Arts & Letters Daily (31 Dec 2009): "The sex life of Grace Kelly is like the home life of the Incas: you can investigate it in depth and muse upon it at length, but never hope to understand it... more
Raymond Chandler wrote that his detective Philip Marlowe has 'as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which is an entirely different matter'... more
Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate - http://aldaily.com/
MARVEL's Shareholders Approve DISNEY Merger: "It's finally official, Marvel is being bought by Disney for money to the tune of $4.3 billion"
Newsarama.com - Comics - http://www.newsarama.com
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke: "An aerospace engineer leads a cadre of industry outsiders dedicated to sparking a revival of thorium. They say it's a supersafe, clean and massively abundant fuel that can be the energy of the future."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated: "The written word is under a prolonged technological siege, according to conventional wisdom. But new research shows that Americans read more than they did in 1980."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Convert Your Address to Latitude and Longitude: "Your address is helpful to the postman. But if you know your latitude and longitude, you'll enjoy more-accurate maps and get more precise directions from your GPS."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
People's Processor: Embrace China's Homegrown Computer Chips: "China's creating a computer chip that can drive anything from an industrial robot to a supercomputer is succeeding. It's going to have a profound impact on computers everywhere."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Six uses for a dead iPod: "Nothing lasts forever, and iPods are no exception. But in many cases, you can still use a dead iPod in some way."
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
CNBC to air 'Welcome to Macintosh' documentary: "Woz-heads and Jobs-worshippers alike will want to set their DVRs for the January 4th showing of the film, which chronicles Apple's history."
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Nokia Increases Scope of Patent Complaints to Include 'Virtually All' Apple Products: "The legal battle between Nokia and Apple has been ratcheted up another notch today with Nokia's announcement that it has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging infringement of Nokia-held patents by 'virtually al..."
MacRumors - http://www.macrumors.com
Arts & Letters Daily (29 Dec 2009): "Captain Sullenberger's landing in the Hudson River was a miraculous application of skill in a situation that offered the best possible luck... more"
Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate - http://aldaily.com/
Four short links: 28 December 2009: "100 Incredible Lectures from the World's Top Scientists -- it's an astounding collection for everyone to have access to. I'm cheekily delighted by the thought that TED talks will become the next generation's equivalent of the cheesy 16mm educational film: 'oh no, not another famous person giving a 20 minute presentation on a life-changing approach to something! It's as naff as Spongebob and that silly multicolour Google logo!'
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O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/
Create a simple time-lapse movie: "You can create a time-lapse movie with your camera, iPhone, or web cam. Time-lapse movies can give us a fresh perspective by speeding up slow-moving action and compressing hours, days, and months into seconds and minutes."
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Arts & Letters Daily (28 Dec 2009):
The Peter Principle appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if academic studies can be trusted. It explains your boss... more
Opera's styles come and go, but its core of music, text, drama, and spectacle is still there. Opera is about pleasure and power... more
Thomas Jefferson opposed ball games, but the wise Abe Lincoln had a baseball diamond built behind the White House and joined his sons in playing ball... more
Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate - http://aldaily.com/
Apple shares hit new all-time high: "Apple Inc. shares reached their all-time high on Thursday as excitement builds over the expected release of its tablet..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
Researchers Create First Functional Molecular Transistor: "Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first silicon transistor, scientists say they have created a functional molecular transistor that could help computing move to the next level."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Who's the Best Batman of All Time?: "William Baldwin will be the new voice of Batman in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, an animated film due out next year. We rank historic Caped Crusaders from best to worst.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock — Faithful or Flawed?: "Sherlock Holmes experts dissect the surprisingly studly portrayal of the detective in Guy Ritchie's new action flick."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes: "It's not just drones' video feeds that can be tapped into -- the U.S. military's primary video-surveillance system is also vulnerable to electronic interception. Militants can see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
OpenID: Over 1 Billion (Potentially) Served: "Thanks to widespread adoption by major players like Yahoo and Google, over 1 billion users now have access to OpenID. Too bad only a fraction of them know what it is and how to take advantage of it."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade: "
With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then tossed them in the trash and made up my own compiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.
The Best
AJAX - It's hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous Java and XML came along, so I'll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages, where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java servlet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.
Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn't have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.
