February 2012
31 posts
Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint standard to provide... →
Sam Byford, reporting for The Verge:
While [Wi-Fi] theoretically saves battery life, speeds up downloads, and eases network congestion, it’s often too much of a hassle to find an access point and log in — especially when you’re on the move. The Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint standard is aiming to solve that …
This is a great solution to a very obvious problem. In the UK, many...
BBC Nature - Ants remember their enemy's scent →
Victoria Gill, reporting for BBC Nature:
Ant colonies - one of nature’s most ancient and efficient societies - are able to form a “collective memory” of their enemies, say scientists.
When one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy’s odour: passing it on to the rest of the colony.
Ants fascinate me.
“One Ram to rule them all, One Genius to find them, One Unibody to bring them all...”
– @Mitchinator
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion preview: Notification... →
Nilay Patel, reporting for The Verge:
It’s only been seven months since Apple launched Mac OS 10.7 Lion, but the company isn’t sitting still: it just announced the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, a tweaked and enhanced new version of the operating system that includes major new features like Notification Center, AirPlay mirroring, and iMessage. Yes, those are all ...
“The phone is too big. You will look stupid talking on it, people will laugh at...”
– Jonathan S. Geller - Samsung’s Galaxy Note is the most useless phone I’ve used (via @Gruber)
Heroku makes sharing SQL data as easy as URL —... →
Derrick Harris, reporting for GigaOm:
Cloud Platform-as-a-Service provider Herokuhas added a new feature to its PostgreSQL database service that lets users share the results of an SQL query simply by sending a URL. The feature, called Data Clips, is in beta mode and is the first new feature of likely many since the company launched Heroku Postgres in November.
According to Heroku Postgres...
Electronic Security a Worry in an Age of Digital... →
Nicole Perlroth, reporting for NYT:
[Kenneth G. Lieberthal] leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear...
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BBC News - Apple stock price surpasses $500 for... →
BBC:
Shares in technology giant Apple have crossed $500 (£317) a share for the first time.
It caps a remarkable turnaround for the iPhone maker, whose shares were once worth as little as $3.19 in 1997, when it faced the possibility of bankruptcy.
Apple is now worth $460bn.
Incredible to see the stock price rise so sharply in the past few months.
(via @IonDigital)
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Event: Aberdeen TechMeetup no. 26 ~ Wednesday 15th... →
Bruce Scharlau, writting for TechMeetup:
The next TechMeetup Aberdeen talk is on Wednesday, 15th February at 6:30pm in the foyer of the North entrance to the Meston Building.
ASP.NET MVC 3 with a touch of Entity Framework 4.1..
An introduction to the current MVC offering from Microsoft. Getting you started with a simple application highlighting some of niceties provided by the frameworks...
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Apple 'one of the best' at monitoring factory... →
Duncan Geere, reporting for Wired UK:
The founder of a Chinese activist group called China Labor Watch has come out in defence of much-criticised technology giant Apple, saying it’s “one of the best” at monitoring its factories.
Li Qiang told Laptop Magazine through a translator: “Although I know that the iPhone 4 is made at sweatshop factories in China, I still think...
Bankrupt Kodak to stop making cameras in 2012... →
Mark Brown, reporting for Wired UK:
In a drastic bid to cut costs, bankrupted Eastman Kodak Co plans to stop making cameras in the first half of 2012.
It’s always sad to see stories like this surface, but Kodak can’t blame anyone else for this.
Sonic Notify: the inaudible QR codes only an app... →
Duncan Geere, for Wired UK:
A startup called Sonic Notify is working on a product that embeds inaudibly high-pitched signals into music and audio, which can be detected by your smartphone.
When a compatible app hears the signal, it could be triggered to take an action — linking you to a website, displaying text or an image, or bringing up a location on a map. That yields all sorts of...
iPad 3 launch event coming in first week of March,... →
Vlad Savov, reporting for The Verge:
Apple’s going to host a launch event for the iPad 3 in the first week of March, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, as reported by All Things D. San Francisco is the location of the event, but there’s no date yet for when the upgraded tablet will be available to buy.
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iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA →
parislemon:
Notes Megan Lavey-Heaton for TUAW:
The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content.
And we have yet another bit of controversy to file away under: Apple Is Not Fucking Stupid.
I haven’t weighed in on the EULA hubbub for this exact reason. If Apple was actually trying to suggest that they own the content of all...
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Drewbot: The Huffington Post Streaming Video... →
dbreunig:
The NYT’s Brian Stelter reports on AOL/The Huffington Post’s live streaming video network announcement:
AOL and The Huffington Post are readying a live video network that will have 12 hours of programming every weekday when it starts this summer…
Roy Sekoff, a founding editor of The…
ShipAIS - Current AIS map →
Anna Cook:
Serious nerd love for this: Live mapping for ships in British waters.
