Mostly Cloudy is no good.
With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away… the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.- Woz
Year 2013
A Colourable iOS 7 Map Pin (Photoshop)
For anyone developing iOS 7 maps-enabled apps, you probably know that the pin image has changed for this version of iOS. iOS has long limited the provided pin colours to Red, Green and Purple. Here is a layered Photoshop file that we used in the latest version of AthensBook and you can use to change […]
Ten Dollar Fonts.
Some weird, some cool, only three seem to contain Hellenic glyphs (and two of those only seem to have uppercase glyphs). The lack of good, free (or affordable) hellenic typefaces is extremely disappointing.
Mind your Mind Share
It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]
SimCity (2013)
Of all the games that I’ve played over the past twenty five years or so, SimCity, in its various incarnations, has to be the one that I cherish and have spent time playing the most. Ever since I laid my eyes on the first version of SimCity in the early 1990s, I became enamored with […]
On CalDAV and Google.
People are annoyed about the demise of Google Reader. Yet more than Google Reader, a service I've used and loved for more than 7 years, I am truly annoyed by the fact that Google is canning CalDAV. And not just because CalDAV is an open, free and widely used protocol (all very good things), but because, in the past, Google has been a champion of open protocols, because its support for CalDAV was reaffirmed only two months ago when it dropped Exchange Support from its Google Docs apps. Because it demonstrates that Google has been somewhat cavalier with its use of 'Openness'.
Perpetual Growth – Economic Pipe dreams
BBC writes about the loss of Moody's triple-A rating by the UK. And halfway down the article you'll find this:
This means it will take longer for the government to reduce the budget deficit - the amount it has to borrow as it is spending more than it gets in through tax revenue.
That is because when an economy is not growing, companies and individuals are paying less tax, and it has to spend more on welfare payments such as unemployment benefit
And this is why modern capitalism, of the sort witnessed by anyone living in the early decades of the 21st century, is a failing system; perpetual growth simply cannot be at this scale for any economy (other things being equal of course) and in this context cherry-picking criteria for ranking people, organisations and countries -- let alone forming the basic operational frameworks by which society functions -- is flawed (at best) and dangerous (at worst).
The main problem here is that moving away from this model goes against centuries (and trillions of dollars' worth) of interests and investment. But we need to move away from this model, we need to 'reform' (not abolish) capitalism simply because in its current form it has lost any sense it made before.