Posts

A now-implausible “What if?” scenario – what happens to the global economy if the US government pays of all of its debt? How much economic growth is the US throwing away by not liberalizing its immigration policy? Michael Clemens argues trillions of dollars. Via Matthew Yglesias. In the spirit of Last Year’s Model, Ars Technica reviews an original iPod on its tenth birthday. The life of a maker of Windows machines: Microsoft and Intel were also petitioned to allow greyscale versions of their respective product logos. ASUS’ request was also approved, which is why you see less obnoxious Intel inside and Windows 7 stickers on the Zenbook. ...

In 2001, Dave Winer wrote about the strategy tax: Ben explained that sometimes products developed inside a company such as Microsoft have to accept constraints that go against competitiveness, or might displease users, in order to further the cause of another product. I recognized the concept but had never heard the term. Google is retiring all of the social features in Google Reader in order to push users to Google Plus instead. Discontinuing these features is bad – I find that people use them very effectively to share interesting stuff and would argue that the shared links from my Google Reader friends are generally more interesting than any single blog that I read. Even worse, Google is going to delete everyone’s past shared links in a few days. So people who have been using link sharing as a sort of blog will soon see their entire archive deleted. ...

Here’s one of those posts where the comments are as important as the original posting: John Peebles says that systems administrators are endangered species and commenters dissent. Good stuff. People who don’t pay any federal income tax are still taxed. Here’s why I don’t read any gadget blogs: after the tech pundits panned the iPhone 4S as underwhelming, it sold double the units that the iPhone 4 did on “opening weekend.” Don’t miss this interview with PIMCO co-CEO Mohammed el-Arian on Occupy Wall Street. Here’s the bottom line: ...

Matthew Yglesias offers a strong argument against the usefulness of public choice theory. Here’s a lesson in the painful side effects of architectural changes: Marco Arment explains how Instapaper is hurt by Apple’s elimination of a permanent cache from iOS 5. Hacked! by James Fallows. The original blog posts that led up to this story are the thing that convinced me to turn on two-factor authentication for my Google account. Horace Dediu looks at how much Apple spends to open an Apple Store. ...

Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of the C programming language and one of the original Unix developers, has passed away. The debt I feel I personally owe to DMR and the other old school computer scientists who created the networked computing environment that forms the basis of my work and most of my entertainment cannot be overstated. Rob Pike announced Ritchie’s death on Google Plus. Tim Bray whipped up a quick post on a few of Dennis Ritchie’s contributions to the field – things we take for granted today but didn’t exist before Ritchie and his colleagues invented them. ...

Dart; or Why JavaScript has already won explains why Google’s new client-side scripting language Dart isn’t going to replace JavaScript anytime soon. For more on Dart, check out the official site. Dart is exactly the sort of thing that it’s impossible for me to get excited about. Why the Occupy Wall Street protesters are angry, in charts. Did you know that one in five infants drink soda? That seems incomprehensible to me. And your don’t miss link of the day: Steve Yegge compares Google and Amazon.com and explains how to build a platform. Incredibly interesting. This was meant to be internal to Google but he posted it on Google Plus with the wrong permissions and now it’s been copied and pasted everywhere. Privacy features are funny. ...

If voice-activated user interfaces like Siri in the new iPhone 4S really take off, third party application developers are going to want in on the action. As John Gruber points out in his iPhone 4S review, that poses an interesting set of problems: People are going to start clamoring for third-party Siri integration as soon as they see Siri in action. But I’m not sure what form that integration could take. Best I can think is that apps could hook up to (as yet utterly hypothetical) Siri APIs much in the same way that Mac apps can supply system-wide Services menu items. But how would they keep from stomping on one another? If Siri supported third-party apps and you said, “Schedule lunch tomorrow at noon,” what would Siri do if you have multiple Siri-enabled calendar apps installed? This is similar to the dilemma Mac OS X faces when you open a document with a file extension that multiple installed apps register support for. ...

I encourage you to read Mike Daisey’s New York Times op-ed eulogizing Steve Jobs. It is both tough and fair. For what it’s worth, I think that Apple’s move toward a closed model of computing, which I have discussed before is justifiable as a technical choice. Is it what I would prefer? No. But it provides customers with both benefits and costs, and each of us can choose whether we think the tradeoffs are worth it. ...

Since Steve Jobs passed away, I’ve read a great many things about him that really struck me, but I haven’t written anything about it. I’ve been an appreciator of Apple products for over 20 years, and have been a user of them for at least 30. I admired his drive, genius, and passion greatly. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the need to let other people know that you appreciate their work. I was sort of inspired by this, but I was more inspired by a talk I heard this week. ...

Nick Bilton explains the ways in which Facebook is easier on new users than Twitter. Yelp is shifting business from chain restaurants to independent establishments. How to get a decent meal at a bad restaurant. Node.js is a cancer. Or it isn’t. On a general note, I am not a fan of polemics like the one at the former link. Alabama’s draconian new anti-immigrant law goes into effect. I have to admit that I have very little empathy for CEOs with a persecution complex. ...