I am a fan of the Chromebook and Chrome in general. It appears that Google has another idea – the Chrome Box. Looks very much like a Mac mini (lowest cost approx. $600), but the price is $329. You add or purchase a keyboard and a display.
So, I am thinking I need one of these and I need to come up with a rationale for my wife. I have used the “it will make me more productive” line too many times.
If you are concerned about the flashback trojan on the Mac, the use of OpenDNS now offers protection (TidBITS). OpenDNS is a service you use in place of a default domain name server to screen for inappropriate content, and now, it seems, for security risks.
I do not understand the cell phone providers. Actually I do, but my constitution refuses to accept the logic used to justify the profit motive.
Today, Verizon, my provider, announces that their commitment to 4G will mean that those of us (the loyal from the beginning data plan owners who purchased the original all you can eat plans) will have to give up our unlimited status to move to 4G (I actually already get 4G on my phone so how will this work).
So, the logic of 4G is that new content categories (e.g., video) become practical with higher download speeds but the opportunity to download these greater amounts of data will mean we can download less data with the basic plan. I am supposed to be impressed by such a deal?
P.S. Is this a reversal?
A couple years ago Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid; The Shallows, proposed that heavy use of the Internet was leading to shallow thinking. This BBC piece points to a study investigating the brain activity of “Internet addicts”. Sure enough a different pattern of brain activity. These are interesting findings, but as any Intro Psych student should be able to tell you – this is a correlation study. We should be interested, concerned, but not convinced. Still, would quality research be possible? One would have to take volunteers and get a random sample from this group to spend thousands of hours online.
This piece from Bloomberg BusinessWeek describes the effort to get Diaspora, a new social network (open source by my interpretation) off the ground.
I joined Diaspora several months ago. I am a little frustrated because the service seems to have little activity relevant to my interests, but I suppose that is the way it goes with startups. Someone has to generate some content so that others find the site useful, etc.
What I find interesting is that Diaspora offers code such that one could set up their own site. The present install process is a bit beyond my pay grade (unless I really wanted to take some time), I am thinking providers will eventually offer install scripts should you want to host a site yourself.
Diaspora is offering invites if you want to take a look.
This from the NY Times describing the Senate Republican blockage of the effort to keep the interest rate on student loans low. I have abstracted the rationale, but you can certainly read the entire article if you are looking for some other explanation.
But they oppose the Senate Democrats’ proposal to pay for a one-year extension by changing tax law that currently allows some wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes by classifying their pay as dividends, not cash income.
“They want to raise taxes on people who are creating jobs when we are still recovering from the greatest recessionsince the Great Depression,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who instead wanted to pay for it by eliminating a preventive health care fund in President Obama’s health care law.
