Tech Today w/ Ken May

Amazon’s taken a leap into the cloud, and they’re taking your music with them. But what exactly is Amazon Cloud Drive? And more importantly: how do you use it? More

As this 1998 PSA on internet safety reminds us, the web can be a scary place. Remember not to trust strangers on the net – especially if you happen to be talking to them on what looks like Microsoft Word. More

Acer’s had its fair share of Iconia’s land in the past few months, but none are as breathtaking (and potentially world-changing) as the Iconia-6120. Said machine was priced at €1,499 earlier in the year, but that doesn’t mean an awful lot to folks situated in America and the Great White North. As of today, consumers in both of those nations have a price and release date to ponder, with $1,199.99 (both US and CAD) netting you a touchbook with two 14-inch Gorilla Glass touchpanels, a Core i5 CPU, 4GB of memory, integrated Intel HD graphics and a 64-bit copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. You’ll also get USB 3.0 support, a 640GB hard drive, a 1.3 megapixel camera, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, an HDMI output, gigabit Ethernet, a chassis that weighs in at 5.95 pounds and a battery that’ll probably sputter along for nine or ten minutes (on a good day). Lookin’ to dive right in? Amazon, as well as “other” fine e-tailers, should be taking orders momentarily.

Continue reading Acer slaps $1,200 price tag on dual-screen Iconia-6120 touchbook, lets US and Canada pre-order

Acer slaps $1,200 price tag on dual-screen Iconia-6120 touchbook, lets US and Canada pre-order originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's taken them a good while, but Vimeo finally has an app—enabling you to upload quickly to your video channel, as well as do simple edits and naturally, watch others' videos. It's free. [iTunes] More

As we’ve speculated it might, Amazon has announced its own cloud-based media streaming service. It’s called the Amazon Cloud Player and you can start using it right now. More

There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More

There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More

There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More

A new coating material for food packaging could keep sodas fizzy, chips crispy and military rations more edible, scientists say. It’s made of a thin film of nanoscale bits of clay, the same kind used to make bricks, mixed with polymers. When viewed under an electron microscope, the film looks like bricks and mortar, according to its creator. More

In the debate about programming languages, libraries, and platforms we focus too much on the technical details. What matters more, is the human community of people who create, maintain, and use the technologies. Every programming language we’d consider is Turing complete, and there is no shortage of tooling or frameworks for any important language. You can build pretty much any web app in any language and it would work. Culture matters. The difference between technologies and languages are their cultures. It defines the way the community structures itself, what it values, the origin myths, the way it collaborates, shares, and creates. With this talk I tried to tell the story of Ruby’s Culture. I also tried to inspire programmers to be active participants, to be creators – not consumers of their tools. Watch the Keynote Last October I had the priviledge of co-organizing the first Ruby Conf in Uruguay . My personal goal was to bridge worlds. There’s a great small hacker community in the region, but the larger community of programmers wasn’t paying attention. We could watch videos of other people’s conferences, but we were missing the hallway conversations. We wanted to have a great programmers conference where we could show off what we’d been doing, be inspired by others, and change the way software development is thought about in Rio de la Plata (Uruguay and Argentina). We hoped to have 75 people come, we had over 250 show up! As the date approached, we needed a keynote. We thought, Blaine Cook , he does a good talk, but he wanted to talk about federated social networks and web standards, it wasn’t quite right. Then Tim Bray said he could join us, he gives a great talk, too, but he’s working on Android these days. The other speakers who have the right energy all wanted to talk about deeply technical topics. Santiago Pastorino just joined Rails Core, and would be great but he wanted to do a very technical talk on meta programming. Eventually we decided that perhaps I should do the talk I wanted to hear. It was my first time giving a full length keynote talk. Focusing on technical subjects is an easier more constrained problem. Inspiring and telling a story is harder. The technology we create is not isolated and mechanical. It’s a reflection of the values, constraints, and aspirations of it’s creators. Free and Open Source technology is even more a community endeavor. We need to understand the history and culture of our creations. For once i’d like to acknowledge that the culture of technology is as important as it’s implementation. Broken implementations are easier to fix than broken cultures. In the last year, we’ve seen the node.js community move from a small technological core, to a full and robust environment. They build libraries, technology, but they managed the process through community organizing and collective values. It’s about rough consensus, running code, and a shared aesthetic. When you choose a technology, these values, the community and it’s culture are as important as performance and type system. The robustness of libraries are a reflection of the community’s work. Pick a healthy vibrant community where you feel comfortable.

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Ruby Culture – The way community and culture shape technology