Category Archives: Technology

Technology

Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player

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”It’s a nice feature for Macintosh users,” said P. J. McNealy, a senior analyst for Gartner G2, an e-commerce research group. ”But to the rest of the Windows world, it doesn’t make any difference.”

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, disputed the concern that the market was limited, and said the company might have trouble meeting holiday demand. He predicted that the improvement in technology he said the iPod represented would inspire consumers to buy Macintosh computers so they could use an iPod.

New York Times article posted 15 years ago today. How time flies!

– via Hacker News

Technology

The Hostile Email Landscape

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This isn’t how the internet is supposed to work. As we continue to consolidate on a few big mail services, it’s only going to become more difficult to start new servers.

Short read and great illustration on trends that can threaten the open internet. 

It’s a catch 22 – Gmail is so damn good, which is why so many people use it, but by using it we contribute to the problem.

Give me convenience or give me death, right?

– via hacker news

Technology

The Cost Of Mobile Ads

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We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.

I’m not at all surprised. Well, maybe a little. More than half of all data in the sample is ads. – leading the pack is boston.com, 38.9 second load time reduced to 8.1 seconds without ads. Holy cow.

Via NYT, HT @Brian Krogsgard / Post Status Newsletter

The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites

Technology

My iPad 2 is not digging iOS9

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I upgraded my iPad 2 from ios7 to ios9 this morning and I’m really wishing I hadn’t. I did some reading & expected a bit of a performance hit, but wow – it’s borderline unusable.

I know it’s way outdated tech but the only thing I really use it for is web browsing, reading news feeds, and watching tutorial videos. The only game I play is Cargo-Bot (which, by the way, is excellent).

I’m talking 3 to 4 second lags between almost any action, and everything is super sluggish to the point that I just want to throw it out the window.

For me, the icing on the cake is that the handful of videos that I kept on the iPad are now, apparently, no longer compatible. They worked last night, tonight they “cannot be played on this iPad”.

Thanks, Obama.

Update – I just finished doing a factory restore and the old iPad seems to be running much better than it was. It’s still not a speed demon, but much more in line with what my expectations were going into this.