Nearly every legendary innovation was initially mocked or misunderstood by the so-called “experts.” In truth, scrutiny and doubt are just part of the toll we pay to take the path less traveled. But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier.
This quote comes from the99percent, from an article discussing criticism, cynicism & sharpening your gut instinct. The article explore when one should embrace the critic’s opinion vs when to ignore it, and includes some worthy pointers into how to develop your gut feeling to this respect.
Programming is more than for just techies – knowing even a little bit of scripting can be really useful in both your personal and professional lives. You can learn to automate the mundane every day tasks at home, or become a streamlined worker at your job by making the long complex tasks simpler and easier to understand.
However it can be daunting to learn a language, especially if you have no previous experience, which is where Codeacademy comes in – as the co-founder, Mike Bloomberg, recently said in an interview:
As the cofounder of Codecademy, which teaches people how to code online, I spend my days working with our hundreds of thousands of users to get them to learn to code in an effective manner online. In 2012, we launched a new program, Code Year, to get more people to realize the importance of programming.
I’ve already signed up for Code Year and my goal is to be able code by mid-2012. Starting with Javascript [the language taught on Code Year) seems like a good idea too, as I spend a large portion of my life on the net.
Programming is one of the few disciplines taught today in schools that virtually guarantees students a job upon graduation. Beyond that, it’s one of the few fields where students are creators–they’re building games, websites, applications, and more.
So will you be making 2012 the year of code? Head over to Code Year and get started now.
I’ve had a Macbook Pro for a while and I have been using Apple’s new OS since the first day it was released, and though it is full of hundreds of new features and some very useful little tweaks, I’ve started to find some annoyances as well.
On the whole there are some very simple things you just can’t do on a Mac [easily] like cut a file and paste in a folder (you have to drag the file into the folder, or copy then delete the original) – this is something you can quickly get used to. However there are some that just don’t make any sense like not being able to play a video in fullscreen or work in an app in full screen on one monitor whilst being allowed to work on a second monitor.
I was quite excited when Apple announced the availability of full screen apps for Lion, because not only do you end up with more screen real estate (Terminal is awesome in full screen) to work in but it means that you can get the same distraction free work environment, that previously you may have had to pay for, with all your current [supported] apps.
I’ve also been using multi-monitor setups for quite some time now, and on my previous machines (that were Windows based) I have found this to be a very efficient enviroment for me.
However, for some reason when you have multiple monitors connected to your Mac, running OS X 10.7 (I’m running 10.7.1), and you switch to full screen mode whilst watching a video or whilst having a pages document open, or using a web browser then you will be greeted with a hideous grey background and loss of functionality on your secondary display. What gives!?
This is apparently a widely know issue and I’m sure it has been reported to apple, I have personally submitted the feedback to Apple.
Hopefully this will be resolved soon, and I will update here when it, until then I must try and work the way that Apple wants me to!
Since the release of the iPad (back in April 2010), it’s difficult not to hear the pitter-patter about tablets everywhere – and it’s no doubt that tablets have been popular and heavily marketed but they still haven’t devoured the general market as many predicted they would.
Though I have been very close to jumping on the tablet band-wagon several times, but there are some things that have been making it difficult to take the plunge:
Price – it’s true that since the initial market explosion a year ago prices have dropped somewhat, I still find it very hard to justify spending at least £399 for a base Wi-Fi only model.
Lack of apps - there are still not as many tablet optimised apps as I would hope – this is particularly true on Android tabs then on the iPad. Of the apps that are designed for tablets a lot of them are games, and with all others only a few are of outstanding quality. Is that the sort of market you want to buy into?
Can I justify the purchase- of course they are not meant to be “serious” work machines, no matter what some of the ads may advertise them to be. It’s just not efficient. However thankfully this is being addressed with the release of keyboard docks and such.
Waiting game - I guess this could equally apply to most tech products. I’m finding it difficult to buy a tablet now, especially with such new innovations just around the corner. I know I am more likely to go for a Android tablet, and with the new quad-core Nvidia Kal-el tablets just around the corner doesn’t it make sense to wait?
