Who doesn’t love a free lunch? C’mon now – you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Yet why do countless people fall for “the inbox hustle“? I’ve been working on whitelisting technology for over a decade, and my sojourn has taken me far from where it started on Windows to the Internet at large, and to the base psychology at play when a typical person gets gamed by crap in their inbox, on Twitter, or on the…
Almost a year ago I posted a two part set of posts discussing “The war for the family room”, where I discussed an impending battle between the Xbox, Apple TV, and Google TV. Things are evolving quite nicely. Though Google TV has effectively flopped in it’s first (overpriced and overly complex) implementation, I’m sure Google will be back. In the meantime, I wanted to take a bit of a look into where all three are now. Apple TV – more content providers, but largely…
It’s been almost a year. I can’t believe it. For almost an entire year, pundits (including myself have been talking about ARM and Windows. We started the year with lots of questions. We end the year with almost all of those questions… unanswered. It’s Microsoft’s prerogative whether to answer the question of how well enterprise customers will be able to port any of their line-of-business (LOB) or ISVs can port any of their apps to Win32 on ARM. It was…
Even if you’ve never heard the term, you’ve used a desire path. We all have. It’s the shortcut with the well worn path between the two houses on your way to elementary school. It’s the path between the science building and the engineering building at your college, where the ornate fountain in the middle and the circular/intersecting sidewalks looked pretty from above when they designed it, but meant many people wouldn’t take the long way all the way around, and…
I remember the original iPhone well. I remember incredibly slow network connectivity but pretty darn good battery life. The iPhone 3G I replaced it with pretty evenly swapped those. I learned that it was worthwhile to turn 3G on when I really needed it and off when I didn’t. 3G giveth bandwidth and taketh away battery runtime. My iPhone 4 today runs close to an entire day on a charge, which usually includes use for email, Twitter, Facebook, and Pandora….
I am noticing a frightening trend. On iOS, there is a growing collection of “security” apps. There is no such thing as a third-party security app on iOS (or on Windows Phone 7 for that matter). They don’t exist. There is no such thing. On iOS, there is (thankfully) no framework for the background task approach that “classic” antivirus has used for the last 25 years. More importantly, due to a vetted application store, the need for such an approach is not…
I’ve long been critical of Google’s lack of “local” search focus. In particular, I think that they’ve missed a lot of opportunities to try and connect with local restaurants (no, not those with logos with you’d recognize – rather, those with food you’d remember), but it goes far deeper than just restaurants. Google licensed Yelp content for some time, and even tried to acquire Yelp back in 2009 to try and fix things like this, and when that failed, Google…
I don’t recall the first time I heard VMware say they were working on virtualization for phones. I do recall my response then, and it’s the same as today. Actually, my response is even more focused today. It’s a silly idea that nobody will buy. More importantly, it’s completely the wrong approach to solving any security issues with smartphones today. I’ve been a huge fan of VMware for many many years (it goes back to when I worked at Microsoft,…
I never met Steve Jobs. It doesn’t matter if I had. What do you say to someone who impacted your life so much, other than a feeble, “Thanks”? My parents tried to expose my brother and I to computing with a IIe. I used it through my first year of college. Honestly, it made me really dislike computers. Sure it technologically pushed the envelope. But the user interface and I never clicked. I have to wonder if Steve Jobs of…
Most likely, you’ve seen The Polar Express. The animation technique used in it resulted in animation that is said to result in the Uncanny Valley effect. The Uncanny Valley theory says that while human-acting robots/animations or other non-human reenactments can very closely mimic the actions of a human, they cannot truly portray the emotion of the human face. The resulting coldness or unemotionality evokes a strange feeling in observers, who will find the character to be insensitive, unmoving, or sometimes…