2010-02-08
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2010-02-06
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In pictures: Concorde through the years at BBC News. “A model of the planned airliner went on show at Farnborough in 1962.”
The gallery also features the Queen on a Concorde in 1977.
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In pictures: Washington snow chaos (a Gerry image; photographer uncredited)
2010-02-04
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Dick Brass in an editorial for the New York Times:Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.
After my post about possible iPad competitors, it was suggested that I was premature in ruling out Microsoft, with a link to a Gizmodo story about the Courier tablet project. However, years of experience have led me to dismiss anything Microsoft produces as a mere demo; for example, WinFS never shipped. Even if Courier does form the basis for a device’s OS, I don’t see the company being able to abandon the well-worn Windows metaphors.
Meanwhile, this editorial is a good summary of the problems Microsoft has. Sure, it’s still profitable (on the back of Windows/Office), but even their one undeniable hit of the last decade, the Xbox, isn’t dominant in the same way, and they have plenty of failures to point to. Perhaps the most telling quote is just after the one I’ve used above:
“Despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.”
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revdancatt on the technology behind the new Guardian Zeitgeist (see also).
2010-02-02
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Another putdown from Rocío Rødtjer’s The Classics, Revised.
I have a terrible habit of getting the Charleses confused. It’s their fault for both having names beginning “D”, ending in “n” (more or less), and living in the 1860s. I’d probably rather read Darwin than Dickens, though.
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Steven Johnson in his article for Time: Apple iPad Shortcomings Spark Questions About Updates.
I suspect that iWork was, on some levels, a bad choice of software to demonstrate. iMovie feels creative to people, whereas Numbers and Pages don’t, even though I’d place bets on there being more published novels written in Pages than there have been big-screen films produced in iMovie.
Apart from iLife (and other media tools), the other missing link in creativity is a programming environment, but I also expect that to show up eventually (although maybe it’ll be more like Dashcode or Coda than Xcode; we’ll see.) Certainly, I can’t see a reason the iPad should be treated as a read-only device.
(Bonus points for the OpenDoc references, by the way.)
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Minimal Mac, quoting from Why a Computer is Not Like A Toaster – And Why It Should Be
On the other hand, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
