E adesso Lenovo, con il suo ThinkPad X1 Extreme da 15 pollici vuol fare fuori il MacBook Pro

Money quote: “To face down this formidable foe, Lenovo has stretched its new, top-of-the-line ThinkPad X1 Extreme to accommodate a 15-inch display (14 inches had been the maximum before). It’s even added discrete Nvidia graphics for the first time. Announced Thursday night at IFA in Berlin, Germany, the ThinkPad X1 Extreme will ship in September with a starting price of $1,860. “

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3301291/laptop-computers/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-extreme-price-specs-features.html

Nuova Apple Keyboard Folio per iPad Pro 2018, presa di contatto e prime impressioni https://www.macitynet.it/cover-tastiera-ipad-pro-2018/

Unboxing iPad Pro 11”, presa di contatto e prime impressioni https://www.macitynet.it/unboxing-ipad-pro-2018/

Oppo parte da Milano per conquistare la classe media degli smartphone - il mio articolo per La Stampa

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/11/07/tecnologia/oppo-parte-da-milano-per-conquistare-la-classe-media-degli-smartphone-avMrUuT5fOIKaSRAF9GhgJ/pagina.html

Mini recensione Apple Pencil, capolavoro di seconda generazione https://www.macitynet.it/recensione-apple-pencil-2/

Notevole storia del New York Times

Amazon critics are saying that the company's decision to split its second headquarters into two (one in New York and one in Washington DC) showed that the bidding process for HQ2 was a farce. Some believe that the decision was made long ago and that the bidding process was just a ruse to extract concessions and kickbacks. Others have been saying all along that HQ2 would be split into multiple locations that Amazon would again play against one another to strengthen its bargaining position. One critic says "It's tempting to roll your eyes at this soap opera, but Amazon will walk away from this stunt with a cache of incredibly valuable data. It's learned all kinds of things from the bidding cities like their future infrastructure plans that even their citizens are not privy to. Amazon will put this data to prodigious use in the coming years as it looks to expand its market power and sideline the competition."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-virginia.html

Si stava meglio quando si ascoltava la musica sull’iPod e non sul telefono. Sono arrivati gli hipster molto, molto giovani.

Money quote: “This video from Pitchfork deftly explains what made the original iPod and its clickwheel descendants such great products, and why using a smartphone to listen to tunes, despite the convenience they afford, doesn't hold a candle to the listening experience a dedicated music player can provide.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/26/why-the-ipod-classic-remains-o.html

🤡🤹🏻‍♀️ #InclusioneSociale #Giovani
«Il circo mi ha aiutato a uscire da una vita molto difficile. Ho capito che il divertimento può esistere anche come cosa normale e non solo con l’uso di stupefacenti. Mi ha tirato dentro Giovanni, venendomi a prendere per strada. Il mio sogno è diventare un trapezista». Marco, 19 anni, cresciuto nel quartiere Barra di Napoli, racconta così il suo incontro con Il tappeto di Iqbal, una cooperativa sociale che da anni promuove il circo come metodologia pedagogica e di inclusione sociale. Quella di Marco è una delle testimonianze raccolte in "Ridere fa bene. Esperienze e riflessioni sul circo sociale", un bel libro appena pubblicato da Cesvot - Centro servizi volontariato Toscana, nato dall’esperienza dell'associazione Carretera Central di Siena che da anni porta avanti progetti di volontariato internazionale e circo sociale in America Latina e Medio Oriente. Come racconto su Vita, il libro ripercorre storie ed esperienze di circo sociale, dalla sua nascita in Brasile negli anni '60 con i cosiddetti "meninos de rua" alle tante realtà attive in Italia. Nel nostro Paese sono, infatti, almeno 25 le esperienze di circo sociale, tra le più note il Circo Corsaro di Scampia. L’arte circense può rappresentare uno straordinario strumento per combattere l'emarginazione e il disagio giovanile ma non solo. Tanti sono ormai gli ambiti in cui il circo sociale viene praticato: dalle dipendenze alle disabilità, dal carcere alla salute mentale. Sì, ridere fa bene! Buon fine settimana 🤠

Un articolo da prendere molto sul serio. Altro che intelligenza artificiale: il problema è la complessità del software.

Money quote: ““When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. She became known for her report on the Therac-25, a radiation-therapy machine that killed six patients because of a software error. “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

Software is different”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

Chissà se ha senso e se funzionerà davvero.

Money quote: “Xinhua, China’s state-run press agency, has unveiled new “AI anchors” — digital composites created from footage of human hosts that read the news using synthesized voices”

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18074806/ai-news-anchor-china-xinhua-digital-composite

Le tasche dei jeans delle donne sono peggio. Lo hanno misurato.

Money quote: “Beyond the obvious measurement differences, we wanted to see just how functional all these pockets were. After all, a pocket is only as good as what you can fit in it.”

https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

Fortune viene venduto a un tailandese per 150 milioni di dollari. All’improvviso gli acquisti fatti da jeffnbezos e Laura Powell sembrano la mano della provvidenza per molti miei colleghi giornalisti americani.

Money quote: “Like many of its peers in media, Fortune has suffered from declines in advertising and newsstand sales over the past several years, and it has increasingly focused on digital advertising and its growing conference business.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fortune-magazine-to-be-sold-to-thai-businessman-for-150-million-1541772000

Oggi, 29 anni fa, Berlino si è risvegliata (se mai quella fatidica notte è andata a dormire) senza più il suo muro. In questo vecchio articolo del Domenicale del Sole 24 Ore, un ragionamento sul senso dei muri e dei confini.

