So
Only 7 days left to take advantage of the aptly named Mac Heist where you can get about half a grand of quality Mac software for $49USD. It that isn't cool enough, a chunk of the proceeds go to charity (you can even pick which ones you would like it to go to). I already have my bundle and am loving it. Heck, I almost paid retail for Wingnuts 2 last weekend, now I essentially get it for pennies on the dollar.
If you don't make it this year, definitely check it out next year as it only seems to keep getting bigger and better.
So
I guess the new MacBook Air is cute and optimized for, uh, thin. Otherwise, I think it is overpriced and under-featured. Thin is nice, but I can't ever think of a time when I though, “I can't use this darn laptop, it's just too thick!”. And the non-user-replaceable battery is a joke.
Now a pen-based tablet (ok, it can have multi-touch, too) in a slightly smaller form factor, running full OS X; THAT would be cool and useful. MacBook Air? No so much.
So
Reading the product page for the newly announced Photoshop Elements for Mac really drove home the growing divide between photography and digital imaging (which I have commented on before). Just look at the features they are touting:
Enhanced ability to create black and whites. This is so overused already because people seem to think that converting an image to B&W instantly gives it some kind of classy/artsy cred that it never had (and never will). It is just annoying.
And my personal favorite: 'one click adjustments'. The perfect opportunity to make your pictures look like everyone else's — not what you actually shot, but what some algorithm thinks is good. No creativity required at all.
Of course, there is nothing to say that you must use PS on your photos. It is just bewildering to me how many people do use it (and abuse it). As one famous professional photographer stated in a podcast (paraphrasing): 'It is amazing how things have changed. For me the creative process is everything I do before I click the shutter: composition, exposure control, lighting, etc. But today, for most 'photographers' the 'creative' process starts after they click the shutter...'
I guess mozilla was an exception, but what I call large 'corporate OSS' projects don't always work out. I also suspect that it is not a characteristic of OSS per se. It seems one of the issues was there was no pressure to deliver anything. So rather than focus on product delivery they created their own OS and programming tools as well as what is reported to be a unwieldy and poorly thought out architecture. Don't know that anyone is in the market for those things.
This reminds me of the first internet bubble when people would rush out and get office space and funding and have no idea what their product or business model was (or should be). They just wanted to be 'doing the startup thing' not actually delivering anything. Then it was time for what I referred to as 'the rise of B2B and B2C' as in 'Back To Banking' and 'Back To College'.
So
I don't know why they bother. Yahoo continuously overcommits and under delivers when it comes to their web and especially their mobile offerings. After their announcement of Yahoo Go 3 at CES, I thought, 'why not see how they have screwed this up'. The usual amount. My phone, a Nokia N75 is listed as 'compatible', but when I go through the error fraught process of actually trying to download the much lauded version 3, I am rewarded with a slightly newer version of 2 that I already have installed. Lame. No version 3 in sight.
Their insistence on using zero-value Flash laden websites is also bewildering. When I attempted to enter my phone number to receive the download instructions, I was curtly prompted to 'enter a valid phone number'. What? Do these retards pretend to validate your phone number against a database of all mobile phone numbers in the US. Not likely. More of their shoddy production, I would say.
So
It has been a bit amazing the amount of rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that has gone on around AOL announcing that it is ending support for Netscape Navigator in February. Navigator and Communicator have been dead to me for years. I jumped to the lighter weight and more feature rich Mozilla builds when they first became stable and then made the leap to the even more nimble Firefox when it emerged.
I think back to the early-90s when I was using the nearly unheard of Mosaic browser to access the precious few sites that existed at the time (and creating a corporate site using the not-so-stable NCSA server code). Then there were rumblings on the Usenet forums about this upstart beta of the 'mozilla' browser. Fledgling webmasters were horrified by this new browser because you could set the number of download treads that the browser could use to access your site. Horrors! This would certainly be the end of the Internet — it can't possibly scale! But somehow we survived and the Mozilla Communications Corporation became Netscape and the rest is history.
So
As sort of companion piece to the previous Facts Are Not Enough there is this article from the Guardian that talks about how some widely held beliefs really have no basis in fact. I am sure you will recognize some of this wisdom from your own lives; here are some of the ones I have heard countless times:
Everyone must drink at least eight glasses of water a day (water is in food and other beverages)
We only use 10% of our brains (science still hasn't discovered the 'un-utilized' 90%)
Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight (makes reading difficult, but not damaging)
Shaving causes hair to grow back faster and coarser (I've heard this mostly from women)
Eating turkey makes you especially drowsy (but Swiss cheese has more Tryptophan in it)
The article doesn't cover one of my personal favorites, the all-too-frequently repeated and quite-well-documented-as-false claim that 'Al Gore invented the Internet'. Whenever I hear some repeat this, it just flips the bozo bit for them in my mind. Anyone who would parrot a lie that big is just a sad individual lacking in critical cognitive skills.
I am sure there is a reason for mouth-eyes pictures, I just don't know what it is. Creepy.
Pretty impressive video of a guy singing a song backwards while performing actions that make it clear that he is not simply rolling the tape in reverse (at least until half way through). My second impression (after amazement) was that this guy has way too much time on his hands.