By The Awesomer, The Awesomer – December 06, 2012 at 08:30AM
The crew of the Enterprise returns home from a mission to find Starfleet in ruin, and the world under siege from a vengeful terrorist (Khan?) hell-bent on destruction. Slightly longer Japanese teaser here.
Star Wars vs. Star Trek
Star Trek Replica Set
Blu-ray: Star Trek TOS
Trailer: Star Trek XXX
Trailer: Star Trek D.A.C.
By Jason Kottke, kottke.org – December 05, 2012 at 12:44PM
My favorite end-of-the-year lists are always the photos. Here are a few that have made their way online so far; I’ll be updating this list throughout the month so send me your lists.
2012: The Year in Photos from In Focus: Alan Taylor is still my favorite picker of photos. Here’s part two.
Best Photos of the Year 2012 from Reuters: Almost a hundred photos, heavy on hard news.
The 45 Most Powerful Images of 2012 from Buzzfeed: A wide-ranging selection of photos designed to tug at the heartstrings. See also The Best Animal Photos of 2012.
Pictures of the Year 2012 from AFP (Agence France-Presse): Not an official list but a nice selection of AFP photos nonetheless.
Tags: best of best of 2012 photography
By Zach Honig, Engadget – December 04, 2012 at 12:00PM
In its former life, Eye-Fi was the exclusive provider of a practical in-camera WiFi solution. That was 2006. Now, as manufacturers begin to implement wireless technologies of their own, it’s back to the drawing board for the former king of in-cam 802.11. Circ appears to be the company’s latest lifeline — a cloud storage solution for your photos that promises seamless syncing, efficient organizing, simple sharing and, best of all, unlimited storage for free. That bargain-basement price tag does come along with a catch — you can only use the service with two devices — but an affordable Plus version will only run you 50 bucks each year, including support for up to 20 computers, smartphones, tablets or Galaxy Cameras. The service is currently open to beta testers, but since the site just went live, you may have some luck if you add your name today. You can also sign up to be notified when Circ’s ready for primetime — all at the source link just below.
Via: AllThingsD
Source: Circ
By Jamie Condliffe, Gizmodo – December 04, 2012 at 09:11AM
Every building material has a theoretical limit which it can’t be used beyond: at some point, the weight of material above is enough to crush what’s below. Now, a team of engineers has worked out that limit for Lego—and it’s surprisingly high. More » 
By Rip Empson, TechCrunch – December 03, 2012 at 11:05PM
Kleiner Perkins Partner Mary Meeker publisher her annual “Internet Trends Year-End Report” tonight, providing an update on the glimpse she gave us into mobile trends back in November. As per usual, the Kleiner partner’s biggest conclusions are somewhat familiar: Internet growth remains robust, and penetration in the U.S. leads all other countries.
While iPods changed the industry and iPhones “ramped even faster,” iPads leave both of those in the dust, as Meeker’s graphs shows the comparison between the three Apple devices, and yet Android has managed to grow 6-times faster than the iPhone — up from 4x at her mid-year talk. And, yet in spite of all this, Meeker concludes that smartphone growth still has an enormous upside, thanks in part to the fact that 29 percent of adults in the U.S. own some kind of tablet, up from 2 percent three years ago.
Mobile growth, again, continues to be the story. And that’s where we see the first big change from Meeker’s mid-year report. Mobile traffic has grown to 13 percent of Web traffic (up from 10 percent in her mid-year report) and, just in case you’re still looking for a Christmas present, Meeker qualified this by sharing the fact that 43 percent of kids want an iPad and 36 percent want an iPad Mini. That’s for ages 6 to 12, meaning that the demand for tablets among young people continues to ramp and ramp fast.
These are the two biggest changes, along with the fact that mobile phones and tablets represented 24 percent of online shopping on Black Friday, versus 6 percent two years ago, with iOS four-times that of Android on the year’s biggest shopping day.
As a result, mobile monetization and revenue are growing at 129 percent CAGR and mobile and tablet, with both Meeker still seeing a huge up-side in the U.S. for both web and mobile advertising — to the tune of $20 billion.