Better competition – I guess this is linked to the point above. If I were to buy a tablet today there are only two real options that I would look to get – the Apple iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Having said all of that, it is still very hard to resist the purchase when you’ve had a chance to play with either of two tablets I mention above. In the end I am quite likely to purchase a tablet in the next six month. Unless of course someone wants to send me a free one for review?
Do you have a tablet? Or are you looking to buy one in the near future? Let me know in the comments below.
Mac OSX Lion has been out for a little while now, and every day people are discovering more and more of the 250+ features Apple has included.
One such feature is the ability to display information on the lock screen. Particularly useful if you carry a macbook. I’ve customised mine to show my contact information, just incase I lose my beloved MacBook Pro and any good smaritan wants to return it back to me.
To do this, open up system preferences, go into Security & Privacy and check the box against “Show a message when the screen is locked:”
If you spend a lot of time writing on your Mac, but find yourself continually distracted by formatting options and the myriad buttons that clutter the workspace then WriteRoom may well be the answer to your prayers.
Of course, this is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea – for me it was exactly what I needed.
When you fire up WriteRoom, you’re a greeted by nothing but a full screen black canvas with a blinking green cursor — it’s a thing of beauty. Moving the cursor to the bottom edge of the screen reveals the name of the document and the word count. Moving the cursor to the top edge reveals the menu bar, and pressing the esc key toggles the full screen mode on or off.
There are other options such as live spellchecking and the ability to change the background and text colour (I personally really enjoy the default style).
There isn’t much more to the app, but then again, there isn’t suppose to be – it’s suppose to be a simple canvas to allow writers to put their thoughts down quickly without any distractions.
I would highly recommend this software, but I know many will find the $24.99 price tag too steep for such limited functionality. Alternatively you could try Bean (insert link for Bean) which is completely free and also offers full screen distraction free writing.
I’ve been lucky enough to never have a laptop or phone stolen. When I came across Prey, I knew instantly that it was worth installing on all my devices that travel with me frequently.
Prey is a free, and lightweight utility that helps you track your stolen laptop and/or phone. Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s free – it has a full feature set.
Once installed it remains dormant until it receives a remote signal (via SMS or via the control panel on the web). You can then instruct Prey take a screenshot of the what your thief is doing, lock down your device, take a picture using the camera and pinpoint the location using GPS and WiFi.
There is no reason why every laptop, macbook and android device shouldn’t have this installed.
Prey is available free for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Download it now free from http://preyproject.com/
If you’ve ever pondered into the deep, dark depths of your spam folder, you would’ve likely noticed a mountain of emails advertising viagra and other such pharmaceuticals. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you ever clicked on the link?
A recent interesting study, looking at the economics of spam-based advertising, highlights this journey — a snapshot of which can be seen in the image above.
Highlights from the study include:
95% of products are monetized using merchant services from a handful of banks
The credit-card transactions were the “choke-point”
Out of the 120 purchases, 76 were authorised, 56 settled and all but 7 were delivered
I include here the abstract for your consumption:
Abstract—Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown). In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email— including naming, hosting, payment and fulfilment—using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organisations who administer them and then use this data to characterise the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.
Summary: The Galaxy S II is a high end phone, and quite easily the best Android phone available on the market right now. It remains to be seen how well it will stack up with other android phones to be released later this year with qHD screens or with the next version of the iPhone. Though given the speed of the phone, the screen quality, the camera and the battery life the competition will have to fight hard.
Though, it won’t be to everybody’s liking. Some will find the phone to be too big, whilst others may dislike the cheap build quality of the back cover, or the poor keyboard or even the fact that it runs the Android operating system. However, I think much like the previous version of this handset, this phone will prove to be quite successful among the masses.
The original Galaxy S made quite a few waves when it was first released, and created high expectations both from Samsung and for other high end smartphones. Unsurprisingly, big things were to be expected from the next high end android iteration from Samsung. Enter the Galaxy S II, read on to find out if it delivers.
