The impact of Apple’s Siri release: From the former lead iPhone developer of Siri. One of the developers of the app that later became Siri spills the beans. Very interesting, some things are indeed simpler than one might have imagined, others certainly more complicated than it reads in the summary. But I agree with one thing: this will surely give a boost to user interfaces for small devices and consumer computers - I can't imagine that we will forever stick with the rather crude text input interface, with keyboard and all.
technik
Outage: Skype unavailable for many users - Golem.de - hey, I rely on Skype. Stop the nonsense with the outages! And what do you mean by "appears to be offline" - if I don't get any contacts displayed and can't establish any connections, then it's factually offline, regardless of the technology behind it.
Long Live the Web: Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee. Why the web is so important to us and why and what we must protect it. Because more and more interest groups are trying to reduce the openness of the web for their purposes, ostensibly often to protect users or rights or other great and positively sounding reasons - but behind it all is simply the grab for power that one wants or fears to lose.
Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera - I only understand half of it, but even that sounds really good. A camera that doesn't just capture pixels but layers of pixels - and then the focus point can be set afterwards via software. The site has some examples. For macro photography, the technology would be absolutely amazing ...
