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On Flickr’s Service Overhaul

Flickr just rolled out their new service structure which basically gives 1 Terabyte of space to the free accounts, and will sunset the Pro account option soon after – in favor of an ad-sponsored system.

And despite being a Pro subscriber for years I think this is a very good move – as it gives enough incentive to bring regular users (back) to the service. Because let’s be honest, to this day Flickr is a superior photo service. The only problem it had was that the free accounts were severely limited; last time I checked 1 And I may be off, since it was years ago since I last was on a free account free users were allowed 200 photos displayed; you didn’t actually have any limits on how many photos you could upload – but it would only display the most recent 200. That, and you were only allowed a certain number of sets.

Even non-professional photographers can find these limitations debilitating to the overall user experience. Enough to compel us to upgrade to their Pro service which cost about $20 a year – which I did and which I never regretted doing. Read More

Notes

Notes
⇡1 And I may be off, since it was years ago since I last was on a free account
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Pogoplug

Being a Drobo owner, one of our newsletters mentioned a promo where DataRobotics collaborated with PogoPlug, a cloud-storage service. While I’m perfectly happy with Dropbox, Pogoplug offers something that I find really useful. So I decided to give it a whirl.

PogoPlug
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Abstraction

Abstraction is a term programmers like to use – the concept of which is basically to approach/tackle a problem CONCEPTUALLY rather than with specific tools. In other words, if applied properly, you’d be able to do whatever it is you intend to do without being tied to a specific requirement (e.g. “I can’t do this unless I have this specific piece of equipment”)

So why the hell am I talking about that right now? Nothing important, can’t a guy shoot the breeze once in a while? It’s been ages since I talked about something in the blog anyways 😉

But sure, let’s apply that a bit on a current experience. Read More

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Hocus PCOS

I’ve mentioned my general opinions regarding this topic. But I guess it would be helpful to drill down deeper.

The thing that makes this issue complicated is that both sides have their respective legitimate arguments – and the “problem” I see is how people assume something has happened simply based on the possibility that it can.

That mindset, while legitimate to a certain extent, is unfair to use in the field of technology because it is an uncontested fact that any system, given enough time, can be compromised. The goal of security experts has always been to, at the very least, make it extremely difficult for any hacker to accomplish such a task in a reasonable amount of time.

So given the elections, that’s quite a slim window of opportunity to get anything done unless you’ve already got a hack in place. That means the system already has to have defeated from the get-go – wether it by knowing the 128bit encryption cypher, or that you’ve tampered with all the PCOS machines, or that you somehow managed to tamper with all remote receiving servers.

Again, these are all possibilities… but you can see how foolish it can be to assume any one of them has happened based on unsubstantiated claims. Read More

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It’s all about the interface

I’ve already explained why I personally think the iPad is a solid/useful gadget for my tastes. But of course there will always be people in the “other camp” that disagree; people who think that the tablet is utterly useless because of how “limited” it is compared to a laptop, or comparing it to the competition which “does more.”

To all those who think that way, and are trying to understand why people like me think otherwise, I present to you three articles below. I believe that all the points/concepts in these articles give a good overall picture of what people from “our side of the fence” are seeing.

Bottomline is, that you can have all the bells and whistles in hardware, but your device will always be as weak as its interface. And historically speaking, choosing the best “interface metaphor” to use for different devices has always been Apple’s forte.