Wednesday, June 30, 2004

This is a cool web project, the open textbook. Its a collaboratively developed math text. 1:53:33 PM    comment []

Dashboards, dirty dishes . . . Tied Tiger (Dashboard Tying in Brief). As an independent Mac developer, the Konfabulator folks and the countless others facing the prospect of competing with tied Tiger functionality have my unconditional support. (Spring took an indirect hit from Dashboard too! See below.) There's been a lot of pixels spilled about Dashboard with many of the stories missing the essential points. Here are some important take aways: Dashboard is an attempt to enter the nascent concept-centric computing market (in contrast to the dominant document- and app-centric markets) that Konfabulator, Spring, and possibly other Mac developers have been cultivating. Apple's "tie it to the OS" approach to entering this market is unethical and suggests a complete lack of imagination on the part of Apple management. It's clear now that Konfabulator was undercapitalized. (Isn't it odd how people mention that Konfabulator needs or needed major feature X, but never question whether a lack of capital was the primary reason for major feature X not existing?) The lesson for prospective developers and existing developers looking toward new markets is that Apple continues to raise the amount (and possibly cost) of capital needed to safely enter the commercial OS X software market. [UserCreations Weblog] 1:45:33 PM    comment []

Shhh everybody might want one I think Dave would say, We both make shitty software, with bugs! (but these are in the same place) Wired: "In its initial investigation, AEI uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," [Scripting News] 1:42:56 PM    comment []

More inside Microsoft from Scoby Tour around Microsoft Research. Well, if lunch wasn't enough, this afternoon Kevin Schofield gave the Channel9 camera a tour through Microsoft Research. I found some interesting things. For one, the inventor of the laser printer, Gary Starkweather, works at research (I got a tour of the lab where he works). For two, in that lab he has a really cool laser printer. Well, it looks like a printer to Visio. But it doesn't print on paper. It actually cuts items out of plastic. So, you draw a shape in Visio (say a gear) and when you hit print it goes and cuts that gear out of a block of plastic). Wow, I want one of those. While tooling around in the lab, I learned that we're working on micro hardware too (Kevin introduced me to Mike Sinclair, who is working on MEMS, MicroElectroMechanicalSystems). I saw a machine which was about the same width as a human hair. It had a little tiny mirror. The mirror was built into a silicon chip. It could be moved up to 20,000 times per second. Enough to reflect light from a laser onto a wall and spell out words. This is a whole world I had never considered, and never would think that Microsoft would be doing research into. Read more about the MEMS research here. I got a lot more too. But you'll have to wait for the video. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 1:14:02 PM    comment []

Space Ship One Photo Gallery Great photos of first private space craft flight. Awesome pictures of Space Ship One. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 1:12:21 PM    comment []