Intermittent miscellany by Phil McCluskey
I'm married to Loobylu and I work at Ning. You can also find me on Twitter, last.fm, LinkedIn, Facebook, and once in a while, on Flickr. My old programmery weblog is here.
You can always ask me a question or submit your own post.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
All of this led to the revelation that we’ve begun a new age of “communal computing.” The desktop revolution centered around empowering individuals: this new revolution will extend that empowerment to groups of people.
via furbo.com
This is precisely the experience of the iPad at our house and it’s one I wasn’t really expecting since it’s completely different from the iPhone, which is much more of a single user device. The iPad gets used by everyone in the family throughout the day. With the kids, there’s usually a clear delineation in terms of the apps that get used (email is one exception since my eldest daughter and I both have our email set up on it), but Claire and I both want to use some of the apps, like Instapaper, and the current workaround is to sign out and sign back in as the other user. I suspect that apps that recognize that a single iPad may mean multiple users and caters to that with account management will have an advantage over those that don’t.
Internet censorship map.
Blue: No censorship
Yellow: Some censorship
Red: Under surveillance
Black: Internet black holes (most heavily censored nations)
But many of our politicians are still living in the 1990’s, pretending the internet is another country and refusing to acquire the faintest clue about it. You’ll see the signs whenever they confuse megabits with megabytes, invent jargon (such as Rudd’s deplorably hilarious “bandspeed”), or blame “hackers” for taking down a website which has crashed because they’ve neglected to provision it adequately. They really have no idea.
Even worse, they appear to believe that we’re just like them, helpless, hapless and ignorant, in need of “protection” from online threats which they’ve either misunderstood or just plain made-up. In reality, their ignorance is far more dangerous to us than anything we’ll ever find on the internet — And who is to protect us from them?
Apparently gas pumpers are a new captive market for advertisers.