The growth of mobile has led to the diminishing market share of Windows, which is now at 35 percent, compared to the 45 percent share of Android and iOS. And while global smartphone and tablet shipments surpassed PC shipments back in 2010, Meeker expects the smartphone and tablet install base to hit its inflection point in the second quarter of 2013, surpassing PCs.
The presentation then launches into the roster of industries and segments that the Internet and mobile devices are currently in the process of re-imagining. Most of these we’ve seen before in the mid-year report, including for Meeker’s “white space” — or that which is still left to re-imagine. But there are a few notable additions including the “Back pocket,” or credit card debt, education and health care.
All in all, much of these “white spaces” focus on the elimination of an enormous problem Meeker identifies several times throughout the presentation: Debt. And one slide towards the end of the presentation puts a particular focus on student debt, which has now passed consumer auto loans and credit card debt in size. Which is sad and pathetic, but that’s me editorializing (not the KPCB partner).
But without further ado, find the slides below:
And here’s Meeker’s mid-year report for comparison:
By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo – December 03, 2012 at 01:06PM
These images by Martín De Pasquale are so surreal that, obviously, you know they aren’t actual photos. But they are perfectly executed. And the reason for that is not awesome Photoshop skills as much as good planning. If you want to make perfect photo composites, it’s not that hard if you plan in advance. Martín’s examples will show you how to do it. More » 
By Simon Slangen, MakeUseOf – December 02, 2012 at 08:00PM
Mac OS X and user-friendliness are two subjects not shy of each other’s company. In general, using a Mac OS X computer feels intuitive, natural; everything feels the way you expect, and your screen real-estate isn’t wasted on unwanted meta-features and overly bloated interfaces. This allows you to focus on the important things.
When you don’t want your computer to work as it would out of the box, you can start playing with the system preferences. This allows you to tweak the settings to adapt your computer to your specific way of use—you make it fit in your office habitat.
It’s only when these tweaks are especially specific and low-level—changing the intrinsic behaviour of your operating system and interface components, like the Finder behaviour and Spotlight indexing—you may not find a resolution in the system settings. That doesn’t mean there’s no solution, though. Using the command line, or one of several third-party tools, you can tweak hidden settings in Mac OS X. We’ll go over these below, in growing order of complexity.
If you’re using Mac OS X Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8), you should take a look at Lion Tweaks and Mountain Tweaks, respectively. These apps provide a more user-friendly way of tweaking your operating system—an easy graphical user interface, rather than using Google and Terminal. Use the app to revert to a 2D-Dock, show the use library folder, disable GateKeeper, remove the new leather interface in the Calendar application, and more.
Mountain Tweak shows three tabs. The first tab—General Tweaks—shows tweaks that can be applied to both Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. The next two tabs outline Lion Tweaks and Mountain Lion Tweaks, respectively. The developer warns that although most Lion Tweaks will work properly on Mountain Lion, the reverse is not true.
One problem with these apps is that it doesn’t keep track of the tweaks you apply. This may be trivial in some cases, but may require you to do the accounting in more complicated scenarios. That said, if anything goes wrong you can always go to Restore (the fourth tab), which helps you revert any applied tweaks and restore your computer to it’s original state.
For a full review, and a more complete overview of the available tweaks, take a look at Tim Brookes’ article on Lion Tweaks and Mountain Lion Tweaks.
A more advanced and in-depth application comes courtesy of Titanium’s Software; the same team developing Onyx. Deeper is one of the best applications to tweak obscure operating system settings of the Finder, Dock, Safari, Spotlight, and more; the specifics of course depend on your operating system version.
Among other things, you can enable the animated desktop, make your version of iTunes less store-reliant, change the specifics of the Finder File menu, and (as in Mountain Tweaks and Lion Tweaks) toggle the 2D dock to improve overall desktop performance.
At the time of writing, you can download Deeper for Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and a number of older operating system iterations. Check to make sure you’re downloading a version of the application corresponding to your operating system. For more information, and a better overview of the available tweaks, check out last year’s article on Deeper from Bakari Chavanu.
