Ever since Sparrow Mail went the way of the dodo,1 the search for a good email client has been on. Sparrow continues to work, but it never fully matured as an email client and will never again be supported. Sparrow therefore is not a good long-term option. I still use Sparrow on my laptop and on my iPhone, but I’ve moved back to Apple’s Mail.app on my desktop system. Mail.app’s interface has improved substantially in the time I … Read the rest
This morning’s email includes an email by the makers of my favorite email client for the Mac and for iPhone: Sparrow Mail. At the top of this email is a simulacrum of Sparrow’s logo, but drawn with Google’s trademark colors. The email starts off with this cheerful news:
… Read the restWe’re excited to let you know that Sparrow has been acquired by Google! You can view our public announcement here, but I wanted to reach out directly to make sure you were
On the heels of last week’s death of the man who turned Unix into a popular consumer product, I am sad to learn of the passing of Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system. He was a 1998 laureate of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his part in the invention of both C and Unix.
Many who aren’t programmers or engineers may not know Mr Ritchie’s name, but anyone … Read the rest
Steve Jobs died today.
There’s no use repeating what has already been said: that he was a visionary, a genius, brilliant, and so on. It’s customary to speak well of the recently passed, but the truth is richer and more nuanced. Steve Jobs did not make his contributions by inventing every last component or by making every design decision in Apple’s products, a fact his critics like to point out. But he did see things in a way too few of … Read the rest
This post is the first in the Invisible Santa Bunny topic, so named because of a commenter’s wry query about how the «Magical Santa Bunny of the Free Market» would address certain problems without legislation, combined with Adam Smith’s famous «invisible hand» of the free market. It’s a chestnut of libertarian rhetoric that problems will resolve themselves with market-driven private-sector fixes, and that those fixes both will be more effective and will better promote freedom. This topic explores that idea … Read the rest
Like many Americans these days, I’m hunting for positive cashflow and investigating ways in which I can trade my time and effort for paper I can turn around and trade for food and lodging and art supplies. And in this day and age, the way to do that is through a variety of websites that connect job seekers with employers.
The highest value sites are ones where the employers have to pay to look at a résumé. The logic is … Read the rest
I was teaching myself C out of the Kernighan and Ritchie book (second edition, so you know I’m a poseur johnny-come-lately) when I tried to pick up Java. This was 1996 and my head was filled with «what if» scenarios that are still as absurd today as they were then. You know, like «what if all applications were OpenDoc components written in Java?» Which is second only to «why can’t we all just get along?» in it’s naïveté. But anyhow, … Read the rest
For background, please read the article from news.com.
I don’t know why I care much about the fate of Apple, but I’ve been trying to follow this story along, and I am hopeful about Apple’s future. Although I still wouldn’t buy a Mac for myself (we’ll see how their NeXT-generation machines look? I’m keeping an OpenMind on this issue 🙂 ), I think that Apple has been a great presence in this industry and that it would be a … Read the rest