Live mappings are some of my favourite visualisations - this one’s great.
(via @Anna_Cook)
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AAPL Orchard: Not Everyone Copies Apple →
aaplorchard:
“[Apple is] going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.”
- Tim Cook in his first email to Apple employees as Apple’s new CEO sent August 25, 2011
“The path [Sony] must take is clear: to drive the…
Facebook Files for an I.P.O. - NYTimes.com →
Evelyn M. Rusli, reporting for DealB%k, NYT:
Facebook, the vast online social network, took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Wednesday as it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service, hatched in a Harvard dormitory room nearly eight years ago, is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s...
Inside Apple: one of the most secretive... →
Amy Willis, reporting for The Telegraph:
Few make it inside the main Apple building. A throng of security guards greets them instead, escorting them back onto the sidewalk, sometimes pointing them in the direction of the on-campus shop where they can buy a token Apple T-Shirt
I just had to laugh at this - of course Apple won’t let strangers walk into corporate buildings!
Boxee desktop app being removed from servers... →
Terrence O’Brien, reporting for Engadget:
It was only the day after Christmas that we learned version 1.5 would be the last to ship for Linux, Windows and OS X. Now, with January coming to a close, its life is officially being snuffed out. Tonight, as you flip the calendar to February, Boxee will be busy purging its servers of the installable media center software.
I was a fan of Boxee...
January 2012
92 posts
“Amazon S3, the retail giant’s online storage web service, how holds more than...”
– Amazon S3 Now Stores 762 Billion Objects
“Apple announced this morning that former Dixons Retail CEO John Brownett will...”
– Apple Names John Browett as SVP of Retail
Installing Markdown as an OS X Services Menu Item... →
Matt Gibson:
I just had a quick look around the web for ways to install Markdown translation as a Service (i.e. available from the Services menu) on my Mac. Most of the hits I got seemed to be quite old, and involved hacking about with an existing service for another text converter.
So, I experimented. And the good news is that since Snow Leopard came out, with its improvements to the Services...
BBC News - Tiger bread renamed giraffe bread by... →
BBC:
Sainsbury’s is renaming its tiger bread after a letter a three-year-old girl wrote to the company, saying the bread looked more like a giraffe, went viral.
In May 2011, Lily Robinson wrote to the supermarket, suggesting that the bread should be called giraffe bread.
She received a letter back saying that renaming it was “a brilliant idea”.
Best news ever.
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Sky will launch an internet based TV service in... →
Richard Lawler, reporting for Engadget:
UK pay TV service Sky has just announced its quarterly results, and despite adding 100,000 subscribers as well as notching its “highest ever first-half adjusted operating profit” it will launch a new internet TV service, available to anyone in the country with a broadband connection.
What everyone keeps failing to address is whether or not...
BBC News - Facebook 'to go public with $10bn share... →
BBC:
Facebook will begin the process of becoming a publicly-listed company this week, valuing the social networking site at between $75bn (£48bn) and $100bn, reports suggest.
BBC News - Megaupload users face data deletion US... →
BBC:
US prosecutors have said that data belonging to Megaupload users and stored by third parties could be deleted as soon as Thursday.
Is anyone else worried about storing their data in the cloud? Highly unlikely, but what if dropbox, gmail, etc. all get shut down?
BBC News - War or gaming fun? Spot the difference →
Phil Coomes, writing for BBC:
The blurring of reality and the virtual world has come full circle. Just over twenty years ago I can remember watching the first stirrings of the Gulf War, arguably the first television war, and one where the images of missile strikes were commonplace.
Interesting read on the comparison of real life and video game graphics…
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We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA →
infoneer-pulse:
If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries,1 it has...
BBC News - FBI plans social network map alert... →
BBC:
The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks.
It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.
…
Privacy campaigners say they are concerned that the move could have implications for free speech.
...
Agile slaves →
J.D. Hildebran, writting for SD Times:
But as I read more closely, I noticed something else. At one point or another, in one article or another, almost every one of the signers tacitly admitted that the Agile movement has not lived up to his hopes. This quote from Andy Hunt is typical:
Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace...
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Ruby Released →
parislemon:
Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm (and former Apple executive), has left HP.
With Palm hardware now dead and webOS now open-sourced, the writing has been on the wall for this to happen for a while. To hear HP tell it, this was the plan all along. As Arik Hesseldahl writes:
Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12-24 month commitment to stay with...
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