this will be changed

• delicious + yahoo search service
  (tags: delicious yahoo api search)

• Zipcar Plans Partnership With Zimride – WSJ.com
  (tags: rideshare car auto zipcar zimride)
• The dark side of Dubai – Johann Hari
  If it's too good to be true…
  (tags: economy dubai globalization)

• Free Stanford course on developing iPhone software
  (tags: iphone education iphonesdk)

• Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss Discuss Angel Investing and Naming Companies
  I was surprised by the good material in their discussions. Kevin & Tim keep going up in my book (if I had one).
  (tags: startup entrepreneur kevinrose timferriss)
• Cyveillance – The World Leader in Cyber Intelligence
  These folks hit my blog from their dashboard @ dashboard.prod.cyveillance.com. *waves for the camera*
  (tags: security surveillance)

If Skype was allowed to transmit voice calls over a cell data network, for several reasons, it would be unusable. There’s overhead in buffering and accommodating the effects of cellular data service in order to provide reasonable voice quality. Whereas IP packets and browsers don’t care if there is a slight delay, voice has stricter latency requirements and that’s one reason cell phone networks didn’t start out as data networks to begin with! Triangulation, echo cancellation, and multiplexing are systems that IP isn’t built for and even if it was, it would be like powering a computer with a solar panel that’s fed by a light bulb, plugged into the power grid.

If you’d like an example, get a 3g laptop card and open Skype on your laptop, then try and hold a phone call as a passenger traveling in a vehicle at 55mph; you’ll soon be disconnected or be unable to understand the call. Skype and the Internet it runs over has no idea you’re switching from Cell Tower 5 to Cell Tower 14 and to expect parts of the call in a different order from the different towers; even if it did, the towers aren’t aware of skype and the bandwidth overhead for the towers to communicate between Skype’s system and your cell phone would be excessive and negatively impact the network as a whole. ATT isn’t handicapping anybody, it’s just not that simple.

I can understand consumer advocacy but some things just don’t work. If it was really practical to run VoIPoCell then none of us would have Cell phones. Skype’s best effort would be to find a carrier to work with them at a higher level than just the iPhone; if Skype wants you to seamlessly transfer your call between the most efficient network, they’ll need much more than Apple’s cooperation.

Now that I’ve railed on Dell I need to return the favor to Apple. Well, not really, but I do wish to post about an issue I’m having simply because I haven’t found a solution, Apple read’s these posts, and a resolution is posted, I will joyfully note it for others to find.

I’m sure others have had this problem but it’s a gamble for me on if and how I plug my LED Cinema Display into my unibody MacBook Pro. This is really lame considering both have been out for months and Apple touts the simplicity of using the new display. There is a reason however, that their advertising has the macbookpro lid open and not closed, it’s really buggy. With laptop closed, when plugging in the cinema display there’s a chance that I will only get a blank screen — the laptop is alive because I’ll get sound feedback by pressing keys on the keyboard; from there, if I sleep (power button, tab key, space key), then when I wake the machine w/click or keypress, half of the time it will be frozen. The fans will light up but no more sound feedback and no video. My only course of action here is to forcefully power down the machine by holding the power button and thus, loosing any unsaved changes.

I know this is a bug between the laptop and display because I have one of each (laptop/display) at home and work and all have this problem. I would note that this would sometimes happen on the old macbook pros but those systems had the F7 key set to essentially ‘refresh displays’ and that would always resolve my problem. Now apple has changed the fn key bindings and that key is no longer available! I don’t know why they took it away because while they did add an expose button they only added ONE button for expose functionality. Needless to say I’m very glad Apple’s keyboard still has 15 functions keys.

If you’re holding out on a unibody MBP then I say keep holding out till these bugs are fixed. Aside from this issue, you *still* have to log out/log back in to change to/from “high performance” — annoying because I never know when I’d like to boot up vmware. Moreover, if you’ve got an older 15″ matte display then you’ve got a feature I personally miss (glare on the glass screens is horrible in any environment).

