A burst of 13 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Google Reader and other customer tragedies >> Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision
Hal Berenson:
From a business standpoint why should Google have kept Reader alive? One reason really, that "Google Account" is super-valuable. It is a means for getting someone to use other services. Moreover, it is the ultimate means of performing tracking. As long as I'm logged in to a Google Account while using Google services, including search, they can track my behavior. And because it is first party none of the attempts to block that tracking apply. TPLs? They don't apply to First Party cookies. Safari and other browsers' outright blocks on Third Party cookie? No effect on First Party tracking. Identities are important, and Google seems to have forgotten that.
Very thoughtful post about the management cost of having many services. Be sure to read his postscript too.
2 Letters from Steve >> David Gelphman's Blog
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard inside the Infinite Loop campus. And of course there were Comm meetings that he would run. But I didn't have any direct contact. Until…
In March 2010, just a couple of weeks before the iPad was due to be released publicly, I had a reason to contact Steve. A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible. She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.
Lots of elements in this story are intriguing: rules, who gets to bypass rules, speed of response among others.
Blackberry Q10 hands-on >> Wireless Worker
Ben Smith was at MWC and tried out a prototype of the QWERTY BB10 product, which he liked. However:
Blackberry staff said they expected many customers to switch to full-touch quickly - they're clearly very confident in the firm's new soft keyboard. It was suggested that - for many - the Q10 may be a transition step. That may be the case, but for those (myself included) who prefer a hardware keyboard for messaging this looks promising.
Very slightly larger keys - will that make people more accurate?
Huge construction firm uses iPads and Apple TV to save millions >> CITEworld
With architectural and planning documents that would otherwise run to 60,000 pages...
The system is centered on a PC in a work trailer with a wired connection to the Internet. Managers use that computer to make major changes to plans using a PDF-editing program from Bluebeam, or to upload new files. This data is synced back to Egnyte's cloud over the fast wired connection. Then, workers in the field can use the iPads and a Wi-Fi connection to get the latest, most up-to-date versions of relevant plans from Egnyte's cloud. They can also mark up plans and take photos of the work site.
Along with the iPads, Pistor set up two digital plan tables on the site. Normal plan tables consist of a big angled slab where workers gather around to consult architectural plans on paper. These digital plan tables include a pair of 55in monitors connected to a PC that's wired to the local network, as well as an Apple TV box. Workers can walk up to the table, connect their iPads wirelessly through the Apple TV to the monitor, and discuss what they're looking at on the big monitors.
The "Cite" in "Citeworld" is "Consumer IT in the enterprise".
A PC and Tablet 'brick' for the price of one >> WSJ.com
Katherine Boehret:
As the [Asus] Transformer's [AIO] name suggests, it also transforms into another device: Pull up on the PC screen to separate it from its stand and it becomes a tablet you can move around the house. It has a handle and a kickstand for propping up on flat surfaces. Like the desktop version, the tablet runs two systems: Windows 8 Remote and Jelly Bean 4.1.
Though this concept sounds smart, it's laughable in practice. The screen measures a whopping 18.4in diagonally and weighs an arm-straining 5.3lb. Apple's iPad screen measures 9.7in and weighs 1.4lb; Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 has a 7in screen and weighs 0.8lb. At home, carrying this around and using it on my lap elicited fits of laughter from my husband. When I flipped the tablet into vertical mode, it looked like I was reading from a giant, stone tablet. And in Android mode, the tablet's battery only lasted five hours.
Start Up Tech - All For A Little Over £500 >> Emer Coleman
Formerly of the London Datastore, and Government Data Service, now setting up on her own:
The first thing my mother asked when I told her I was setting up my own company DSRPTN was "but who will do your filing for you?" I had to tell her that I could not remember the last time that I actually filed anything physically. She was also concerned about where my office would be located because it's difficult to grasp that setting up your own business can be a very easy process and all you really need is a few bits of good kit.
Fascinating choices, especially of carrier.
Taking a stand on open source and patents >> Google Open Source blog
Today, we're taking another step towards that goal [of an open internet] by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.
