SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.
The US State Department is planning a new embassy in London, so they held a design competition to put together an energy-efficient, safe, and appealing architectural plan.
They recently announced the winner of the contest is a firm called KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia. Their design is a throwback to Middle Age siege defense tech, complete with motte-and-bailey and a moat:
“The reflecting pool evokes a castle moat. “To keep a medieval fortress secure, you needed to prevent people from taking pickaxes to the base or undermining it,” Rogers says. “A moat was one of the best ways to do that.” In olden days, they were also used to raise eels and fish for food. We imagine the US embassy will forgo that tradition.”
Inside China factory hit by suicides »
This Foxconn manufacturing campus in Shenzhen employs 300,000 workers.
A Moderate's Position on iPad openness »
Alex Payne on iPad:
“By the end of the day, I was convinced. Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.”
His impressions on the system’s openness are much more reasonable than the insanity Cory Doctorow posted previously.
While it would be nice for the device to be more “open,” ultimately consumer-grade devices favor closed simplicity over development-heavy openness. If Apple were to spend the time building wild APIs and letting devs do whatever they want, the consumers who don’t care about those things (read: nearly everyone) end up with lazily constructed, unreliable software and falsely blame Apple for making a lame product.
Satellites orbiting Earth, by nation.
/via neatorama
Twitter’s John Adams (infrastructure guy) on scaling the site and general operations.
Palm Pre review »
The epic, detailed review from Josh Topolsky at Engadget.
Looks a lot better than I was expecting. A fair competitor to the iPhone.
The future should have been incredible.
Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB charger —
For $25, I’ll gladly pick up at least oneof these. Why has it taken so long for someone to create something with both A/C power and USB power?
