With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.
Compare this to Google, the company perhaps most associated with the cloud. Google’s approach has been to make the cloud more accessible to existing PC users. They’re doing this by extending familiar concepts. Google Docs is Microsoft Office, but in the cloud. Your main point of interaction is a file system, but in the cloud. Gmail is Outlook, but in the cloud. Etc.
Meanwhile, another company now largely associated with the cloud, Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee. But it takes developers to build something on top of it to give users a product to use. Some are great. But many again just extend the idea of the cloud as a remote hard drive.
While the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the opposite of their competitors. Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. When Jobs gave a brief glimpse of their new North Carolina datacenter that is the centerpiece of iCloud, he only noted that it was full of “stuff†— “expensive stuff,†he quipped.
How on earth can Apple’s approach to the cloud be the same and also the opposite? There’s a cloud alright, and it’s being smoked big time.
Someone explain to me how Amazon or Google force the user to care how the cloud actually works? When I read books on the Kindle app, “it just works” on iPad, Blackberry, or iPod – i put one device down, pick up the other, and start reading right where i left off. When I open a document in google docs in one web browser at work, I save my document and go home and open the same document from my PC at home, and “it just works”.
OK, I think Gruber had a better insight in pointing out that for Google, the Cloud is accessed through a browser window, whereas for Apple, it’s accessed through your entire screen. But then again, have we forgotten about AWS? Or App Engine?
whatever. get ready for endless droning on by the MG Sieglers of the world about how the Truth is In the Cloud. ooooooh!
I was very eager to see the latest APOD, a timelapse video of the night sky where every frame was digitally rotated to make the sky seem stationary and the earth rotate. Unfortunately, the video was served with a copyright takedown notice by one Nicolas Fabian Bustos Vargas, who appears to be a PhD at the Chilean observatory in question. Here’s the video linked from APOD and here’s the claimant’s video channel at YouTube, where the raw footage is from.
It seems that Bustos took the original video and Jose Francisco, another astronomer and “visual artist” processed the footage to make the video linked from APOD, without permission. APOD and its users are caught in the middle, and it’s a shame.
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
[…]
it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.
“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.
It is known as “gold farming”, the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games’ makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.
The trading of virtual currencies in multiplayer games has become so rampant in China that it is increasingly difficult to regulate. In April, the Sichuan provincial government in central China launched a court case against a gamer who stole credits online worth about 3000rmb.
The lack of regulations has meant that even prisoners can be exploited in this virtual world for profit.
Lady Gaga, presumably not born this wayI can’t claim to be a big fan of Lady Gaga, especially since her new hit single Born This Way is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself.
In fact, you’d probably have to bribe me to listen to Lady Gaga. With, say, 20 GB of disk space on Amazon’s new Cloud Drive serviceWhich, as a matter of fact, is precisely the deal today – for $0.99, you can get the upgrade to 20 GB from Amazon, as long as you download Gaga’s album. This is a good deal despite the forcible auditory abuse, and it ends today, so hurry up!
For 99 cents this is a great deal. 20GB on Amazon Cloud Drive is 4x the size of Microsoft’s SkyDrive and 10x more than Dropbox. The service also integrates with Amazon’s new music service so you can access any music you buy from Amazon on any device, immediately without re-uploading.
I found Secret of Kells on Netflix. It was only 90 minutes, so low-hanging fruit indeed. A really wonderful, enchanting story. The plot summary from Wikipedia lays out the plot:
The story is set in the ninth century and gives a fictionalized account of the creation of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript and known today as one of Ireland’s greatest national treasures. Obsessed with building a mighty wall to keep marauding Viking raiders from destroying the Abbey of Kells, Abbot Cellach expects his young nephew Brendan to follow in his footsteps. Brendan has apprenticed in the scriptorium of the monastery and has heard the story of Aidan of Iona, a master illuminator who is working on the Book of Iona. Later, Aidan himself comes to the monastery, accompanied by his cat Pangur Bán. Brother Aidan has escaped from the Vikings who have destroyed his own monastery, and had brought the unfinished Book of Iona with him. Taking Brendan under his wing, Aidan asks Brendan to venture into the forest to look for gall nuts to make ink, though the boy is fearful as he was forbidden to go into the forest by his uncle. Brendan eventually decides to venture into the forest, where he meets a forest spirit named Aisling. She is suspicious of Brendan at first, but soon befriends him after helping him find the gall nuts. Though Cellach learns of his adventure and forbids him from leaving the abbey’s confines, Brendan secretly defies it as Aidan teaches him illumination while Aisling introduces him to a wider world.
of course Wikipedia goes on from there to summarize the entire story, which is spoilertastic, so don’t read the rest until you’ve seen it. Hopefully the excerpt above is sufficient to motivate you to seeking this one out, though.
I particularly liked the Harold and the Purple Crayon sequence! 🙂
Sorry if it disappoints you guys, but there’s not gonna be any more Hobbes & Bacon… not for a while, anyway – our comic is more of a skit show, we do a gag, sometimes two, and then we move on, just like Family Guy or Robot Chicken, if we kept going, then it would be a strip about Calvin & Hobbes, and that’s just not what we do.
We tried to stay true to what Calvin & Hobbes meant to us, and what the style and atmosphere was, and I hope that we were able to capture what people loved about the strip – which is impossible, we’re not Watterson, we’re the Heyermans – there’s no way we can totally capture his style, no matter how much we tried.
But the most important thing, what we really wanted people to do was to go back and read Calvin & Hobbes, or support Watterson by getting the books if you don’t have them.
We don’t make any money on the strip, so hopefully you take all your desire to read more Calvin & Hobbes and support one of the most amazing artists of our time.
Some of us were lucky enough to be around when it was happening, to read Calvin & Hobbes in the paper, and if you’re like us, it guided and shaped who you are, and drove you to be different and be creative.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Pants are Overrated would be a completely different thing if Bill Watterson hadn’t created his masterpieces every day when we were kids.
I did a lot of anime-blogging on Shingu when I watched it and my post on the finale (SPOILER LINK!!) had some pretty heavy, informative discussion. A listing of all my Shingu posts is here.
is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself.
Which, as a matter of fact, is precisely the deal today – for $0.99, you can get the upgrade to 20 GB from Amazon, as long as you download Gaga’s album. This is a good deal despite the forcible auditory abuse, and it ends today, so hurry up!
