Rafe – Page 74

Author: Rafe (page 74 of 989)

Consumer Reports on the iPhone antenna issue

Consumer Reports cannot recommend the iPhone 4 due to the antenna issue:

It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

We reached this conclusion after testing all three of our iPhone 4s (purchased at three separate retailers in the New York area) in the controlled environment of CU’s radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber. In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers (see video: IPhone 4 Design Defect Confirmed). We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.

Aside from that, it’s their highest scoring app phone. Apple’s claim that the problem is the signal strength indicator isn’t going to cut it.

Links from July 10

July 10, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Terrance Aym thinks that the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico could release a giant methane bubble that ends life as we know it. He wins the “most extreme hypothetical” award.
Zonal Marking previews the final game of the World Cup.
Federal prosecutors want to charge ticket scalpers with a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for bypassing CAPTCHA to purchase tickets in bulk.
Oh, and if you are bypassing CAPTCHA on Web sites, the NSA is setting up a surveillance program that will probably catch you in the act.
In the UK, the new conservative government is giving up anti-terrorism powers, just as it promised. Police officers will no longer be authorized to stop and search people without probable cause.
Rich people are walking away from their mortgages at a greater rate than poor people. That’s why they’re rich, I guess.
Etsy engineer Mike Brittain explains how they resized 135 million images in 9 days.

Links from July 9

July 9, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

One thing I noticed about this list of Popular Rounded Sans Serif Fonts is that none of them are on TypeKit.
The US government has lost 75 percent of the habeas corpus cases brought by detainees at Gitmo, and yet we’re asked to trust them with the authority to detain people indefinitely without putting them on trial. There are still 181 detainees at Gitmo. All the action is at Bagram in Afghanistan, now.
Gaia Vince reports that Seed, the company behind ScienceBlogs, has a history of compromising on ethics in the quest for revenue.
Adam Serwer writes about the degree to which Americans have allowed fear to undermine our principles.
A lot of people propose to reduce the future obligations of the federal government by raising the retirement age. Put me in the group who sees this as another example of the callous disregard for people whose work involves manual labor on the part of the rich and coddled.
David Galbraith has figured out exactly when and where the Web was invented.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson explains what we’ve learned about current trends in soccer strategy from the World Cup.
The State Department has denied a visa request by Colombian journalist Hollman Morris based on some language about “terrorist activities” in the Patriot Act. Hollman has won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard but is barred from entering the United States. He has been a persistent critic of human rights violations by the Colombian government, which is allied with the US.

Two companies that seem to have learned a lesson

July 9, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Good thing I wrote about Blizzard and ScienceBlogs’ identity management problems on Wednesday, because both of them have already reversed course.

Seed removed Food Frontiers (the Pepsi blog) from ScienceBlogs after some of their higher profile bloggers started abandoning ship.

And Blizzard has cancelled its plans to publish the real names of posters on its forums. It is still using real names in the Real ID system, which I think is a mistake. Screen names are the answer, Blizzard. Trust me.

One proposal to fix the federal budget

July 9, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

University of Delaware economics professor Laurence Seidman has a proposal that’s too sensible to ever be adopted for fixing the federal budget. Here’s his description of the problem:

The worst federal budget policy is the one we’re now following: ignoring the looming large future deficits while refusing to enact temporary fiscal stimulus to combat the recession. As long as Congress and the president refuse to tackle the large looming future deficits, financial markets and the public will rightly stay nervous.

He suggests three things, the first is a “normal unemployment balanced budget rule” for Congress. It would require the annual federal budget to be balanced if the unemployment rate is 6%. The second is a set of changes to entitlement programs that would avert their future budget-busting growth. And the third is a set of stimulus programs pegged to the unemployment rate:

At the same time, Congress should enact a set of temporary tax cuts and expenditures to stimulate the economy. This legislation must contain a phase-down schedule so that these temporary measures are phased out as the unemployment rate, which is currently over 9 percent, falls below 9 percent, then 8 percent, then 7 percent, and are completely terminated when the unemployment rate falls to 6 percent. Note that these temporary measures would have no effect on NUBAR, because they would be completely terminated when the unemployment rate falls to 6 percent.

It’s the kind of idea that would work if we had two parties that were interested in restoring economic growth and fixing our future budget problems. Instead we have one party that wants the economy to stay broken for political reasons, and another party that prioritizes avoiding perceived political risk over actually fixing problems.

Links from July 8

July 8, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

I’ve been posting links to Twitter and Pinboard, and I’m going to try to start collecting them here as well:

Bradford Plumer explains to a sceptic why we should act now to mitigate climate change.
What science tells us about how to get the most out of a vacation.
Fake is a browser automation tool from the creator of Fluid (the single-site browser tool) that I’m playing with. Seems great so far.
Internet Explorer 9 incorporates some cool new performance measurement tools.
Eric Meyer argues that CSS vendor prefixes are a good way to allow browser makers to innovate, and should not be discouraged. I agree.
Maciej Ceglowski looks into Legacy.com, the site that provides online obituaries for many newspaper Web sites, including the New York Times, and finds a business that is built around cynically exploiting the bereaved.
There’s evidence that exercise helps prevent the effects of aging on your brain.
If companies really want to save money, they should offshore the executive suite.
Steve McCurry digs into his archive for soccer photos.

