Technologizer

Love these. The artist's commented too: https://technologizer.com/home/2025/04/22/pc-connection-ads-raccoons/#…

Ideally DRM would be banned, as it's in fine a danger for liberal democracy. But there are very powerful interests (including at the state level) that consider DRM worth having even to 'protect' something as trifling in comparison as commercial leisure products. So I guess we're stuck with personally avoiding DRMed (including online only) media, and supporting the likes of EFF, GoG, and https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ See also : https://technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-piracy…

If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome. https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html My favorite part is this: “After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

I'm reminded of this: https://www.technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-… Also submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094029

The modern products sold under the Norton brand are a slur on the name of Peter Norton, a real dude who made some excellent software products and wrote some important books back in the day. https://www.technologizer.com/2014/06/05/where-have-you-gone-peter-nor… I guess there's a lesson here: if you sell your name, eventually it will be used for something that will tarnish it.

There was an excellent article by Benj Edwards about Computer Space and Dabney's contribution to video game history, including the invention of the "slipping counter" circuit that moved onscren objects on this game and Pong: https://www.technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-o… “Nolan came to me one time and he said, ‘On a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV, the picture will go up, and if you turn it the other way, it goes down. Why does it do that?’ I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sync and the picture timing. He said, ‘Could we do that with some control?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we probably can, but we’d have to do it digitally, because analog would not be linear.'”

"Works best in Chrome" Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again. http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-viewe… In Google's words: "The goal of the Dash (Dart) effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development on the open Web platform" I will never support Google's walled garden. Dart is a pathogen.

I thought this story was a repost, but it's just been covered many many times here and elsewhere. I dug up a few of the older stories to evaluate whether I was crazy, and decided to drop them here while I had them. http://technologizer.com/2011/11/19/inside-facebooks-amazing-oregon-da… http://scobleizer.com/2011/04/16/photo-tour-of-facebooks-new-datacente…

This is a good overview of the Land story and some of the parallels with Jobs, but if you're interested and have a bit more time, I highly recommend this long-form piece at Technologizer: http://technologizer.com/2011/06/08/polaroid/ The odds Land faced in conceiving, building, and shipping not only an instant camera but the chemical and manufacturing processes required for such a product are staggering – and not far off at all from the feat of the first Macintosh. It's a riveting story.

here's a more future-proof link to the article http://technologizer.com/2009/07/06/im-an-ex-xm-subscriber/

To better understand the role of Steve Jobs, I recommend reading this excellent article from Technologizer (that got buried on HN as some good submissions do) about Edwin Land of Polaroid and the innovative product of the time, the SX-70. "Edwin Land was brilliant, prescient, prickly, and demanding, and hounded his employees into doing great things they might never have accomplished otherwise. That sounds like Steve Jobs. Land described photography as “the intersection of science and art.” Jobs likes to cite Land’s quote and says that Apple’s work sits “at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology,” a location which is surely in the same neighborhood. Land demoed new Polaroid products himself at corporate events that were famous for their hypnotic effect. Jobs carries on the tradition. And both Land and Jobs were forced out of the companies they founded, in two of the more preposterous decisions in business history." http://technologizer.com/2011/06/08/polaroid/

This change butts up against what I think is a fundamental, unsolved UI issue. Power users often don't realize how much if an issue "getting lost" is for novice users. Dave Worthington's Mom said[1] of the iPad: Well, it’s too touchy. Even though I’m better with it now… if you happen just to move your hand or something, you know, then all of a sudden you’re out of what you’re in. That’s bad I think. Notice she doesn't say "you go back a page" or "you've opened something" she says "you're out of what you're in". Anyone whose done some usability testing knows that users all the time get "out of what they're in" and are completely lost. And as the designer you are screaming in your head "You've just gone to your Account page! Just click the huge red "Back to my movies" link at the top of the page you ninny!" All. The. Time. Bless us, designers and users both. I call this an unsolved problem because the options are equally bad: 1) Have one panel where you replace the contents frequently. Like a web browser. Unfortunately, as the article points out, prevents doing two things at once. And it forces people to learn often complicated mechanisms for navigating from state to state. 2) Show multiple panels at the same time. Takes up a lot of space, especially when there are lots of panels. Can be confusing at first. 3) Show multiple panels, but with the ability to close panels. This introduces the UI problem of reopening them. You can allow people to shrink/move…

You could build a twitter search app, which searches and returns real time news. It should be capable of categorizing tweets about an event as headline(MJ's dead), more info at(latimes.com), comments. In short it should search twitter for real news and display it in a traditional blog style. Perhaps, it could even display excerpts from the info source site. The comments display should be real time so that you can in effect discuss the news with totally random people without having to follow them or anything. A killer feature would be an up/down voting system, so that any noise in the news items gets immediately voted out. Btw killer domain name. Perhaps use "What's tweetin now?" as a tag line. EDIT: Why it would be valuable: Ask Jeff Goldblum :P ( http://technologizer.com/2009/06/25/twitter-the-fastest-way-to-get-inf… ) EDIT2: You could also add a user rating system like the one at stackoverflow, in order to get the bots out and give more weightage to more popular users.