Hardware
With a 4.3 inch screen boasting super AMOLED plus technology, WVGA resolution of 800 x 480 and a dual-core processor the phone is certainly a beast – both on the outside and in. Thankfully it seems that Samsung thought about this during the design process, because as soon as you pick up the phone it’s hard to believe how impossible thing it is.
Boasting dimensions of 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.49mm (it’s the thinnest phone available in the market right now), weighing just 116g and the screen covered with the toughened gorilla glass it feels great in your hands. The only negatives here are how thin and low quality the plastic rear cover feels, which also makes the phone slightly slippery to hold in the hands.
Surprisingly the first thing you notice when you pick up the phone is not how big it is, or how thin is or even the flimsy back cover – instead the first thing you will notice and admire is the superbly vibrant and crisp screen.
The screen is so bright and colourful with images so realistic and the viewing angles so wide that you’ll be forgiven if you mistook it for a display model. Even though screen doesn’t pack the pixel density of some of the upcoming phones with qHD screens (with resolutions of 960 x 540), personally I prefer it to the LCD screens, as it proves to be quite readable even in bright sunlight.
Under the display lies the physical home button, with two touch-sensitive keys on either side (menu on the left and back on the right) and though the phone is lacking the search key most android users might be used to, holding the menu key will invoke the same function. On the leff edge rests a thin, slim volume rocker and on the right edge lives the power/lock button – this again may take some getting used to depending on your previous handset.
On the top edge lives the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and on the base is a microUSB port which doubles up as a HDMI out assuming you have the correct cable.
On the front lives a 2 mega-pixel camera for video calling and vanity shots, and on the back lives the 8 mega-pixel camera with neighbouring single LED flash. Along with all this there are the usual accelerometer, digital compass, g-sensor and GPS / A-GPS; connectivity is provided by quad band GSM and HSPA, Bluetooth 3.0 and WiFi a/b/g/n. Keeping everything running is a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 2GB of ROM – there is also 16GB of internal memory (11GB available) and can be extended with with up to 32GB of microSDHC memory card.
Software
Samsung, thankfully, has loaded the latest version of Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) – this is dulled slightly with the presence of TouchWiz 4.0.
TouchWiz is OK, but if you’re used to the stock version of Android (as I am), it feeling a little bit lacking. Though with a little bit of practice and patience one can easily get used to it. Nevertheless, TouchWiz does have it’s advantages for example the selection of widgets.
There are other more useful features too, best of which are the shortcuts in the notification areas which allows you to quickly activate/deactivate WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sound and auto-rotation. In addition you get seven home-screens, the various hubs (social, music, reader’s & game) and some interesting redesigns some which you will love, and some you will hate.
I love the calendar redesign which is not only more useful, but also looks rather better. However I hate the keyboard Samsung has chosen over the stock keyboard. It tends to lend itself to a lot more mistakes than the stock, and also sucks at auto-correction, such as auto-capitalization and inserting apostrophes and other punctuation.
Quite honestly fast text entry is pretty much out of the question using the stock keyboard. Thoughtfully, it seems Samsung foresaw this problem and has included Swype keyboard. I would recommend that you change the default to Swype or another keyboard (I personally prefer Swift Key) as soon as you get the phone.
There is also a variety of other apps included, such as photo and video editors, Polaris office, an IM client and several diary and memo apps, none of which I have used even once since getting the phone, but others might find useful.
Then there are a couple of additions under the Motion settings, which utilizes the accelerometer to zoom in-and-out of images and web pages and to navigate between [home and app] screens by tilting left and right. Neither of these features I found of my use. The turn over feature is quite useful, which allows you to mute incoming calls and sounds by turn your phone over.
One of the most useful app included is Kies air. Running Kies air on your phone will give you an IP address which you simply enter into your browser, this then allows you to browse multimedia files, contacts music and messages over the wireless connection. The obvious limitation is that your computer must be connected on the same WiFi network as the phone. If Samsung could bring 3G support for this it would be an even more awesome app.
Performance
The with the latest version of Android, a hearty 1.2GHz dual-core processor and an astonishing screen using the phone is a very pleasant experience. The phone just flies, and does not slow down a bit no matter what you throw at it.