Twitter - When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting web sites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer's mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it's easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.
Ubiquitous WiFi: I want you to imagine you're on the road in the mid-90s. You get to your hotel room, and plop your laptop on the table. Then you get out your handy RJ-11 cord, and check to see if the hotel phone has a data jack (most didn't), or if you'll have to unplug the phone entirely. Then you'd look up the local number for your ISP, and have your laptop dial it, so you could suck down your e-mail at an anemic 56K.
Now, of course, WiFi is everywhere. You may end up having to pay for it, but fast Internet connectivity is available everywhere from your local McDonalds to your hotel room to an airport terminal. Of course, this is not without its downsides, since unsecured WiFi access points have led to all sorts of security headaches, and using an open access point is a risky proposition unless your antivirus software is up to date, but on the whole, ubiquitous WiFi has made the world a much more connected place.
Phones Get Smarter: In the late 90s, we started to see the first personal digital assistants emerge, but this has been the decade when the PDA and the cell phone got married and had a baby called the smartphone. Palm got the ball rolling with the Treos about the same time that Windows Mobile started appearing on phones, and RIM's Blackberry put functional phones in the hands of business, but it was Apple that took the ball and ran for the touchdown with the iPhone. You can argue if the droid is better than the 3GS or the Pre, but the original iPhone was the game-changer that showed what a smartphone really could do, including the business model of the App Store,
The next convergence is likely to be with Netbooks, as more and more of the mini-laptops come with 3G service integrated in them, and VoIP services such as Skype continue to eat into both landline and cellular business.
The Maker Culture: There's always been a DIY underground, covering everything from Ham radio to photography to model railroading. But the level of cool has taken a noticeable uptick this decade, as cheap digital technology has given DIY a kick in the pants. The Arduino lets anyone embed control capabilities into just about anything you can imagine, amateur PCB board fabrication has gone from a messy kitchen sink operation to a click-and-upload-your-design purchase, and the 3D printer is turning the Star Trek replicator into a reality.
Manufacturers cringe in fear as enterprising geeks dig out their screwdrivers. The conventional wisdom was that as electronics got more complex, the 'no user serviceable parts' mentality would spell the end of consumer experimentation. But instead, the fact that everything is turning into a computer meant that you could take a device meant for one thing, and reprogram it to do something else. Don't like your digital camera's software? Install your own! Turn your DVR into a Linux server.
Meanwhile, shows like Mythbusters and events like Maker Faire have shown that hacking hardware can grab the public's interest, especially if there are explosions involved.
Open Source Goes Mainstream: Quick! Name 5 open source pieces of software you might have had on your computer in 1999. Don't worry I'll wait...
How about today? Firefox is an easy candidate, as are Open Office, Chrome, Audacity, Eclipse (if you're a developer), Blender, VLC, and many others. Many netbooks now ship with Linux as the underlying OS. Open Source has gone from a rebel movement to part of the establishment, and when you combine increasing end user adoption with the massive amounts of FLOSS you find on the server side, it can be argued that it is the 800 pound Gorilla now.
As Gandhi said, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.' When even Microsoft is releasing Open Source code, you know that you're somewhere between the fight and win stages.
Bountiful Resources: 56K modems, 20MB hard drives, 640K of RAM, 2 MHz processors. You don't have to go far back in time for all of these to represent the state of the art. Now, of course, you would have more than that in a good toaster...
Moore's Law continues to drive technology innovation at a breakneck pace, and it seems that related technologies like storage capacity and bandwidth are trying to follow the same curve. Consider that AT&T users gripe about the iPhone's 5GB/month bandwidth cap, a limit that would have taken 10 solid days of transferring to achieve with a dialup connection.
My iPhone has 3,200 times the storage of the first hard drive I ever owned, and the graphics card on my Mac Pro has 16,000 times the memory of my first computer. We can now do amazing things in the palm of our hands, things that would have seemed like science fiction in 1999.
The Worst
SOAP: The software industry has been trying to solve the problem of making different pieces of software talk to each other since the first time there were two programs on a network, and they still haven't gotten it right. RPC, CORBA, EJB, and now SOAP now litter the graveyard of failed protocol stacks.
