Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. (Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.)
(HT: JT)
Archives for 2009
Google Announces Its Own OS
Google has announced that it will be creating its own operating system based on its web browser, Chrome. Fast company summarizes:
The OS will be open source, lightweight and have “speed, simplicity and security” at its core. The lightweight and simple aspects are clear from the fact that the OS is going to be initially targeted at netbooks–it’s absolutely a separate project from Android.
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As if that’s not enough, the way Google appears to be re-thinking an OS is completely new. Chrome OS is designed to be instant-on, with a minimal interface and most of the user experience will happen via web interactions. Chrome will run within a “new windowing system” superimposed on a Linux kernel, and the whole thing will work like it’s in a browser. Consequently “all web-based applications will automatically work” so developers will supposedly be able to write software that runs on Chrome, and in browsers on Windows, OS X and Linux machines.
10 Stunning (and Useful) Stats About Twitter
This was a helpful article by Rohit Bhargava summarizing “10 standout conclusions” from a recent analytics report on Twitter by the media analytics company Sysomos.
One interesting fact: Tuesday is the best day to tweet something.
Apple Stores Now Fixing Cracked iPhone Screens In-House
If you’ve ever had the misfortune, as I have, of dropping your iPhone on concrete, here is some good news from the Infinite Loop blog:
An iPhone falls to the ground in slow motion and makes its first impact on a corner. You watch as the cracks branch out over the screen like a spiderweb. If it hasn’t happened to you, it has happened to someone you know—and now, Apple can fix it on the spot at one of its retail locations.
Jim Dalrymple at The Loop has confirmed that Apple retail stores have begun performing this in-house repair with what amounts to a big suction cup in the back. The machine separates the broken glass from the rest of your precious iPhone, letting the technician install a shiny new one.
The cost will be $199, and it is not covered under warranty or Apple Care.
25 Must-Have iPhone Apps
Fast Company has a good overview of 25 highly useful (and/or interesting) iPhone apps.
Get up Early or Stay Up Late?
What’s more effective — getting up early or staying up late? Or both?
The Common Denominator of Success
From Stephen Covey and Rebecca Merrill’s book First Things First:
The common denominator of success is not hard work, astute human relations, or luck, although all are important. It is putting first things first.
Great news. Except that that among all the things they listed (and all the other things they could have listed), that’s the hardest to do.
If There's Always Room for Jello, There's Always Time for Learning
From Seth Godin:
This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there’s so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we’re stuffed.
Often, we’ll decide that something is full, stuffed, untouchable but then some Jello shows up, and suddenly there’s room.
Think about your schedule… is there room for an emergency, an SEC investigation, a server crash? If you took a day off because of the flu, is your business going to go bankrupt? Probably not.
So, if there’s time for an emergency (Jello), why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?
Mac Snow Leopard Update
Here are the enhancements and refinements that are coming with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Helpful Review of the iPhone 3G S
This was a helpful and detailed review of the iPhone 3G S, via the Infinite Loop blog.
I’ve picked one of them up and it is indeed much faster. Now, it now longer takes 2 minutes for my OmniFocus app to open up (the 2,345 actions or something like that tended to bog it down). Also, it’s great to have video.