Interminable Dross

Apple Scotland: Having a wee bit of trouble

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:24:00 -0700

Apple Scotland: Having a wee bit of trouble

"What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:16:55 -0700

“

What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms. As Marc Andreessen argued in the Wall Street Journal this summer, “software is eating the world.” Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways and a central kitchen that roasts three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice a day.

So perhaps there’s a different insight from Apple for Obama. Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.

”

- Nicholas Thompson

At Least He's Honest

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:26:14 -0700

Alex Isenstadt writing for Politico:

Boehner dismissed Democratic claims that House control is up for grabs and argued that the once-in-a-decade redistricting process has made the GOP’s hold on the majority ironclad.

Redistricting “gives us a very strong foundation for the decade,” Boehner said.

“I think it will be nearly impossible” for Democrats to win back the House in November, Boehner said. “I think our freshman members are doing a good job preparing themselves for the upcoming election. I would also note that redistricting across the country has helped those freshman members and others in tough seats who will now have better seats.

My belief is that the problems with our government, specifically the inability of the President and Congress to tackle any big issue in any substantive way - tax reform, entitlement reform, the debt and deficit, the military budget, education, energy, and the environment to name a few - is fundamentally structural. Specifically, it’s caused by heavily gerrymandered districts in the House, and the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate.

Gerrymandering in the House means almost all members are from safe districts and are easily reelected every 2 years. The House incumbency rate is consistently over 90%. If an incumbent from a safe district does face a challenge, it’s in the primary, so House members are encouraged to be responsible to primary voters rather than general election voters. This leads to an excess of ideological partisans in the House.

Redistricting is far worse in the modern age because computer software enables the drawing of district lines with extreme accuracy. Whereas legislators once laid maps of their states on the ground to draw districts by hand, it’s now possible to sit at a computer and bring up a wealth of demographic and voter behavior that makes creating safe districts a snap.

I don’t think our extreme partisan political culture will change until there’s redistricting reform, short of a national emergency. One positive sign is that California’s giving reform a try.

parislemon: This is actually the craziest chart about Apple...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:04:51 -0700

parislemon:

This is actually the craziest chart about Apple following their insane earnings today.

There is exactly one company on that entire list that is not an oil and gas company. And they’re not that far from the top.

xScope 3 Is Out

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:08:15 -0700

xScope 3 Is Out:

Go buy it, loser.

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:52:29 -0700

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

2011 Was the Second-Worst Year for U.S. PC Sales in History, Except at Apple

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:59:40 -0700

2011 Was the Second-Worst Year for U.S. PC Sales in History, Except at Apple

"Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt...."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:05:21 -0700

“

Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.

If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.

If Democrats can’t restore Americans’ trust in government, it really doesn’t matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.

”

- David Brooks, Where Are the Liberals?

Silicon Valley Napkin

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:47:50 -0700

Silicon Valley Napkin

Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:18:52 -0700

Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone

Google TV on Lots of TVs at CES

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:03:00 -0700

From Electronista:

Google has removed the mystery from who its Google TV partners will be at CES with a full listing ahead of the show. Some using chips from Marvell and MediaTek, TVs from LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio will all run the Android-based TV OS. Vizio’s sets will be behind closed doors, but the rest should be public.

When Eric Schmidt said in early December that Google TV would be on a “majority” of new TVs by mid-2012, so many were quick to just dismiss him outright rather than reflect on what he might have meant. Eric Schmidt isn’t stupid and it’s probably a safe assumption that he spoke deliberately and based on concrete knowledge. Now it seems like that was indeed the case and a deluge of Google TVs are in fact on the way, for better or for worse. (My guess is the latter.)

Daft Punk on 5 Floppy Drives

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:53:09 -0700

Daft Punk on 5 Floppy Drives

"Several things are worth noting here. The first is that, in today’s Republican politics, one..."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:21:45 -0700

“

Several things are worth noting here. The first is that, in today’s Republican politics, one reliable way to reach beyond the Christian base is by whipping up nationalistic hysteria with language lifted straight from the McCarthy era. If criminalizing all abortions and nullifying all gay marriages are a little too sectarian for you, surely you’d like to try some old-fashioned traitor-hunting. (Santorum has also accused Obama of “sid[ing] with evil” in Iran, a country with which he plainly wants to go to war.)

The second is that this kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all. Certain forms of deterioration—like writers using “impact” as a verb, or basketball coaches screaming about every foul—become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong.

”

- George Packer

“People who say, ‘I’m not a computer person’ will be as disconnected from society...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:51:07 -0700

“People who say, ‘I’m not a computer person’ will be as disconnected from society as someone who says today,’I don’t know how to read.’”
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) December 31, 2011

"Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion..."

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:25:51 -0700

“Nowadays, a candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the “so-called Palestinians”, to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right; that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished.”

- American politics: The right Republican

"To the outside world, it has always been easier to mock North Korea’s craziness than to fathom its..."

