firehose

Market Basket in Danvers has a new executive lounge….does anyone else smell feet?

 

I'm now on the board of directors of the EFF.

Monster Party (Human/Bandai - NES - 1989)

gamewtfs:

I think this is the first kid in the history of the Nintendo Entertainment System to show a moment’s hesitation before traveling to an alien world to engage in hand-to-hand combat with hundreds of violent, blocky creatures.

djempirical

yaaaaaaay, #ohio! :( :poop: :-1:

Original Source

Loneliness is a bitch. I have a ton of empathy for people who are alone but don't want to be, and for people who are certain they're going to be alone forever, and for people who feel excluded from the possibility of love altogether. It's such a shitty, self-perpetuating cycle—and I know that because I used to live in there. I hated it! It's also a breeding ground for nasty, gendered bitterness—particularly misogyny (men tend to blame women; women tend to blame ourselves). The drive to be nurtured and accepted by another human being might not be the biggest challenge we grapple with as a species, but it foments a unique brand of self-destruction.

Ugh, fuckin' dumbass romance. It'd be better if we were all just blocks of cheese. And NO, I DO NOT HAVE A WEIRD SEXUAL THING ABOUT CHEESE.

So what do you do? One of the main talking points in every single How to Make Yourself Attractive listicle is confidence. Confidence, confidence, confidence. Fake it till you make it. Except also don't fake it, because nobody wants to bang a faker. That can be an incredibly discouraging logical dead end—turns out, the one weird trick you need to solve all your problems is this thing that you just have to be born with because it's a vaguely George Clooney-shaped ungraspable abstraction that scampers away when you look directly at it! So just figure out how to, um, have that. But without trying too hard. Or looking at it. Now go get 'em, tiger!

A lot of guides for how to meet people tell you to fake confidence. To force eye contact. To dress outside of your comfort zone. (This Reddit thread falls into that trap a bit, but it's genuinely pretty adorable and could be useful for people struggling with this.)

- Having confidence in yourself is probably the biggest one. A lot of people don't realize the difference a little confidence can make. Even extreme arrogance is better than low confidence.

- Yeah, I hear that so much. Unfortunately I don't really have much of an idea of what it consists of. What are some examples of behavior in confident people? And how is one to go about increasing it?

- Try not to give a shit about what people think of you. If you can do that then you will have a lot more confidence in yourself.

So I want to talk about confidence for people who are struggling with confidence. Here are the things:

1. The opposite of confidence isn't shyness—it's fake confidence.

It seems like a good plan—to just mimic the confidence you see in others and hope it passes for genuine—but it's not. It is a bad plan. There's a big uncanny valley when it comes to confidence, where you think you're swaggering around like James Bond but really you're just frenetically fumbling through magic tricks and insulting everyone at the bar like a fucking freak. It's disconcerting for those of us on the receiving end. And by the way, if you take a look at how James Bond actually picked up women—mostly he was just like, "Hey."

A way better plan is to stop trying to carve yourself into this socially prescribed shape that you think deserves confidence, and start finding actual confidence in the things that make you you. If you're unhappy with your body or your mind or your social life, that's one thing—but change yourself for you, not for some faceless ringwraith you plan to bone some day in the future as soon as you get good enough at kettlebell squats. That's bad for you and dumb.

2. If you trick someone into liking you by being full of shit, you end up dating someone who wants to date a bag of shit.

Honesty is so great! Here's what happens if you're completely honest about yourself with people you might want to date: You end up maybe dating people who actually like you instead of people who like that weird character you made up. (Plus, cuts down on continuity errors.) Here's what happens if you're not honest: You end up hanging out with dicks you don't like. Worse than being alone! Hooray!

3. People are attracted to love, not hate.

About six months into dating, my current boyfriend and I discovered that, coincidentally, both of us had spent a few (dark-ish) years obsessively listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast every night as we fell asleep like weirdos—like a kind of fucked up, screeching security blanket. It's not something we do anymore, or ever did together, but it's one of the many threads that make up our big tangly connection. He doesn't love me because of how much I hated being alone. He loves me because he sees how much I love the things I love.

If you want people to love you, you should love stuff. Bitterness is like Citronella for vaginas. Are you interested in anything? Do that thing. You never know who you might meet in Thing Class—and even if you don't, hey! You got to spend a bunch of time doing your thing!

