David Lidsky's Blog, page 3008
April 14, 2015
"Guitar Hero" Is Back: "We Wanted To Give People Stage Fright"
A crowd that seemingly reacts to your on-stage performance in real time was key to reviving the concept.
It is 2015, and I am playing Guitar Hero.
Meet The New Zealand Company That's 3-D Printing Rocket Engines... And They Work
New Zealand-born inventor Peter Beck has a dream: 3-D printing rocket engines and putting a new satellite into orbit each week.
An upstart New Zealand rocket company says it has found a way to drastically cut the cost of satellite launches: 3-D printing rocket components. The Rocket Lab's new Rutherford engine, formally announced on April 14 at Colorado's Space Symposium, is built out of carbon-based materials instead of metals, and will allow satellites to be launched for $5 million a pop—less than 1/40th the price of the average rocket launch.
Can This Dysfunctional Life Coach Make You Care About Privacy Rights?
Karen is an app that shows you the downsides of blindly trusting apps (instead of telling you about it).
Though the controversy over government surveillance has been raging since Edward Snowden's NSA leaks were first revealed in 2013, there's a pervasive feeling that the American people don't care about, or don't understand, these hard won revelations. Last Sunday on the HBO news parody show Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver and his crew ventured out onto the streets of New York, asking people whether they'd heard of whistleblower Edward Snowden and if they believed the government could be monitoring their communication illegally. Most people both hadn't heard of Snowden and didn't believe the government program he'd exposed could be real . Oliver then asked the same people how they would feel if they knew the government could see their naked photos. No one wanted the government to see their dick pics, and though most didn't believe it was happening, even the idea deeply concerned them.
How Typing Is Destroying Your Memory
Studies show that you're more likely to remember things that you write down, but there are circumstances where you should grab your laptop.
Bad News: If you take notes in a meeting using your laptop, or if you create a to-do list using an app, you might be undermining your ability to recall the information later.
Today Is Equal Pay Day: How Can We Finally Close The Gender Wage Gap?
Today symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn as much as men earned in 2014. How can we change it next year?
If you are a woman reading this, you may have been essentially working for free until today.
Inside Wall Street's Persistent Wage Gap
A detailed exploration of why women in finance are still earning so much less than their male counterparts.
Imagine you're at the office one day, just picking something up off the printer, when you catch a glimpse of a confidential document: a list of the salaries of everyone in your division. Unless your employer is unusually transparent (maybe you work for the federal government, or this place), you're likely in for a few unpleasant surprises. (Wait—the coworker who rolls in an hour late every day makes $10,000 more than you?!)
How Marissa Mayer Mobilized Yahoo
Almost three years in, Mayer's Yahoo is still a work in progress. But it's made real progress in reinventing itself for the smartphone era.
"I joke that my son is about as old as my tenure here," says Marissa Mayer, the president and CEO of Yahoo. "He showed up when I was about eight weeks in. And I just have this vision that when he gets older, we're going to have these conversations where he's going to be like, 'Okay, so, Mom, your whole career was about search. Tell me what it was like.'
April 13, 2015
The Next Wave Of Interfaces: Touch, Plus Something Else
In the Apple Watch and other new gadgets, multitouch input is improved, augmented, or passed over altogether.
In the days when Macintoshes all came with 9" monochrome displays, I once came upon a woman in a computer store trying to make sense of Apple's boxy beige computer. Looking at the display, she tried to activate an on-screen button by tapping the mouse against the screen rather than sliding it around the desk to control the cursor. In doing so, she demonstrated that direct manipulation of on-screen items is often more intuitive than indirect input devices such as a keyboard and mouse.
Periscope Cracks Down On "Game of Thrones" Piracy, But It's No Copyright Nightmare--Yet
Periscope can be used to consume media without paying for it. But do you really want to watch Game of Thrones this way?
Practically the moment Twitter launched Periscope, the speculation began: Could this new wave of live-streaming mobile apps be the Internet's next copyright problem child?
Watch Live: SpaceX Launches A Rocket And Tries To Land It On A Floating "Drone Ship"
SpaceX will attempt the precarious ocean landing after launching cargo to the International Space Station. Liftoff is set for 4:33 p.m. ET.
Update 4:33 p.m. ET: At just three minutes before liftoff, engineers scrubbed the launch due to bad weather. The team will try again tomorrow at roughly the same time.
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