On the 8 Spot

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it’s butt ugly, but it’s also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved.  An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn’t come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There’s no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.

So Samsung, was it worth it? Your product won’t sell as well, but you won’t piss off one of your biggest component customers either. I understand the motivation, but I still feel like you’ve sold your soul.

When Apple started patent trolling, they basically admitted they weren’t going to win in an open market, and they decided to drag Samsung down with them. The crazy thing is, Samsung is letting them. They’ve ceded ownership of the rectangle and other common sense design traits to Apple, and did everything they could to bow down to their largest customer.

The result? A phone designed by lawyers. What a scary precedent.

The Samsung Galaxy S III: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers.

Still waiting for my turn to get these lovely devices!

Considering its price, the Raspberry Pi is quite remarkable. It’s obviously no powerhouse, but $35 gets you a system capable of office work, light image editing, browsing, programming, emailing and so on. The Pi’s versatility makes it suitable for various dedicated roles too, such as a torrent box downloading through external USB or network drives, or as an XMBC-based HTPC, which we might cover eventually.

It’s easy to lose track of the Pi in-between other regular-sized devices.

Although there are many obvious uses for the Raspberry Pi, the platform’s open nature means your imagination is the limit. It’ll be interesting to see what the community cooks up in the coming months. We’ll be watching and posting our own how-to guides when time comes.

via Raspberry Pi Review & Initial How-To Setup Guide – TechSpot Reviews.

Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer have researched what makes people miserable at work, and wrote this for The Washington Post:

Over the past 15 years, we have studied what makes people happy and engaged at work. In discovering the answer, we also learned a lot about misery at work. …

What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making the progress they expect to make in meaningful work.

People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so.

Andrew Bynum leads the league in looking exasperated. He is often seen as childish because of it. What’s one lost chance? Nothing, really. The thing that happened to Bynum on that play happens to everybody. Grow up, kid.

But what happened on that play happens to Bynum a lot.

via The exasperation of Andrew Bynum – TrueHoop Blog – ESPN.