Rafe – Page 62

Author: Rafe (page 62 of 989)

How Steve Jobs brings hope to the world

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.

A thought provoking piece on Steve Jobs and finding hope in a secular world.

School segregation, the ongoing issue

January 17, 2011 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Dana Goldstein writes about school segregation in the modern era, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Day:

American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago.

What really drew me to her story is her simple explanation of how the soon to be dismantled school assignment program here in Wake County, North Carolina works. I’ve been following the story around this for years and never understood the nature of the program until I read this blog post:

The Wake County program located high-achieving, themed magnet schools within poor neighborhoods, and opened them up to any interested student. For each seat at the magnet school occupied by a middle class or affluent kid from across town, an inner city child was given the opportunity to bus to the neighborhood school the wealthier kid would have attended, if he hadn’t chosen the magnet instead.

In fact, given that participation in the program is completely voluntary, I’m not sure what’s at issue or what the goals of the new school board are.

Another theory on Google’s dropping H.264

January 16, 2011 / Rafe / 5 Comments

Horace Dediu has another theory on why Google is dropping support for the H.264 video codec:

I rather think that Google’s decision is a misguided emphasis on technical details in lieu of engaging in a deep strategic re-evaluation.

Don’t miss the interesting comparison to Apple’s decision to go with the PowerPC over Intel processors back in the day.

I’m sort of obsessed with this decision by Google not because of its effect on me personally, but because I’m curious as to how companies come to these kinds of decisions. It’s complex and fascinating.

On our uncivil discourse

January 14, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I sat down to write a post about the Tucson shooting last weekend and the toxic rhetoric that may or may not have contributed to it, but then I found that Fred Clark of the Slacktivist made the very point I was hoping to make, so go read him instead:

Violent language and violent rhetoric can be a problem, but I do not think it is the main problem afflicting our diseased political discourse.

The main problem, rather, is disingenuous rhetoric that coolly and calmly demands a violent response from anyone who believes it or takes it seriously. This talk may have nothing to do with guns or crosshairs or “reloading,” but it is the logic of life and death. That logic doesn’t just raise the possibility that some unhinged person on the fringes might take it wrong. It suggests and requires violent action as an unavoidable moral obligation.

Read the rest.

One reason Google dropped H.264 support

January 14, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Matt Drance offers one hypothesis for why Google is dropping H.264 support:

If H.264 becomes and remains the dominant codec, then Google needs to convince all of its partners to bundle H.264 decoder hardware in order to preserve a competitive video experience on Android. It cannot, however, guarantee them favorable licensing terms, because it is not a licensor in the H.264 patent pool. Android and Google could end up with a problem on their hands if OEMs hesitate or get hit with lawsuits.

Enter WebM/VP8. By overseeing both the technology and policy, Google has much more power to insulate its partners, and thus the entire Android platform, from disruptive patent or license disputes. If all goes well, it could go a step further and require Android OEMs to include VP8 decoder hardware from a (hand-picked, of course) list of vendors, guaranteeing a minimum standard of video playback on all Android devices. Google could even acquire one or more of these vendors for good measure.

Why dump H.264 entirely? Why not hedge your bets, especially if H.264 is working right now? Google says “our goal is to enable open innovation;” what it in fact means is “we prefer patents we own.”

Google’s decision to drop H.264 support in Chrome

January 13, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Google’s decision to drop native support for the H.264 video codec in Chrome has generated a number of arguments on the Web. Google’s defenders argue that H.264 is not royalty-free and is thus inappropriate for use with HTML5, since the W3C refuses to mandate the use of royalty-encumbered technologies in its specifications. Google’s critics argue that this doing so is a cynical move aimed at bolstering its own codec, WebM, and undermining vendors like Apple and Microsoft who support H.264 and who don’t support WebM or Theora. It seems inarguable that this decision by Google insures that Flash players will continue to be the primary means of showing video on the Web.

The best overview of this issue that I’ve seen is Peter Bright’s piece at Ars Technica: Google’s dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness.

Gauging the battle between carriers and handset makers

January 12, 2011 / Rafe / 7 Comments

One of the most encouraging things about the original iPhone was that it was an Apple product, not an AT&T product. Apple maintained control over just about every aspect of the user experience, and customers relied on AT&T only for connectivity. This was great news for end users, because mobile carriers tend to do an awful job in terms of user experience. One of the reasons the iPhone was so starkly different from everything else on the market at the time was that it was so obviously free of the horrible sorts of interfaces that carriers always foist upon their customers.

I was among the many optimistic people who believed that the iPhone was the harbinger of things to come, and that soon there would be a plethora of handsets from a variety of manufacturers that, like the iPhone, reflected the design choices of the handset maker rather than the carrier. Aside from the discontinued Nexus One (which no carriers subsidized) and more recently the Nexus S (offered by T-Mobile), that hasn’t happened.