I really like the machine, don’t get me wrong, but my previous generation MBP would be fine [if I hadn't busted the display].

• browsermedia's browsercms at master – GitHub
  (tags: rails cms)
• Processing 1.0
  Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.
  (tags: programming visualization opensource)

I’m sure the buzz has reached out past SXSW for enough folks to have taken a glance at Dell’s new adamo laptop. From the elegant sound track to the vogue appearance of adamo’s web site, you would think you’re getting a laptop worth complimenting BMW’s Nieman Marcuss 7-series. Dell commits that this machine’s style, craftmanship, and performance is so tempting that “you’ll fall in love.” Unfortunately the Adamo falls short.

I’m not alone nor am I the first in bringing this to light but there’s a few factors for folks to consider which paints a grimmer picture. Dell has grown year over year based on it’s leverage, market position (small business), and visceral partnerships with Intel and Microsoft. Crucial for Dell’s current revenue operations, Adamo ignores Dell’s assets in favor of aesthetics. Indeed, the adamo is profound; it’s black and white presentation is a shadow over Dell’s lack of focus on their industry, engineering, and customer.

So let me first put up these factstimates to keep things in context:

• Leverage: Dell took on > $1bn in debt last year; six times that of 1q08
• Market Position: HP is kicking Dell’s ass with server sales and Apple is turning the industry upside down
• Microsoft/Intel: Intel is giving Apple chips before Dell and Apple’s OS is slowly gaining momentum at the cost of Dell’s cash incentives from Microsoft

As the PC industry dries up and laptops peak, being replaced by mobile devices, netbooks, and non-msft OS, Dell is spending who knows how much money on marketing the Adamo and trying to create a ‘luxury’ image akin to Rolls Royce or Bentley.

Despite the fact that you can’t create prestige over night, even if you could, it’s obvious that the Adamo was an expensive device to engineer and the parts are costly; how can this be sustainable? Such an imbalance might be considered an R&D cost but not so with the Adamo. In it’s most recent iteration the MacBook Air was given a beefier video card making it useful for gamers (why else would a ‘road warrior’ need ‘power’?) yet the Adamo is stuck with an Intel GPU which is OK but won’t do much more than power Vista’s gpu-hungry GUI. Speaking of Vista, the machine comes w/4GB of RAM which is now standard on PCs but is really the equivalent of 2GB to a mac or linux simply because Vista uses the other 2GB. I get it, building fast hardware is difficult and expensive and Dell has to make money somehow. But why then, did they add multimedia start/stop/pause/play buttons to the face panel of the machine? The machine doesn’t even come with a DVD/CD player! You’re going to have to have the laptop open, have windows running, and have an audio application running to use the buttons. Moreover, the Dell already has an FN button on the keyboard so Dell could have re-purposed the function keys rather than adding additional hardware, firmware, and software that’s required to power the face panel buttons. Dell can argue usability here but for a device that’s supposed to be thin, light, and fashionable, the cost is simply not justified.

Dell could have knocked a home run with the Adamo by making it simple, fashionable, light and practical – yet they failed. I’m sorry Dell, but you just aren’t a luxury brand and that bandwagon will likely be over for PC before you’ll make a dent.

Here are reviews I discovered which contain additional technical information and opinions about Adamo:
Dell Adamo Luxury Laptop [ctv.ca]
Dell’s Adamo Imitates MacBook Air’s Price, Not Its Profile [wired.com]
Dell’s Adamo Laptop: Too Sexy for the Times? [seekingalpha.com]

• Turing | Would you like design with that?
  Met these guys at SXSW. Their cards were AWESOME as they were careved out of wood. kudos for the company name.
• Ahead of G20 summit, council told to switch off illegal £15m CCTV network | UK news | The Guardian
  This article missed one problem with the cameras. £250k per camera is ridiculous to begin with for even a a 720×576 camera.
  (tags: g20 cctv security)