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:01:07 -0700

“To the outside world, it has always been easier to mock North Korea’s craziness than to fathom its horror, even as an estimated two to three million people died there of starvation in the late nineteen-nineties, and a generation of children were stunted by extreme malnutrition. (Even when Westerners took Kim Jong-il seriously, they tended to treat him as a punchline. The Economist depicted him on its cover under the headline, “Greetings Earthlings,” and President Bush called him “a pygmy” who acted like “a spoiled child at a dinner table” and was “starving his own people” in “a Gulag the size of Houston.”) Kim Jong-il made the mockery easy. Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean film director who was kidnapped and held captive for years by the North Korean dictator, told me that Kim adored Rambo, James Bond, and Friday the 13th movies. But, Shin said: “He doesn’t know what fiction is. He looks at these movies as if they were records of reality.””

- Unreality Check: From Kim to Kim in North Korea

The 15 Most Memorable Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:31:48 -0700

The 15 Most Memorable Christopher Hitchens Quotes

Newt Gingrich and the Rule of Law

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:24:37 -0700

Newt Gingrich commenting on his dislike of things he dislikes:

There’s “no reason the American people need to tolerate a judge that out of touch with American culture,” Gingrich said on CBS’ Face the Nation.

You mean like Brown v. Board of Education? Courts are required to uphold the rights of the minority as well as the majority.

And Gingrich recently has said judges should have to explain some of their decisions before Congress.

Judges do explain their decisions in great detail in their rulings. The Constitution provides a means for Congress to enforce accountability on the judiciary. It’s called impeachment. It’s a subject about which Newt knows a thing or two.

“Do you want to move towards American exceptionalism, reassert the Constitution, reassert the nature of America, or do you, in fact, want to become a secular, European, sort of beaurocratic socialist society?”

Hate it break the news, but the Constitution establishes a secular government for the United States. You are of course free to work toward the repeal of the First Amendment if you wish. Let me know how that goes.

"So, What Phone Should I Buy?"

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:46:30 -0700

Normally I try to avoid reading, much less write about, the sloppy thinking and lazy writing that passes for “tech blogging” these days, but this muddled article trying to “answer” the question “which phone should I buy” was too much.

Now, if you’re my mom, this is the part where I’d say, “well, what do you want to be able to do with it?” Twenty or thirty minutes later, we’d rough out a list of maybe two or three phones, then we’d go into carrier stores and have her try out devices while I fight off pushy reps with smooth conversation (or, failing that, fists). But when I’m having a casual conversation with a casual acquaintance, that’s often not a practical solution for either one of us. So out of sheer laziness, what’s my stock response?

“You know, honestly, just buy an iPhone.”

And mind you, I’m not proud of saying that. I’m not trying to push Apple products, and I don’t currently own an iPhone myself. Rather, it’s a very selfish piece of advice: you see, by suggesting a phone to someone, you become, on some level, “on the hook” for that individual’s post-purchase satisfaction. You’re going to hear the good and the bad. You’re going to get the late-night emails and instant messages asking what to do when Angry Birds freezes. And maybe — just maybe — this person is going to like you a little bit less if you recommend a phone they don’t like.

Why is the author not proud of saying that, and why does saying so mean he’s pushing Apple products any more than he would be pushing the products of whatever vendor makes a phone you could recommend “in good conscience.”

That’s not to say I don’t love Android… I do. The Galaxy Nexux is the best smartphone I’ve ever used (which is why it’s in my pocket as I write this). But anyone who’s used Android at length knows that it requires more care and feeding to make it great than iOS does. Spec-for-spec, Android’s raw potential is greater — but it takes more elbow grease to get it there. It’s no different from desktop operating systems for the past thirty-plus years. Different strokes for different folks.

What does “the best smartphone I’ve ever used” mean in the context of this article? Does the author mean it the way Walt Mossberg or David Pogue would mean it, namely that the author thinks most people looking for a new smartphone should buy it? It sure doesn’t sound like it, since he just said most people should buy an iPhone. I guess what he really means is that the Galaxy Nexus is the best smartphone he’s ever used for his preferences and needs, but doesn’t think it’s quite ready for primetime for most people.

The article doesn’t even really attempt to answer the question posed at the outset. Instead we’re walked through a muddle of thoughts from someone who wishes he could recommend his personally preferred phone to other people but knows he can’t because it’s not good enough.

An article like this makes a better entry in one’s personal diary, and has no place as an article in a technology publication.

"Hitch lived so large, and so beyond the rules, that his mortality seems especially hard to accept. I..."

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:32:36 -0700

“Hitch lived so large, and so beyond the rules, that his mortality seems especially hard to accept. I remember the day some eighteen months ago when he told me that he was mortally ill. He had missed a few stops on his book tour, which wasn’t like him, so I called to see if he was all right. “No,” he said frankly. “I’m not. I have cancer.” I was so stricken for the next few days that I couldn’t get much work done. Then I noticed that during the time that I was using his illness as an excuse to procrastinate, he had himself authored a handful of brilliant pieces. I couldn’t work, but he couldn’t stop working. He was a born writer, whose irrepressible talent and verve put most of the rest of us journeymen to shame.”

- Jane Mayer on Christopher Hitchens