minima-list // mnl.st

2012-06-03

Picplz Shutting Down Permanently

From an e-mail I received yesterday:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted. Until then, you can log in and download your photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in your photo feed. Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

What can I say? Not all Instagram clones are as good as Instagram. It would be nice to see a Picplz-fail inspired article on Instagram clones and their life cycle. I wonder how many similar apps have failed, by now, trying to replicate Instagram’s succes.

Original article and comments, here
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2012-06-01

Mike Daisey and the "badge of honor"

I found this at Stephen Hacket, who’s saying Mike Daisey blasted Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher on the D10 interview with Tim Cook. Now, I’m not an English native and I really hope “blasted” is some irony, because Daisey should shut the hell up and swallow his lies. Mossberg’s aggressiveness is isn’t aggressive enough for what Daisey has done, but he’s right: “being attacked by an admitted liar is sort of a badge of honor.”

You see, Mike Daisey is a liar. He took a vacation in China and wrote some science fiction, playing with journalists’ credibility. I can get misunderstandings, I can get being lied or not getting the information properly, it happens and mistakes get published. But I don’t get premeditated lies. It’s like first degree murder. For premeditated stories, Daisey’s punishment is to be forever silent. He lost his right to comment on journalism.

Original article and comments, here
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2012-05-31

Therefore

René Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks “Would you like a beer?”. Descartes says “I think not” and promptly vanishes.

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Helvetica in Motion

Cool. Watch it.

Original article and comments, here
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Hammer.js - easy multitouch gestures for sites

Hammer.js is a small library for handling touch events. You can add tap (touch/click), double tap, hold, drag (touchmove/mousemove), swipe, and transform (pinch) events to any website. Comes as a jQuery plugin as well. Go check the demo. [via]

Original article and comments, here
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2012-05-30

Kafka

I loved this:

Facebook is Kafka with a thumbs-up button.

Brent Simmons is damn right. But then again, some people need to graduate MIT and work in its research labs to understand ~~the importance of social media~~ how Facebook changed people.

Original article and comments, here
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Tim Cook: "I'm not Steve Jobs' replacement"

Tim Cook about Steve Jobs:

Steve was a genius and a visionary. And you know, I’ve never viewed my role as to replace him. I think he’s an irreplaceable person. Steve was an original. I don’t think there’s another one of those being made. I’ve never really felt the weight of trying to be Steve. It’s just not who I am. It’s not my goal in life. I am who I am, and I’m focused on that and being a great CEO of Apple.

A great summary of the D10 interview in MacWorld. I thing this quote is one of the most interesting in the whole interview. I know, I’m going to write once again about “haters gonna hate”, but the fact is lots of Apple products users don’t trust Tim Cook. That’s because they really think a new Steve Jobs should have taken Steve Jobs’ place. Well, there’s no other Steve. And Tim Cook does a hell of a job as Apple’s CEO, cherishing Apple and Steve Jobs’ legacy while doing business on his own terms, following Steve’s steps but on his own terms and strategies. Which is absolutely cool.

Basically, Tim Cook says this: “Stop comparing me with Steve, we’re different, damn it!” Again. But, of course, in his own very elegant way of saying it.

Original article and comments, here
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Tim Cook: "We didn't invent the tablet"

We didn’t invent the tablet market. It was there. We invented the modern tablet.

Tim Cook said that at D10. Now, for starters, it takes a lot of courage to say it, especially in a context in which all haters say “Apple didn’t innovate anything, it’s just marketing, they’re copycats.” That’s one. The second, here’s what Cook says about “transformers”; on the long run, it’s about Windows 8:

I love convergence and I think convergence is great in many areas, but I think products are about trade-offs. And you have to make tough decisions, you have to chose. And the fact is the more you look at the tablet as a PC, the more the baggage from the past affects the product. […] You end up not building the best product, in this particular case, when you try to converge this.

And here’s a bit more on how tablets will kill computers. I’m kidding, he’s not saying that, “analysts” say it. Cook says they’re different:

People want tablets to be incredibly thin.But if you look at it as a notebook, you’re not gonna come out of the design of the product and be a kick-ass product, something people say “Wow!, This is what I wanted!” […] Many people will select a tablet over a PC. It will clearly cannibalize the PC, so from that point of view, at a macro point of view, they’re connected. But I think if you force them together, I think the PC is not as good as it could be, and I think the tablet is not as good as it could be.