> He had kept tape backups from old BBS systems, and was able to recover a warez copy of the SDK – unbelievable! It actually worked, I was able to build a few sample plugins! Why History Needs Software Piracy[1] [1] https://www.technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-pi…

It seems like most of it is a rewrite of this 2010 article by this Tandy Trower guy who worked on Windows: https://www.technologizer.com/2010/03/08/the-secret-origin-of-windows/

You can read the original article here: https://www.technologizer.com/2023/04/15/the-end-of-computer-magazines… Comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583853 ...instead of the Hackaday summary ripoff

There were many. Google Meet, Google Hangouts Meet, Duo, Hangouts on Air video chatting, and even in 2008 Gmail had video chat https://www.technologizer.com/2008/11/11/gmail-adds-voice-and-video-ch… now there is a non-Hangouts Meet button banner integrated into Gmail wasting 10% of screen real estate of your inbox on Android's limited size screens.

I setup my own geocities website in 1998, so they had to have had it then. According to the document here [1], AOL's web browser was introduced in 1995. [1] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/05/24/aol-anniversary/2/

If past is prelude, they'll try again, within about a decade. They first tried a retail store ~1999-2001, before even Apple, with at least one outlet being in San Francisco's downtown 'Metreon': https://www.technologizer.com/2009/10/20/1999-microsoft-store-vs-2009-… (By my recollection, it was somewhere within the 2nd-floor footprint of the Target that's there now... not far from the bowling alley/arcade.)

The update rate has to be very high and the alignment perfect or it will drive users nuts. Which means it will probably be done soon, although not in this round. Doing it with lightweight short path optics is also difficult. All this stuff with diffraction gratings and Fresnel lenses makes for a crappy image. That can sometimes be overcome; the Polaroid SX-70 camera had a very compressed optical system with Fresnel lenses without compromising image quality too much.[1] The other option is simply to show the real world via a camera feeding into the system. That's been tried many times, and it works OK, although lag will make users faceplant or ill. [1] https://www.technologizer.com/2011/06/08/polaroid/sx70-light-2/

The only thing iOS had for me was reliability Android and Android apps are more reliable than iOS and iOS apps [1]. Depending on who you believe this has been the case for a long time [2][3] or is a recent trend [4]. As Android vs iOS is the mobile equivalent of vi vs emacs it is not easy to find objective reporting on the subject. [1] https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=android+ios+crashes [2] http://www.technologizer.com/2012/02/06/which-phone-os-crashes-more-it… [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/02/does-ios-crash-more… [4] http://fortune.com/2016/08/25/apple-ios-failure-rate/

It matters because people writing angry blog posts because apple leaves someone out has happened at every iteration of every apple product ever. Apple removing the firewire port was the end of the world. http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/16/jobs_responds_to_outrage_ove… Apple removing the matte screen option was a the end of the world http://www.macworld.com/article/1136061/matte_laptops.html Using USB instead of ADB, SCSI and GeoPort and ditching floppy drives was the end of the world http://www.technologizer.com/2008/10/17/firewire-isnt-alone-a-brief-hi… I don't think I even need to link posts about powerpc, flash player, or the 30 pin connector

It's probably real, but to steal someone else's line, they're "selling like an unspecified number of hotcakes".[1] And to steal another line (from Steve Jobs, related to Amazon's vague brags of Kindle Sales) - "Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody." [2] It would be nice to know the actual quantities of watches being sold from the horse's mouth as opposed to guesstimates from analysts. [1] http://www.technologizer.com/2010/08/25/new-kindle-is-here-selling-lik… [2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/in-qa-steve-jobs-snipes-at-am…

Steve Jobs, in 2008, on why touchscreen iMacs are bad http://www.technologizer.com/2008/10/14/my-question-with-steve/ Steve Jobs, in 2010, on why touchscreen laptops are bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeNsqqKadQ4 Jonny Ive, last week, on why touchscreen laptops are bad https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/jony-ive-talks-about-putting-the-…

Am I the only one who read this as "glory be to our overlords for they give us 1 in every 100 days off" The exact same government agencies that are being praised for their pro competition prescience allowed the market to become an oligopoly between 2000 and 2010. http://technologizer.com/2011/03/20/att-buys-t-mobile/

Frank Shaw of Microsoft revealed that Google was invited to jointly bid Nortel’s Patent Portfolio but declined. http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/03/microsoft-just-kicked-google-in-the-n… http://technologizer.com/2011/08/04/google-shows-how-not-to-complain-a… Take everything with at least a boulder of salt before turning to an emotional being.

On the other hand, I believe we did see exponential growth in our ability to both automatically drive cars, to automatically translate text, and in voice recognition. If we consider 1958 to be a good starting point for self-driving cars (http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars/), might we say that Google's car is orders of magnitude more powerful than those of 1986? If we consider 1954 a starting point for machine translation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation), again might we find that Google Translate is similarly in a different league than SYSTRAN of the 1980s? I do not really have the knowledge and sources to back those claims up, so I have to frame them as opinions for now. Could someone with experiences or deeper knowledge about these areas weigh in?

I'm not sure if these were so wild, since they don't seem to be companies as high-profile or controversial as Color. Siri is somewhat wild insofar most people didn't expect that Apple was working on such a project. I'm talking more about the Apple will buy Twitter/EA/RIM stories. http://technologizer.com/2011/07/29/a-brief-history-of-apple-not-buyin…

Thanks, author, for the drip of your contribution to the ocean of everything-has-to-die-for-linkbait. http://technologizer.com/2010/08/18/the-tragic-death-of-practically-ev…