The two applications mentioned above both provide an easy way to tweak obscure operating system settings. Most of the time, they provide an interface to low-level settings that are reachable through the command line. Maybe you see where we’re going—instead of using one of the aforementioned applications, you can tweak the same (and more) settings using the Terminal. Mind you, if you don’t know what you’re doing, this is not the place to learn.
On the other hand, if you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, a great place to pick up those obscure operating system commands is at Secrets—a self-proclaimed database of hidden settings for Mac OS X. Browse through the commands to find new gems, or search for something specific. There are sure to be some interesting Terminal commands you don’t already know.
Have you ever tweaked hidden settings in Mac OS X? What did you (try to) achieve? Let us know in the comments section below the article!
The post Three Ways To Tweak Hidden Settings In OS X appeared first on MakeUseOf.
By Phil Freo, TechCrunch – December 02, 2012 at 02:00AM
Editor’s note: Phil Freo leads the engineering team at ElasticSales. Previously he was at Quizlet and Google. Follow him on Twitter.
There is often confusion about the various roles of a web engineering team. I have had to explain, even to technical recruiters, the differences between these roles and that the lines that separate them are often fuzzy. I thought I’d share the framework I like to use to evaluate whether someone is a good fit for a startup’s technical team.
In a startup, you can’t afford to have people who are only able to do one thing. Someone could be adept at writing HTML/CSS, but if they don’t have a great eye for design or know JavaScript well, it’s just not worth having them on the core team. Similarly, somebody who knows a little bit of everything but isn’t advanced in anything will just drag the team down.
The size of the company or startup will determine how many different hats each engineer must wear. Many startups get off the ground with a single founder who does a little bit of everything until he or she can grow the team. It’s also possible to outsource some roles completely. Just as cloud-hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services have drastically reduced the need for hardware/network engineers in web startups, platforms like Heroku take it further and (for a price) can reduce sysadmin and DevOps work almost entirely in the beginning.
In pretty much every case, when a startup grows, people will inevitably start specializing. Even those rare gems, who in the early days can spend the first half of the day in Photoshop and the second half scaling a database, will eventually specialize at least somewhat. If you’re hiring well, you’ll always find someone who can outperform you in at least one area.
I’m a big fan of “full stack” people and think specializing too much, too early, is a bad sign for startups. At Elastic, each of our engineers has written CSS and done database/server management. It’s good when a problem arises for there to be more than one person capable of fixing it. That said, I’m spending the bulk of my day writing in JavaScript/Backbone.js because I enjoy it much more than a coworker who’d rather be in Python as much as possible. That’s healthy and it works.
Here’s an overview of the main functional areas on a full-stack web engineering team:
We like to evaluate engineering candidates based on a combination of breadth and depth. Candidates need to be proficient in two or more main areas. And the fewer areas they’re comfortable in, the more of an expert in those areas they need to be. You shouldn’t hire for single hard-defined roles, but rather across a spectrum of skills. For example, some good fits for my team right now could include:
Rather than separately trying to fill the four job descriptions that I mentioned earlier, hiring people who have the right blend of breadth and depth across the spectrum is crucial.
There are many other important criteria for evaluating engineering candidates beyond where their skills fall on the web technology stack. People should be considered overall and judged on a team/culture fit, the ability to just get stuff done, product sense, communication and problem-solving skills, and experience with production systems, to name a few. And while having a well-balanced team overall is crucial, remember that technical fit is an important part of it. So figure out how many hats you need somebody to wear, and go find the engineers that will best fit on your team.
By spinnrad@mac.com (Editor), InnovationDAILY for Syndication – Saturday December 01, 2012
A successful personal relationship must follow the 5:1 rule: for every unpleasant interaction, at least five positive interactions are needed to offset the negative one, says Stanford Professor and author Bob Sutton. Research in the workplace also shows that just one rotten apple – or someone who repeatedly proves to be selfish – can be contagion that severely reduces overall team performance. These contagions must be removed for the health and longevity of the team.
By awkward, AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com – November 30, 2012 at 04:36PM
“The family got together to celebrate Uncle Joe’s 30th. I was fortunate to miss this one.”
(submitted by Maria)