4. A great way to endear yourself to women is to fight against the societal structure that oppresses them and made you lonely in the first place.

All this shit—your "type," the "criteria" you think you need in a mate—is arbitrary. It's social conditioning. I used to think I wanted to date someone tall (I'm tall), until I started asking myself why I felt like that and couldn't come up with a single coherent answer. Then I dated some dudes who were way shorter than me, literally never even noticed after the first 2 minutes, and then literally never thought about it again. Because THEY'RE PEOPLE. That arbitrary people-criteria you think you really, really want but can't get? Just try to imagine not wanting it. Voila! Now go out and bang whomever, Criss Angel. You can do this. Now please stop making eye contact with me.

Original Source

mikejuk writes "It seems that Firefox 23, currently in beta, has removed the option to disable JavaScript. Is this good for programmers and web apps? Why has Mozilla decided that this is the right thing to do? The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications. The idea is that if you provide lots of user options then users will click them in ways that aren't particularly logical. The result is that users break the browser and then complain that it is broken. For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways — ways that worry the end user. Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites. Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out the tomato plants [Devon] grew using a monitoring system he built himself. It’s based around a Raspberry Pi. As far as grow controllers go it falls a bit short of full automation. That’s because the only thing it can actuate is the black water line seen hovering above the plants. But [Devon's] work on monitoring and collecting sensor data should make it easy to add features in the future.

The moisture sensors pictured above monitor the soil in which the plants are growing. But he also has temperature and light sensors. These are very important when growing from seed and could be used in conjunction with a heating mat for plants that require higher soil temperatures (like pepper plants). The tomatoes are also pretty leggy. Now that he’s monitoring light levels it would be good to augment the setup with a grow light. A long term goal could even be a motorized bed which could raise the plants right up to the bulbs so they don’t reach for the light.

Don’t let the stars in our eyes distract you though. He’s done a ton of work on the project both with the physical build, and in plotting the data collected by the system. Great job!

Filed under: green hacks, Raspberry Pi

By Britt Julious (cross posted from WBEZ.org 91.5 Chicago)

You’re not good enough and you never will be and we need to remind you of this again and again. Do not get comfortable. What you’ve done matters little. For every act is just an act, existing in a vacuum, not representative of the whole, or even a part of who you think you are.

This is what I imagine is being said to someone like Beyonce or Rihanna or Michelle Obama by the media and by society at large. It might not be said explicitly, but it is implied forcefully and continuously. They are three of the most visible black female public figures and they are three of the most controversial. Controversy, I realize now, is largely a manufactured tool, one that is used to control the narratives of the people around us. And the narrative of the black woman – public or not – rarely changes: you will not be good enough. Do not forget.

Regardless of what Beyonce or Rihanna or Michelle Obama does, they will get criticized for their actions. To the public, there is no such thing as a good or respectable black woman. They are women who are almost “good,” but not quite. The ways in which society tries to find and develop these characteristics of “bad” rarely differ from figure to figure.

All of their actions are up for debate, even when they are personal and non-threatening. What has Beyonce done but work hard to be the best performer she could possibly be? Well, for one they say, she is not a good enough feminist. One of my friends said that she was uncomfortable with the fact that Beyonce named her tour “The Mrs. Carter Tour.” But why is a woman’s feminist cred eliminated because she changed her last name? Why do personal decisions that threaten no one eradicate one’s support of equality between the sexes?

My mother changed her last name and I can’t think of a better representation of feminism lived in the everyday world. Her strength, her work effort, her words about hard work and personal achievement, the visibility of shared responsibility … all of these things led me to feminism before I knew what that was.

Beyonce is not a good feminist. She is not feminist at all. This is what they say. A recent Ms.magazine article fueled the flames not for what it said about Beyonce’s feminism, but because anything was said at all. Readers were upset that anyone could try to relate the two. Beyonce is not a feminist because she dresses “provocatively.” Beyonce is not a feminist because she changes her last name, because she shows vulnerability, because she is proud of her motherhood and her marriage. Beyonce is not a feminist because she is not what a feminist looks like. She is not a feminist because we say she is not. If we seek to promote the value in feminism and challenge the negative connotations of feminism in the public eye, tearing down a performer who speaks openly about women doing right for themselves, who literally called herself a feminist, does more harm than good.