The state of liberal economic thinking the economy

July 7, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Brad DeLong captures the general line of thinking in an article for The Week, entitled Keynes & Co. have lost the stimulus argument. In it he explains why he’s pessimistic about our current economic situation, things the government can do to restore economic growth, and why the government probably isn’t going to do any of those things. Here’s his summary of the current situation:

The good news is we have avoided another Great Depression. But it seems ill-advised for Barack Obama to stand up on a Friday morning in early July and say that the economy is “headed in the right direction” (even if, as he said, “we are not headed there fast enough”) and to highlight “the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector.” The employment-to-population ratio has been flat since November. Over the past six months–since the downturn ended–the U.S. economy has not been recovering from its near-depression, and not been putting a greater and greater portion of its potential labor force to work. Rather, it has been bumping along the bottom. There is a big difference between the economy getting “better” and the economy “no longer getting worse rapidly.”

Ultimately, I come down on Krugman/DeLong side in this debate. There are specific things the government needs to do to get the deficit under control (or, alternatively, it could just do nothing), but those are structural changes to the federal budget. In the meantime, we need economic growth.

Two companies that don’t understand identity

July 7, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

There are two growing identity-related controversies that I’m keeping an eye on today.

The first is ScienceBlogs’ decision to add a blog sponsored by Pepsi to its stable. ScienceBlogs publishes many highly regarded blogs, and authors there are concerned that the Pepsi blog will hurt their credibility. Just take a look at the front page of ScienceBlogs and you’ll see that most of the posts are about the new corporate blog. One blogger is abandoning his blog for now. Another says that paid content is going to cost ScienceBlogs its reputation. There are many, many more examples.

The other news that caught my eye was game company Blizzard’s decision to start publishing the real names of posters on their official forums. Blizzard makes a bunch of games that people generally play under aliases they choose. They have World of Warcraft or Diablo characters that have their own names, or handles that are used for real time strategy games like Starcraft. These names were also used on Blizzard’s community forums. Recently they launched a system called RealID that enables you to connect with friends using your real name, so that they can chat with you and see what you’re doing, regardless of which game or character you’re playing. You can even link your RealID to your Facebook account. Now they’ve decided that when you post on the company’s official forums, your real name will be displayed on your posts. This decision has set off a fit of nerd rage the likes of which have seldom been seen.

In both cases, companies have misunderstood how people regard them. I’m not sure that having a blog posted by Pepsi employees hurts the credibility of other blogs on ScienceBlogs, as long as the blog is clearly labeled as such. I don’t think any less of James Fallows because Clive Crook also has a blog at The Atlantic, for example. The big problem, as I see it, is the interaction of paid content with pseudonymous blogging. There are few things academics prize more than their integrity, and ScienceBlogs’ decision to accept paid content is perceived as a threat to the integrity of the other bloggers at ScienceBlogs. How are they to know that one of their fellow pseudonymous bloggers isn’t a corporate shill for Exxon? The problem isn’t Pepsi’s blog, per se, it’s the shadow it casts on other blogs that lack full attribution.

Blizzard’s problem is that they don’t understand that most of their customers see a bright line between “game life” and “real life.” Few people want Google searches for their name to turn up results that include them arguing with some orc on their server who killed them by surprise a couple of years ago. Many people don’t even let other players know the names of all of their characters, much less their real names. Indeed, the ability to forge a somewhat independent identity for your game persona that’s separate from your real life persona is one of the key attractions of online gaming. And yet Blizzard seems to want to turn their games into Facebook games, where not only do you play, but you also share your game activities with everyone you know. This is a serious misapprehension of their audience, and it has blown up in their face in a spectacular way. I expect that Blizzard will wind up reversing itself completely before too long.

There’s a lesson in here for these companies that’s similar to the one Facebook keeps failing to learn with all of their privacy problems — identity is a big deal, and when you start mucking with the boundaries, bad things happen.

Update: See Broken Toys for more on Blizzard’s identity issues.

Why is the government is blocking access to oily beaches?

July 5, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

I’ve been reading stories about the government at every level blocking access to areas affected by the oil spill pretty much since the oil spill started. Just this weekend, Duncan Davidson reported on new restrictions on journalists documenting the effects of the spill in, Should it be a Felony to Cover the Oil Spill? Glenn Greenwald rounds up news of law enforcement officers working with BP personnel to prevent journalists from covering the spill. He also notes that this pattern of behavior precedes the spill — law enforcement previously detained a freelance photographer for photographing a refinery in Texas City, Texas. The reasons why the government might not want people to see how bad it is on the Gulf coast these days are obvious, but the calculus is depressing. The government sees the costs of harassing journalists who are trying to document the spill as being lower than the costs of people seeing the effects of the spill.

Tyler Cowen on Andy Grove on American competitiveness

July 4, 2010 / Rafe / 10 Comments

Tyler Cowen responds to the Andy Grove essay I linked to previously. I think Cowen, who rejects the essay wholeheartedly on economic grounds, gets the better of the argument. There’s no doubt in my mind that in the greater scheme of things, globalization is a strong positive force in the world. People in rich countries get better stuff at lower prices, and people in poor countries do gradually move up the economic ladder. The jobs in Chinese semiconductor factories may not be great compared to jobs in America, but they’re still better than peasant farming in China. However, the benefits of globalization are not evenly distributed, and if we’re going to commit to globalization as a project, we should also commit to providing a strong social safety net for people who are losing out to globalization as well.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held