Posts

Clive Thompson explains why people accept and even enjoy the grind in games: Why? Because there’s something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into WoW, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you’ll level up. It doesn’t require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you’ll do better; play 50, you’ll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours. ...

Cory Doctorow on the deal between ISPs and the music industry to spy on and interfere with music sharers: This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is. ...

Tim Bray on the current crop of Apple keyboards: Geeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a rough consensus that the original IBM PC’s clackety high-travel product has never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is right, the latest Apples may be better. That’s my impression as well, and I couldn’t be more surprised. Before Apple introduced its aluminum keyboards, I thought this was the greatest keyboard ever, but even if Avant made a keyboard with the same mechanism just for the Mac, I wouldn’t trade. ...

Paul Kedrosky has a guest post from Tom Vanderwell on moral hazard. Moral hazard describes a situation where parties behave differently because they do not expect to bear the full consequences of their actions. For example, when a guy in a bar acts especially belligerent because he’s got his big, tough friend with him, that’s moral hazard at work. Free market purists argue that moral hazard distorts the free market, and so firms and investors should not be insulated from risk. In other words, the FDIC should not exist, because then the risk of bank default would force customers to be more informed about the loans their banks make. This would cause banks who make risky loans to lose business, and thus strengthen the banking industry. ...

From Matthew Yglesias: It seems that a commercial flight pays $2,014 in taxes to fly from New York to Miami, whereas a private jet only pays $236 even though the impact on air traffic control is the same.

Fred Clark writes about why credit scoring should be more of a political issue: Lenders and debt merchants are in the same boat as the rest of us. They don’t have access to the extra-constitutional triumvirate’s top-secret proprietary information either. But credit-card banks and mortgage brokers and insurance companies and auto lenders have more time, resources and incentive than consumers do for probing the mysteries of these all-important formulae. They’ve pieced together enough of the puzzle that they’ve gotten quite skilled at manipulating this statistical game to their advantage. ...

The Free Software Foundation’s list of reasons why you should avoid the iPhone have gotten plenty of coverage, which is of course the point of making such a list. I assume their tactics are the same as Greenpeace’s criticism of Apple’s environmental practices. The goal is, of course, to get Apple to change its behavior, but I suspect the primary goal is also to educate consumers about the aims of the groups making the criticism. Apple is more effective than any other company in technology at garnering tons of press coverage, most of it positive. Activist groups target Apple with the knowledge that it’s the best way to advance what I expect is probably their primary goal – publicizing their cause. ...

NPR has an article today on Mr. Jalopy, one of the most interesting people in the world who you may not have heard of. I think it’s about time for the MacArthur Foundation to hook him up.

Apple made a clever user interface change with iPhone 2.0: When you enter text into a password field, it briefly displays the character you just entered. After a few seconds, it changes the character into the mask, but it gives you some visible feedback that you’re entering the characters you think you’re entering. (I always had problems entering passwords correctly until this feature was added.) It’s an acknowledgement that entering text using a virtual keyboard isn’t foolproof, and it provides a good compromise between masking passwords so people can’t see your password over your shoulder and enabling users to avoid typos when entering them. ...

Stanford professor Anand Rajaraman takes a look at the recent debate about the long tail from a different perspective: It is instructive to look at the Facebook Facebook app trends study published by Roger Margoulas and Ben Lorica at O’Reilly Research. The study shows that at last count, there were close to 30,000 facebook apps. Usage, however, is highly concentrated among the top few apps, a classic example of a hits-driven industry (see graph on right) – no long tail. However, these hits have been produced by the collective action of millions of Facebook users, rather than by a small set of savvy media executives. And there’s a lot of churn: new applications join the winners and old winners die and are buried in the tail. ...