April 2010 – Page 4

Month: April 2010 (page 4 of 5)

Apple hates cross-compilers

A lot of people have taken note of the following passage in the iPhone 4 developer agreement:

Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.

It’s clear that Apple isn’t going to allow Flash to run on the iPhone, so Adobe came up with a creative alternative — a tool that lets you convert Flash into a native iPhone application. Packager for iPhone is to be included with Flash Professional CS5. Now Apple has made it known that applications created in this manner will not be approved for inclusion in the iPhone App Store.

Why would Apple make this rule? Perhaps there’s a technical reason, but my guess is this is pure cutthroat business. To create applications for the iPhone, you have to use Objective C. If you want to port the same application to Android, you have to rewrite it in Java. If Adobe and other tools vendors come up with applications that translate from ActionScript to Objective C and to Android’s flavor of Java, suddenly it’s much easier for developers to maintain their applications on multiple platforms. It looks like Apple wants to make sure that being multi-platform stays expensive, and that people just stick with building applications for today’s dominant platform — iPhone.

Statistics, the key skill of the next decade

April 8, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Stephen O’Grady explains why he’s taking a statistics class:

Life, according to economics, is about incentives. My incentive to learn such things is simple: the ability to be able to understand more completely what data is trying to tell us will have value. Value more than sufficient to offset my investment. Or so I hope.

I would love to learn more about statistics for a very simple reason — so many of the things that interest me most these days were written by people who are using statistical methods to break down data. Whether the topic is sports, economics, or political science, people are using statistics to look at old problems in new and interesting ways.

I’m also seeing more and more ways that a better understanding of statistics could make me better at my job. In software development, we’re a lot better at gathering data than we are at analyzing that data to turn it into useful information. In many cases, we look at performance information and have a hard time distinguishing between noise and clues. Getting better at that requires deeper math.

John Gruber’s iPad review

April 7, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

If you (like me) don’t own and haven’t used an iPad, you may enjoy John Gruber’s lengthy review.

I think this bit is exactly right:

Kindle has a better chance of long-term success as a software platform than a hardware one.

From day one I have wondered whether Amazon.com intended to make money on the Kindle or whether it was a proof-of-concept designed to spur the market for e-books. They’ve been aggressive about porting the Kindle reader to other platforms, and Amazon.com seems to be doing quite well selling digital music even though they don’t sell a music player. I imagine their margins are very good on e-books, regardless of whether or not the buyer purchased a Kindle.

Network neutrality is heating up

April 7, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Yesterday, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC does not have the authority to force ComCast to treat all Web traffic as equal, or regulate internet service providers in any other way, either. Ryan Singer has the details and implications at Wired.

The Wikileaks footage

April 6, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I was going to write a post about the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” footage, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. As usual, someone else wrote exactly what I wanted to say. In this case, it’s James Fallows:

There will be lot of those “real questions” to consider, from rules of engagement to the apparent cover up of the footage. But the threshold point I meant to start with is this: The very high likelihood of such “tragedies” occurring is a very strong reason not to get into wars of this sort.

By “of this sort” I mean: twilight-zone urban warfare, not to mention “discretionary” or “preventive” wars, and situations in which a heavily armed-and-amored occupying force of foreigners tries uneasily to mix with a population overwhelmingly of a different race and religion and language. For their own survival, the occupiers need to be hyper-suspicious and ever alert — even though today’s prevalent Counter Insurgency doctrine (“COIN”) warns of the self-defeating consequences of behaving this way. (Indeed, a mounting debate about the COIN approach in Afghanistan is whether the effort not to seem distant from the local population is exposing US soldiers to too much risk.) It is a situation with enormous potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and tragedy. And therefore one to avoid if you have any choice at all.

War is an invitation to commit atrocities, by accident or with intent. This is apparent if you study any war. Historian Steve Rabson estimates that during the three month battle of Okinawa, US soldiers committed rape more than 10,000 times. Japanese soldiers raped the women of the island as well.

The time to prevent the sorts of horrible events (whether you consider them justified by the circumstances or not or not) depicted in the video is when politicians are working to convince us that war is necessary.

The future of privacy

April 6, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Bruce Schneier’s latest essay is about privacy:

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations–your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

He calls out the social networking sites for declaring privacy to be dead when, in fact, they are the ones who are continually working to kill it in order to make more money.

The ugly side of aggregation

April 5, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Michael Wolff’s new publication, Newser, is probably the best example yet that aggregation-oriented startups have taken the wrong lessons from weblogs. Andrew Leonard reviews the site:

But what takes Newser beyond countless other similar sites is a truly precious degree of shamelessness. All of the above stories — even the slide shows — are repackaged, rewritten and abbreviated versions of content originated by other publications. When your pursuit of traffic leads you to the point of ripping off a Fox News Lindsay Lohan/Britney slide show, you have stooped so low you can’t even reach up to the lowest common denominator.

Some people never forget a face — I never forget a name, and one thing I appreciate is that Andrew Leonard doesn’t either. In his blog post he makes sure to remind people who may not remember that Michael Wolff is the same guy who tried to write a book damning the insanity of the dot com era and wound up exposing his own sleaziness instead.

The value of the iPad

April 4, 2010 / Rafe / 4 Comments

This is the most interesting sentence I’ve read in all of the iPad reactions I’ve seen over the past 24 hours.

While I will bring it on some trips, most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.

It’s from Tyler Cowen’s mini-review.

Judging bloggers by their books

April 4, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I was entertained by the meme that spread through the economics blogosphere a few weeks ago, in which the bloggers listed the books that influenced them the most. The main take away for me is that when it comes to reading, I swim at the shallow end of the pool. Most of the books on their lists that I have read I have forgotten almost entirely. Maybe reading blogs by people who read and really thought about these great books will make me a little smarter. Anyway, Adam Bramwell goes through the various lists and chooses winners. Entertaining.

The iPad commeth

April 2, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

People are going to start receiving their iPads tomorrow, and to mark the occasion we’re seeing one more spasm of iPad punditry. Tomorrow the hypothetical iPad dies and the real life iPad arrives, probably dashing the hopes of dozens of media companies who think that the iPad is their one way ticket to massive subscription revenue. (Danny O’Brien has a good post on that.)

Cory Doctorow took one more shot at the iPad today, making some good points in an argument that didn’t hold together particularly well. His strongest arguments are those meant to deter people from building native iPhone applications. And I do think that if you care about ubiquity and openness, you should avoid the iPhone platform and stick with building Web applications. Everything seems to indicate that they’ll run beautifully on the iPad, just as they run beautifully on your Netbook, or your Mac, or your Windows PC.

The piece I really wanted to link to, though, is Greg Knauss writing about the iPad future. Or, more generally, a future that involves simpler devices that require less expertise and maintenance than today’s personal computer. Greg argues that this future is inevitable, and that furthermore, it’s a pretty great future. I think that’s probably the best way to look at it.

As I write in my earlier piece on the iPad, we’re going to have to look somewhere other than our desktop for open platforms in the future.

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