In the latest Simpsons episode, the family visits the new Mapple Store at the mall.
I don’t know how long the video will stay online, but it’s just great!
I had never visited an Apple Store before my trip to London at the beginning of the month, but I found it was really fun; it felt like visiting the HQ of the Church of Scientology for some reason :P
Anyway, enjoy the fist few minutes of perfect Simpsons sarcasm.
_2.png "ISIC la carte didentité internationale des étudiants - Google Chrome (2)")
Et moi qui pensais connaître plus ou moins bien la gamme de produits de développement Microsoft quand même…
Je ne dirai pas où est-ce que j’ai trouvé la faute par contre ;)
Sitepoint is giving away its book The Art & Science of CSS during a two-week “Twitaway” (5 days left as of the writing of this post).
The book looks pretty interesting from what I browsed when I got it a few minutes ago, so I actually recommend it at least as a quick reference for some pretty useful CSS techniques.
What do you have to do to get it? This is where it gets interesting:
Follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter*! You’ll get a DM with instructions on how to get it.
I’m quite a fan of Twitter (you can follow me if you want), so I really like the idea. If you’re worried about your “stats”, don’t: @sitepointdotcom will follow you back :P And if you’re worried about spam, you can always stop following the account with a single click ;)
* If you don’t have a Twitter account (although I really encourage you to create one, you might like it) you can also get the instructions by e-mail.
I was really looking forward to it because I wasn’t fan of the “blades” at all, so I obviously logged on to Xbox LIVE last Wednesday to download the New Xbox Experience (NXE).
One of the new features of the NXE is the creation of avatars, which I was kind of forced to test even though I really, really needed to sleep. Avatars are not something new; we already had Miis on the Wii for example.
On the Wii they can be used as characters for certain games, but they’re still just a few elementary shapes with a face that more or less might look like you. On the Xbox, even though I haven’t tested any games that use the avatar as a character, the 3D model itself is of excellent quality! I don’t claim to have created a clone of myself, but I think that it’s recognizable enough.
Even better, Micrsoft is all about connecting devices, software, services, your car, … so it’s just natural that your avatars can also come out of the Xbox:
Just replace (gamertag) by your own—in my case it’s xboxMadd0 because someone had already taken madd0 :(
Download the NXE if you haven’t already and have fun sharing your avatars ;)
Oxford compiled a list of the top ten most irritating phrases used in English texts: books, magazines, the Internet, etc. Before I stop using them, I thought that they deserved to be put together in what is probably, by extension, one of the most irritating paragraphs ever written:
With all due respect, I personally think that it's a nightmare that at the end of the day most people will continue using these irritating phrases 24/7. At this moment in time it is absolutely necessary to control this fairly unique phenomenon which shouldn't of taken off in the first place; after all, learning proper English is not rocket science, is it?
I think that the list is funny, but irritating language is something very subjective that I don't really core about. So, at the end of the day ;) I'll probably continue to use some of these.
As a side note, though, English altogether can be rather irritating to us non-native speakers. Try to read a little bit of poetry out loud, you’ll see what I mean.
Yahoo! co-founder and Microsoft hero*, Jerry Yang is standing down from his position as CEO of one of the Internet’s biggest portals.
I know I have a résumé some around here… jobs@yahoo.com, you said? And the subject line? :P
* Microsoft offered $33/share a few months ago and Yang refused to sell. Today Yahoo! shares are too close to $10 not cry (or quit).
Photo jdlasica
I had already talked about it not so long ago, tomorrow (or actually today on my watch, but let’s talk PST) November 19th, we’ll be getting the new Xbox Dashboard.
Creating avatars, streaming from Netflix, buying stuff on a computer and having the Xbox download it automatically, and accessing Community Games are just a few of the new features included.
