Posts

Roger Ebert, on education: Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained.

Both Matthew Yglesias and Karl Smith (guest blogging for Ezra Klein) posted today on deficit spending by the federal government. They both dismiss the idea of opposing budget deficits for reasons of morality or responsibility and instead discuss them in terms of their impact on economic growth, which is the only thing you should really care about. Debt is a tool that can be used to make you (or America) better or worse off depending on the terms of the loan and what you do with the money you borrow. ...

Marco Arment has a great post on why “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to new hardware platforms. It lacks pithy quotes, so I urge you to go read it. It’s not very long.

People have noticed that Capital One advertises different interest rates on auto loans depending on which browser you’re using. Plenty of people are speculating as to the reasons why. I’m with the group of people who think that this is a manifestation of A/B testing rather than discrimination based on the browser you choose to use. Even if it is based on your browser (rather than random numbers or something in your cookies), I’d still guess that it’s just an arbitrary way of segregating the market for testing different interest rates to see what kind of response they draw. Wonder if Capital One will wind up having to explain what’s behind it? ...

Dave Pell talks about social impact of the Walkman: The Walkman and its offspring, such as the iPod, completely changed the way we experience music. And even more compelling, these devices also had a huge impact on the way we interact (or don’t interact) with each other. Before the Walkman, listening to music was quite often something we did together. Headphones and portability changed that. The very same sounds that had been a cornerstone of our social experience suddenly transformed millions of us into isolated walking zombies. ...

Ed Felten, known to most as the brilliant mind behind the Freedom to Tinker blog, has been appointed as Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. This is one of those moves that makes too much sense for me to have ever believed that something like it would ever actually happen. Next thing you know Bruce Schneier will take a job with the Department of Homeland Security.

Seth Godin on political ads: Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded. There are positive ads as well that are intended to encourage turnout from supporters, but there’s no doubt that he’s right about negative ads. Here’s my strategy for choosing who to vote for: I never vote for crooks. If a politician seems to be a crook, I won’t vote for them regardless of party. Then I vote for the party whose goals align most closely with my own, regardless of the individual candidate (as long as they’re not a crook). ...

I’m always interested in the ways people learn to browse the web more effectively. This learning seems to center around getting better at filtering out noise and getting straight at the stuff they care about. We have a constant battle between the human capacity to adapt and the desire for publishers and designers to get people to pay attention to ads and appreciate their design skills. Jakob Nielsen has a new study that shows that people have gotten good at ignoring images that don’t add value what’s on the page. People have figured out how to identify and ignore images that are not “real.” It seems that the leading practitioners of Web design have already figured this out. Most advice these days seems to be to cut the fluff, and this study confirms that instinct is correct. People are getting better and better at filtering out non-meaningful things on Web pages anyway, so it’s better not to put them there in the first place. ...

Marco Arment makes the point that the Mac App Store is for developers who aren’t already developing Mac apps. This was the point I was trying to get at the other day when I said: I can see a future where a sizable percentage of Mac users only use applications that they installed through the Mac App Store. There are a lot of people who buy Macs, go to the Apple Store and take some classes, and never bother to install anything on their Mac that wasn’t there when they bought it. Maybe they buy a productivity application so they can do word processing, and that’s it. ...

Chris Adamson talks about the strange fact that the number one use of Java desktop applications is to run tools used to create Java server applications: We know the big use for AWT and Swing, and it’s a terrible irony: measured by app launches or time spent in an app, the top AWT/Swing apps are surely NetBeans and IntelliJ, IDEs used for creating… other Java applications! The same can be said of the SWT toolkit, which powers the Eclipse IDE and not much else. This is what makes this white elephant so difficult to dispose of: all the value of modern-day Java is writing for the server, but nearly all the Java developers are using the desktop stuff to do so, making them the target market (and really the only market) for Desktop Java. If there were other viable Java applications on the desktop, used by everyday end-users, Apple couldn’t afford to risk going without Java. There aren’t, and it can. ...