October 29, 2003
Whither the daylight?
Finally, a great mystery answered... sort of. The semi-annual change of time had always been something of a mystery to me; why, after all, would daylight not be worth saving? Turns out daylight savings time has little to do with farmers, but was an
energy conservation measure taken by many countries during World War I. It fails to answer why they didn't just change the whole year, though...
(via Zeldman)
On truth and net-savvy desktop apps
Tim O'Reilly is a bright guy, but many of the things he's quoted as saying in this Wired article are either false, or betray a fundamental lack of understanding about the kind of customer understanding and tradeoffs required to develop successful software products.
Speaking about the growth of Apple's desktop apps that expand the application beyond the desktop, he says:
"Apple is the first old-world computer company to get this," said O'Reilly. "Apple has started to take that network concept, the idea of reaching beyond the single device, and they're starting to build that into their applications."
While Tim is absolutely right in his belief that desktop software is heading this direction, he's pretty mistaken in his belief that Apple is the first innovator. QuickBooks has done this for at least three years, with integration of online bill presentment, merchant card services, website creation, etc. etc. He continues:
However, O'Reilly said the implementation of this idea is often inconsistent. For example, O'Reilly noted that songs can be bought online through iTunes, but it is not possible to buy stock photos through iPhoto, Apple's digital photo repository.
C'mon, Tim. One of the major reasons iPhoto has been successful is because it was designed with a very clear goal in mind: helping consumers with digital cameras organize, print and share their photos. It's not a tool for graphic designers, who are the prime consumers of stock photography. What percentage of digital camera owners do you think have ever had the need to buy a stock photo?
Likewise, iTunes allows music to be shared automatically across a local network using Rendezvous, Apple's zero-configuration networking technology, but there's no equivalent service in iPhoto for sharing pictures, O'Reilly noted.
But there is! It's called .mac, and it enables iPhoto users to share photos by uploading them to the web. If you asked digital camera users whether they'd rather share their photos with people on their home/local network or over the web, the vast majority would say the latter. And that's what iPhoto and .mac do.
iTunes is different. though. Its sharing model is design to help families and small groups of people to avoid the hassle of duplicating MP3 libraries for all the different points in the house or local network where they want to listen to music. Sure, some of them would like to share them over the web, but that's simply not going to sit well with the recording industry -- a key partner for Apple in the store.
October 14, 2003
Have they *ever* watched local news?
From CNN.com:
In Washington...top Bush administration officials and congressional Republicans stepped up complaints about news coverage of the war, saying national news outlets ignore good news in favor of stories on violence.
Link
October 8, 2003
The best superhero ever
NY Times on the street justice of Angle Grinder Man
(via Joi Ito
October 7, 2003
For those who always believe what they read
A correction:
A Sept. 21 item in the Metro in Brief column about a woman fatally shot in Prince George's County and a child who was wounded incorrectly reported the woman's age, the child's sex, the child's location at the time of the shooting, and the street on which the shooting occurred. A correct account of the incident appears in today's Metro in Brief column.
Link
(from Ben)
October 6, 2003
Creative or not? The 2x Mouse
One of the nice things about working at a big company is that when things break, you're usually not the one that has to fix them. So when one of the buttons on my mouse stopped working recently, I went down to Brian's office to see if he had any new optical mice lying around.
Brian handed me a new one, in a shiny green plastic package with "2x" emblazoned prominently on the front. Can one mouse really be two times as fast as another? Is there a de facto "1x" mouse speed? What if it went too fast?
One is left wondering if someone in the marketing department decided that they could get people to upgrade to a faster mouse. I've never had anyone I know complain about a mouse being too slow.
