The King is Dead, Long Live the King

I've been resisting the temptation to write about Android. But after reading some of the blogs about Android netbooks, I can't keep quiet.

Aside from being a Really Cool Idea, I don't have a lot to say about netbooks themselves. I've got an Android phone (thanks, Google), and I like it, and it would be nice to see the operating system move from the cell phone world onto other hardware. Netbooks are a logical step. But what's the next step after netbooks? How long will it be before we see "big" computers--full sized laptops and desktops, developer machines for serious coding, video and audio production, even servers--run on Android?

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Google I/O keynote, day 1

Just one very quick note:

When Apple released the iPhone, I said that they had changed the game. Not because they had created the coolest, prettiest phone in history, but because had a phone with a real browser that suppported real HTML with real JavaScript. You can write cool apps in Cocoa, sure. But what's more important is that you can write cool web apps that really, really work; and when you can do that, you have apps that are accessible from any platform, including any phone that also has a real browser. Now you've moved a light-year ahead. Cool as native iPhone apps are, it's still very hard for me to get really excited about applications that only work on one on one particular platform--whether that's the iPhone, Windows, IE, Firefox, or whatever.

Google clearly gets this; they demo'd it, with apps running in browsers (including iPhone and Android browsers) that you'd never expect to see outside of a full-fledged desktop application. HTML 5 and JavaScript are enabling technologies. I'm still a little wary of GWT, though the idea of JavaScript as the web's assembly language (my term, not theirs) is appealing. But whether you write your JavaScript by hand or via GWT, being able to embed 2- and 3-d graphics, geolocation, databases, and threading directly into a web application--that's the end of one ballgame, and the start of a whole new one.

Wolfram Alpha a Google Killer? Not... Supposed... To... Be

I'm getting tired of reading about whether Alpha is a Google-killer. I've seen Stephen Wolfram's presentations a couple of times; he's quite careful to say that it isn't. There's a fundamental difference that many people out there are just missing. Google is a search engine. Alpha looks like a search engine, but it isn't; it's all about curated data, and the analysis of that data.

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Hacking Primes in Mathematica

If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it.

This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution of the first digit of prime numbers. One of the comments asked an important question: is this really just an artifact of base 10? Math really doesn't "know anything" about bases, so if this idea doesn't generalize to bases other than 10, it doesn't mean much.

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You ain't gonna need what?

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with strange requirements based on what they think they might want.

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The desktop 3D printer

Yesterday, Andrew Sheppard pointed me at a desktop 3D printer for under $5000. That brought back some memories...

In the early 80s, I worked for Imagen, the company that made the first laser printer that sold for under $20,000, the first laser printer that sold for under $10,000, and the first laser printer that sold for under $7,000. We didn't make the first laser printer that sold for under $5,000. That was Apple's first LaserWriter, and although the company survived for a few years more, it's really what did us in.

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The Corporation's Two Bodies

The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost theological in nature. It is most certainly theological in, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "the promised land where every coin is marked In God We Trust, but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. ("Autobiography," A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958, New Directions)

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Building Better Silos

It's been good to watch the use of OpenID spread. It's great to see that ma.gnolia.com has dropped "traditional login" in favor of OpenID. And I was encouraged to read about Yahoo's support of OpenID. Granted, it took me a while to get around to trying it.
But when I got around to trying it, Yahoo!ID was a disappointment. The promise of OpenID is to return ownership of ID to the users, and to eliminate identity silos, in which the big sites compete to own your identity and your data. If that's the goal, Yahoo!ID may not be a step backwards, but it's certainly not much of a step forwards.

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Domain-Specific Social Applications

I haven't heard a whole lot about domain-specific social applications; most of the ones we're familiar with attempt to serve a very broad audience. Most of the talk at SG FOO was about the world's Facebooks, Flickrs, and LInkedIns--who of course were very well represented. All of these sites attempt to be something (in some cases, everything) to everybody.

But there's another way to slice the pie. Last summer, my brother was in the hospital for an extended period. He and his wife created a CarePages account. CarePages isn't all that unlike Facebook: it has a blog, a photo gallery, a message board, and "virtual gifts." You can receive notifications via email (they don't seem to support SMS). CarePages appears to be supported partly by advertising, though I would guess that the bulk of their funding comes by contract to the hospitals offering the service (in my brother's case, Johns Hopkins).

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Social Privacy

At Social Graph FOO, privacy was the proverbial elephant in the room. Its presence is widely acknowledged, and the OAuth and OpenID guys are doing what they can to make people aware of the problems that arise when people aren't allowed to manage their personal data effectively.

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