This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I’m a few days late mentioning this, but the following is a good piece with some thoughts on the potential for what Apple’s Tablet might be. Worth reading.
The Tablet
(John Gruber, Daring Fireball, 31 Dec 2009)
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Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.
And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.
I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.
It will not be pitched as such by Apple. It will be defined by three or four of its built-in primary apps. But long-term, big-picture? It will be to the MacBook what the Macintosh was to the Apple II.
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A bit on Obama counterterrorism from cousin Heather (who also happens to be a foreign policy expert).
In Fact, We do Have A Counter-Terrorism Strategy — And Experts Say It’s Producing Results
(Heather Hurlburt, Huffington Post, 30 Dec 2009)
Today John Boehner made the nonsensical claim that the Administration doesn’t actually have a strategy for combating terrorism. Since one of the core elements of the Administration’s strategy has been to go about the business of blocking violent extremists without giving them the gratification of talking about them in public all the time, perhaps it’s understandable that a few of his colleagues could use a little primer as well.
The good news: the US does have a counter-terrorism strategy, and some experts believe its first year has shown results in dismantling terrorist leadership in Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan; pushing Al Qaeda into a funding crisis; and helping lower Muslim public support for extremists while improving support for the US.
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(from io9)
As I write this, 12 minutes ago it flipped over to 2010 (UTC).
So welcome to the future and all that.
A nice little summary of this year’s action in the Content Industry vs Pirates battles (at least the BitTorrent part of those battles).
Top Tier BitTorrent Sites Suffer Pain in 2009
(enigmax, TorrentFreak, 29 Dec 2009)
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By scale and exposure, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt became the three most prominent BitTorrent sites in the latter half of the decade, serving billions of torrents to multiple millions of BitTorrent users.
Due to this massive and unprecedented level of interest, it became increasingly clear – the movie and music industries, just as they did with dozens of sites and services before them, would move to crush or suffocate them into submission. 2009 became a painful year for all three of them.
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| In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…
Sam and Ivan talk about:
- Underpants Bomber
- Security Overreactions
- Missed Warnings
- Apple Tablet Rumors
Just click to listen now:
[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20091228.mp3″ text=”Recorded 28 Dec 2009″]
or
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Actually probably just a big headed early human. But still fun!
Theories on Why Our Bigger Brained Predecessors Vanished
(Sonia Zjawinski, io9, 29 Dec 2009)
What’s weirder is that with further examination, it was discovered that whatever genus owned the skull also had small, childlike features — a Boskop face only takes up 1/5 of its cranium size, while a typical European adult face takes up roughly 1/3 of its cranium size.
Big head, small face? Sounds familiar, eh?
Lynch and Granger, who wrote about Boskops in their book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence note in their Discover article that we aren’t the only ones to think of stereotypical extraterrestrials when we hear about Boskop characteristics. American anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote about this very idea in his book, The Immense Journey in 1958. “Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”
More info on the Wikipedia Boskop page of course.
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