Posts

Sunlight Labs on the <a href=http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/recoverygovs-success/"">good things about Recovery.gov: See– we want to see both the information government has chosen to deliver and the recipe for it, alongside its ingredients. Imagine, for instance, if Recovery.gov launched, and the Obama Administration just outright claimed success, and cited through press release, millions of jobs and economic recovery. That, after all, is the alternative. Instead, Recovery.gov’s done exactly what it’s supposed to do– make it so that people can look at the data and make up their own minds as to what is really happening. ...

I’ve been seeing snippets of Cormac McCarthy’s interview with John Jurgensen all week and I finally got around to reading the whole thing. You should too, it’s inspiring.

Venkat Rao deeply examines the US and British versions of The Office and tries to distill a theory of management from them. Seriously, read the whole thing. Update: The essay’s description of over-performing losers moving up to join the ranks of the clueless (if you read the essay this will make sense) reminds me of a story. There was a guy on our high school football team who wanted to come in first in every drill. If the coaches told us to take two laps around the track, he had to finish those two laps first. If the coaches had us pushing a sled, he’d push the sled the hardest. I won’t tell you what all the other players called him, but even at that early age, most people seemed to get that his effort was almost entirely misspent. ...

Tim O’Reilly reminds us that the price of interoperability on the Web is eternal vigilance. Let’s skip to the end: It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. ...

Last night offered a perfect illustration of one of the many reasons newspaper journalism is in trouble. In last night’s game between the Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots, the Patriots, up 6 points, went for it on fourth and 2 with 2:08 left in the game. They failed to make the first down, and Peyton Manning took the Colts in for the score, winning the game 35-34. Let’s look at the analysis offered by a major metropolitan daily, the Houston Chronicle. ...

Last month I suggested in a post about concussions in football that it’s football helmets that are the biggest problem. Helmets are ostensibly protective gear, but they’re what enable football players to use their bodies as weapons. Most concussions are caused by helmet to helmet collisions, and those that aren’t are usually caused by the fact that players where enough protective gear to stay out of control. Now Reed Albergotti and Shirley Wang have a story in the Wall Street Journal asking the same kinds of questions. Football with different protective gear would be a different sport, but that may not be so bad. ...

This week, Apple got a lot of bad publicity when two iPhone developers abandoned the platform because of the way the app store approval process is handled. The first was Joe Hewitt, the developer of the Facebook iPhone application. You can read his reasons why here. Back in August he expressed his frustration with Apple but said he wasn’t going to boycott the platform. Then today Rogue Amoeba announced that they’ll be focusing on the Mac going forward because of problems they’ve had with Apple’s approval process. ...

Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s definition of a real conservative: At the core of real conservatism is a distinction between theory and practice, a deep resistance to ideology, a respect for free inquiry and the philosophic spirit, a respect for social stability and coherence, a moderation in governance and a deliberation in action.

David Pogue has blown the whistle on unethical billing practices at wireless carriers before, and he does it again today, this time calling them out for making it difficult for customers to avoid getting tagged with excess data charges every month. Here’s a quote from an unnamed Verizon employee: The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO. ...

RedMonk analysts James Governor and Stephen O’Grady have weighed in with their IT predictions for 2010. There’s great stuff in both lists. For me, 2010 is going to be about bringing some 2006-era technology up to 2008 or 2009 standards, if things go well.