpload, who is currently under house arrest. Woz accused the US government of a “poorly thought out attempt to extradite” MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom, with prosecutors “attempting to take advantage of loopholes.”
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I’ll admit it, I laughed.
A good bit of humor on a Monday. I especially like the “Find My Socks” feature.
Marketing Land:
After seeing yet another “hands-on” review of the Microsoft Surface tablet, I thought it would be interesting to shed more light on what exactly the journalists who assembled in Hollywood this week for the Surface launch event actually got to do with the tablets. In short, not a lot. Come along as I explain the hands-off reality of what I saw.
Nice to see someone calling a spade a spade. No matter what you’ve read, none of the assembled media got any real “hands on” with the Surface.
Our Mac and iOS support has now become so mainstream that we realized we just don’t need to keep Mac news on its own blog, so we won’t be posting here any longer.
Om Malik:
Google is very likely to launch a cloud services platform at its annual developer conference, Google I/O next week in San Francisco. It was one of the topics of discussion in the hallways of our Structure 2012 conference. We have since confirmed with multiple sources who are familiar with Google’s plans which include a more comprehensive offering that its current app engine and storage offerings.
This will be very interesting.
Many thanks to Sidecar.me for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
Sidecar re-imagines the traditional phone call for your smartphone.
Sidecar lets you call and share:
See What I See Video: Share amazing real-time videos.
Photos: Snap brilliant pictures, or share photos from the phone’s gallery.
Locations: See where you are in relation to others, and share locations.
Contact: Information: Pass along and integrate contacts from their phone’s address book.
Whisper Text: Send a private text message to another Sidecar user during a call.
And the price is unbeatable:
Sidecar users can call each other anywhere in the world for free
Sidecar users can call regular phones numbers in the US or Canada for free over Wi-Fi.
Download the app for free in the App Store:
MG Siegler dissects Gizmodo’s sycophantic stance towards Microsoft and the Surface tablet.
Google has added the ability for developers to respond to user reviews on their Google Play download service – a feature iOS devs have long dreamed of for the App Store.
The app, dubbed paycardreader, will skim card numbers and expiry dates, along with transactions and merchant IDs, and was successfully tested against a German PayPass Mastercard.
Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and friend of Steve Jobs, just bought Hawaii’s sixth largest island.
Wired:
A team of engineers and two crazy drivers are preparing for a history-making challenge drawn from the daydreams of every child who’s ever crisscrossed his parents’ living room with plastic race tracks: building, and racing on, a human-scale Hot Wheels double loop track, just like the one you had when you were a kid. The “Hot Wheels Double Loop Dare” is set to take place at this month’s Summer X-Games in Los Angeles.Drivers Tanner Foust and Greg Tracey will attempt to race through a 60-foot vertical loop modeled after the new Double Dare Snare Hot Wheels toy, in what would be the first time in history two cars mounted a vertical loop at once.
I have found memories of playing with this track as a kid so I’m looking forward to this stunt. But, just like the Niagara Falls tightrope walker, they’ve had to remove some of the element of danger by using a safety net in case the cars can’t complete the loop. Chickens.
GM Authority:
Last week, Apple announced a host of planned updates to the Siri personal assistant service found in company’s iPhone smartphone and iPad tablet (Siri integration is coming to iPad in the fall). One of those updates, called “eyes-free”, allows an iPhone or iPad user to use Siri without picking up or looking at the device to initiate the feature, which can be used to schedule a meeting, send a text message, add a reminder, find a local restaurant, check sports scores, and perform a myriad of other tasks — all using natural-language voice commands.Today, GM Authority has learned that The General will soon introduce Siri eyes-free integration in its vehicles and the first ones to get the integration will be the Chevrolet Spark and Sonic. While the automaker’s media representatives didn’t provide specific timing details, we were told that we should expect an announcement within the next 12 months.
Jim and Dan continue their conversation about the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. They also offer perspective on Microsoft’s Surface announcement, purchasing music, page views, proper attribution, guitars, and more.Sponsored by Harvest, and Squarespace.
OWC’s blog shows a Retina Display-equipped MacBook Pro driving three external monitors, plus its own – a ton of real estate off a single laptop.
The Surface tablet isn’t the first Microsoft product to be called Surface. But why recycle the name?
Staffers for Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, met with Google officials on Monday to discuss privacy issues related to the camera-equipped planes. They plan to meet with Apple on Friday.
Parislemon:
I’m just now catching up on the news about the new Microsoft Surface. Reactions seem mixed, tilting slightly positive or at least hopeful. People seem to want to believe Microsoft can pull this off and that’s understandable — competition is good, and right now, the iPad has no competition. My hunch is that whatever tablet Google announces shortly will be more of a Kindle Fire competitor than an iPad competitor. This Surface is a full-on iPad competitor.On the surface — see what I did there? — the thing seems compelling. It’s a tablet that runs Windows, and Office, and has a keyboard. There’s no denying that the keyboard/cover hybrid is a smart thing to try.Two years ago, I think this thing would have been pretty competitive. Today? Color me very skeptical.
Everyone, especially the tech media, should be skeptical about this tablet. Microsoft? Shut up and ship.
MG Siegler:
Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.
I am glad that I don’t make my money based on pageviews. I say what I want, when I want because I believe it to be true. That’s it.
io9:
Check out this elegant infographic by Invader Xan, molecular astrophysicist and master of ceremonies at astronomy blog Supernova Condensate. Here, silhouetted in colors that correspond to their present state of operation, you’ll find twenty iconic spaceships and space stations situated beneath the only fictional spacecraft of the bunch: the U.S.S. Enterprise.What’s great about this image is that all the spacecraft have been drawn to scale. This gives you a real sense of perspective.
I love that he has listed the Starship Enterprise as “in development”.
This is the first video I’ve seen online, so I thought I’d post it. I was playing an EVH Wolfgang guitar through an Avid Eleven Rack. I was very pleased with the tone from the Eleven Rack. […]
Michael Fey was kind enough to post some pics from the beard WWDC party last week.
They are late to their own gigs and often disappoint when they do show up.
With Microsoft news today, I thought we could take a look back at this gem. […]
Sidecar re-imagines the traditional phone call for your smartphone.
Sidecar lets you call and share:
See What I See Video: Share amazing real-time videos.
Photos: Snap brilliant pictures, or share photos from the phone’s gallery.
Locations: See where you are in relation to others, and share locations.
Contact: Information: Pass along and integrate contacts from their phone’s address book.
Whisper Text: Send a private text message to another Sidecar user during a call.
And the price is unbeatable:
Sidecar users can call each other anywhere in the world for free
Sidecar users can call regular phones numbers in the US or Canada for free over Wi-Fi.
Download the app for free in the App Store:
This is hilarious. Joseph Rooks made a Tumblr blog where people can download my beard and put it on other people.
Much respect Joseph.
Linux progenitor Linus Torvalds has strong words of condemnation for Nvidia’s support (or lack thereof) for Linux with its “Optimus” GPU switching technology.