I finally got sick of the perfect East Bay weather and insanely high rent prices: I moved back to Austin, TX this week after a year in sunny California.
While I will surely miss all the perks of living in the Bay Area a few minutes away from San Francisco, it sure is good to be back. I hope to get settled quickly and meet up with all my friends soon.
A few hours ago, Mexico won the Gold Medal in the London 2012 Olympics after convincingly beating Brazil 2-1. Next championship: Brazil 2014 World Cup.
Update: Some readers point out that apparently there are other sporting events in the Olympics besides soccer. A small minority even cares about them. Congratulations to whatever countries won other medals on whatever sports.
“A heat shield has to slow the spacecraft from 13,000 mph to about 800 mph. Then a giant supersonic parachute has to unfurl properly to slow the rover further to about 200 mph. Then onboard radar has to detect the surface, and rocket engines aboard a kind of jet pack have to fire, slowing Curiosity to a crawl. Finally, a bridle has to lower the rover from the jet pack to the surface.”
…and it worked. NASA’s Curiosity rover landed a few hours on Mars. It’s the size of a small car. How incredibly cool.
The Samsung vs Apple trial opened today. Apple is accusing Samsung of “slavishly copying” its designs, specifically for the iPhone and the iPad.
Samsung is a gigantic company that can put together impressive high-technology products like almost no other company in the world. They build components (screens, chips) and they build end products. They should be admired for this.
But it’s obvious to me that there is a deeply ingrained culture of copying other companies’ successful designs and not respecting their intellectual property. They make the highest quality, most reputable KIRFs. The phone market is probably where this shows the most obvious. This is not new and is not just about Apple.
Examples:
Does this phone remind you of any other phone? Perhaps one that was quite successful a just few years ago? If you can’t see how this phone is a close copy of Blackberry, then let me convince you: coincidentally, this phone was named “Blackjack“. Is that close enough?
Here’s a slightly older model. Its thin flip-phone form factor may remind you of a very popular phone made by Motorola in the mid-2000s: the RAZR. It could have been worse, of course… they could have called it Samsung BLDE. Instead Samsung kept all the vowels and called it Blade. To avoid confusion, of course.
And here is the Samsung Galaxy at the heart of the lawsuit, next to an iPhone. Even the background color of the phone app icon is the same! At least they did not call it sPhone or iSamsung. So… copy or gigantic coincidence?
There’s many more examples floating around the web: cables, packaging, their tablet. We’ll see how it develops. Samsung may get away with it because what they did is still legal as defined by the law. But nobody should pretend that there’s no copying going on.
1.
Yesterday marked the 18th anniversary of the AMIA bombing attack in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people died, mostly Argentinian Jews. It is hard to imagine that any country in the world would allow an attack of this magnitude in its soil and do nothing about it other than be incompetent at best, cover it up at worse. Iran and Hezbollah were determined to be behind it.
2.
Yesterday a bus carrying Israeli tourists was bombed in Bulgaria. Netanyahu declared that Iran is believed to be behind the attack. It is unknown how Bulgaria and Israel will react.
3.
Algeria, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States are the members of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, a group formed in 2011 under the leadership of the United States, to “provide a unique platform for senior [counterterrorism] policymakers and experts from key partners in different regions to share key insights and best practices.”
Israel is not a member, despite assurances by the U.S. that it would be included. Common sense and raw data says they should be. It’s very symbolic, but nobody wants to offend the sensibilities of some of the members.
The Olympics are coming! One thing about it that has puzzled me is the logo they are using. Maybe I am missing something, but if this was selected I assume that’s because people like it. I think it’s hideous and apparently I’m not alone.
What’s your take?
n
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This is the cover of Proceso magazine for July 2nd, 2012 about the presidential elections in Mexico. I won’t explain it here.
Solid State Drives have been replacing Hard Disks on computers lately. Instead of storing data on a rotating magnetic disk, they store data in flash memory: basically silicon chips that keep data even when powered off. They are lighter, use less power, have no moving parts, and most importantly are way faster than hard disks. The problem is that, compared to their rotating counterparts, they are (still) more expensive.
Still, prices have dropped dramatically recently. Shlomit’s computer was feeling a little sluggish so I decided to give it a nice little upgrade.
After waiting for a good price on DealMac for a few weeks, I bought a 256 GB Crucial M4 for $180, a very good deal at the time of this writing, to replace the stock 250 GB spinning disk.
The upgrade is reasonably simple, here are the steps:
Really, the speed difference is amazing. Everything is snappy. Opening programs like iPhoto or iTunes happens in less than a second.
If you have a computer that’s 1-2 years old and you want something much faster without buying a new machine, strongly consider upgrading to an SSD. You may have to sacrifice capacity but I think it’s worth it. Just put your pirate movie collection in an external hard drive and/or pay $25 to keep your music on iTunes Match.
If you are buying a new laptop, make sure you get one with an SSD. If it’s too expensive, get a slower processor instead to make up for the difference. You will be surprised at how most slow tasks are dramatically sped up by an SSD. Don’t believe me? Check out this video of a side by side comparison:
Google announced the Nexus 7 tablet on Wednesday during their Google I/O conference. This is the first Google branded Android tablet ever. In summary:
My friend Andy wanted to know what I thought of it, so here it goes:
Android
Based on the reviews I’ve seen, it looks like after four years of stutter and jerkiness, Google got very serious about making the Android UI fluid and responsive. This was hard because Android was originally developed to be a Blackberry clone and some basic architectural decisions were made that prevented having a smooth interface. This is one example of Google aggressively fixing the most serious flaws in Android and it looks like they are making lots of progress. That and the deep integration with Google’s excellent cloud services. Android is getting better.
Price point
To beat the iPad, it is not enough to have a comparable product. You either have a much better product or you have a much cheaper product.
After many attempts, no Android tablet was good enough. So Google chose plan B: sell a much cheaper product. The Nexus 7 hardware does cut some corners (back camera, cellular radio, expansion ports) but what it has is very good. And it is being sold at cost – hoping to make it up later by selling movies, apps, songs, ads.
So rather than being a direct iPad or Windows 8 competitor, the Nexus 7 is aiming at the cheap Amazon Kindle Fire. And it looks like it is much, much better product.
Sucks to be Dell
These are tough times for OEM partners: Microsoft releases Surface and has the advantage of early access to software and direct access to Windows engineers. Now Google does something even more ruthless to its parners: on top of all the advantages of owning Android, they decide to sell hardware at cost.
Dell, HP, Asus, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. cannot sell tablets at cost without a way of making up their losses later. In the brave new world of tablets, Apple’s “making the whole widget” way is the way and Microsoft and Google seem to have caught on to that.
Bottom line
This is the first Android product I’ve ever wanted to own. It appears to be really good, and the price is great. Best of all, it’s very light (340 g). Sure, they had to destroy the trust of every hardware partner they have in the process. Too bad for them.
