Linked List: October 13, 2010

Wednesday, 13 October 2010

The Flintstones Hawking Winston Cigarettes ★

Times change.

Windows Phone 7 and Removable Storage ★

Paul Thurrott:

Supported devices (not all Windows Phones will be expandable) will include a micro-SD card slot, which by Microsoft’s requirements must be placed under the battery cover (i.e. next to the actual battery) and not be externally accessible. That’s because this functionality isn’t designed to be something that is swapped out, used with a PC, or whatever. Instead, the micro-SD-based storage will work in tandem with whatever storage is available inside the device. So let’s say you get a device and it has 8 GB of storage internally plus an empty micro-SD slot. You could add a memory card (with 8 to 32 GB of storage) to dramatically expand the storage (to up to 40 GB).

What you can’t do is swap it out without hard resetting the device. That’s because the storage on the card and the internal storage is co-mingled, and the system makes no differentiation. There’s no way to know where something (an app, song, whatever) is stored, and if you do pop out the card, the phone will complain. And it won’t be readable on your PC, so you can’t use it to transfer content in either direction.

At first I thought this sounded like a mistake. Why allow it at all? But if you think about it, it actually does seem like a reasonable compromise. It’s something advanced users can diddle with when they first buy a device, but which regular consumers will never see or need to be concerned with.

Water Droplets Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array ★

Hypnotic super-slow-motion macro footage.

On the Lack of Referral Information From Twitter Links ★

Speaking of Tim Bray, he makes a good point here about incoming traffic from Twitter: it mostly comes without useful HTTP referrer headers. When a website links to DF, I can tell where the incoming visitors are coming from. When someone links to DF from Twitter, I can’t.

Tim Bray on the Samsung Galaxy Tab ★

Bray works for Google as an Android developer evangelist, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt. But, as he says, given that he’s been using it for a month, this is probably “the most exhaustive Tab review on the planet”. Spoiler: Bray likes it a lot.

On the flip side, though, Jason Snell got to play with one, and tweeted:

Galaxy Tab browsing experience disappointing. Lag before scrolling, serious judder while scrolling. Breaks the spell of touch interface.

Any sort of touch lag or scrolling judder is unacceptable in iOS. Perhaps this is endemic to using Android 2.x on a tablet-size display.

FCC May Force Mobile Carriers to Warn Users Before Charging Overage Fees ★

A welcome change. I can’t wait to hear more from the carriers about how they’re not currently screwing customers with these overage fees.

Microsoft Announces Windows Phone 7 Sync Software for Macs ★

Josh Topolsky:

According to a statement from the company issued late in the day, beginning some time “later in 2010” Mac users will be able to live the dream along with their PC counterparts by downloading a beta OS X application which will allow you to sync “select content” from a Mac of their choosing to a Windows Phone. The company was short on details, but hopefully we can pry more info out of the big M in the coming days.

Times change.

Sony Releases Stupid Piece of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work ★

The Onion News Network predicted Sony’s Google TV product back in February 2009. Seriously, look at this “Unique Remote” — can you believe this is the real remote, not the joke one from The Onion?

Apple to Hold ‘Back to the Mac’ Media Event October 20 ★

A “sneak preview of the next major version of Mac OS X”, and, I’m just guessing here, the brand-new way-cooler MacBook Air.