I was telling someone the other day that the iPhone is to the original (1984) Mac as regular cell phones (like my old Motorola PEBL or Sony Ericsson T610) are to DOS. You could get things done with DOS, but the Mac was a heck of a lot friendlier. I guess I’d say that other smart phones are like Windows 3.1. They have more applications than the iPhone but they’re not nearly as nice to use. ...
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has posted frequently on the Yahoo Finance message board discussing his company’s stock for years, under a pseudonym. He was outed when the company released documents in response to an FTC antitrust suit.
Orion magazine has a meditation on the vastness of the universe that’s worth thinking on. “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” Whatever we believe in–God, children, nationhood–nothing can be more important than to take a moment every now and then and accept the invitation of the sky: to leave the confines of ourselves and fly off into the hugeness of the universe, to disappear into the inexplicable, the implacable, the reflection of that something our minds cannot grasp. ...
iPhone hackers seem to have discovered that all of the applications run as root. In the world of Windows, that’s no big deal. In the world of Unix, it’s unheard of. As Andrew Shebanow points out, it also explains why third party developers aren’t yet allowed to publish iPhone applications.
Shas, a far-right Israeli political party, is trying to pass legislation that would restrict access to certain content to adults who sign up for a special license. The content is the type of stuff that all politicians seem to want to censor. Needless to say, such a bill would require the implementation of a new identification system and a huge amount of networking hardware to provide the infrastructure for applying censorware to all of Israel’s Internet connections. ...
I read that at Google, engineers create a design document for just about every project they work on. It led me to think about how I might incorporate design documents into my usual work practices. I’m looking for processes for teams of one or a few people. Here’s what I hope to get out of a design document: Describe the requirements for the feature (or set of features) described by the design document. Enable the writer to clarify their own thinking on the design of the feature being described. Enable the person who’s requested the feature to be able to review the design to make sure their requirements are being met. Enable other developers to review the design document to find flaws and suggest improvements. Enable anybody who’s going to be working on the product a year down the road to review the design document and figure out what the code they’re working on is actually supposed to do. UML So what goes into a design document and how do you structure it? For a bit of guidance, I looked at the types of UML diagrams that are available. I’m not a huge fan of UML, but the theory behind it is that a full suite of diagrams models a system in its entirety. Here’s how I rate the various diagrams in terms of their conceptual utility. There may be better ways to represent the concepts in the diagrams that UML. ...
One of the weird things about blogging is that while I would hope that the various criticisms (constructive and otherwise) that I post would someday be read by the subjects of criticism, I never actually expect that it will happen. Is Dick Cheney ever going to swing by and decide to quite promoting torture because some loud mouthed software developer takes him to task for it? Is the person responsible for the email application on the iPhone going to see that I, like Walt Mossberg, am in favor of adding a feature enabling users to delete multiple emails at once? Granted, some of my posts have reached the subjects of those posts, but I’m always surprised. ...
Walt Mossberg zeroes in on one of my iPhone gripes: Unlike on a BlackBerry or Treo, the iPhone doesn’t allow you to delete whole groups of email en masse by date, or even to select large groups and then delete them en masse. This would be a good feature for Apple to add down the line. Deleting every email individually is a big pain. I’d even be happy a “delete the whole inbox” button. ...
An economic experiment confirms the effect of testosterone on decision making.
Bruce Schneier posts a link to a paper that shows that terrorists fail to achieve their political objectives almost entirely. Terrorists succeed in killing people, scaring people, and pissing people off, but they don’t succeed in achieving the political change that they hope for. Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, and I’d add that terrorism is war by other means. The obvious joke is that terrorists should read academic papers concerning their field of endeavor, or at least read blogs on the same subject, but I suspect that for most terrorists the violence is more attractive than the achievement of political aims. ...