Malcolm Gladwell is a great story-teller, no doubt about it. I loved his latest book Outliers. And whilst I agree with Joel Spolksy that the book is little more than cleverly strung together anecdotes, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, Gladwell’s chapter on the necessity of hard work (you must do your 10,000 hours) to achieve success is a good motivator. Yes, it might be...
Adobe Infinite Images and Deep Earth
Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article). You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this. What’s cool about the the Adobe system is how it uses tagging (based on...
Werner Vogels – Chief of the Year 2008
Amazon’s CTO – Werner Vogels – has been awarded the Information Week Chief of the Year title. He’s quickly given the credit to his team of course, legend that he is. Now, it’s easy to be cynical of awards – it seems that sometimes companies/twitter abusers/magazines/etc just create them as a marketing device – but regardless, it’d be hard to disagree with the decision in this case...
When the chips are down… people play games
Should we be surprised by this Gartner report outlining the second year on year decline in PC chip sales (they’re predicting a 16.3% decline). Intel and AMD must be doing it hard, like, ahem, just about everyone in the IT industry. Well, not quite. At least games are doing well, with sales of game hardware and software in the US up by 10% over last year’s figures (that’s a nice little $3B...
WordPad Zero Day exploit
OMG, panic! But don’t be distracted by that other zero day exploit (you know, the Internet Explorer one), here’s where your security gaze should be firmly focused: WordPad. It turns out that WordPad has a significant exploit. And by significant, I mean it affects at least one person. I strongly recommend WordPad users (both of you) stay glued to your browser screens (here) in anticipation of...
Google Chrome leaves beta
I’ve been using Chrome a fair bit lately. Why? It’s fast. And although people point to its lack of basic features, plug-in architecture (although that is in the works), cross platform support and it’s lack of market share, I for one don’t care, as long as it is fast for browsing. I use Firefox when I need the other stuff. Anyway, Chrome came out of Beta yesterday. Download it here. Love...