SOAP was a particularly egregious failure, because it was sold so heavily as the final solution to the interoperatibility problem. The catch, of course, was that no two vendors implemented the stack quite the same way, with the result that getting a .NET SOAP client to talk to a Java server could be a nightmare. Add in poorly spec'd out components such as web service security, and SOAP became useless in many cases. And the WSDL files that define SOAP endpoints are unreadable and impossible to generate by hand (well, not impossible, but unpleasant in the extreme.)
Is it any wonder that SOAP drove many developers into the waiting arms of more useable data exchange formats such as JSON?
Intellectual Property Wars: How much wasted energy has been spent this decade by one group of people trying to keep another group from doing something with their intellectual property, or property they claim was theirs? DMCA takedowns, Sony's Rootkit debacle, the RIAA suing grandmothers, SCO, patent trolls, 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0, Kindles erasing books, deep packet inspection, Three Strikes laws, the list goes on and on and on...
At the end of the day, the movie industry just had their best year ever, Lady Gaga seems to be doing just fine and Miley Cyrus isn't going hungry, and even the big players in the industry are getting fed up sufficiently with the Trolls to want patent reform. The iTunes store is selling a boatload of music, in spite of abandoning DRM, so clearly people will continue to pay for music, even if they can copy it from a friend.
Unfortunately, neither the RIAA nor the MPAA is going gently into that good night. If anything, the pressure to create onerous legislation has increased in the past year. Whether this is a last gasp or a retrenchment will only be answered in time.
The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of 'best practices' that some consultant convinced the management to follow.
Endless retrospectives and sprint planning sessions don't mean squat if the stakeholders never attend them, and too many allegedly Agile projects end up looking a lot like Waterfall projects in the end. If companies won't really buy into the idea that you can't control all three variables at once, calling your process Agile won't do anything but drive your engineers nuts.
The Workplace Becomes Ubiquitous: What's the first thing you do when you get home at night? Check your work email? Or maybe you got a call before you even got home. The dark side of all that bandwidth and mobile technology we enjoy today is that you can never truly escape being available, at least until the last bar drops off your phone (or you shut the darn thing off!)
The line between the workplace and the rest of your life is rapidly disappearing. When you add in overseas outsourcing, you may find yourself responding to an email at 11 at night from your team in Bangalore. Work and leisure is blurring together into a gray mélange of existence. 'Do you live to work, or work to live,' is becoming a meaningless question, because there's no difference.
O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/
EyeTV Live3G: Free web app streams live TV over 3G to your iPhone: "With Elgato’s new EyeTV Live3G web app, you can watch live TV and EyeTV recordings anywhere..."
MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/
Insurgents Intercept Drone Video in King-Size Security Breach: "In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military depends on an array of drones to snoop on and stalk insurgents. Now it looks as if insurgents are tapping into those same drones' broadcasts, to see what the flying robot spies see. It's potentially one of the most serious military security breaches in years."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Archaeologists lift granite pylon from Cleopatra's sunken palace complex: "Nine-ton pylon was part of the entrance to Temple of Isis, in a palace complex submerged in Alexandria harbor"
Salon - http://www.salon.com/?source=rss&aim=/
MIT unveils new 'smart' bike wheel | Cutting Edge - CNET News: "Any existing bike can be retrofitted with the wheel. In fact, the MIT team sees it as a plug-and play-device, one that any bike owner should be able to easily install as a back wheel."
Get the Most Out of Google Voice: "If you're one of the lucky ones with a Google Voice number, you know it's much more than just another voicemail inbox. Learn some tricks to unlock the free voice service's hidden features."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Dropbox 0.7.79 - Online synchronization tool with Finder integration; free 2GB account. (Free): "
The Dropbox application is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. A video on the site explains more.
MacUpdate - Universal Binary - http://www.macupdate.com/macintel.php
Make a Podcast, Become Internet-Famous: "Make your voice heard by creating a podcast. All you need is a microphone, some lightweight studio software, and something to say."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Set Up a Webcam for Chats, Streams and YouTube Videos: "Want to become a YouTube star? Or maybe just video chat with friends across the globe? You'll need to learn how to set up a webcam and a microphone on your computer. Follow these steps and you can start chronicling your life for all to see.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
How the iPhone Could Reboot Education: "Brian X. Chen (wired.com) reports that Abilene Christian University has just finished the first year of a pilot program in which 1,000 freshman students each received a free iPhone or iPod touch to explore how the always-connected devices ’might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity.’ Says Bill Rankin, a professor who helped plan the initiative: ‘I think this is the next platform for education.’"