2012-05-29

The HDD is not enough. For Adobe, of course

That’s the standard Adobe Reader, occupying my Air’s hard drive. It takes 416 MB to read text. Speechless. Well done, Adobe.

Original article and comments, here
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Different TV stations, same content. Sharing the news

The stations here compete for viewers, but they cooperate in gathering the news — maintaining technically separate ownership, but sharing office space, news video and even the scripts written for their nightly news anchors. That is why viewers see the same segments on car accidents, the same interviews with local politicians, the same high school sports highlights. The same kind of sharing takes place in dozens of other cities, from Burlington, Vt., where the Fox and ABC stations sometimes share anchors, to Honolulu, where the NBC and CBS stations broadcast the same morning show.

It’s what happens in the US with at some local TV stations. Which reminds me of a local business in my country, started in 2007 or 2008, I think. A TV star started a series of shows which her production company sold to local TV stations. With some differences, viewers from different counties were seeing the same thing. But they were receiving good content that local networks wouldn’t otherwise have been able to deliver. I think something similar can be done in the news business in the US. Deliver the same news, but record it with different anchors and sell it to local networks. Might be an idea, right?

Original article and comments, here
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Apple is clearly going oh!-so-down

Cook wants key players in Washington to know they now have an open line to the chief executive in Cupertino. That was the message aides briefed on the meetings said Cook conveyed in sit-downs with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Yeah, Apple is clearly going down. I mean, it’s not like Tim Cook is trying to bring new corporate and, especially, some new government clients, right? And, we all know Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs and he’s going to take the company so down!

Yes, I’m being ironic.

[via]

Original article and comments, here
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2012-05-28

All your houses are belong to Facebook

Two robbers have paid a visit to a house in south-eastern Australia, hours after a teenager posted a photo on Facebook of a large sum of cash. The masked men, armed with a knife and a club, struck the home of the 17-year-old girl’s mother in the country town of Bundanoon on Thursday, police say.

Because Facebook is for meeting nice new people.

Original article and comments, here
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Yup, rating agencies underperform. And use blackmail

Just read an article and remembered about this:

McGraw-Hill Cos., owner of Standard & Poor’s, has “underperformed its potential” and should break into four parts, shareholders Jana Partners LLC and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan proposed. […] The company “has consistently underperformed its potential and traded at a sizable discount,” Jana said in the filing.

Well, what do you know?

Now, what exactly does “underperform” mean? Not enough money, maybe? Oh, so if S&P underperformed, it’s legit to say Moody’s and Fitch underperformed, right? Oh, so rating agencies downgrading countries is, basically, the equivalent of some strange form of blackmailing, right?, and a way to keep the old and attract the new clients, huh? Well, now. Doesn’t that sound a bit like a conspiracy? Well, not really. It’s just business. A dirty business, for what it’s worth.

Original article and comments, here
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A Facebook phone? But, why?

OK, so there are rumors of a Facebook phone coming soon. Like, really? Are you serious? But, why? For instance, the Facebook app is responsable for draining 3 percent of your Android phone for each charging cycle. Compare that to the 13% used by the touchscreen and the 4% used by the system to keep the phone logged in to the network. Imagine a Facebook phone. If the Facebook Android app uses almost as much power as the cell idle system… Really? I mean, really?

Anyway, what I’d like to know is this: is Facebook going to be a manufacturer using its own OS or is it going to be just another HTC-like manufacturer, using Android as the core OS for its phone? Because, just look around, Nokia dies, RIM crashes and burns, why another OS? Remember the rule of the three?

Original article and comments, here
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2012-05-27

Soundcloud Downloader. I'm a pirate, baby!

When I saw ‘Drive,’ I fell for the soundtrack. ‘College’, I mean. I’m not a fan of d’n’b and its bastard dubstep, but I like electronic music. Old-school electro, whose parents descend from psychedelic and synthesizers. The ‘Drive’ sountrack is just that, and the French dude David Grellier is doing a hell of a job with his project College. What happens when you like the music but you can’t buy it? Well, you become a pirate. And if you find the music on SoundCloud.com… It’s how I found SoundCloud Downloader. I don’t have to explain what it does, do I? Anyway, If you liked College, here’s the link to the tunes. Enjoy.

Original article and comments, here
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