In last night’s debate, Paul Ryan asserted that under the Obama administration, America will have its smallest navy since before World War I. That brought me back to my post about aircraft carriers. Here’s a breakdown of all of the operational aircraft carriers in the world: As we know, China’s aircraft carrier is unusable. Are we really worried about the United States’ naval capabilities? (via Conor Friedersdorf)
How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline I just got around to reading Kurt Eichenwald’s account of Microsoft’s decline in Vanity Fair. Microsoft has always held a grim fascination for me – when I first started writing this blog my number one topic was inveighing against Microsoft’s monopoly. Now Microsoft is just another information technology company. The article puts Microsoft’s drift down to two causes, a stagnation of its stock price that stopped the minting of Microsoft millionaires, and a stack ranking system that creates perverse incentives inside the company. My only criticism of the article is that it refers to Microsoft to being “cool” in the past more than once. As someone who was around at the time, I can guarantee that nobody ever thought Microsoft was cool. ...
Why cheaper computers lead to higher tuition Steve Pearlstein explains one of the most important outcomes of an economy with rising productivity, Baumol’s disease: No matter how innovative people were in coming up with new technology and new ways of organizing their work, Baumol and Bowen reasoned, it would still take a pianist the same 23 minutes to play a Mozart sonata, a barber 20 minutes to cut the hair of the average customer and a first-grade teacher 12 minutes to read her class “Green Eggs and Ham.” Based on this observation, the duo predicted that the cost of education and health care would inevitably outstrip the price of almost everything else. ...
Everyone should program, or Programming is Hard? Both! Mark Chu-Carroll explains the nature of computer programming in response to the general criticism that programming is difficult because it requires people to understand too much about how computers work. That’s not a great summary, so I’ll encourage you to just click on the link and read the article instead.
China has deployed its own aircraft carrier. The vessel is a rehabilitated Ukrainian carrier that China purchased in 1998. Unfortunately, China does not have pilots who have practiced landing a plane on an aircraft carrier, nor do they have any planes that are capable of landing on an aircraft carrier. What’s the point? That it’s a lot more difficult to develop a capability than it is to build something. The obvious recent example from technology is the launch of Apple’s Maps application. Apple developed an iOS app that has all of the features one would expect from a cutting edge mapping application but they lack the capability to keep their own set of world maps accurate and up to date. For more on this, check out David Talbot’s article on the challenges involved in building a legitimate mapping application. As it turns out, most of the work is in building that capability. ...
The Blue Collar Coder Anil Dash writes about a career path for people who are coders but not necessarily computer scientists. We already see this to some degrees in areas like ops, data center work, and desktop support. I certainly think there is plenty of room for this idea in software development as well.
Strange Loop 2012 This is a fantastic conference overview, and it happens to be an overview of what many people described as the most fantastic software development conference of the year. I’m really going to try to attend Strange Loop in 2012.
Yesterday I saw an interesting link on Daring Fireball to a study that reported the results of searching for 2028 cities and towns in Ontario in the new iOS 6 Maps app for which Apple has apologized. Unsurprisingly, the results of the searches were not very good. The first question that sprang to my mind when I read the piece, though, was, “How good are the Google Maps results for these searches?” Not because I thought Google’s results would be just as bad, but because looking at statistics in isolation is not particularly helpful when it comes to doing useful analysis. Obviously you can look at the results of the searches and rate the Apple Maps versus reality, but rating them against their competitors is also important. What should our expectations be, really? ...
The Well does not own your words San Francisco Chronicle columnist and long-time Well member Jon Carroll attempts to explain The Well. If you’ve ever been curious about it, now is a great time to join.
I’m pretty sure the universe is trying to teach me something. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been dismissive of Web analytics. I’ve always felt that they’re for marketing people and that, at least in the realm of personal publishing, paying attention to analytics makes you some kind of sellout. Analytics is a discipline rife with unfounded claims and terrible, terrible products, as well as people engaging in cargo cultism that they pretend is analysis. Even the terminology is annoying. When people start talking about “key performance indicators” and “bounce rate” my flight instinct kicks in immediately. ...