SlashGear for iPad and iPhone
RSS Feed

Author Archive for Philip Berne

Longing for Boredom

, Jun 24th 2010 Discuss [2]

Working as a High School teacher in a Charter school, my job wasn’t simply to teach and follow the curriculum. I was also a student advisor for a group of kids. It’s sort of like a guidance counselor role. I help them get along with each other, and with other teachers. I would help them get psyched about going to college, then help them through the application process. We had guidance counselors, but they were really more like social workers and psychologists. I gave advice, and filled the more traditional guidance counselor role.

Read The Full Story

You Get What You Pay For

, Jun 23rd 2010 Discuss [11]

Gourmet magazine is relaunching itself as a free iPad app. The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham previews the new app and asks whether a repackaging of the magazine’s decades of content will be enough for Gourmet fans. Home cooks, she says, “are now used to interacting with others by sharing and commenting on recipes online.” Pardon the pun, but what a crock.

I’ve spent plenty of time reading online food and recipe sites, and I can tell you they exemplify the biggest problems of the so-called Web 2.0 movement. When I read a recipe on Epicurious, for instance, I usually check the comments to see how the recipe turns out. Instead, what I always find are comments like: “I hated this dish. I followed the recipe exactly, except that I didn’t have fish sauce so I substituted Heinz ketchup, and I didn’t have fresh chicken, so I used broken glass instead.”

Read The Full Story

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

, Jun 22nd 2010 Discuss [2]

After sixteen years of using portable computers, I’m more convinced than ever that cloud computing, especially cloud based storage, will save us all. It’s not without problems and caveats, but I’ve been betrayed by storage solutions I thought were reliable, and I’m ready to bury the hard drive in favor of the great gigabyte in the sky.

Read The Full Story

How to Save the E-Reader

, Jun 21st 2010 Discuss [6]

Does the e-reader need saving? If Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the like have sold plenty of units, the category is still facing some tough competition and it lacks a compelling reason to exist. Apple has fired the first shots in the consumer tablet war, but I think e-reader devices can easily survive if they avoid that fight altogether.

Read The Full Story

E-mail Must Die

, Jun 18th 2010 Discuss [10]

E-mail doesn’t make sense. Text messaging doesn’t make sense. Neither does instant messaging. Phone calls don’t make any sense. These systems are all outdated and its time to scrap them for a much smarter system.

Read The Full Story

One Console to Rule Them All

, Jun 16th 2010 Discuss [4]

Competition is usually great for consumers, especially in the gadget world. Competition among phone makers is the most obvious example, but even digital cameras, laptops and netbooks, and HDTVs are all part of a highly competitive electronics landscape. Buyers can now find these products at lower prices with more features than ever before. It’s tough, perhaps even un-American, to argue against competition, but in the video games industry, a little less competition would do gamers a lot of good.

Read The Full Story

Stop Twiddling Your Thumbs and Stand Up

, Jun 15th 2010 Discuss [0]

Originally, I wanted to title this story “Why Women Hate Consoles,” but I’m sure there are many women who would take exception to that complaint. I’m not married to one of those women. My wife hates console gaming. She doesn’t just hate playing games on my Xbox or Playstation, she hates when I play them, too. For a while, I couldn’t figure out why.

Read The Full Story

Taking a Tech Time Out

, Jun 14th 2010 Discuss [6]

My son is a biter. He’s a toddler, and he has a bad habit of biting the other children in his class. We have him at a Montessori pre-school, so instead of day care he has teachers and a principal, even though he’s not yet two years old. It’s a great experience for him, but every day or so we have to sign a form at the end of the day when we pick him up acknowledging the fact that he has bitten some other toddler.

The school is kind enough to keep things anonymous. They don’t tell us who he bit, and presumably they don’t tell the other parents which child bit theirs. Sometimes I pick him up and the form I have to sign says that another child bit him instead, and it’s gotten to the point where that’s a relief. At first my snarky attitude was that it’s better to be the biter than the one getting bitten; now I just hope it wasn’t my son doing the biting.

Read The Full Story

The Desktop OS Will Never Die – Just Multiply

, Jun 11th 2010 Discuss [9]

More and more people are traveling without a laptop these days, who otherwise might have been laden with a heavy machine. Some of them are realizing that their email, Web browsing and even basic document needs are better met by a smartphone. Some have even taken the plunge to buy a tablet like an iPad, and find that it does the trick just fine. In fact, with its light weight, great casual gaming and top-notch multimedia capabilities, the iPad or a similar tablet might be a better choice than a laptop for many travelers.

Read The Full Story

Leave Mark Zuckerberg Alone

, Jun 10th 2010 Discuss [6]

The discussion around Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed “meltdown” at the D8 conference has been disgusting. Here’s the CEO and controller of the board for the most popular site on the Internet, a site with more users than there are citizens in the United States, and almost every headline reads the same.

“Zuckerberg . . . Sweats”

Read The Full Story

What Was Missing From WWDC? Nothing

, Jun 9th 2010 Discuss [5]

I thought there would be far more rumors leading up to Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference. After all, the big story had already been blown, which left a lot of room open for speculation. Besides, a number of significant Apple products are due for an update, right?

Read The Full Story

What I Learned From Working at the Apple Store

, Jun 8th 2010 Discuss [9]

At the turn of this century, I worked for a few Web sites that you haven’t heard of because they collapsed in the great tech bubble. I became a High School teacher and stuck with it for five years before I got back into tech journalism. But while I was teaching, I took on some extra jobs, one of which was working at an Apple store at a very expensive mall. I learned a lot in my time there.

Read The Full Story
Pages: Prev 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next