The most complete review of Apple’s new OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion – the ars technica review

It’s bold, it’s brash, and it’s 25 pages long. Don’t worry it has a table of contents. If you’re short on time, read the TOC and you’ll be up-to-date. Otherwise, sit back and dig in for a feature rich update on your favorite computer.

 

Apple’s traditional desktop computing business has suffered many indignities over the past decade. Once Apple’s flagship product line, the Mac first found itself playing second fiddle to the iPod—a mere music player—in the early 2000s. Today, matters are worse; on a graph of Apple’s revenues, the Mac now appears as a thin strip of earth while iOS devices are the mountain that sits upon it.

Apple presented last year’s release of OS X 10.7 Lion as part of a turn “back to the Mac.” Ostensibly, the tagline was Apple’s promise to bring innovations from its mobile operating system back to Mac OS X. But more broadly, it also meant that the Mac would receive more of Apple’s attention.

That attention resulted in some dramatic changes to aspects of the operating system that had not been reconsidered in decades: application launching, the document model, process management—even basics like window resizing and scrolling. As Apple’s newly refocused gaze fell upon its desktop operating system, many parts of it were deemed archaic and unworthy of continued existence.

At the end of last year’s Lion review, I concluded: “[Lion] marks the point where Mac OS X releases stop being defined by what’s been added. From now on, Mac OS X should be judged by what’s been removed.” Unfortunately, the surgery was not a complete success. There were… complications.

 

Source: ars technica – OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica review

 

 

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Newsmastering – or why it’s an incredible time to be a news geek

European news editor Robin Good used to write all the time about a concept he called Newsmastering.

Newsmastering is the ability to identify, select, aggregate, filter and distribute/publish news and informatiom streams on very tight, specific themes/topics.

Newsmastering is a new emerging and much needed network function allowing the huge news flow to be categorized, filtered, de-spammed and re-routed and contextualized in one thousand and more ways.

The output generated by a skilled and qualified newsmaster enables a great number of individual to avoid needing to subscribe to tens of RSS feeds or to having to visit multiple sites daily to keep themselves on top of the latest relevant news to their specific field of interest. The newsmaster aggregates and compiles very high-quality news feeds which completely replace the need to visit or subscribe to large number of RSS feeds, suddenly providing those same individuals with much greater time available to them and much higher quality up-to-date news available to them at all times.

It’s an incredible time to be a news geek. Who can be fastest, smartest, best, add the most value, exercise the most compelling editorial judgement, capture social experiences and build a loyal audience?

The game is on!

 

Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick – We’re entering a golden age of news geekery

 

 

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Unemployment is not as important as we think, when it comes to predicting the next President

Make no mistake: the higher the unemployment rate in November 2012, the less likely President Obama is to win a second term.

But we should be careful about asserting that there is any particular threshold at which Mr. Obama would go from favorite to underdog, or any magic number at which his re-election would either become impossible or a fait accompli. Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance on Election Day is complicated and tenuous.

…historically, the correlation between the unemployment rate and a president’s electoral performance has been essentially zero.

Unemployment increased by 1.9 percentage points over the course of Richard M. Nixon’s first term, but he won re-election easily. It also increased in George W. Bush’s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first terms, and their re-election bids were also successful. The unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent from 5.3 percent, meanwhile, in Bill Clinton’s second term — but his vice president, Al Gore, could not beat Mr. Bush in the Electoral College.

There are also cases in which the data behaved more intuitively: Jimmy Carter and the elder George Bush all faced high unemployment rates when they lost their re-election bids, as did Gerald R. Ford in 1976, and that was surely a factor in their defeats.

 

Keep reading: On the Maddeningly Inexact Relationship Between Unemployment and Re-Election

 

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A century of Olympic posters

‘The Start of the Sprinters’ Dash’. Yusaku Kamekura (art director); Osamu Hayasaki (photographer)

 

 

Images from the book “A Century of Olympic Posters” by Margaret Timmers:

As snapshots through time, Olympic posters provide a fascinating record of our world, a lens through which we can explore links between sports and art, politics and place, commerce and culture. A Century of Olympic Posters offers an intensely visual representation of the modern Games, and shows the evolution of the Olympic Games poster as well, from the first official poster for Stockholm in 1912 right up to the present.

 

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National Geographic premieres new show – Comic Store Heroes

This is Comic Store Heroes, a wild and wacky adventure into the subculture of comic book super fans, where dreams are everything… and with a bit of faith and spandex, they really can come true.