When I see Michelle Obama on the screen, I see a woman like the women I grew up around. She is poised and beautiful and intelligent. She is also real. There is an argument to be made about the decorum of the First Lady, but I don’t think Obama has ever questioned this.

 Perhaps it is because she exists not as a wallflower, but as a powerhouse that we are threatened by an eye roll. Perhaps because she is literal strength that we find her reaction to a heckler as a wrong. As an outsider, these reactions shock me. Why are we upset that Obama reacts? What do we expect of her?

As an insider (an insider of the black female experience), they do not. Black women can’t show their cards. If you have achieved something, the only way to continue rising is to keep one’s head down. Opinions? Emotions? Reflections? Please! Take a seat!

In a recent, ridiculous story for the UK’s Daily Mail, Liz Jones chastised Rihanna for not acting as a perfect role model. Ignore the fact that one of the most consistent things about the singer is that she refuses the label of “role model.” Why do we expect this of her at all? Why is she not allowed to live her life as she chooses? Yes, she has young fans. But why do we act as if good parenting is no longer a viable option in preventing our children from “bad” influences? If we are to talk about the actions of pop stars, why is Rihanna criticized more than her peer, Lady Gaga, who too speaks openly about drug use and recklessness? There exists a double standard, one that has become abundantly clear.

There exists, in the life of a black woman, public or not, the notion that the other shoe will drop. You are waiting for the challenge, the comeuppance, the moment in which others will tell you who you are and how you should live. This extends to the general female experience, too, and the Other experience as a whole. The other shoe waits. You wait.

This is why our interpersonal bonds are so important and public. I’m remembering a man who said that black women are catty. That made no sense to me. The ease in which I build friendships with women who look like me cannot be explained. But perhaps there is the reality of what we must face and what we have been told. One can never overstate the importance of knowing your stories and feelings are important and true.

I am reminded of what my parents – my mother in particular – used to say: You will have to work twice as hard to get half as far. You do not always have the luxury to dress down, to not always be your best, to mess up. Any sign of weakness, of humanity, is a reinforcement of stereotypes we have yet to eradicate. I did not know this to be true then, but I understand it now. The world reveals itself.

by valkiry

I've been putting off publishing my review of Feed Wrangler. It was late to the game and had the most ground to make up. Believe it or not, I don't like to write negative reviews.

Today, Feed Wrangler bridged a major gap. Feed Wrangler OPML Import will now automatically create "Smart Streams" from Google Reader feed groups.

If you are already using Feed Wrangler, there's no need to delete and start over. Running another import of the Google OPML (XML) file will automatically create the new smart streams. It is a bit slow, so go enjoy a nice beverage while it's working.

A former North-Vietnamese soldier has been reunited with his arm after more than 40 years.

Nguyen Quang Hung, a Vietcong soldier during the Vietnam war, had his arm amputated by US army doctor Sam Axelrad in 1966 after his arm caught gangrene.

Dr Axelrad kept the bones of the arm as a reminder of the good deed he had performed by treating an enemy soldier.

He began a quest to track down the owner of the arm in 2012, meeting Mr Hung on Monday to return his bones.

"I'm very happy to see him again and have that part of my body back after nearly half a century," Mr Hung said.

"My arm bone is evidence of my contribution to the war. I will keep it in my house... in the glass display cabinet," he said, adding that he hoped the arm would help him claim a veteran's pension, as his army files had been lost.

He also plans to be buried with his bones.

Returning mission

Dr Axelrad said he was "unbelievably happy" to be able to return the arm.

"When I amputated his arm [in 1966], our medics took the arm, took the flesh off it, put it back together perfectly with wires, and then they gave it to me," he said.

"When I left the country six months later, I didn't want to throw it away, I put it in my trunk and brought it home, and all these years it has been in my house," he added.

In 2011, he returned to Vietnam and tried to find the man whose arm he had amputated - a move he later said would help provide "closure".

A local journalist wrote about his mission, and the news eventually spread back to Mr Hung.

When he heard he would get his arm back he said he "really could not believe it".

"I can't believe that an American doctor took my infected arm, got rid of the flesh, dried it, took it home and kept it for more than 40 years," he said.

He added later that he considered himself "very lucky" compared to many of his comrades who died in the war.

