Month: April 2011

These aren’t “beta” tablets. They’re bad tablets. It’s that simple. It’s true that their hardware seems closer to iPad-caliber than their software, but improving software is the hardest part of making products like these. By the time RIM releases “a serious software update or three” the entire market will have changed. The truth is, Motorola, Samsung, and now RIM have released would-be iPad competitors that pale compared to the iPad. Just say it.

Daring Fireball Linked List: Harry McCracken: ‘The Era of Beta Hardware’

entrepreneurship & tech: Start with clear goals

entrepreneurship & tech: Start with clear goals

unprojects:

As some of you know, I’ve been keeping notes about the last year trying to get Marco and Steps off the ground. It’s been an incredible, nerve wracking, gut wrenching, awesome making experience. I’ve learned and grown a ton. I started off writing Kerouac-stream-of-consciousness style and have…

Why Developers Should Run for Congress – A Healthy Information Diet – InfoVegan.com

Why Developers Should Run for Congress – A Healthy Information Diet – InfoVegan.com

Third, great developers are systems fixers and systems hackers. There is no system more ripe for elegant process hacks than the United States House of Representatives. Put a developer in Congress, and they’ll start exposing data on their own. They’ll build systems to make it so they can hear from their constituents better. Just as Ted Kennedy had his staff make the first Congressional website, a developer in Congress will seek to use new technology to make their job easier. That’s what hackers do.

@lexinyt profiled my @noneck twitter account in the New York Times CityRoom’s “twitter patter”.

Here’s a full copy of the text…

Tweeting Since January 2007
Followers 3,365
Twitter Bio Dir. of tech innovation @NYSenate.gov; co-founder/partner of@NuAMS; @digidem advisor; member of#BikeNYC, #TN2020 & @RSAorg.

The five-year history of Twitter is short, especially when compared to the life, so far, of Noel Hidalgo, who describes himself as “old enough to remember when friends had black-and-white TVs and push-button cable boxes.” Yet Mr. Hidalgo has already embodied four different Twitter accounts: @TaxiNYC, where he chronicled his path to becoming a taxi driver in 2008; @NewAmsterdamize, his former feed of cycling nerdom; @noneck, his primary public Twitter identity; and a private Twitter persona where he composes personal messages “without hindrance.”

For much of the past five years, Mr. Hidalgo, 32, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has worked at the New York State Senate,most recently as its director of technology innovation, promoting “transparency, efficiency and participation” with the public. He is part of the city’s vanguard of civic-minded Web gurus that includesRachel Sterne, Mayor Bloomberg’s first-ever chief digital officer, with whom Mr. Hidalgo shares a regular Twitter dialogue. After this week, his last at the Senate, he will focus on several new digital projects, including New Amsterdam Ideas, an information technology consulting group he helped found to serve government agencies, news organizations and social media start-ups.

Messages from Mr. Hidalgo’s @noneck account, about 20 to 30 per day, cover a staccato burst of topics, from politics to food to the curiosities of life in New York. “Twitter not only is my primary news source, but it is my virtual workshop that allows me to tinker and hone my revolutionary ideas,” Mr. Hidalgo wrote in an e-mail. He said he spends more time tweeting each day “than Pedro Espada spent in his district campaigning for re-election.”

Americans need to have a Detroit moment, where they realize they’re pulling their money and wasting it on the richest guy in the room. The richest 1% hoard an obscene amount of the wealth, while the average American has to save up to eat at Red Lobster on his birthday.

Wake up, America. Because somehow, they’re banging the porn stars and you’re getting the crabs.

Bill Maher (via kateoplis)