February 2012
31 posts
Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO formats →
Wow. Look at the clean simple design of that page. Look at the human-friendly URL. No registration required. Product keys shown right on the page next to the download link. The link is a regular old HTTP download of a regular old ISO image. They even post SHA1 hashes.
Look out, Apple: Microsoft got game.
“Following an analysis on the pedestrian accidents that have been reported over...”
– Pedestrian safety: Selectboard to address rise in accidents - Brattleboro Reformer. So in other words, the plan is effectively to do nothing. Great…
“While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the...”
– A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine. LOL.
Taking Its Place Among the Largest Companies -... →
I’m glad we left 1992 behind and no longer live in a world where Philip Morris and Wal-Mart are vying for largest market cap.
“Amazon spends more than $90 a year for each Prime customer, losing $11 annually...”
– LukeW | Data Monday: Amazon Prime. I wish Amazon didn’t bundle their video offerings with their shipping program, because one rocks and the other sucks. Customers who want fast shipping shouldn’t be forced to subsidize crappy video.
“Note that removing your Web History also pauses it. Web History will remain off...”
– How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect | Electronic Frontier Foundation. I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve turned off Web History in the past, and never explicitly re-enabled it, and yet while following these instructions today I saw that...
“They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was...”
– Scott and Scurvy. An excellent essay that explores how progress in one field can lead to regression in another.
“it’s just another swipe to the left,”
– “and then a pinch to the right!” (Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion preview)
“Women make up 50% of the global population, 40% of the global workforce, yet...”
– Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank, in the Women of the World app, a World Bank and Fotopedia collaboration.
“If you have MS and are mobility restricted, like me, and if you have the means,...”
– MS And Mixel | LIFE IS BUT A DREAM…. Wow. (via subtraction)
How Carrots Became The New Junk Food | Fast... →
Doe this mark the beginning of a dark new age of marketing, or of a bright new age of nutrition?
“It all started, her mother said, when Janice was 6 and picked up a book at the...”
– Janice Voss, Shuttle Astronaut and Scientist, Dies at 55 - NYTimes.com.
“If two threads have opposite ideas of what a and b are, this carries the...”
– mikeash.com: Deadlocks and Lock Ordering: a Vignette. Wow! I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before, it’s so simple and elegant.
“Travis Kurowski, who covers lit mags on his blog, Luna Park Review, estimates...”
– Literary Heirs - NYTimes.com. My bro mentioned on NYTimes.com (and in this Sunday’s printed paper).
If these properties are so well implemented and so useful to the mobile Web, they became de facto standards ; let’s turn them as soon as possible into de jure standards through W3C standardization.
Hear hear!
I am also calling Apple and Google to remove support for the “experimental” versions of a property when the final one is implemented and shipped.
Good luck with that....
“So here’s a thought: maybe traditional social values are eroding in the white...”
– A Strange Form of Social Collapse - NYTimes.com
White House May Look to Compromise on... →
FIrst SCOTUS grants religious organizations exemption from employment discrimination laws, and now the President is going to grant them an exemption to universal health care laws? If our government is going to keep allowing people of faith to break more and more laws, I too might find Jesus one of these days…
“we can adjust every font-size on the page by using media-queries to change the...”
– Responsive News: Fluid grids, orientation & resolution independence. Seems like a bad technical solution to what is actually a design problem. If I rotate my 16:9 tablet from portrait to landscape orientation, the font size shouldn’t double—that’s the opposite of responsive design....
“The error rate for hand-counted ballots is about two percent.
All voting...”
– Schneier on Security: Error Rates of Hand-Counted Voting Systems
“Wasserman says the Justice Department is saving its legal firepower to challenge...”
– How the GOP Is Resegregating the South | The Nation. Sounds like the Justice Department is fighting the wrong battle: does it really matter whether minorities can vote if they’ve already been packed into a few majority-minority districts? Also, since most people see gerrymandering as...
“The author mentions the rise of for-profit businesses increasingly running...”
– Schneier on Security: Prisons in the U.S.
“The style system matches rules by starting with the key selector, then moving to...”
– Writing efficient CSS for use in the Mozilla UI - MDN. Ho-ly shit. I did not know this, and knowing it now makes me want to revisit every bit of CSS I’ve written in the last 10 years. It embarrasses me to post this, but I feel obliged to share for the sake of any other web devs who may not yet...
Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law - NYTimes.com →
The “Buffett Rule” bill is good marketing but bad legislation. Let’s focus on actual fixes to the tax code, such as restoring capital gains taxes and removing special interest deductions, rather than being distracted by a band-aid bill with a cute name.
Rhode Island City Enraged Over School Prayer... →
Kudos to Ms Ahlquist for standing up for what’s right. The Times also has a follow-up editorial.
