The Insider News

Marco.org[^]:

I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive. But I hate it. It’s limited, often clunky, outdated, and deeply flawed.

I, Cringely[^]:

What’s keeping us using desktops and even notebook, then, are corporate buying policies, hardware replacement cycles, and inertia. How long before the PC as we knew it is dead? About five years I reckon, or 1.5 PC hardware replacement cycles. Nearly all of us are on our next-to-last PC.

Dalton Caldwell[^]:

Perhaps you think that Twitter today is a really cool and powerful company. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been much, much more. I believe an API-centric Twitter could have enabled an ecosystem far more powerful than what Facebook is today.

VisionMobile[^]:

When the iPad first appeared on the market, publishers immediately saw its potential as a media-consumption device. Indeed they were right: iPad (and tablet) users are more likely to buy content than smartphone users. What they were not right about though was that native apps were the right vehicle to break into this market. A number of high-profile publishers have been recently abandoning native apps in favour of the mobile web.

Alan Winfield[^]:

In artificial systems it seems we need a new and broader definition of self-awareness - but what that definition is remains an open question. Defining artificial self-awareness as self-recognition assumes a very high level of cognition, equivalent to sentience perhaps. But we have no idea how to build sentient systems, which suggests we should not set the bar so high. And lower levels of self-awareness may be hugely useful and interesting - as well as more achievable in the near-term.

Ars Technica[^]:

There are two end-user computing devices I hold in the highest disregard: all-in-one PC desktops and thin clients. While they both apparently have their place in the information technology ecosystem—preferably far away from me—they also carry with them a hidden message to the poor worker drone stuck using them. Your boss doesn’t think you’re worth spending money for a real computer.

Quote:

Reporters have documented cases of deadly, preventable, explosions at iPad factories, and repeated instances of employees dying of exhaustion after long shifts [...] while Apple makes hundreds of dollars of profit on each iPhone or iPad it sells, only $8 and $10 (respectively) goes to the workers that make it.

Clean Rinse[^]:

This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. To start us off, I’m going to paste the entire big stack right here, to let you get a broad overview of where every piece fits in the stack. If you do not understand this right away, don’t be scared.

Gyrovague[^]:

E-books will be obsolete within five years. Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF.