Claiming they’d mistakenly allowed the book to be sold by a publisher who didn’t own the rights, Amazon remotely erased both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from hundreds of devices, and credited the accounts of the affected Kindle owners.
That quote, and the link included in it, are from a paper by Don Eyles, introduced by the BBC as “a 23-year-old self-described ‘beatnik’ who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing.”
These days it’s rare to find an icon that fits in 152 Kbytes of computer memory!!! Those guys wrote all the software that got a spacecraft to the moon and back.
I walk by the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory every day… but today I have special respect for the kind of work those people did, and do.
Xconomy magazine calls it the technology that might have saved Polaroid: a small, portable, low-power, inkless printing system. It’s basically a special paper that’s got embedded crystals inside of it that turn from white to either cyan, magenta, yellow, or black when exposed to heat. The printer itself is a little thermal print head that can deliver microbursts of different temperatures at very precise locations.
In case you don’t have time to watch it now, here’s a quick excerpt from the video:
Talib Kweli: “The song ‘Whitey on the Moon,’ Gil Scott Heron – what, you thought he was talkin’ about LBJ or Nixon? Naw, he was talking about Buzz Aldrin!”
[Clip from Gil Scott Heron: “I can’t pay no doctor bills / but whitey’s on the moon”]
Buzz Aldrin: “Gil and I are cool now. I explained to him that, we came in peace for all mankind, and… he backed off.”
Talib Kweli: “People think of hip hop, and they think of beefs: we had east coast / west coast beefs, down south / up top beefs… but, it doesn’t compare to the beef between Earth-walkers and Moon-walkers, which I think is a way more dangerous beef.”
Buzz Aldrin: “I don’t have any beef with the Earth-walkers.
My Palm Pre Posted on June 8th, 2009 at 4:46 pm by necco
I upgraded my phone to the new Palm Pre this weekend. Being a Sprint customer and having a phone that was starting to seem antique made the choice pretty easy (I’ve had only two cell phones in the last seven years that I’ve been with Sprint). Honestly, I was done with T9 typing and no web browser. I actually waited in line for an hour to get one of the 50 phones delivered to Santa Monica, CA. This was a new social/cultural experience for me (waiting in line for the newest block of silicon and plastic) and I was able to handle the ordeal by telling myself it was an anthropological learning opportunity. Interestingly, the people in line seemed pretty normal and friendly. There were no strange Pre fanatics or obvious hard-core geeks. In fact, I don’t recall anyone even saying anything about the Pre, but it was obvious that people were excited about it.
My take on it? I think it’s fantastic. It’s intuitive, has all the touch screen capabilities introduced by the iPhone, comes with all the apps I will every actually use and it’s smooth and quick. It’s also a bit smaller (length x width) than the iPhone, which has always seemed a little unwieldy to me. One of features that really proves itself is the ability to have multiple applications running simultaneously (load a web page, a large file from an email, get a software upgrade or download an application all at the same time). The applications are sorted into visual “cards” that you can easily navigate by flicking your finger left or right. Close an application instantly with a flick of the finger.
The Pandora application works perfectly. Signing up my work email (Microsoft Office Outlook with Exchange from saveonit.com) literally took 10 seconds, required no email to our IT department and all of my calendar events automatically started appeared as notifications. The notification system is nice: it pops up a stack of transparent notices on the bottom of the screen. The MMS application makes it easy to navigate between conversations you’ve had or are having. And the camera takes crisp three megapixel shots with almost no noticeable delay between button press and when the phone is ready to take another picture.
So, if you’re like me and never really wanted an iPhone, but felt like you were missing out on some cool features then I would highly recommend the Pre to you. I’m loving it.
F-your-I, blog readers: I’ve disabled hotlinking of any images hosted on noiselabs.com/blog … if you’ve been hotlinking those images on a page hosted somewhere else, you’ll now see a “broken image” icon.
If you need any of those images for your own website, I suggest you download them from one of our legitimate pages, and upload them to your own hosting provider.
I meant to post about this when it was first published back in April: Steve Crocker’s Op-Ed in the New York Times marking the 40th anniversary of the RFC, the process by which Internet protocols are standardized. It makes for some great reading. Also interesting is Crocker’s RFC 1, the initial Request For Comments that described the HOST software requirements for machines connected to the brand-new ARPA Network… which laid the foundations for this vast series of tubes we know today as teh Internetz.
My dad just sent me a demo for jaw-dropping “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, which went live this past weekend. You put in a search term, which could be a mathematical formula, two cities, whatever, and it analyzes the term and its context and returns related statistics, plots a curve, gives you a map, shows mortalitiy rates, whatever! Off the hook!
The design reminds me of a suggested contextual search engine design from Tufte I remember reading somewhere…anybody remember?
