Linked List: August 10, 2010

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Adobe Ships Mac OS X Flash Player With H.264 GPU Decoding 

Thibault Imbert:

We just pushed a few minutes ago a new version of the Flash Player 10.1.82.76 containing a nice feature that was in beta until now called “Gala”. Yes, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player.

The catch? Hardware accelerated decoding requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 and one of the following video cards: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M, or GeForce GT 330M GPUs.

The Ballad of Steven Slater 

Hit play, trust me. See also: this and this.

Flexibility and Power 

Brent Simmons:

Whenever I think about new (or old) features in software, I think about whether they’re flexibility or power features.

They’re different things. Flexibility is the ability to change how software works; power is the ability to do more with less effort.

Mike Monteiro Beats Gmail 

“Who needs to delete when you have so much storage?”

Dell Streak Pricing: $300 With Two-Year AT&T Contract, $550 Without 

That’s almost twice as much as a good iPod Touch, and if you wait a few weeks to buy the Touch, you’ll get one with a Retina Display and dual cameras. If Dell can’t make an iPod Touch competitor, who can?

And if you want to argue that at 5 inches diagonally, the Streak is a tablet, that means it costs $50 more than an iPad with a 9.7-inch display. And apparently it’s going to ship with a year-old version of the Android OS. Great work, Dell.

Chuck House on HP’s Shitcanning of Mark Hurd 

Chuck House speculates that HP’s board was looking for a reason to force Hurd out:

The Voice of the Workplace, HP’s thirty-five year historic ‘measure’ of employee feelings (done every five years) showed in April an astonishing finding — more than two-thirds of HP’s employees would quit tomorrow if they had an equivalent job offer. Not a raise, not a promotion, simply an alternative. That number never used to be in double digits.

Hurd was, apparently, very unpopular with the HP rank-and-file.

Engadget: ‘HP Tells Employees WebOS Tablet Coming Q1 2011’ 

So will there be a single credible iPad competitor out in time for the holidays?

Select Scenes From the World’s Longest Yard Sale 

A film by Jess Gibson:

Follow four assholes along Highway 127’s annual “World’s Largest Yard Sale”. From Defiance, Ohio all the way down to Gadsden, Alabama. 627 miles.

‘Stanley Was a Great Dancer’ 

Lovely interview with Christiane Kubrick by Tom Happold at The Guardian. (Requires Flash, alas.)

The Incident 

Games like this are why iPhone users get laid so much.

Statistical Analysis of the Attractiveness of User Profile Pictures 

Fascinating statistical analysis of user profile pictures from the dating site OkCupid. Among their conclusions: iPhone owners have more sex than BlackBerry and Android owners. (Via Andy Baio.)

Cadillac’s CTS-V Coupe 

Dan Neil, car columnist for the WSJ, says the Cadillac CTS-V coupe is more fun to drive and makes the BMW M3 and Audi RS 5 “look like taxis”. Agree or disagree, it’s a sign of resurgence in the U.S. auto industry.

‘God’s Number’ Is 20 

With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.

South Korean Police Raid Google Office 

Choe Sang-Hun, reporting for the NYT:

The South Korean police raided the offices of Google Korea on Tuesday as part of an investigation into whether the company had illegally collected and stored personal wireless data.

What Google Could Learn From Pixar 

Peter Sims:

Despite an unbroken string of 11 blockbuster films, Catmull regularly says, “Success hides problems.” It’s an insight Google should acknowledge and act on.

Android Market Worldwide Limitations 

Android Market is available in 46 countries around the world, but there are only 13 countries where people can purchase apps. In the other 33 countries, you can only download free apps. And there are only 9 countries from which developers can sell priced apps in the Android Market. So if you live in, say, Scandinavia, you can neither buy nor sell paid Android apps in the Market.

Yours Truly, Back in 2008, on Why RIM Is Screwed 

Synopsis: mobile phones are evolving into pocket-sized computers; Apple has 20 years of experience making portable computers, and RIM does not.

I’d say the latest iPhone and BlackBerry models bear this prediction out. RIM’s new flagship 9800 (a.k.a. Torch) is, relative to current Android and iPhone models, slow and chunky. It may well be a great phone and texting device, but it’s not much of a mobile computer.

‘My Cooking Diary’ 

Recipes by Sharon Hwang, photos by Mike Matas, a fascinating website design.