Apple Hot News - http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
Wireless Brain-to-Computer Connection Synthesizes Speech: "For the first time, a brain-computer interface has wirelessly translated brain waves into sounds. It's a major step toward mobile, wireless systems that can help paralyzed people express themselves."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Macworld Editors' Choice Awards: Software: "Of the hundreds of Mac apps we saw in the past year, these 13 were our favorites.
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Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
What is Google Voice?: "You've probably heard about Google's online phone service. But do you really know what it is, how it works, and why you might want to consider it? Chris Pepper has some answers.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
iTunes compilations: what holds them together?: "The Compilations tag and functionality in iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone can be confusing. Here's how it all breaks down.
"
Macworld - http://www.macworld.com
Block Web Ads Across Your Entire Network: "Imagine what the internet would look like without pesky ads taking over your page all the time. Luckily, local whitelists and router scripts make that dream a reality and don't take too much effort to install.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Comic Book Artists Illustrate Sci-Fi Legends: "Arthur C. Clarke, Neil Gaiman and other writers changed our world by putting their own visions down on the page. The favor gets returned when comics pros train their inks and brushes on literary legends for web gallery Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
How to Fix a Scratched CD: "Finding an old stack of CDs or DVDs under your stereo is a mixed blessing. There's your long lost copy of Doobie Brothers, but there's a gigantic scratch on it. Here's our guide to salvaging your CDs and listening to the music.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Applying Quantitative Analysis to Classic Lit: "Stanford English professor Franco Moretti, famous in bookish circles for graphing, mapping and charting novels by hand, is going digital. He hopes to soon be flying through the creative output of entire eras, ultimately changing the way we look at literary history.
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Apple Looking to Acquire Music Streaming Service Lala?: "CNET reports that Apple is in 'advanced' negotiations to acquire music streaming firm Lala. The news comes from two sources who reportedly have knowledge of the discussions between the two companies.
Talks are very advanced, said the..."
MacRumors - http://www.macrumors.com
EtherPad Shuts Down after Google Acquisition: "
EtherPad is a Web-based tool for simultaneous writing, in which multiple people can see keystrokes as other people type them. It's now about to disappear after the acquisition by Google of AppJet, the firm that developed and supports EtherPad, and its developers.
EtherPad will continue to operate until 31 March 2010 for registered free and paid users, although AppJet won't charge fees after 4 December 2009. Free public pads can no longer be created, nor can new accounts be registered. Paid users can download all their current documents via the account page. Downloadable versions of the software will be supported through current contracts.
The AppJet folks are joining the group behind Google Wave, the invitation-only service in testing by Google for simultaneous and sequential writing, discussion, and interaction. I've been using it for some weeks, and still find it baffling, where EtherPad was instantly explicable and useful. I hope the AppJet team brings its approach with them. (Two of the three AppJet developers were previously Google employees, reports GigaOm, which notes the deal was worth 'less than $20 million.')
I wrote about EtherPad early this year - see 'EtherPad Brings Simultaneous Writing to the Web,' 16 February 2009 - after we at TidBITS started using it extensively. While we still like SubEthaEdit, which has its own advantages, EtherPad allowed ad hoc and program-free collaboration.
EtherPad was created by AppJet, a firm that started up to develop a Web applications platform - a simplified way for companies to start with all the basics to build rich browser-based programs. EtherPad was a bit of a proof of concept that turned into a separate line of business.
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Awkward News Ahead: "Geoffrey Miller on some inconvenient truths in the human genome. The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions."
Zeta Woof - http://grdurand.com/blogger/
Blue Whale Song Mystery Baffles Scientists: "Blue whales are singing in a lower voice all around the world, but scientists can't figure out why."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Intel Shows 48-Core Processor for Research: "Nicknamed the 'single-chip cloud computer,' the processor consumes about the same power as two standard household bulbs."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
Bees Release Deadly Odor That Shortens Sibling Lifespans: "Honeybee larvae release pheromones that effectively trim the lifespans of their older sibling caretakers."
Wired News - http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
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