- Stephen Elop is a Flight Risk (Silicon Beat) — a foresight-filled 2008 article that doesn’t make Nokia’s new CEO look good. A reminder to boards and CEOs that option vesting schedules matter. (via Hacker News)
- CHDK — Canon Hack Development Kit gives point-and-shoot Canon digital camera new features like RAW images, motion detection, a USB remote, full control over exposure and so on. (via Sennheiser HD 555 to HD 595 Mod)
- The Atavist – iPad app for original long-form nonfiction (what used to be called “journalism”). (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Why Most Published Findings are False (PLoS Medicine) — as explained by John D. Cook, Suppose you have 1,000 totally ineffective drugs to test. About 1 out of every 20 trials will produce a p-value of 0.05 or smaller by chance, so about 50 trials out of the 1,000 will have a “significant” result, and only those studies will publish their results. The error rate in the lab was indeed 5%, but the error rate in the literature coming out of the lab is 100 percent!.
"Microsoft" entries
What did Microsoft get for $8.5 billion?
Microsoft shelled out a lot of cash for Skype. Here's what they'll get in return.
Why would Microsoft pay so much for a company that doesn't have vastly superior technology or great financials? Here's five reasons.
Four short links: 14 February 2011
Vesting Incentives, Camera Hacks, iPad Longform Saviour?, and Bogus Science
In Google's "glass house," a battle with Bing looms
Commentary: Copy or theft? How Google set themselves up to get Bing’d.
Is Google's recent war of words with Microsoft a case of calling a thief out by name, or a matter of pot calling kettle black?
Four short links: 11 January 2011
Microsoft and the Web, URL Library, Optimism, and NoSQL Instruction
- Dive Into 2010 (Mark Pilgrim) — Mark wrote a hugely popular guide to HTML5 which was available online and published by O’Reilly. 6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. That is not a typo. The site works fine in Internet Explorer — the site practices what it preaches, and the live examples use a variety of fallbacks for legacy browsers — so this is entirely due to the subject matter. Microsoft has completely lost the web development community.
- google-url — the Google URL-parsing library, designed to be embeddable.
- Reasons to be Cheerful (Charlie Stross) — if all we ever do is gripe about ways in which the world is not perfect, we will make ourselves miserable and fail to appreciate ways in which things are getting better. Important.
- NoSQL Tapes — videos of lectures on NoSQL topics. (via Hacker News)
Developer Year in Review: Operating Systems
Windows 7 outshines Vista (not hard), Linux still in peril (hard luck), and the Mac App Store launches (hard sell)
Last year saw Linux fight free of one legal morass, and perhaps right into another; Microsoft take another swing at replacing XP; and Apple bring the App Store model to the desktop.
Four short links: 21 December 2010
Big Companyitis, Spyware Apps, Maturing Cloud, and Mobile Sync
- Cash Cow Disease — quite harsh on Google and Microsoft for “ingesting not investing” in promising startups, then disconnecting them from market signals. Like pixie dust, potential future advertising revenues can be sprinkled on any revenue-negative scheme to make it look brilliant. (via Dan Martell)
- Your Apps Are Watching You (Wall Street Journal) — the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.’s Android operating system […] Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies. […] Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a “supercookie,” […] on iPhones, this number is the “UDID,” or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can’t be blocked or deleted. “The great thing about mobile is you can’t clear a UDID like you can a cookie,” says Meghan O’Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. “That’s how we track everything.”
- On Undo’s Undue Importance (Paul Kedrosky) — The mainstream has money and risks, and so it cares immensely. It wants products and services where big failures aren’t catastrophic, and where small failures, the sorts of thing that “undo” fixes, can be rolled back. Undo matters, in other words, because its appearance almost always signals that a market has gone from fringe to mainstream, with profits set to follow. (via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter)
- libimobiledevice — open source library that talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch®, iPad® and Apple TV® devices without jailbreaking or proprietary libraries.
Developer Year in Review: Mobile
Our look back at 2010 starts with the year in mobile.
The past year brought new success for Apple, a breakout for Android, a windfall for lawyers, and app stores galore.
7 areas beyond gaming where Kinect could play a role
How Kinect could apply to art, education, health and other domains.
Microsoft's Kinect has implications that go beyond gaming. From medicine to learning to participatory art, Alex Howard considers ways Kinect's interface could shift our computing-based interactions.
Four short links: 24 November 2010
Android, Cellphone Photos, Long-Exposure iPhone Apps, and Open Street Map
- What Android Is (Tim Bray) — a good explanation of the different bits and their relationship.
- Cell Phone Photo Helped in Oil Spill (LA Times) — a lone scientist working from a cell phone photo who saved the day by convincing the government that a cap it considered removing was actually working as designed. (via BoingBoing)
- Penki — iPhone app that lets you paint 3D messages which are revealed in long-exposure photographs. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
- I’m Working at Microsoft and We’re Donating Imagery to OpenStreetMap! (Steve Coast) — MSFT hired the creator of OSM and he says Microsoft is donating access to its global orthorectified aerial imagery to help OpenStreetMappers make the map even better than it already is.
Four short links: 11 November 2010
Bounty Paid, C Archived, Blind Queried, and Links Shared
- Open Kinect — less than a week after the bounty for developing an open source driver for Microsoft’s Kinect controller was announced, it is claimed. libfreenect is the software.
- CCAN — the Comprehensive C Archive Network.
- TextCAPTCHAs — simple questions, written in English, that are accessible to blind users.
- F1 — Mozilla browser extension for sharing links via Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. (via Chris Blizzard on Twitter)