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RT @fraserspeirs: Future Shock: http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

“Apple actually invented the modern laptop computer with [the] Powerbook. It was the first laptop that had a TFT screen - the first modern LCD screens. It was the first laptop that pushed the keyboard up, creating palm rests, and had an integrated pointing device.”

— Steve Jobs

2 years ago

“I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.”

— Stephen Fry

1 notes

2 years ago

OK, I officially want one :)

I think Andrew will be getting one for sure, as he hasn’t got an iPhone yet.

It’s just like Star Trek. The future is here!

2 years ago

“The rise in student uptake of Macs is gradually leading to more and more interest in Macs as scientific workstations. A Mac can be used to answer email, surf the web, and write scientific articles, but it can equally run high-performance calculations. This is due to the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, and more recently to Apple’s emphasis on performance in Snow Leopard. Technologies like OpenCL and Grand Central are very attractive to scientists who need to crunch numbers.”

— Large Hadron Collider Powered By…Apple?

2 years ago

Apple ranks highest among Greenpeace’s top tech companies

2 years ago

Reminder: Backup your data!

Last week something terrible happened; my computer refused to start up. Rescue disks reported that the hard drive had failed.

This can happen to any computer at any time; it is the one thing Macs are not safer from than PCs. Luckily it is also something that Mac OS X has a built-in mechanism to avoid, as long as you do a few easy steps to turn it on.

I’m talking about Time Machine, the automatic backup system that you can just set and then forget.

Of course, you have to set it up first, and this is where people make the big mistake of not bothering. They think it will never happen to them - wrong!

All it involves is buying an external hard drive (I went for the Time Capsule as it was wireless, and is also a full-featured WiFi base station), connecting it and then when the Mac asks if you want to use this as your Time Machine backup, just say yes.

So luckily for me, I had everything backed up. I also use this machine for my business, and we have extra backups for that, too (If the hard drive you are backing up to is located in the same room as your computer, then it is not a good backup in case of fire, theft etc. We use both Dropbox and iDrive at work to back up important data).

All it took for me to restore my Mac to complete working order was to get a new hard drive, then take the computer home and start it up. The Mac OS startup process said “Would you like to migrate everything from your Time Machine backups?” and I said yes. After a couple of hours (there was a lot of stuff!) the computer restarted and it was exactly as I had left it before the hard drive failed!

I was amazed at this; not only every file in its place, but all the preferences set correctly, the software was all activated and up-to-date, all my work was ready to go as I had left it.

Considering my last experience of a hard drive crash was when I was on Windows, and there was no built-in automatic backup system, and backups basically meant sitting there for hours making DVDs of my stuff, Time Machine has been an absolute marvel.

As Joel Spolsky recently said:

“The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.”

So now, having done a restore from my Time Machine backup, I can heartily recommend using it. If you do not have a backup strategy, do it now before it is too late!

1 notes

2 years ago

“12% of male and 7% of female customers simply needed to plug in or turn on their appliance.”

—

These people should not be allowed to use computers!

BBC NEWS | Gadget problems divide the sexes

2 years ago

8 out of 10 viruses recommend Windows 7

4 notes

2 years ago

“Operating systems aren’t mere components like RAM or CPUs; they’re the single most important part of the computing experience. Other than Apple, there’s not a single PC maker that controls the most important aspect of its computers. Imagine how much better the industry would be if there were more than one computer maker trying to move the state of the art forward.”

— John Gruber

2 years ago

“Consumers now buy more PCs than businesses do, and their wants and desires for better-looking devices have invaded the cubicle. The current breed of consumer has shown an ability to turn something like the Apple iPhone into an overnight sensation, then demand that companies embrace it.”

— New York Times, Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy

2 years ago

♥ this!

(via christaloves)

403 notes

2 years ago

“A Game Informer survey of 5,000 readers found that the Xbox 360 has an astounding 54.2 percent failure rate. That means 54.2 percent of Xbox 360 consoles fail in one way or another. That’s well above the reported failure rates of Sony’s PlayStation 3 (10.6 percent) and Nintendo’s Wii (6.8 percent).”

— Survey: Xbox 360 failure rate is 54.2%

1 notes

2 years ago

Mass call for government apology to computing pioneer Turing

Writer Ian McEwan is among thousands of people calling for a government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.

1 notes

2 years ago