The Vietnam war, which ended in 1975, killed an estimated 58,000 US soldiers and three million Vietnamese.

Original Source

This series of posts is about enabling sustainable businesses on the App Store. In Part 1, I discuss why Paper and other productivity apps may not be doing as well as you might think. Part 2 explores why casual games, in contrast, are a sustainable business, but not a differentiator for platforms (I added a follow-up here). Part 3 analyzes why Apple in particular seems hesitant to enable sustainable businesses on the app store.

I love apps, especially productivity apps. If games are all about user input, with minimal app output, and consumption apps about app output, with minimal user input, productivity apps are about both. You put something into an app, and the app returns something back to you, better.

Think about Photoshop, or Excel: you put in data, and the data is returned to you, transformed. Same thing with a text-editing app, or a calculator, or a mileage tracker. Productivity apps add value, and the more you use them, the more valuable they become.

Unfortunately, productivity apps are a terrible match for app store economics. The app store favors:

• Simple, inexpensive apps that are downloaded by a lot of people
• Free front-ends for for-pay or advertising-based services
• Games with repetitive mechanics that can monetize existing users through in-app purchases

The solutions for enabling sustainable productivity apps are actually pretty obvious – just look at how productivity apps make money elsewhere:

• More expensive apps with trials
• Paid updates
• Built-in subscription support

And yet, iOS 7 introduces radical change in nearly everything except for app monetization. Why doesn’t Apple do more to enable sustainable businesses on the app store?

I see a few reasons, ranging from the concrete to the more speculative.

Apple’s business model devalues developers

Apple makes money on hardware. It’s in their interest that said hardware be sold for as much of a premium as the market will bear. However, it’s equally in their interest that the complements to that hardware are sold as cheaply as possible, and are preferably free.

That is why, for example, iOS updates are free, and OS X updates nearly so. Both cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but they only exist to sell more hardware, not to make money in and of themselves.

This is standard strategy, especially in technology. Look at Google: the vast majority of their services are free because they want to drive usage in order to capture signals and serve ads. Microsoft, which has felt the pain of Google commoditizing services and Apple commoditizing OS updates, did the same thing to hardware makers: Windows supported everything under the sun because the increased competition would drive down the cost of hardware, leaving all of the profit to Microsoft.

In the case of apps, the current app store, full of a wide variety of inexpensive apps, is perfect from Apple’s perspective. It’s a reason to buy Apple hardware, and that’s all that matters. Anything that on the surface makes the store less desirable for hardware buyers – such as more expensive apps – is not in Apple’s interest.

Developers don’t have an advocate on Apple’s leadership team

Scott Forstall started at NEXT. He was a major contributor to NEXTStep, and then to OS X. He had every reason to be a fierce proponent of Cocoa, the NEXTStep-derived API that was native to OS X. Yet it was Forstall, in his role as director of API frameworks, that pushed for Carbon, the API that maximized backwards compatibility with Mac OS 8 and 9. More recently, it was Forstall, as head of iOS, who pushed most forcefully for 3rd-party apps to be allowed on iOS.

Forstall proved himself, again and again, to be a huge proponent of 3rd-party developers. And he’s gone.

I get why Forstall had to go, but to be clear, it was a massive loss, especially for apps.¹ There certainly remain many, many people at Apple that care deeply about apps, but the policy changes I and others are calling for will be decided at the top.

In Forstall’s absence, who in the leadership team is making the case? I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone else in that Monday morning meeting prioritizes developer issues.

Apple has been burned by productivity apps before

As I just noted, the great thing about productivity apps is that they add value, and the more you use them, the more valuable they become – the potential value of a productivity app is limited only by the amount of data you are willing to put into it.

The trouble for Apple – or any platform provider – is apps that cross that line from nice-to-have to completely irreplaceable. It’s at that point a user’s loyalty shifts from platform to app, and there are no greater examples than the aforementioned Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

Last week I transcribed significant portions of the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld Boston. In that keynote, he described how Apple was dependent on Adobe for many of its sales, and, more famously, introduces Apple’s “partnership” with Microsoft.

Jobs’ closing speech, where he said that “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose,” is well-known and still cited; however, I think the full quote is more telling (emphasis mine):

You know, where we are right now, is, we’re shepherding some of the greatest assets in the computer industry. And, if we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here.

