Happy Birthday Steve

Video
Instapaper

Steve Jobs would have been 57 today. He may be gone, but his work1 is still around and better than ever before.

via iDownloadBlog

  1. the Mac, iPhone, iPad among other things, but most of all Apple ↩

Jeff Atwood leaves Stack Exchange

Link
Instapaper

Jeff Atwood decided on putting his family before working “crazy hours”:

Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

Now I neither started a family, nor do I have kids, but I remember (though vaguely) what it was to learn programing in the days before Stack Overflow and I’ll be forever grateful to both Jeff and Joel for all the new things I’ve learned and all the bugs I’ve fixed thanks to the site they started.

Ethically Questionable

Link
Instapaper

Paul Lloyd:

Now Facebook is hoovering up many of the best designers in our industry. As new features continue to encourage users to hand over more personal information, its designers have become devil’s advocates. Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move.

Maybe ethic is over-rated after all, especially in the wake of Path’s “nasty thing we’ve been doing, but forgot to tell you” story.

Is the iPad a PC?

Link
Instapaper

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, there is an ongoing debate on the Internet whether or not the iPad should be recognized as a PC, which subsequently would make Apple the biggest PC manufacturer.

The notion that a personal computer should have a keyboard, mouse or trackpad to be considered one is as outdated as the one where bigger is better. The key thing here is personal and honestly I don’t see how any PC can be considered as personal as the iPad.

Shawn Blanc curated some of the best writings on the topic and finished with an astute quote of his own:

For millions of people, an iPad is a perfectly good replacement for their laptop or desktop. They just don’t know it yet.

Speculative Developers

Link
Instapaper

David Sparks:

They barf out as many apps as possible in the shortest time possible in hopes that they strike gold in the App Store lottery. They run a never ending treadmill with little thought about the user experience except (sometimes) making sure their apps don’t crash. Some of these “developers” don’t know a lick of programming code. Instead, they are fountain of ideas with a group of somewhat ambivalent programmers on speed dial in India, Russia, and other far away places.

If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome. Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make something you’re proud of. Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.

It was inevitable. People like fast and easy…money among another things, but there’s a certain type of people who like to succeed by being better. Hard to see such people becoming majority any time soon by looking at todays world, but they are still out there.
Last year we lost one such person, but I’m sure at least one had been born since then.

Over 3 years later, “deleted” Facebook photos are still online

Link
Instapaper

Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content “did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site,” but said it’s currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they “deleted” from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

Consider the “possibility” that everything you (and everyone else) put on Facebook (valid for every other social network) will stay online even after you decide it should not be and try to delete it. (Applies to private photos, deleted tweets, etc.)

via Ars Technica