Posts

John Gruber writes about a leaked email from Yahoo executives beseeching employees to switch from Outlook to Yahoo’s own mail product. It’s kind of sad, and as Gruber points out, wrongheaded: If your employees are only using your own products or services because they have to, or feel obligated to out of some sort of loyalty, you’re losing. At work, my team builds internal tools. I have no interest in imposing those tools on anyone. It’s our job to build tools that people want to use, or prefer to use over the other available alternatives. I welcome the competition, because participating in the marketplace of ideas sharpens our work and keeps us honest. When I see people doing their own analysis work rather than using something we built to make that work easier, it’s clear that we’re failing to build the right things or to communicate about them effectively. ...

I’ve recently read two books about computing history, and I intend to write about them both. The first is Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder was invited by Tom West of Data General to document the creation of a new computer–a 32 bit supermini designed to compete with the formidable VAX 11/780 from DEC. The book covers the era when building a new computer meant building a new computer from the ground up. The idea of building a computer from off-the-shelf components had not yet arrived, companies built everything from scratch, and wrote all of the code for the new system, all the way down to the metal. Even for highly integrated, brand new systems like the iPhone, many more components sourced from third parties were used than companies like Data General, DEC, and IBM used back then. The original iPhone was built using an existing CPU, and an existing operating system. All of the hardware and nearly all of the software for the Data General system was produced specifically for that system. It is likely that no engineers work completely original systems any more, the costs are too high. It’s hard to read about that kind of work and not feel both nostalgic and intimidated. ...

I didn’t really pay much attention when Adobe’s massive data breach was first reported, but now that all of the details have emerged, we know that the scope of the breach is truly spectacular. The Naked Security blog has the details. This episode is particularly sad because the best practices around password storage are well understood. Even though practices like using slow hashing algorithms are pretty new, and I wouldn’t have expected Adobe to have adopted them, the basic approach of storing a salted hash has been in wide use for quite some time. ...

News about NSA spying programs has been breaking at a dizzying pace since the initial stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks were published by Glenn Greenwald. The big news last week was that there are NSA efforts to tap the network connections used to route internal traffic for huge online companies like Google and Yahoo. The Washington Post has the gory details today, including slides leaked by Snowden that show what looks like traffic captured from Google’s internal network. ...

Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google In 2011, Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson, and Sony (basically everyone not in the Android camp in the mobile handset business) teamed up to buy Nortel’s patent portfolio. Today they filed a suit to recoup some of that investment, suing Google and six Android handset makers for patent infringement. Interestingly, they’re not suing them for violating a telecommunications patent, but rather for patents related to search advertising. I hope Google fights this one to the bitter end and wins. ...

So if your answer started with “because in C…”, you’ve been repeating a good story you heard one time, without ever asking yourself if it’s true. Mike Hoye digs into the history of zero-indexed arrays in Citation Needed. Fantastic walk through the history of computing, and a fun reminder of how comfortable it is to leave our beliefs unexamined.

A number of my Republican friends love to bring up the negative effect that Obamacare is having on workers. If you like theoretical arguments, there’s CKE Restaurants CEO Andrew Puzder arguing that Obamacare inevitably brings about a shift of full time workers to part time work. In a poll of 603 smallish business owners, 41% said they had frozen hiring because of Obamacare. For people who prefer to stick with anecdotal evidence, there’s a guy who owns Five Guys restaurants that says burger prices are going up because of Obamacare. ...

Turns out Java is not just going to sit there and let Scala eat its lunch. Java 8 will have lambdas: Before lambdas, developers often used a poor “beef to bun ratio” to express ideas, often with inner classes.

I wanted to link to this Ars Technica post on Google’s levers of control over the Android ecosystem by Ron Amadeo, mainly because it’s a really nice piece of reporting. He explains how Google has reduced the open source footprint of Android and migrated to closed source versions of many of the key applications and services that Android users expect. Google then uses bars Android handset makers from making non-approved Android devices in exchange for licensing these closed-source applications. ...

There’s a lot to hate about Cade Metz’s article on server-side Java from last month’s Wired magazine. For one thing, Java has been more successful on the server than on the client for at least 15 years. The fact that you can use it to build large-scale Web applications is not news, nor is the fact that the JVM is a great host for languages other than Java. That said, the tradeoffs that go into choosing a software development platform are interesting. The Wired article is mostly concerned with scaling at levels that are unrealistic for nearly anyone to plan for. And indeed, platform is only a small part of the scaling discussion. I’m sure that most of the software written for Healthcare.gov was written in Java, and it didn’t solve any of the problems that are endemic to that sort of project (about which more some other time). ...