We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. OK? We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job, and if others are going to help us, that’s great, cause we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault. It’s our fault. So, I think that’s a very important perspective.

I think, if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. We like their software.

So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.

The emphasis brings home the point: Jobs’ statement was completely driven by Apple’s desperate state and the fact that Apple’s potential users cared more about Photoshop and Office than they did the Mac. For Jobs especially, it must have been humiliating.

I had a unique vantage point into how Apple looks at this time in its history due to my time spent on the Apple University team, and something that struck me was the powerful impact Apple’s near-death experience had on all those involved. That Wired cover, and the fact Apple lost nearly a billion dollars in 1996, came up unprompted again and again. For those that were there, it still fundamentally shapes how they view the world and how they make decisions.

To be clear, this has tremendous value: there is nothing like near-death to realize you have nothing to lose – a great recipe to avoiding disruption. In fact, one of my concerns for Apple is what will happen when all of the old guard is gone, leaving those who have only known success.

But there have been downsides to this paranoia. Apple’s inefficient use of its cash is the most famous, but I think developer hostility is an aftereffect as well. I would go so far as to argue that that Boston keynote was at the root of Jobs’ opposition to any 3rd-party apps on the iPhone, much less app store policies that enable sustainable businesses. Never again would Apple be held hostage to an app that was bigger than Apple.

To be fair, Cook has already reversed Jobs’ position on cash. However, the enthusiasm with which he promoted $10 billion paid to developers – which I believe is mostly driven by in-app purchases in casual games – suggests he doesn’t appreciate there is a problem with the app store.

---

Then again, who is to say it’s a problem? I’ve already pointed out that cheap apps align with Apple’s business model.

And that’s fine, as long as the iPhone is dominant in other areas. But is it?

To bring back my favorite chart, the mobile hierarchy of needs:

When the iPhone launched, it was, as Jobs said, five years ahead when it came to hardware and the OS. However, that was six years ago; today it’s apps that are the biggest reason to buy an iOS device (and services the biggest reason not to).

Were Apple to invest more in its ecosystem and enable sustainable productivity apps, I believe iOS could build a moat comparable to the one enjoyed by Microsoft for over two decades. Namely, for customers who care about apps, it ought to be unthinkable to consider any other platform.

---

While pondering this article, I was struck by this tweet from Aaron Levie:

Incumbents get disrupted because the very moats a company builds up to be successful in one era become a liability in the next.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) June 27, 2013

Three years ago, I wrote an academic paper on Apple and the Innovator’s Dilemma, and argued that Apple’s narrow focus on the end-user shielded them from disruption:

Apple’s focus on user experience as a differentiator has significant strategic implications as well, particularly in the context of the Innovator’s Dilemma: namely, it is impossible for a user experience to be too good. Competitors can only hope to match or surpass the original product when it comes to the user experience; the original product will never overshoot (has anyone turned to an “inferior” product because the better one was too enjoyable?). There is no better example than the original Macintosh, which maintained relevance only because of a superior user experience. It was only when Windows 95 was “good enough” that the Macintosh’s plummet began in earnest. This in some respects completely exempts Apple from the product trajectory trap, at least when it comes to their prime differentiation.

Indeed, it seems that Apple simply isn’t very interested in moats. They do what they think is right by the user, strategy nerds like me be damned. This kills them on Wall Street, but perhaps is the only possible route to avoiding stasis, and ultimately, disruption.

This is why Apple is so fascinating.

This is a three-part series on enabling sustainable businesses on the app store.

• Part 1: Papering Over App Store Problems
• Part 2: Casual gaming is sustainable, but not a differentiator & Additional Notes on Casual Games
• Part 3: Why doesn’t Apple enable sustainable businesses on the app store?

1. I’ll write more about this in the context of iOS 7 soon

The post Why doesn’t Apple enable sustainable businesses on the app store? appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

Oh, the humanity.

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Technical barriers to grafting one person’s head onto another person’s body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group.