Amid the dark and dangerous shadows of New York, the real life Gotham City, shines a bright light that lures comic fans from every corner: America’s largest comic store, Midtown Comics. While dealing with eccentric super fans, daily battles for geekdom supremacy, men dressed as bananas, and one million customers a year, boss Gerry is also preparing for the biggest day of his comic year – New York Comic Con. And it’s just six weeks away!

So he’s put his main men, Thor “The Marketeer” and Alex “The Negotiator” on the case. Thor has to track down a comic celebrity to appear at the store’s Comic Con booth, while Alex has to buy 10,000 old comics from super-collectors to then sell at the Con as well as completing a personal mission for his boss: finding Gerry’s elusive holy grail comic, “Hot Stuff, The Little Devil No.1″. This was the first comic Gerry ever read as a kid, and without it Midtown Comics wouldn’t exist. As an incentive, Gerry has offered Alex a cash bonus if he finds it. But it’s gonna be a hell of a challenge – it’s one of the rarest comics in the world!

Comic Store Heroes, premiered Friday, July 13th at 8P et/pt.

 

Source: National Geographic Blog

 

 

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A refreshing look at climate change in America – what are we doing about it?

A refreshing, well-balanced look at climate change in America.

 

You don’t have to be a climate scientist these days to know that the climate has problems. You just have to step outside.

The United States is now enduring its warmest year on record…Meanwhile, the country often seems to be moving further away from doing something about climate change, with the issue having all but fallen out of the national debate.

Behind the scenes, however, a somewhat different story is starting to emerge — one that offers reason for optimism to anyone worried about the planet. The world’s largest economies may now be in the process of creating a climate-change response that does not depend on the politically painful process of raising the price of dirty energy. The response is not guaranteed to work, given the scale of the problem. But the early successes have been notable.

Over the last several years, the governments of the United States, Europe and China have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on clean-energy research and deployment. And despite some high-profile flops, like ethanol and Solyndra, the investments seem to be succeeding more than they are failing.

 

Keep reading: N.Y. Times – There’s Still Hope for the Planet

 

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United States loans three satellites, worth $1 billion, to Mexico – MEXSAT

Did you know that America had an Export-Import Bank?

 

The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) approved a $922 million loan guarantee to support the export of three satellites and related equipment to the Mexican government for the MEXSAT regional mobile satellite system. Mexico’s Secretariat of Communications and Transportation will purchase the satellites from Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems in El Segundo, Calif. Boeing will produce two satellites with mobile service satellite (MSS) capacity and will subcontract a third satellite with fixed service satellite (FSS) capacity from Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va.

The three satellites will be used to deploy the MEXSAT system, a next-generation, space-based communications platform that will help support social and economic development within Mexico. Various sectors will benefit from MEXSAT, including programs focusing on education, health care, disaster relief and rural telephonic service.

Mexico is one of Ex-Im Bank’s nine key markets and accounted for $8.3 billion of the Bank’s worldwide credit exposure at the end of FY 2011. In FY 2012 to date, the Bank has authorized approximately $1.8 billion in financing for U.S. exports to Mexico.

 

Source: Embassy of the United States in Mexico

 

 

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Which baseball team has the most fans on Facebook?

If everything is a competition, then which baseball team has the most Facebook fans:

  1. New York Yankees – 5.9 million
  2. Boston Red Sox – 3.7 million
  3. Chicago Cubs – 1.7 million
  4. San Francisco Giants – 1.5 million
  5. Texas Rangers – 1.4 million

 

Data pulled from a great post on iStrategyLabs:

As we cross the all-star break, we decided to take a look back at how things have changed. What we found was a strong correlation between their achievements in the 2011 season and their level of Facebook fan increase.

Graphic:

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Tourism – 11% of Egypt’s GDP – is on the rise

“No political force, political party, president or government working in a democratic, responsible framework, and therefore accountable to public opinion … could follow policies that harm tourism in Egypt,” he said.

“Four million people work in tourism, while more than 14 million are impacted by it indirectly,” he added, saying Egypt had the potential to achieve, by 2017, tourism revenues of $25 billion, double the figure it earned in 2010, pre-uprising.

Tourism constitutes 11 percent of gross domestic product.

Egypt expects to receive more than 12 million tourists by the end of 2012, a 23 percent rise over the previous year.

Many in the tourism sector fear recovery would be slow if President Mohamed Mursi imposes Islamic strictures on the sector such as banning the skimpy swim wear and alcohol that are a normal part of a beach holiday for many foreign tourists.

The Brotherhood has not indicated it would do either.

 

Source: Yahoo! News – Egypt expects 23 pct more tourists in 2012: minister

 

 

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