One waterfall can power an entire continent
One waterfall. Enough power for an entire continent. Meet the ultra-massive Grand Inga Dam.
The design targets to top 39,000 MW in installed capacity, sufficient to meet the entire power demand of the African continent.
Africa has over 1 billion people spread across 52 countries and is larger than China, United States, Western Europe, India, Argentina, three Scandinavian countries and the British Isles combined. And one single waterfall can take care of all that for decades. The scale is beyond meaningful comprehension.
Disruptive
Yep, the biggest reason I wanted Apple to succeed back in 2007 was because I wanted someone to show the world that leapfrogging the competition with insanely great products is a much better and more profitable business strategy than the mindless cloning that the PC industry has been doing all along.
But… instead of Apple’s success spawning a 1000 Apples as I had so dearly hoped, it spawned the same 1000 leeches of the PC industry sucking on the efforts of the pioneer. I don’t care about these parasites and their “me too” products. They are impotent, they have no life and it’s stupid to expect them to do anything worth getting excited about.
But I do keep hoping that someday the leeches realize they are copying the wrong thing - that they’re copying Apple’s products when they should be copying Apple’s fundamentals, which is to make great products that redefine the landscape of the industry.
Samsung, Sony, LG, Motorola et al should pick up little known research projects that have the potential to change the way we do things today, polish them, build a cohesive business strategy around them, plan a great ecosystem supporting them and do a scalable product launch driving mass market adoption. I don’t want another iPad clone. What I do want is Augmented Reality (SixthSense), Thought Computing and Space elevators. Whoever does that gets to be next in line to suck money out of my wallet.
You should know by now that I normally do not get into much “news” around here. Especially when it’s not specifically Mac news. There are a ton of great Mac news sites out there and I leave that job up to them. That said, Chairman Gruber linked to a highly fascinating Wall Street Journal…
Source: minimalmac
Gyrotasking
Gyrotasking is an idea I had last year for a better way to switch between apps running on your iPhone. The current way to switch apps is to double-tap the home button, bring up the multitasking bar, scroll through and search the ‘icon soup’ for the icon of the app you want to switch to, and then click on the icon.
But it doesn’t have to be this tedious if we make use of the gyroscope that every iPhone 4 (and above) ships with. This is the base for my idea - Gyrotasking.
Gyrotasking lets you switch apps by simply pressing the home button and then moving/rotating the iPhone physically around you and depending on how much your arm/iPhone rotates around you, the apps start switching in sequence.
Here’s an interactive flash widget I made to demo the idea - simply press and hold the home button in the demo below with your mouse and move your mouse left/right to switch between open apps. It’s one, simple fluid motion to switch between apps instead of the present “double-tap, scroll through and search for app icon you want to switch to, then tap on that icon” flow.
I did this file sometime about the middle of last year and Apple has since updated the switching transitions so if you see that the switching animation in my flash demo doesn’t look exactly the way it does on your iPhone, this is why. The file is also a bit too wide but I don’t have the time to edit it back down to a more compact res.
While doing this on an iPhone mockup on your desktop using a mouse is clumsy, you can get a real world feel for it very easily. Simply hold up your iPhone, press and hold the home button and swing your iPhone left and right slowly while imagining the apps switching, like in the demo above - ain’t that sweet?
Why every PC manufacturer wishes they ‘lost’ like Apple
As makers of products that change the world and re-invent entire industries , Apple deserve their ‘loss’.
PageLeap - Google Chrome Extension W.I.P
PageLeap is an extension I made to scratch a personal itch and I use it heavily every day. I want to release it to the public, but the desire to add more features is so overwhelming that the extension has been on the back-burner for 6 months now, as I try to think up of what potential features users might want and how I should go about implementing them without adding bloat. Here’s PageLeap…
…a simple list of quick shortcuts to pages you visit everyday. I’ve finally decided to screw features and post it as it is next week. It’s better than never being able to release it at all, right?
In the shit-pile that is the YouTube comments, you will, at times, find diamonds
From the YouTube trailer for Cowboys & Aliens comes this gem of a comment…
A long time back I came across another comment that was just as hilarious, involving a Zune, squirting, and running away from the RIAA. Wish I had saved that video link then.
Never enjoyed a gadget ad like I did when I watched this one. Voiced by Peter Coyote and set to Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Gold Lion instrumental, this is one heck of a job from Apple’s TBWA\Chiat\Day Media Arts lab.
Boy would I love to see Apple do more ads like this instead of the usual jinglebell-ish ones.
Can these new payment services beat Paypal?
Recurly, Stripe, Chargify and 1000s more to come. Why will they succeed when Google Checkout, with all that Google-y muscle, hasn’t? Perhaps their ambition is to just carve out a niche for themselves instead of replacing Paypal as the dominant online payment solution. Now that makes sense.
Or perhaps they plan to be behind-the-scenes and do B2B (eg: power the Saas businesses) rather than handle B2C themselves (which requires oodles of user trust that comes from brand recognition).