TMZ.com

Three lawsuit suits against Elmo creator Kevin Clash thrown out San Jose Mercury News A judge in New York on Monday tossed out three lawsuits accusing former Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash of sexually abusing three underage boys, according to the Associated Press. Federal Judge Kevin Koeltl said the claims came more than three years after ... Sesame Street Elmo Scandal: Three New York Lawsuits Against Ex Puppeteer ...Design & Trend Belated Claims Against Elmo Actor Thrown Out of CourtCourthouse News Service Kevin Clash -- BIG VICTORY FOR ELMO in Child Molestation CasesTMZ.com Tallmadge Express -The-review all 222 news articles »

The New Yorker

Selfie while tackled by Security

ladyw1nter:

korydwen:

Remember that time Star Trek called out bigots about contraception ?

Every time I get one of these posts across my dash I want to kill JJ Abrams just a little more.

Farewell Hackaday, the time has come for me to move on. Don’t worry, hackaday will keep going, just like it did when [Eliot] moved on, and [Phil] before him.

I wrote my first post on July 9th, 2008. Since then I’ve had so much fun, and written a total of 1,552 posts (including this one). In my opinion, there is simply no other site like Hackaday.com, our readers are passionate and knowledgeable and it shows, even if some of you are incredibly rude to each other(that’s a sign of passion right?).

While some projects stand out in my mind, it is the people I have enjoyed the most. The people I met when I went to all the different hackerspaces, my co-writers[Mike Szczycs] and[Brian Benchoff], past hackaday employees, our commenters,  and even my boss [Jason Calacanis].

If you want to find me, I’ll be at calebkraft.com or on facebook or G+. I have a twitter too, that I guess I’ll start using today.

Join me after the break just one more time while a take a trip down memory lane with a few of my favorite moments from the last few years.  Oh, and yes, I think saying “after the break” is stupid. What else do you say though?

I built some really fun things.

and some things I feel I can be proud of

This controller didn’t help [Thomas] that much, but it gave me the idea for Thecontrollerproject.com which I’m proud to say has already begun helping people.

I drove almost all the way across the country visiting hackerspaces.

I can’t describe how amazing this was for me. I met people from Arizona all the way to South Carolina. I saw hackerspaces that were 110 degrees inside and hackerspaces that were old masonic temples. The people I met were always enthusiastic, helpful and pleasant.

I jammed stuff up my nose for April fools

I made this thing a long time ago and was waiting for a reason to do something ridiculous.  I thought it was a great chance to make fun of the kickstarter emails we get all the time. Yes, I did actually shove that thing into my nasal passage.The links actually went to my personal paypal account too.   I think I actually got about $3 in donations off that form!

I got tazed.

We thought maybe you guys would like some coverage of the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas back in January of 2010. Turns out we didn’t see a whole lot there that we thought you’d be interested in. I stepped up to the plate to take the blame and the punishment.

I had a bunch of other posts in mind, but as I started adding I couldn’t stop. Maybe I should just leave it here.

I’d like to thank the readers again. If it weren’t for your projects happening in your homes, businesses, and hackerspaces, this site wouldn’t exist. You guys are freaking awesome.

Filed under: news

I love this game

Last week Google rolled out improved satellite imagery across all of its mapping products. Based on imagery from the NASA/USGS Landsat 7 satellite, Google’s new higher resolution image of earth weighs in at 800,000 megapixels and is now nearly free of cloud cover thanks to software trickery. The new imagery can be seen on Google Earth and the satellite view of Google Maps.

scalesofperception:

Amazon Unpacked by Ben Roberts

Workers at Rugeley spend their days wandering the massive warehouse, either squirreling away incoming products, pulling orders down from shelves, or packing them up for shipment. In each of these activities, the workers’ motions are not driven by the engine of human judgment or expertise but rather by the massive engine of Amazon’s exquisitely complex fulfillment mechanism: a computer that both tracks and commands every worker’s movements throughout the day.

An Amazon fulfillment associate might have to walk as far as 15 miles in a single shift, endlessly looping back and forth between shelves in a warehouse the size of nine soccer fields. They do this in complete silence, except for the sound of their feet. The atmosphere is so quiet that workers can be fired for even talking to one another. And all the while, cardboard cutouts of happy Amazon workers look on, cartoon speech bubbles frozen above their heads: “This is the best job I ever had!"

SoP

 

 

 

TIMELORD_RUN=no

In a letter to subscribers today, Microsoft announced that it plans to retire its venerable TechNet subscriptions service. New subscriptions will no longer be available after August 31, 2013, and the subscription service will shut down as current subscribers' contracts end.