Found this on Core 7 … its absolutely hilarious.
“Bill: What;s this?
Job’s It’s an iHouse.
Gates: But its got no windows.
Jobs: Exactly”
Tag Archives: Technology
more multi-touch user interfaces
Amy over at Slash 7 has posted up some links on her blog to a number of videos showcasing different multi-touch user interfaces. I have to admit, the Perceptive Pixel stuff has me really excited!
Google Apps Launches premium offerings
Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later but it’s official. Google is launching a premium service for companies wishing to use Google’s on-line app’s as opposed to traditional desktop suites such as MS Office. The premium package includes a custom 10GB Gmail inbox, Google Calendar, Writely, Google Spreadsheet, GTalk IM, Google Pages, Google Custom Home page, and iGoogle – the price will be around $50 per Employee per year, as opposed to MS Office which costs between $500-$600 per license..
You can read more about the competitive pricing in this articly over on NY Times. It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft react, however I doubt they’re will be any immediate impact from this, it will take time for Google to take any significant market share for the simple reason that I personally don’t believe large organisations are ready to trust Google with all their corporate data … yet!
I’ve been using OpenOffice for a while now, I also have MS Office on my works laptop. My own feeling is that as much people berate Microsoft, the Office suite is actually really quite good. Open Office is catching up, but does have a fair way to go in terms of a feature by feature comparison. Google’s Writely ( word processor ) doesn’t come close to having the same number of features in it as either of the other two, but the question is … does it need to? I don’t think it does. Most users probably dont use more than 30% of the features ( if that ) in MS Word – I know I don’t! ( admittedly I’d still love to use LaTex ).
Google’s new offering is not only a threat to both OpenOffice and MS Office, it’s an excellent example of how, with today’s technologies, you can liberate people from the desktop and deliver compelling Software as a Service Solutions, that users can use … anywhere! They’re not tied down to a single machine … and that’s really cool!
In fact find out more over at the Official Google blog.
7 habits for effective text editing
Here’s a really cool talk by Bram Moolenaar the creator of Vim. There’ some really great tips some of which are obvious others aren’t. I remember when Rob and I were paired on Cenote, we did most of our development work on Fedora Core, Rob re-introduced my to Vi and Vim and gave me loads of great tips, this talk was somewhat reminiscent of that. It’s definitly worth watching!
P2P has no effect on legal music sales
Rob recently talked about Steve Jobs views on how the music industry’s insistence on DRM simply doesnt work, which I agree with. Along similar lines I was very interested to read about a new study published in the Journal of Political Economy. I think the study refers to this paper, or perhaps a more recent version of it entitled The effect of file sharing on Record Sales, an Empirical analysis. that asserts that illegal music downloads have no noticeable effect on the sale of music – which is completely contrary to the claims made by the record industry.
The brain scan that read people’s intentions
Came across this article on the Guardian online.
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act
When I read the headline the first thought that sprung to mind was 1984 closely followed by Minority Report. It reveals how far neuroscience is progressing but an urgent debate is needed on the ethical issues surrounding such technologies.
The idea of being able to control a computer with your mind, or a wheelchair on the face of it sounds quite appealing and advocates of this technology argue that it could have many such benefits.
Detractors maintain that such technology could be used to create an Orwellian style society. This kind of technology has the potential to change society, and we need to understand and encourage debate around its ethical use:
“Do we want to become a ‘Minority Report’ society where we’re preventing crimes that might not happen? For some of these techniques, it’s just a matter of time. It is just another new technology that society has to come to terms with and use for the good, but we should discuss and debate it now because what we don’t want is for it to leak into use in court willy nilly without people having thought about the consequences” Barbara Sahakian,Professor Neuro-Psychology at Cambridge
“These techniques are emerging and we need an ethical debate about the implications, so that one day we’re not surprised and overwhelmed and caught on the wrong foot by what they can do. These things are going to come to us in the next few years and we should really be prepared,” Professor John Dylan-Haynes
Multi Touch user interface
This demo from Perceptive Pixel of their new Multi Touch user interface looks amazing! I agree with Rob, I really want one too!
Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
Charles S. Knight has a compiled his list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. The article makes for an interesting read as he describes his method of analysis by comparing them to Google under a set of categories he defines.
What made me grin the most was the reference at the end of the article to Asimov’s The Last Question, an excellent short story that wonderfully suggests an answer to the question “is Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, a fait accompli“. In fact for making that observation/link alone Charles gets a thumbs up from me.
Google Booksearch … now visualise places mentioned in books on maps!
So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you’ll find a map on the “About this book” page.
To see this in action just search for any book on http://books.google.com for example this Book on New York, when you click on the About this book page you get the places referenced in the book displayed on a map, along with the page references from the book.
Maybe i’m just a big geek … but I think its really cool!
Welcome to Google Planet? is Google building a virtual world?
Came across this article in New Scientist. Rumours are circulating that Google is developing an online Virtual world, much like Second Life. I suspected this might be the case when they acquired SketchUp last year which allows users to contribute 3D buildings for others to see which can be overlayed on Google Earth.
Read the New Scientist article for more information … but I’ll definitly be keeping an eye on this. Google has made a habit out of taking on very established markets and re-defining them. I do hope though that Google, if they go down this road, improve on the metaphor, I really hope they dont end up cheesing people off like SL has 🙂