Normally upgrading operating systems isn’t a task people find fun or exciting. For that reason, among others as well as fear of change, I still know many folks running Tiger, and in some extremes, OS 9.
With Leopard, those waiting to upgrade their operating system had a bit more cushion. In most cases, Tiger was still being supported, and people who were delaying the leap to Leopard could still get by, albeit a bit more slowly. The user interface changes Leopard employed when compared to Tiger, were a bit more drastic in comparison to Apple’s most recent OS release.
Snow Leopard, builds directly upon OS X’s progressive interface changes that Apple made with Leopard. So upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard shouldn’t confuse even the most novice mac user. The single, snazziest new “feature” is that Exposé found some intelligence. Instead of opening all of your windows in a single row, Exposé now understands a few more levels of what windows belong to what application. Additionally, some tools in simple navigation and control of your open windows have been added. All in all, it’s arguably the flashiest new addition to Apple’s entire OS release, but not even close to the most important.
If you’re not familiar with Digg.com, here’s the jist… Members of the site find good content from around the web, other Digg members then vote it up or down, if a story gains popularity it makes the homepage, thus resulting in national exposure.
In theory this sounds like a great concept. However, sites primarily driven by user generated content can quickly turn into a sticky mess of bullshit. When these same sites are centered around an ever-revolving popularity contest that has absolutely no meaningful or stimulating interaction at all, they implode…
Welcome to Digg.
I hold a deep passion for martial arts. Many people may not know that in a previous life I studied to be a black belt for about 5 years. I’m not too keen on American style boxing so much, but more bushido, jujitsu, tae kwon do and the such.
Below is an amazing compilation of Mixed Martial Arts upsets from the past year.
NOTE: If you don’t want to watch the whole video, scrub to the 7:50 mark and watch it from there.
While checking in at SoulPancake today, I was turned onto SIA for the first time by SoulPancake user coffeeyesplease. The intriguing discussion can be found here and has some great music discovery if anyone’s interested in finding some new stuff.
Five years ago, after numerous consecutive Phish tours across the country, a large group of friends and I traveled to Coventry Vermont where Phish last broke things off. The music sucked and the atmosphere was concrete depression mixed with a little bit of suicide.
The grounds were muddy, the band was sad, people were broke, and it rained so much in the days before the festival, that what seemed like Army forces had to be brought in to help the masses get through those 3 days.
But now, five long years after leaving us in a cold, wet and dirty swamp in North Coventry Vermont, when the economy is in the dumps and our unemployment numbers have skyrocketed past 4.2 million people without jobs, Phish decides it’d be a good time to hit the road again. And best of all, to kick things off at Hampton Coliseum on Friday, March 6th 2009 – they opened with a juggernaut… Fluffhead.
As you may have seen with my entry about Tarsiers, I have become rather interested in unique creatures that somewhat scare the shit out of me. What you see below is a Giant Japanese Hornet, and from the looks of things, you never want to meet one.
These hornets live right outside Tokyo, can fly upwards of 50 miles a day, and presumably kill around 40 people each year.
Image Credit to Muenster
The economy is throwing numbers at the public that are just nearly impossible to understand. How can we as a people judge one economic stimulus plan versus another if we cannot determine the difference between 1 trillion and 3 trillion dollars?
The video below is called The Crisis of Credit: Visualized. It attempts to depict the economic meltdown through a nicely done animation. Until the government figures out how to effectively communicate to the masses, maybe they should turn to creative mediums.
“The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.” Crisis of Credit is a nice project by Jonathan Jarvis. Thanx to my buddy Casey for pointing me to this.
I am possibly one of the last people around without a Facebook account. Seriously. Next time you’re at a stoplight, look around. Chances are, more than 50% of the people you see have a Facebook account. Don’t believe me? Ask them.
Now, when people find out that I don’t have a facebook account, they often times react with “wow” and “huh?” Sometimes I’ll get a chuckle and a “well, that’s just weird,” but for the most part I let it slide without feeling the need to explain my thoughts.
Aside from Facebook.com being a corporation that when squinting at looks like a small Microsoft replica, the entire thought that under no circumstance do I own my own content makes me cringe. I am not sure most people understand, but EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF CONTENT that you put on Facebook… They own. Every photo, every tag, every image, every word, every comment, every link, every click, every shared anything, every poke, every single thing. But you can just delete your account right? NO! Even when you delete your account… YES! EVEN WHEN YOU DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT !!! They own your content forever. This is makes me far too uncomfortable.
These are personal photos, letters, discussions, comments, that Facebook owns. These are people and system administrators working on the application itself that can, and most likely do browse your information unsolicited. Humans by nature will do things they are not supposed to do. If you put a big fat “don’t click” this in front of someone, they most likely will. And out of those 150+ people working at Facebook, you can be sure at least a few of them have illegally browsed some photos, comments and discussions. The only thing is, in a way… It’s not illegal. As the Consumerist intelligently points out, Facebook’s new Terms of Service agreement ever so slightly states that “even when you delete your account, they still own your content… forever.”
