Awesome find. Jordan Mechner:

Video game source code is a bit like the sheet music to a piano sonata that’s already been performed and recorded. One might reasonably ask: If you have the recording, what do you need the sheet music for?

You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.

Finally I can brush up on assembly language.

I love this man.

This is indeed a dark day. Instagram was my ‘anti-facebook’.

Mark Zuckerburg:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.

You mean you ‘get’ to acquire Instagram.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently.

I hope so.

Users generate simple, consumable content on Instagram. Photos. Not a mess of Farmville moves and second hand content streams from other mediocre applications.

They also use instagram on one (type) of device. Smartphone. It’s so simple, and I love it.

I don’t want music, video, gifs, tweets, gamification. i just want photos.

Please don’t fuck this up.

Interesting essay. Even more interesting distribution method.

It’s pretty shocking when one of the most recognizable household-name brands fails so miserably. It’s a real testament to just how little their executives knew about…anything.

Also, I like how almost every article detailing a company’s demise now ends with the same sentiment: “if only they had Steve Jobs…”

Now the web is going somewhere…

2011 was the year of the tablet. 2012 will be the year schools catch up with 2011.

Ms. Rosenbaum, a high school teacher in Idaho, is doing it wrong.

Her room mostly lacks high-tech amenities. Homework assignments are handwritten on whiteboards. Students write journal entries in spiral notebooks.

Ms. Rosenbaum did use a computer and projector to show a YouTube video of the devastation caused by bombing in World War II. She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”

She is a republican (shocking) and is irrationally afraid of the change (shocking) technology will bring to the classroom. Instead of providing any morsel of a reasoned argument against exposing student to new technologies, she instead attempts to downplay it’s importance.

Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method

Smash-cut to 20 students struggling to keep their eyes even partially open, counting the seconds on the analog clock circa 1967, shifting uncomfortably in a chair made mostly of lead and burnt-orange lucite. Oh, the boredom.

Why fight technology, or anything remotely progressive for that matter? A conservative position that aims to hold on to tradition for tradition’s sake is charming at best, but should’t be taken seriously. Computers in the classroom might challenge the status quo, but seriously, isn’t that how every fucking great thing in the world happens ever…ever??? Indeed.

It reminds me of John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, who was always annoyed by his incessant guitar playing. Like Ms. Rosenbaum in Idaho, she just couldn’t quite connect the dots:

“The guitar’s all very well as a hobby, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.”

The computer’s all very well as a hobby, children, but you’ll never make a living out of it.

From C|Net:

The BBC reports that the engineers are concerned about small cracks that have appeared on the wing ribs of some Airbus A380 airplanes, and that they’re calling for the whole fleet to be grounded for investigation.

Airbus:

We confirm that minor cracks were found on some noncritical wing rib-skin attachments on a limited number of A380 aircraft. We have traced the origin. Airbus has developed an inspection and repair procedure, which will be done during regular, routine scheduled four-year maintenance checks. In the meantime, Airbus emphasizes that the safe operation of the A380 fleet is not affected.

I don’t like the words “aircraft”, “wing” “cracks” and “noncritical” to share the same sentance. Doesn’t sit well.

I’ll stick to trains.

from Forbes Tech:

“Rick Santorum” is currently the second most popular Google search term (after “Iowa caucus results”), and the number one hit for Rick Santorum’s name is, for the first time in a long time, not sex-related.

It was a good run.

More than two years after Apple introduced its 27-inch iMac, HP will offer the first large-screen Windows-based competitor with its new Omni 27 all-in-one.

Yes, just what everyone’s been clamoring for: an uglier, clunkier, lower-resolution version of the iMac.

No thank you.

I have a feeling Mashable uses Go Daddy. Todd Wasserman:

… all of us will suffer if entrepreneurs feel that they can’t take unpopular stands from time to time. In their heart of hearts, the people who run Go Daddy may have a different opinion about SOPA than you do, but, at this point, they’re not going to do anything about it, so who really cares? Punishing the company for a thoughtcrime is very 1984.

Who cares? I do. Maybe they won’t do anything about it now, but they eventually will.

If Go Daddy thinks it would be good business to support SOPA, despite the loss of thousands of domain registrations, why wouldn’t they?

Also, its not a thoughtcrime if they act on it.

There’s an inherent flaw in the term ‘social media’.

There’s no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I’m the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!

My favorite line:

You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.

Kids today…

Yes I know it’s for children. But…

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.

I need to have this.