What's most interesting about Marco Arment's (Tumblr, Instapaper) iPad post is not that his expectations of use for the iPad differed substantially from his real world usage. That's to be expected of any new technology device. It's that despite not being able to arrive at a good reason for the average person to go out and get one if they already have a traditional computing device (Logically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for most computer owners.), along with his own candid reasons (It’s absolutely not a productivity device for me, but that’s OK;the iPad isn’t an all-purpose computing device ), he also cites the mere act of using one, the visceral nature of enabling a multi-touch experience on a larger screen and playing with it to do something, seems to confer good enough reason to buy one (using it is satisfying and delightful).
It once again reinforces the notion of Apple's amazing ability to widen a technology niche they pioneered through sheer force of will, brilliant marketing and inveiglement, and continues their streak of leveraging their deep understanding of how to create emotional connections between technology and the public, to the point where people are willing to part with their dollars even if they are unable to articulate a compelling enough reason to do so.
# § Apple, Technology, Thoughts
I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn't happen.
More at Donald Norman's site.
# § Design, donaldnorman, innovation, Technology, UsabilityI prefer emotional states of mind on the Asperger spectrum like smarmy or gormless. # § server, sysadmin, Technology, Unix
Sydney to Singapore # § Aviation, Technology, Transportation
Great photographs of old-school hardware # § Hardware, Photographs, Technology
An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. # § API, Specifications, Technology
Save your binary data onto a sheet of paper that you can later rescan to recover. # § Cool, Storage, Technology, Uncategorized
Neil helps demo Silverlight with Instant Watching. # § Demos, Microsoft, Netflix, Technology, Uncategorized, Video
Kind of disappointing only because they could have reinvented application state and chose to go classic. # § Culture, Hardware, Technology, UI, Uncategorized, Usability
The evolution of SOAP and web services specs as a conversation. Awesome. # § Irony, SOAP, Technology, Uncategorized, Web-Services
A beta tester "writing":http://www.maluke.com/blog/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2 about Amazon's "Elastic Computing Cloud":http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011, which is a fully programmatic virtual computing environment:
The main point of course is that it can be set up and torn down programmaticaly. It works like this: you upload a system image (Amazon Machine Image or AMI) and then make a call to boot it, you use another call to monitor the status of your instances, once they boot up you know the domain name you can use to connect to the instance, for ex. domU-12-31-33-00-00-01.dc3.compute.amazonaws.com. It only supports Linux at the moment, and I have one particular use for this service that would need Windows, so I can’t wait until it supports OS’es other than Linux. Just in case you missed it — your instances can be web servers, database servers, load balancers, anything. The traffic within Amazon EC2 and S3 is free, so you can have setups as funky as you wish. Remeber what it takes to build Flickr or Livejournal datacenter? Now you can do similar setups from home (unbelievable) and just let Amazon take care of the networking and hardware. This is so much more ‘WebOS’ than Google’s walled garden.From Amazon's own description of EC2:
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.This is a pretty amazing service and the closest equivalent I can think of to "Mainframe Linux on the S390/Z900":http://linas.org/linux/i370.html which allowed for on-the-fly instantiation and breakdown of virtual Linux servers. # § Amazon, Cool, Technology, Uncategorized, Web-Applications, Web-Services
More like they forgot to change the oil and sparkplugs. # § Perl, Programming, Technology, Uncategorized
With pee-churs, no less. # § Technology
MPG link # § Technology
No kidding. Formaldehyde-drenched frog photos, so not for the squeamish. Cool, sick and wrong at the same time. # § Technology
Microsoft intends on removing the determiner from its vocabulary. # § Technology
Azureus apparently has this in 2.3. Anonymous, secure torrent announcements should be next... # § Technology