I experience no lag whatsoever while fighting off an onslaught of zombies in Plants vs Zombies or while jumping up and down in the world of Corby. Similarly watching HD videos or browsing the web is a smooth experience.
However do note that since the device doesn’t carry a Tegra 2 chip, you wouldn’t be able to download and play the games specifically designed for this – which, to be completely honest, is not such a big deal.
Similarly performance is extremely speedy when browsing maps, with Google maps pinpointing my location extremely quickly with zooming in out of maps was lag free. The combination of the speedy rendering and the big screen makes the phone a very good substitute for a sat-nav.
Galaxy S II scored 3367 in Quadrant standard edition.
Camera and multimedia
The main camera holds it own at a very respectable 8 megapixels, and shooting full HD 1080p video making the phone a well rounded multimedia device. The photos that are captured are very natural looking with accurate portrayal of colours; unfortunately the same can’t be said for photos taken in the dark, however the single LED flash helps a little here.
Similarly the videos recorded give an accurate depiction of the subjects being shot, with the focus working well most of the time. The focusing seems to struggle when recording fast moving objects or when there are huge contrasts in lighting.
The 2 megapixels camera on the front is only really good for video chat, other than that I would only really use it for vanity shots you there is no other option.
Within the camera app, surprisingly, there is a bucket load of customisation options allowing you to change ISO, white balance, resolution, metering and a whole lot more. In the video mode, you can change the resolution from 1920 x 1080 to the MMS friendly of 176 x 144.
Multimedia playback is well supported with a long list of codes included. Video can be in MPEG4, H.264, H.263, WMV, DivX, Xvid and VC-1. Audio can be in MP3, OGG, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB
AMR-WB, WMA, WAV, MID, AC3, IMY, FLAC and XMF; in addition there is support for 5.1 channel pseudo-surround sound when you plug in your headphones.
Calling and messaging
Call quality is well handled thanks to noise reduction feature, similarly the sound quality is excellent over the earpiece and loud speaker.
Video calling is also quite well integrated into the system, however I was only able to use it once due to the lack of my contacts that possess the ability.
One of the best features when it comes to the phone application is when you finish a call, you are given a brief option to re-dial the same person (audio or video call) or send a text message – especially useful if you forgot something.
Messaging is standard business. There is a plethora of messaging options, how many of these you use will depend on the number of networks your subscribe to – there is options for POP/IMAP emails, exchange support, Gmail, Google Talk and support for various other IM client. Samsung’s social hub does well to collate messages from all these sources to one location.
Battery
With so much included in the phone, including the big bright screen, a screaming fast dual-core processor and so much wireless connectivity you’d be forgiven to think that the Galaxy S II battery life would be equivalent to a sprinter than a endurance runner.
In this case you’d be wrong. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the standard 1,650 mAh battery coped during day-to-day use.
The battery lasted through a full day of constant use which included some gaming, internet browsing, shooting some pictures and videos and navigating using Google maps – all of this with wireless and push email switched on resulted in the battery lasting for a miraculous 28 hours!
Pricing
Since the release the price of the phone has gone down slightly from the original £509 ($899) for the SIM-free and unlocked 16GB version to a little more reasonable £498.84 ($799) (amazon.co.uk and amazon.com link). Or you could get it for free on 24 months contract from as little as £29 per month. The pricing may seem high but in reality it is priced quite competitively other among other high-end smart phones including the iPhone 4.
Recently the daily mail published a remarkable interview of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. In the interview Mr. Gates discusses, rather candidly, many personal things — from his children teasing him, to his friendship with Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg, Bono and Oprah to his plans for chaining the world.
Here is a highlight of what you can expect:
Why not be the guy who cures cancer instead?
‘The motto of the foundation is that every life has equal value. There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer. When you die of malaria aged three it’s different from being in your seventies, when you might die of a heart attack or you might die of cancer. And the world is putting massive amounts into cancer, so my wealth would have had a meaningless impact on that.’
I implore you to read the interview in it’s entirely as it’s a rare glimpse into the psyche of a genius. However what I most enjoyed about whilst reading this piece is we get to see the human side of Bill, that is not always apparent.