Now I’m seeing a similar prediction from Owen Thomas at VentureBeat, arguing that the Verizon picking up the iPhone in its pristine state is a sign that carriers will lose control of the handsets.

I’m not as optimistic about this as I once was. Android has not been helpful in this regard. Because of the way Android is licensed, carriers are free to manipulate it in any way that they choose before installing it on handsets, and manipulate it they do. Apple alone insists that carriers who offer its handsets do so without customizing the phone to suit their needs.

For a number of good reasons (one of which is that they won’t allow carriers to customize the iPhone software or put their logos on the hardware), iOS is unlikely to become the dominant OS in the handset market. Android is an excellent product, and Android handsets are going to be offered across the full handset price range soon enough. RIM and Microsoft aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The question then becomes, is anyone other than Apple going to stand up to the carriers and demand that they control the user experience instead of the carrier. Right now, it doesn’t seem likely.

Fred Phelps is a troll

January 11, 2011 / Rafe / 4 Comments

I wish the media would take Rogers Cadenhead’s advice when it comes to dealing with Reverend Fred Phelps and simply ignore him. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s the pastor whose tiny congregation pickets military funerals and other events with placards bearing hateful messages. His church has announced it’s going to picket the funerals of victims of the shooting in Tucson, and he recently made the news by showing up at the Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral.

People who hang out on the Internet should have no problems recognizing Phelps for what he is — a troll. The message on just about every forum I’ve participated in on the Internet when dealing with these types is, “Don’t feed the troll.” When they fail to provoke the response they’re looking for, they search for greener pastures.

I met a woman who had just left a counter-protest against Phelps on the day of Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral and she was talking about how many people showed up to shield the funeral from Phelps and his crew. I couldn’t help but think that even though she was well intentioned, she and the others who joined her were in the end part of the problem. Don’t feed the troll.

2011 Skill of the Year

January 8, 2011 / Rafe / 9 Comments

I’ve set upon the idea of picking up a new skill this year. Over the past couple of years I’ve let my Ruby on Rails skills atrophy as I haven’t been working on any Rails applications professionally, and the Rails world changes too quickly to keep up with if you aren’t immersed in it every day. Instead I’ve been using a lot of Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, and SQL, with a dash of client-side JavaScript when needed. In 2011, it’s time to pick up something new or take a new look at something old. Here are the options I considered.

Ruby on Rails is something I already know, or at least knew, and I’m sure I could pick it back up quickly. However, I still don’t have a good Ruby on Rails project on the horizon, and so it would be just as much a pain to keep as it has been. I wouldn’t mind having a new Rails project to work on, but until one comes along, I’m going to leave it alone. I would consider working on my Ruby skills, but it’s hard to use Ruby for general purpose scripts at work because our servers all run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which uses some old version of Ruby and is apparently impossible to upgrade. Ruby on Rails, I love you, but it’s a pass for 2011.

I am intrigued by big data projects. I’d love to dig into Hadoop or other tools that can be used to manipulate large data sets, but at the same time, I already work with some fairly big data sets at work and find that I can mine the data out of them that I need with SQL. In other words, while this area intrigues me, I don’t have any interesting problems to solve right now. Without that, it becomes tough to get motivated to really dig in and learn this stuff.

Another option is to learn a new (to me) programming language, like Clojure or Scala. Doing so would be great in terms of mental stimulation, but probably less great in terms of practical application. We’re not going to start using either of them at work this year, so I’d probably spend months learning one of them and then forget nearly everything I’d learned before I ever got to turn back to them for practical reasons.

Android or iOS are other options. Mobile development is huge right now, and I have a lot of ideas for apps I’d like to build. I could probably pick up Android development fairly easily since I already know Java. The only reason not to do it is that I am not a great user interface designer, and the best mobile apps are triumphs of interface design. I certainly have time to become a solid mobile developer, but without someone else’s design to implement, I think I’d just be unsatisfied with the results of my work. I may still try to pick up some mobile development skills, but they’re not going to be my primary focus this year.

The choice I settled on is JavaScript and Node.js. I already know JavaScript, but I wouldn’t consider myself a strong JavaScript programmer. I can generally solve the problems I’m asked to solve in JavaScript, but I find myself using a lot of libraries that there’s no way I could write on my own, and it’s easy to get lost in complex scripts. Not only is Node.js interesting in its own right, but learning about it gives a good chance to learn pure JavaScript as opposed to JavaScript simply as a way to manipulate Web pages. I’ve said before that HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL are the most transferrable skills for Web developers. JavaScript is the weakest of those skills for me, and I need to get better at it. That’s the plan for 2011.

The ways people use search engines

January 7, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Marco Arment lists the ways people use search engines and talks about how spam has taken over each of them. I think his categories of search types are pretty accurate and agree completely that spammers are systematically taking over each of them. I find that going to Amazon or other trusted retailers and looking for reviews is much more useful than looking for product information on Google these days. I also find that I use site: searches more than I ever have before. Trusting Google to return results for the whole Web just isn’t very effective any more.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held