Here is the new Terms of Service agreement: As you can see it looks fine, but there are two important sentences missing from the end of this agreement.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
And here are the two lines from the end of that paragraph, which happen to be missing now: As expected, they directly explain that you could at one time remove your content… Now, you cannot… Ever.
You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
And, just for good measure, the agreement explicitly states what remains their property… forever.
The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.
I have accounts with Twitter, Vimeo, and of course Gmail. I have my contacts inside Adium, and I use my personal blog to express myself online. I will never join Facebook, and the slight moments of insanity when I consider it, the sheer thought of Facebook being able to peer into my life without any control over my digital content makes me realize that eventually this will backfire. Whether it be in a corporate shake-down where Facebook implodes while distributing your content to advertisers for direct targeting, or whether it be because Facebook employees were illegally learning about future employers, employees and competition to get a leg up. How it happens is yet to be determined, but at some point, Facebook’s intentions as a whole will emerge. And they’re not about “connecting to your friends.”
Facebook and ConnectU have been going through an incredibly futile legal over the last few years. The classic scenario: ConnectU’s founders claim that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea and turned it into “The Facebook” in 2004.
Hat-tip to Valleywag’s Owen Thomas for nailing this situation. HIs facts are clear and there’s no fluff. In a nutshell, ConnectU’s founders come from a large pile of money, have the funds to keep this case going, and out of the $65 Million they’ve one, have about $2.7 million left. Ouch.
Valleywag: Lawyers for ConnectU are bragging about winning a $65 million settlement for their clients from Facebook. But what did Divya Narendra and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss really get from Mark Zuckerberg? Almost nothing.
The Winklevosses and Narendra, Harvard classmates of Zuckerberg, sued him after he launched Facebook, claiming he had done work for their project and then stolen code from it to start Facebook. They reached a settlement last summer in which Facebook agreed to acquire ConnectU for cash and stock — $20 million in cash and 1.25 million shares of Facebook. But then they fired their former lawyers, Quinn Emanuel, amid a contest over legal fees, the value of the settelement, and new evidence they said they’d discovered.
Based on the price Microsoft paid for its 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in the fall of 2007, the stock component of that settlement was worth $45 million. Quinn Emanuel is seeking $13 million in a contingency fee — 20 percent of the total take, which is $65 million as far as ConnectU’s former lawyers are concerned.
But the appraised value of the stock last summer was far less — $11 million, based on a valuation Facebook sought for its own stock-option plan. That’s $34 million of $65 million gone.
At this year’s TED Conference, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of malaria ridden mosquitoes onto the crowd as he explained, “I brought some mosquitoes – we’ll let them roam around the auditorium. There’s no reason only the poor should experience this…”
Bill Gates speech from TED 2009
Shortly after Gates released the mosquitoes, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation confirmed the incident, Read More…
Microsoft Research has been playing around with something they’re calling Songsmith. Nearly everyone is calling the actual software a joke, and the advertising equally horrendous, but Microsoft has already won by getting even the naysayers to be a tad bit curious.
While most people are clamoring about the fact that an Apple is used in the Microsoft commercial, I can’t help but think that this was done on purpose. Microsoft is well aware that Apple’s cult-like following also has a plethora of seemingly influential websites that write about the company on a daily basis. How else would these Microsoft commercials find their way into Apple devoted websites?
A little introduction: Over at Think Brilliant, we use a suite of web-based applications to manage our company’s communication, directly reach our clients and partners, and generally stay organized. It’s been developed by a great company based out of Chicago called 37 Signals, and for the most part we have no complaints.
But… The one feature missing from a crucial piece of the puzzle is becoming a nasty liability. One too risky for us to keep avoiding. We’ve tried to keep our mouth shut for months because we know there’s a wall around 37 Signals and they don’t like listening or taking requests for new features. But, we are long time partners who are deeply entangled with our BaseCamp centralization. By this feature being missing, we are considering doing the unthinkable, well until now… and leaving 37 signals.
37 Signals makes 4 pieces of software that can be grouped and used together, or one by one, depending on a particular person or company’s needs. The products are called Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire. In this post, I’m talking about Campfire.
Posted in Insanity, Opinions, SimplyStaggering, Think Brilliant, Ze-awwn-line-inter-toob at January 22nd, 2009. No Comments.
This video is called A walk in the mountain with Julie by Sébastien Abes. Out of all of the video and motion work that I’ve been consuming, this stuff has really captured my imagination.
The subtle emotions that are hinted through syncing music with vivid natural experiences, such as opening your eyes (when the video begins), or when the video speeds up to blur motion. Towards the end of the piece, notice the subtle digital undertones… It’s great.
The Air Is Crisp Up Here
Co-Founder of Think Brilliant and SoulPancake, dog-lover, Phish fanatic. My Content Explosions are tasty as ever.Flickr Photos
Think Brilliant- BAKE IT FIRST, ICE IT LATER November 20, 2008Hello everyone, When approaching a new project or application, it’s important to remember that a strong foundation developed on a stable platform is essential. Knowing the limitations of your infrastructure or media outlet, is key in realizing the full potential of your product. Whether it be a 3D visualization for BMW, or an enterprise level web [...] […]
- BAKE IT FIRST, ICE IT LATER November 20, 2008
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