Money quote: "L'idea di Febvre è che i luoghi di confine sono punti di sutura più che di frattura. Fine della politica è nel proporli appunto come luoghi di sutura per fare in modo che lo siano per davvero: la geografia non è mai ciò che c'è e la politica è uno strumento per fare in modo che la geografia non sia il registro dei conflitti. Oggi vige un diverso principio. I muri ci appaiono come naturali. Lo storico francese Claude Quétel, che con pazienza si è messo a indagare non solo il funzionamento di quelle fratture, ma anche l'origine, la diffusione, la crisi e talora il crollo, scrive nelle righe conclusive di questo suo libro che i muri «non pretendono di essere soluzioni. Sono risposte»."

https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2018-11-09/ci-sono-muri-che-indicano-coabitazione-guardinga-piu-che-distanza-153913.shtml?uuid=AEURgGeG

A coloro i quali manca Leonard Cohen, ecco i suoi quadernini postumi. Ce n’è un armadio pieno...

Money quote: “Two years have passed since Leonard Cohen’s death on the eve of the 2016 American presidential election, and to no one’s surprise, the world remains steeped in the miserable mix of darkness and fleeting hope that the poet-songwriter articulated so well. The Flame, published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Cohen’s parting gift: a collection of poems, lyrics, drawings, and pages from his notebooks. Cohen’s son, Adam, writes in his foreword: “This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet … It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.” Below, we present a selection of images from the book”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/07/selections-from-leonard-cohens-notebooks/

Si sta meglio da vecchi? Boh, forse...

Money quote: “Sohn posits that happiness isn’t so much a feeling of peace, but a “state of fulfillment, meaning, or abundance .” It’s also possible that it’s not something we can necessarily appreciate while it’s happening, but only when we’re looking back on it.”

https://lifehacker.com/why-being-middle-aged-may-be-the-best-part-of-your-life-1828366010

I vigili del fuoco di San Francisco si costruiscono da soli le loro scale, tutte in legno. E c'è una ragione (ovviamente) se lo fanno, che non è ingannare i tempi morti tra un intervento e l'altro. Perché hanno un'officina dedicata e sono molto orgogliosi del tipo di operatività che questa attività gli consente.

Money quote: "Wood is resilient in ways which aluminum—now standard for fire department ladders—can't even compare. "You know if you take an empty coke can and bend it three or four times and it tears really easy? That's what aluminum ladders will do," Braun says. "They have a seven to eight year lifespan, after which they need to be replaced."

Wooden ladders, on the other hand, can last indefinitely. "You can stress wood right up to its failure point a million times; as long as you don't go beyond that, it will come right back to where it was. They can be involved in a fire for a pretty long time; after that, it's just a matter of sanding off the top coat of material then inspecting the wood. If it's good we'll re-oil it, revarnish it, and put it back in service.""

https://gizmodo.com/inside-san-francisos-fire-department-where-ladders-are-1552279252

Quando Apple era in crisi nera, a metà anni Novanta, decise di comprarsi un sistema operativo multitasking "tosto" per fare un salto tecnologico che le consentisse di recuperare Windows NT. Le scelte erano tra NeXT OS di Steve Jobs e Be OS. Venne scelta la prima, Jobs rientrò in azienda e il resto è storia.

Tutti i pochi geek appassionati di Be OS ricordano però la supposta superiorità (oramai leggendaria) dell'altro sistema operativo, un po' come capita quando si parla di Amiga OS con un seguace del culto della Commodore. Se ne parla, ma se ne sa poco. In effetti alcune cose noteovli c'erano, a partire dal file system. Qui si racconta per bene com'era fatto e perché sarebbe ancora uno strumento valido (considerando che il file system di Apple è stato sempre un suo punto debole, almeno sino all'attuale AFS). Se non sapete esattamente cos'è un file system, Ars Technica ve lo spiega.

Money quote: "BFS was created in 1997 by Dominic Giampaolo and Cyril Meurillon, both of whom worked at Be. It was designed to be multi-threaded and lightweight, and to support high-volume, streaming multimedia. It was also designed to support the database features of the previous Be file system. Even though it was written at a time when systems typically had only 8MB of RAM and a mere 9GB of disk storage, many of the forward-thinking design decisions made then are still valid today.

BFS didn't quite end when Be shut its doors after failing to get bought by Apple. In 2002, Axel Dörfler re-implemented BFS for Haiku as an open-source project. The last part of this article features an interview with Axel.

Before we can talk about what made BFS so special, we first have to cover some file system basics."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-beos-filesystem/

Una bibliotecaria spiega la "regola del 50" che ha creato per decidere se abbandonare o no la lettura di un libro: leggi le prime 50 pagine e se ancora non ti piace, mollalo. Ma c'è anche una interessante variazione per chi ha superato i 51 anni...

Money quote: "Mine was also a family of readers, with a house full of books, and my childhood library was virtually a second home to me, so I certainly didn't lack for choices in my early reading life. But to my way of thinking back then, I had to finish the book I was reading, even if I already knew that I didn't especially like it, before I could start another one, one that I might love.

It wasn't until I became an adult, and a librarian, that I began to question my commitment to finishing each and every book that I began. Now that I really was living a major portion of my life in the library, I literally found myself surrounded by books, tempting me, calling to me from the shelves. How could I - in one lifetime - ever get through everything I wanted to read if I had to finish those books that I discovered to be (at least to me) boring, badly written or just plain bad?"

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/nancy-pearls-rule-of-50-for-dropping-a-bad-book/article565170/

Senza tempo. I critici usano questa espressione come alternativa per "classico". Ma applicarlo al design è possibile? E se sì, qual è un design senza tempo, cioè che non invecchia?

Money quote: "But what if I want my product or brand to be timeproof?

I want to design my product once and I want to keep that design for the long run - and by long run I mean that 15 years from now it will still look good; it won't look outdated and out of touch.

Is it even realistic?"

https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/timeless-classic-ui-design/