Over the weekend, I listened to an MP3 conversion of a talk at Google by Christopher Bonanos.
He wrote Instant: The Story of Polaroid.
It’s difficult to imagine such a massive company hitting the rocks and sinking so quickly.
But consumer videotape was the rock that sunk Polaroid like a corporate Titanic.
Filed under Apple: The Company, Books To Check, Digital Overthrow, Google, Reference, Video, Writer
Six Sites With Free Digital Comics
And really, why wouldn’t you want these?
And, most of the time, they can be read on an iPad Mini-sized tablet, as my past PDF tests have shown (as long as that clone has a Retina-class screen; I wouldn’t bother with any lower-resolution screens on any tablet, even larger ones — despite this: How to Read Digital Comics on the ($50) Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet).
Filed under Digital Periodicals, eBooks: General, Reference
The first ever photograph of light as both a particle and wave
Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.
It’s very early in the morning as I type this and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.
Video explanation after the break.
How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name
Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
Filed under Apple: The Company, iOS, Quoted, Reference
iPad Pro review: Apple’s laptop killer? [Warning: Stupid autoplay video!]
Not all USB Type C cables are equal: A Googler tells you which to avoid
But USB Type-C is still a new technology… and while you can find plenty of cables and adapters available for purchase, it turns out not all of them work the the way you’d expect. Not sure which one to buy? A Google employee is here to help.
I took my first trip to Micro Center in Brooklyn yesterday. I marveled at a brand-name USB-C to USB cable adapter that was going for US$22.95! My god!
(I went there to buy a US$9.99 card r/w for the CLIE’s Memory Stick. Wound up buying one that was priced at US$14.99, on sale for US$5.99. And it also had 3 USB ports! Seeing all the choices not available at Best Buy was a bit of a shock!)
Filed under Other Hardware, Reference
A loose end I’ve been meaning to tie up one day. Today is that day.
Sources:
Haggling Over ‘Sony Phone’ Precedes Jury Selection for Apple v. Samsung
Sony Xperia C4 site
Filed under Reference
Dame Stephanie Shirley: Why do ambitious women have flat heads?
Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. In this frank and often hilarious talk, she explains why she went by “Steve,” how she upended the expectations of the time, and shares some sure-fire ways to identify ambitious women …
Oh my god.
What an extraordinary woman!
If you need a dose of inspiration, watch the video at the link. Watch it even if you’re highly motivated!
Two things:
1) Why the hell didn’t I hear about her before today?
2) Why the hell isn’t the BBC doing a mini-series dramatizing her life? Or at least a multi-part documentary?! What a story!
Additional:
Dame Stephanie Shirley website
Wikipedia: Steve Shirley
UK Independent: Dame Stephanie Shirley: ‘Success has a cost. Women today are so naïve’
Amazon: Let IT Go – The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley
Filed under Reference
I couldn’t help thinking about Steve Jobs while reading that. And the next two quotes from it.
EVERYTHING’S NEGOTIABLE
If you don’t have the chutzpah to ask for the unthinkable, you’re not dreaming big enough.
Here is the young Steve Jobs, possibly just thirteen, a member of the HP Explorers Club, from Walter Isaacson’s biography:
The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided to build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in an electronic signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called the CEO. “Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto and called him at home. And he answered and chatted With me for twenty minutes. He got me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters.”
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
And wait. There’s more:
His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an assembly line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward the pushy kid who had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I love this stuff, I love this stuff,” and then asked him What he liked to do best. And he said, ‘To fuck, to fuck.” Jobs had an easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who worked one floor above. “They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d go upstairs and hang out with them.“
Boldfaced emphasis added by me.
And people think the primary lesson Steve Jobs learned from his father was doing quality work.
Oh hell no.
I found the one sentence that explains Jobs.
Filed under Reference
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