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Panasonic Lumix GF1 Field Test — 16 Days in the Himalayas - A beautifully designed review for what looks like a beautiful camera. Click for high-res photo

Panasonic Lumix GF1 Field Test — 16 Days in the Himalayas - A beautifully designed review for what looks like a beautiful camera.

Intel, Micron announce 25nm NAND flash production

marco:

This is the tipping point for SSDs to become mainstream.

Currently, good SSDs (the bad, cheaper ones generally aren’t worth buying) are small and expensive. Intel’s excellent X25-M series, the gold standard, is about $450 for 160 GB.

SSDs based on this 25nm flash are likely to offer 160 GB in the $200 range and 320 GB in the $500 range.

I’m really excited by this, too. Solid-state drives are the next step in new computing performance heights.

(this post was reblogged from marco)
“The lines are movement, and the dots are periods of inactivity. (The bigger the dot, the longer the rest.)” (via Door Sixteen » My mouse path.) Thanks to Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the link.

“The lines are movement, and the dots are periods of inactivity. (The bigger the dot, the longer the rest.)” (via Door Sixteen » My mouse path.)

Thanks to Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the link.

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How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.

stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been… - Another great piece about computer technology, this time from Steven Frank of Panic.

His distinction between Old and New World computing echoes the distinction I described between traditional desktop computers and personal/mobile computers, devices that produce and devices that consume, respectively. What Steve does here is articulate the point I was merely hinting at; that in order for a true revolution to begin with a New World device like the iPad, devices like the iPad must be capable of developing applications as well as using them.

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With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I’d seen them with my eyes.
Wired 15.04: Mixed Feelings - Sunny Bains, writing for Wired, describing the sensation of “seeing” through a device attached to his tongue. Bizarre and thrilling technology.
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The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Future Shock - This is one of the best things I’ve ever read about technology. Just read it.
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It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you’re cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage.

Alt Text: New Cult Spares Members From Early Adopters’ Pain | Underwire | Wired.com : The whole scheme is to keep us buying things we do not need yet make us believe we do. It’s a natural side effect of modern technology and capitalism as I see it. Keeping up with the Jones’ is harder than ever.

As a result, our culture suffers from overstimulation—there’s more out there than we can possibly ever read, watch, listen to, play, see, or experience. The world has, in a sense, gotten small enough to be even more overwhelming than ever before. Just because we can fly from one end of the earth to the other doesn’t mean we can see everything, the same way that having the ability to visit any website instantaneously means we can see every website on the Internet. It’s the ultimate post-modern catch-22.

Remember, It’s Actually a Computer

John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to a TechCrunch story this morning about Wolfram Research pricing their Alpha “computational knowledge engine” iPhone app at $50. Next to TomTom’s navigation app (which costs $100), this is the most expensive iPhone app I know of. This has (once again) temporarily refueled the argument about how much iPhone apps should cost.

The whole issue with the price of iPhone apps, which is to say any app priced above five bucks, is due to a widespread incomprehension that the iPhone is actually a computer. Normal, everyday folks are accustomed to paying tens and hundreds of dollars for software. But that software always had to be “installed” on their “machine” at home with a disk. The idea of buying expensive software for what in their minds is just a fancy cell phone is something completely foreign to them, especially given that all it takes are a few taps and your password, and bingo, new application. The painlessness of adding new “apps” (which just sounds like “toys” to most people’s ears) makes it seem like they should be cheap. The intangibility of software, and how to put a value on what it does, has never been more apparent.

The challenge Apple and any other company serious about competing with the iPhone faces is how to change people’s perception of what a “cell phone” is. Sure, “smart”-phones have been around for a while, but the iPhone was the first that actually broke the mold and showed what a real smartphone can do—become a real pocket computer.

Life In The Cloud

Just another quick graphic to show how our digital lives are becoming more and more integrated with the cloud through email, streaming video and music, mobile devices like phones and netbooks, and…

Vol Libre, an amazing CG film from 1980 : Stunning for 1980.