The update is as simple as it gets, but if you’d like a walkthrough, here’s Major Nelson:
In case you’ve never heard of Merlin Mann before, he is a well-known author who frequently writes about productivity issues. He’s website, 43folders.com, is all about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
Merlin was at Google in March to talk about time and attention, here’s the video:
I like that he mentions that the rules, routines and techniques of some may not be good for others, but they are still necessary. We really need to work on that where I work…
How to think about the tools that we use is something very important too. I know that we really suck at adopting tools over here. We should start thinking about how to integrate new tools into our work habits, such as Twitter or Facebook-like applications. There’s so much potential, but we still need to learn to tap it.
I will not summarize the video, because it’s only 35 minutes long and it can be easily listed to while doing other stuff, so there’s no excuse ;)
Times change and smart people adapt in consequence. That’s pretty much the definition of evolution, right? And it’s those who adapt, the fittest, who will survive. Well, today the one place where change is taking place is on the Internet and I honestly believe that only those who can adapt will survive.
A few months ago we learnt that the Queen of England (it’s actually the British Monarchy, but the Queen sounds better) had a Royal Channel on YouTube. We know that the Prime Minister has a Twitter account. Yesterday, President Elect Barack Obama addressed the Nation on YouTube:
Sure, the New York Times reported today that once he takes office President Obama will probably lose his e-mailing rights, but in the meantime, I think that using the Internet is a positive sign of someone who understands the world today.
No, in fact it is quite the opposite!
For a little over a year I had no antivirus on my computer at home because I thought them to be extremely resource-consuming and unnecessary given my configuration and my knowledge. I had tested several solutions previously—free, commercial—but they always seemed bloated and slowed down my computer. That’s why, when I was invited to attend a presentation of the latest version of Norton’s Antivirus—no, sorry, security suite Norton Internet Security 2009 (NIS 2009 for friends) I went there filled with prejudice.
It was Rowan Trollope, Vice President of the Division of Consumer Products at Norton, who had come to Paris to tell us of his baby. He had, after all, more or less staked his career on this version, as he explained to me during a long conversation we had after his presentation.
We were entitled to a heap of numbers: more than 500 000 man hours of development, 300 improvements in performance, 1-minute installation, significant reduction in the number of files to scan and, therefore, the time to do so… In summary, what we were supposed to get is that NIS 2009 is fast and light; fast and light as never witnessed before: able to turn on a machine with 256 KB of RAM, smart enough not to disturb the user of the computer and not to scan files that we know are “trusted” thanks to Insight technology.
_2.png "Norton Internet Security - Norton Insight")
After the presentation of the product I was able, as I have already said, to discuss at length with Rowan and by the end of the evening I only wanted to do one thing: test this miracle of computer engineering.
I would like to make a short "disclaimer": I was able to test NIS 2009 because I was offered a copy with a year of protection for 3 PCs. Sure, I could have downloaded the trial version on the site, but I am not dumb either. That said, I am known to be quite unpleasant and to criticize even gifts, so what follows is honestly what I think.
Back home, even if it was late, I could not help but to turn on the PC and install immediately. First test, is the installation time really under minute?
The answer: No. But almost. I spent some time filling out forms to create my account and activate, etc. The installation itself may have lasted less than a minute, but the experience in itself probably lasted just under 10, and that is what I remember.
That aside, everything else is true! When I say “Two Months without an Antivirus” it is just because it has been 2 months since I installed NIS I have barely noticed it. From time to time I see a small message, telling me that the current scan will stop because I am back.
Once, on my work computer (yes, I have also installed it on my machine at the office) an update didn’t go well. NIS automatically connected to the support servers (there’s free support, by the way, even if I have not needed to the call them for the moment) and offered a step-by-step procedure to solve my problem; and it worked, which is the most important.
A conclusion then? I like NIS 2009. It is undeniable that today it is vital to protect ourselves, or risk becoming a spammer robot or losing data. How can you not appreciate protection against the millions of threats around today when it is imperceptible? Now, will I renew my NIS subscription in 10 months? I’ll have the answer when the time comes, and it will depend only on my budget. Worst case scenario: I will take only the antivirus, instead of the complete security suite.
So you’re still here? How about a video of the Symantec meeting of September 18th:
/avatar-body.png){kind=link}
/avatarpic-l.png){kind=link}
/avatarpic-s.png){kind=link}