We've begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.
With 18,000 or so patents to choose from.. how about the next ones are Motorola's Wi-Fi and H.264 patents?
Password denied: when will Apple get serious about security? >> The Verge
When Ars Technica investigated security issues in iCloud last year, it found that "your data is at least as safe as it is when stored on any remote server, if not more so," but that its weaknesses lay in Apple's lack of disclosure of its security processes (even Ars' assessment depends on a fair amount of guesswork), its prioritization of ease-of-use over full security, and its retention of encryption keys to iCloud data on its own servers. Apple's defense has traditionally been that its security processes are "industry-standard." But in the still-young consumer cloud, Apple is one of the leading companies helping to define that standard.
Good article pointing out how one email/password combination is the key to a huge number of services. But that's also the case for Google (email, documents, phone services, Play), Microsoft (email, cloud, store, Xbox). Everyone is vulnerable in some way.
Three eras of currency >> Chris Dixon
Three eras of currency
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
Note the "e.g."
Bitcoin may be the global economy's last safe haven >> Businessweek
Paul Ford:
I'm increasingly convinced there's one thing that Bitcoins do that's genuinely interesting. They decentralize trust. Trust is hard to earn; verifying transactions is a brutal problem, which is why PayPal locks down your account when there's too much money flowing into it. Creating trust is traditionally the work of federal governments and branding agencies. Trust is also an easy thing to squander. Just close a beloved service, à la Google Reader. Or allow your banks to fail, causing an entire country to suddenly realize that the value of their deposits, the fundamental integrity of their financial selves, was arbitrary all along.
Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has its own story. There's nothing to trust but math. Suddenly an idea that sounded terrible — a totally decentralized currency without a central authority, where semi-anonymous parties exchange meaningless tokens — becomes almost comforting, a source of power and authority.
That's where Bitcoin thrives: where people would prefer to throw in their lot with anonymous strangers instead of the world economy. It's gold-bug thinking reinvented for an age of fluid transparency and instantaneous transactions. And as such it's an excellent indicator of anxiety. Where you see Bitcoins in action you find a weird and heady mix of speculative angst, a fear of being left behind, and people who appear to have lost faith in institutions, who feel most left behind.
Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up >> Hacker News
And boy, are they frustrated:
from having studied this for many, many hours over many moons, is that what Apple is trying to do is fundamentally hard, if not entirely unfeasible. They're trying to replace a smart server with one that's dumb as a doorstop. More specifically, they're trying to emulate a CRUD web service with a file sync engine.
Conflict resolution is left up to individual clients, since the server doesn't do any "thinking". Likewise, there is no canonical, authoritative state of the store, since the server doesn't "think", only the clients do. Apple was hoping that by shoving a bunch of diffs of your database onto the server, that clients can reliably reconstruct a sane database by playing them back - except that multiple clients are updating the diffs simultaneously and there is no server-side conflict resolution.
Oh, and if stuff fails, there are no regular snapshot states to fall back to, because iCloud is a file store, not a database engine. Your whole store is now corrupt. Enjoy.
Bitcoin infographic >> Visual.ly
Infographic: how a Bitcoin transaction works. View at your own risk.
Donglegate: why the tech community hates feminists >> Wired.com
However, just because these points of view are equally visible both online and offline doesn't mean they're equally valid. Factual evidence simply does not support the idea that men are being oppressed and that women have the upper hand socially, legally, or economically.
Yet the myth of equality persists, since the technology industry considers itself a meritocracy where the "good" ones — for example, talented engineers and programmers — will rise to the top regardless of nationality, background, race, or gender. When considering the dismal numbers of women (as well as African-American and Latino men) in tech, the meritocratic presumption is that these minorities aren't good at or interested in technology; otherwise, there would be more of them.
If we admit there are structural barriers to entry, and a culture that actively discourages and women and men of color from participating, then it logically follows that technology is not a meritocracy. And this threatens many dearly held beliefs of technology workers: It suggests those at the top aren't there because they're the best, but because of hard work and privilege.
From which many other conclusions logically flow.
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