Month: June 2012

Categories
Apple

Apple Moves Towards Faster Updates

Curious note in the latest Apple Mountain Lion update:

– Daily Checks for required security updates
– The ability to install required security updates automatically or after restarting your Mac
– A more security connection to Apple’s update servers.

Clearly the trend to more rapid updates for client side software is accelerating. I’m not sure I like things being required though as updates sometimes cause problems. It’s only a matter of time before a prematurely released upgrade rapidly takes out an entire platform.

Categories
Software

Winamp’s Downfall

First we hear about Flickr’s downfall, now Winamp. It’s amazing to hear how this big companies bought and killed an acquisition by refusing to let them thrive.

In both cases corporate culture ironically killed everything they were trying to acquire. In both cases, they could have been huge, had they been agile enough to stay on the bleeding edge.

Categories
Personal

Catching Up

I was away for the past week, as a result I’ll be in catch up mode for the next day or two as I process through things. Unlike in the past. I did relatively well keeping up with things like email, so I expect it to be much easier.

Categories
Around The Web Audio/Video

Slash Performs Acoustic Sweet Child O’ Mine

Slash - Accoustic Sweet Child O' Mine

Slash - Acoustic Sweet Child O' Mine

Slash performs Sweet Child O’ Mine acoustic, including the infamous solo. Your Argument is Invalid.

Categories
Funny

Holding People’s Hand

Holding People's Hand

Holding People's Hand

It’s slightly awkward just watching this. Clever idea for a YouTube video.

Categories
In The News Tech (General)

More On Cell Phones vs. Toilets

India has 919 million [pdf] mobile phone users as of March 2012. That’s out of a 1.2 billion (per Wikipedia) population. That’s about 75% of the population. Less than 50% of homes have toilets in India. It’s even worse for women in India to the point of a Right to Pee campaign.

I’ve touched on this now multiple times. Humanity has put mobile phones as a higher priority than hygiene, sanitation, safety and human dignity.

It’s a depressing statistic.

Categories
Mozilla

Disabling Java In Your Browser

For the past 2 years now I’ve been browsing the web with Java disabled. I’ve had less than 5 situations where I needed to turn it on to do something, and all of those were situations with a limited audience (a very old technical tool, intranet applications). I’m of the opinion you really don’t need it enabled to happily browse the web anymore. I can’t disable Flash yet, but Java I seem to be largely fine without. I still have it on my computer in case I need it, but it’s seldom.

Given the past security issues and the fact that Java is outright annoying UI wise and slow to load, I don’t miss it at all. It served a purpose years ago in a webpage when it was difficult to build apps, but those days are long gone. It’s amazing if you remember Java being used for mouseovers way back when.

Categories
Funny

Not Sure Which Is More Terrifying

Shark Week
Shark Week

Shark Week

The theme to Jaws will now be playing in my head every time I see a tampon commercial.

Via: Very Demotivational

Categories
Internet Politics

HTTP Status 451 – The HTTP Status At Which Requests Burn

Tim Bray is proposing a new HTTP status, 451 for:

…when resource access is denied for legal reasons. This allows server operators to operate with greater transparency in circumstances where issues of law or public policy affect their operation. This transparency may be beneficial both to these operators and to end users.

This is awesome and I 100% support this idea. I’d even like to see governments mandate that 451’s be used. Of course North Korea, Iran, and China would never follow along, but hopefully most western countries would.

It’s also a very fitting tribute to Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451 who recently passed away.

Categories
General

Thoughts on WWDC 2012

Lots of little notes on today’s announcements…

Continue reading “Thoughts on WWDC 2012”