Last Tuesday, the future finally sounded like the future. A coalition of willing billionaires, spaceflight professionals, and scientific advisors under the banner of Planetary Resources announced thei
My Mac setup used to consist of a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro. When I realized that the laptop was plenty powerful to serve as [my only computer](http://shawnblanc.net/2008/03/review-macbook-pro/) I sol
Had Narrative Science—a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company's Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from
It all started with Snow Crash . If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that , and more importantly I want to do that , I’d never have embarked on the path that…
Like many others , I was disappointed by how Walter Isaacson’s official biography of Steve Jobs turned out . With the kind of access that Isaacson had to Jobs’ information, photos, close friends and c
Credit: Our annual destination conference, Mashable Connect, brings our community together for three days to connect offline in an intimate setting at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World®. Re
Out There There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew MULTIVERSE PROPONENT The cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss Credit... Joshua Lott for The New York Times Why is there something, rather than nothing at all?
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart peopl
One way to judge the scope of an app is to think about how much time you’re intended to spend using it. There’s plenty of room for apps you use here and there for a few minutes at a time, or which you
Coda is a text-editing, CSS-styling, WebKit previewing, file-managing, FTPing, terminal-accessing, web-site-building and publishing application for the Macintosh. And, Coda has no duct tape. All Inclu
This bad article , nicely rebutted by John Gruber , uses a common argument against Apple: that, inevitably, other hardware manufacturers will figure out why Apple products are so popular, create their
[Federico Viticci venting on his personal blog about writers that condemn services because they are free](http://ticci.org/condemning-free-on-principle): >There is a shared sentiment among independent
For most of my life, I’ve struggled to quantify what constitutes an enticing interface. There are certain basic aims from which you can take your pick - intuitiveness, attractiveness, clarity, simplicity, consistency, and more - but those are general guidelines. I’ve had trouble defining what an…
Latest posts Open source Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm Infrastructure How we scaled Reads On the Twitter Users Database By on Thursday, 23 February 2023 Infrastructure Kerberizing Hadoop Clusters
OK, whippin' up the ol' Business Activity Statement for the first quarter of this year, tum te tum, run the special government BAS-management software and... it tells me I'd better renew my AUSkey cer
Today, half of U.S. residents are single, and a third of all households have one occupant. Illustration by Jean-François Martin As reliably as autumn brings Orion to the night sky, spring each year se
It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals. T
DISCOVER Magazine: RT @edyong209: Monkey see, monkey read? Baboons can learn to tell English words from nonsense words, w/o any knowledge of language http://t.co/rh0kOYXL
Oliver Reichenstein Flickr iA Writer is a super simple text editor for Mac and iOS . Advertisement Advertisement It's just a blank page and text. The idea is to keep you focused on just writing. Despi
Clues to the Origin of Snake Venom Which came first, the snake or the venom? Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Melbourne who has spent the last few years reconstructing the evolutionary hist
Photo: Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram , a tiny compan
In the past year or so the smartphone landscape has seen a trend of screen size increasing from around 3.2/3.5 inches to 4.3, 4.65 and as high as 5.3 inches in the case of the Samsung Galaxy Note. The iPhone screen however, has remained at 3.5 inches since its debut in 2007. iPhone 4/4S 960 x 640…
Media Platforms Design Team Published in the April 2012 issue Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance. In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as
O n February 14, 2012, millions of Americans retrieved the latest copy of Time Magazine from their mailboxes and found, on the cover, a picture of two dogs snuggling against a pastel pink backdrop. Ab
Of course, I watched the Macworld SF keynote yesterday, and apart from noticing the iWork.com icon, I also saw all sorts of nice UI changes and icons. I skimmed through Apple’s new online guided tours
Sometimes, you get the strangest, yet most appealing ideas walking down the street instead of when you’re at your desk nibbling on a pencil. It just hits me, sometimes before I go to sleep, or when I’
Tom and I have been working on Frameographer on and off for about 6 months. Like our other products, it was created to scratch our own itch. We were dissatisfied with the current offerings in the mark
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Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years.…
Published 24 March 2012 Share page About sharing Image caption, Koepcke returned to the crash scene in 1998 Juliane Koepcke was flying over the Peruvian rainforest with her mother when her plane was h
Opinion A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney THE recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “lik
What’s the value of all the upgraded features in the third-generation iPad? $100. I’ll show my work later in this article, but it’s an important number. Apple is consistently criticized by pundits, bl
Opinion A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney THE recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “lik
Welcome back, friends, to the show that never ends! Another year has passed us by, and it’s time for our annual reckoning of the worst in Apple coverage ! While you’re waiting for the four-letter word
Three pundits, three outlandish claims! First, our old friend Rob Enderle is back! (Did he ever leave? Is there some way we could arrange that?) And this one is tagged Not Safe For Work! Also, Not Saf
The following post is less than traditional. I wanted to write on something that is very dear to my heart, something that I feel is rather underrepresented in the astrophysical community. It is a refl
Last night’s release of Paper , a new drawing and sketching app for iPad (The Verge has a good review and interview with its developers), got me thinking about a trend I’m seeing lately in several hig
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