Matt Burns, TechCrunch:
The $999 11-inch MacBook Air is Apple’s low-end device. Like the Surface RT, it offers just enough power to get by and nothing more. I wouldn’t recommend the base Air model for anyone that wants to venture outside of iPhoto or the web browser. It’s not a work machine; the $999 MacBook Air is a Facebook machine.
It’s just as pathetically easy to goad the rest of the tech press into publishing utter bullshit. This isn’t unique to games journalism at all.
How many do you remember?
In 2003, the agency’s investment arm, DARPA, tapped the non-profit research institute SRI International to lead a five-year, 500-person effort to build a virtual assistant, one the government hoped might yield software to help military commanders with both information overload and office chores. Although it wasn’t the project’s mission, this helper, the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO, would ultimately provide the inspiration and model for Siri.
Lots of stuff you might not know about Siri’s origins in this Huffington Post piece.
How bad does your operating system suck when people have to pay this much just to get rid of it?
Agreed.
Michael Homnick compares WordPress, Blogger, Jux, Tumblr and Posterous Spaces.
Twelve South’s newest creation is the PlugBug World, a new version of their dual charging adapter for MacBook power supplies. It’s priced at $45.
PlugBug replaces the MacBook’s power plug or extended power cord. The red attachment snaps into place and provides an additional USB port powered with 2.1 amps to provide a way to charge your iPhone, iPad or other device without wasting another power port or USB plug on your Mac.
The PlugBug World comes with plugs to fit power outlets around the world. It can operate independently of the MacBook power adapter as well, so if you just need to top off the battery on your iOS device, you can plug the PlugBug World in and juice up.
This summer, on June 1-2, 2013, citizens in cities across the Nation will join together to improve their communities and governments as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.
Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans.
That’s a pretty cool idea. Hopefully something good will come of it.
hitting cities like Hershey, Pennsylvania; Chicago; Milwaukee; Boston; Vancouver; Salt Lake City; and Denver. The band will also return to Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the first time in decades.
Halifax? Hey Jim!
Pixelmator is a great image editing app and all that I use on my Mac.
It’s a Mid-Side stereo microphone for iOS devices.
Capo can now import songs from apps like Dropbox. Great app.
Jeff Sonderman, Poynter:
The [National Labor Relations Board] is standing up for the rights of workers to discuss wages and working conditions. The legal term is “concerted activity” — when workers take action to collectively discuss their employment terms — and the board says that’s just as protected on social media as it is in the company break room.
What’s not protected, as far as the National Labor Relations Board is concerned, is acting like an idiot. A few shining examples are included in the Poynter piece.
Brendan Sinclair, Gamesindustry.biz:
“We are in the peak of [violence in entertainment],” [consumer safety advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph] Nader said. “Television program violence? Unbelievable. Video game violence? Unprecedented.” He added, “I’m not saying he wants to censor this, I think he should sensitize people that they should protect their children family by family from these kinds of electronic child molesters.”
Sorry to see Nader adopting a ridiculous Jack Thompson-level of rhetoric on this issue.
iOS continues to lead as the top selling smartphone platform sold in the U.S, with 51.2% of market sales for the 12 week period ending December 23rd, 2012, according to data released today by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
Interesting to note that Android “remained stable” year over year, with Windows a very distant third.
The same company also says iPhone is big in Japan, taking two-thirds of the smartphone market.
Peter Zigich is back with more ideas for what a new Mac Pro might look like (we posted some previous work of his last September). I don’t think his ARM processor theory holds water – at least for a while – but I like the idea of a something as powerful as a Mac Pro in a less unwieldy box.
Jony Ive is a designer, he’s not an administrator. This guy is a grade A moron. Even he says, “It’s unclear whether Ive has the skills to manage Apple.”
The similarity in our names make me even angrier. Forbes is a complete fucking joke with shit like this.
Summarized: Wall Street investors are nervous about Apple because of its push into new markets, its complex supply chain and its coverage by analysts who consistently have their heads up their asses.
Dawson College ought to be ashamed of themselves. They’re punishing a guy who did exactly the right thing. He’s already gotten job and scholarship offers, and the school looks like a bunch of bumbling idiots.
Good for Andrew Kim for making an opportunity for himself. Hopefully his talents won’t be wasted at Microsoft.
More mobile competition is good.
Julianne Pepitone for CNN Money:
“These are not minor — these are aggressive changes,” said Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s senior director of communications. “This is a fundamental shift in our business operations.”
Imangi Studios had a good weekend. The company said on Monday that its new app, Temple Run 2, was downloaded more than 20 million times in its first weekend on the App Store.
In addition to the huge downloads, Imangi said Temple Run 2 accumulated over 210 million sessions, which equals a combined time of 1,775 years of gameplay. So, people are not only downloading the game, they are playing it as well.
The original version of Temple Run was downloaded more than 170 million times in the various places it was available.
Imangi describes the game like this:
Featuring high-res graphics, new obstacles, abilities, player powers, and achievements, Temple Run 2 takes place in an entirely new and infinitely more challenging world filled with curvy roads, hills and valleys, where players must fly down zip lines and speed along in mine carts to get away from the temple dwellers and retain control of the idol.
You can download Temple Run 2 from the App Store.
The message is, why deal with Blackberry and iPhone when you can be more productive with a Galaxy series phone?
Chris Breen at Macworld offers some helpful advice for parents looking to limit their kids’ iOS device use, including configuring your AirPort router to limit network access specifically to those devices during certain hours.
While his instructions are specific to AirPort devices, you can do the same with other routers as well – my Comcast cable modem’s web interface does the same thing.
Marcus Wohlsen, Wired:
Does anyone know what news Qualcomm announced at CES this year? What products it unveiled? No? But you do know that the chipmaker put Big Bird onstage. And Steve Ballmer.
Wohlsen counts Qualcomm’s keynote address at CES as one of the worst ever. Apple made the list, too. Check it out and let us know if you agree.
Ben Fritz, LA Times: The U.S. operations of iconic but long-troubled video game maker Atari have filed for bankruptcy in an effort to break free from their debt-laden French parent.
Atari was acquired by French video game maker Infogrames in 2003, which later changed its name to Atari S.A. In recent years, the U.S. part of the business has rebuilt itself as a Web and mobile game publisher, experimenting with ad-supported models and limited partnerships—including short-term campaigns with new non Gamstop betting sites—that never quite scaled. A complex relationship with the parent company in France and London financiers has kept Atari’s U.S. operations from growing more quickly, Fritz reports. The bankruptcy move would unshackle the U.S. organization from its European counterpart and its debt.
For some of us, writing is hard. Theo Sanderson has decided that it’s not quite hard enough and has created the “Up-Goer Five” text editor.
The name comes from a xkcd cartoon about a diagram of the Saturn V Rocket but explained using only the “ten hundred” words English speakers use most – thus, “The Up-Goer Five”.
Sanderson’s text editor lets you write about a topic of your choosing but it alerts you when you use “non-permitted words” in the applet’s text field.
Give it a try – Sanderson says it gave him “increased clarity” in his writing. It just made me even more frustrated with the writing process.
While Americans worry about things like “Why are we here?” and “What is the nature of the universe?”, we Canadians send our astronauts into space to ask good, down to earth questions.