Month: December 2013

Hunting of the Snark

Hunting of the Snark:

So I’d think twice about deciding your online persona is “righteous asshole.” If it seems like a good idea, think two more times. You are not speaking truth to power. It is not a litmus test for determining your true friends. You are not guaranteed that only the “right” people will be pissed off. And you will build an audience that rewards you for being unkind—which makes it all too easy to cross lines you shouldn’t. When you get called on it, it’s too late to rip off your asshole mask and protest that’s not who you really are.

[Smack on.]

The kettle is talking to whom!?

Trust Me (I’m a kettle) – Charlie’s Diary:

And it’s not just keyboards. It’s ebook readers. Flashlights. Not your smartphone, but the removable battery in your smartphone. (Have you noticed it running down just a little bit faster?) Your toaster and your kettle are just the start. Could your electric blanket be spying on you? Koomey’s law is going to keep pushing the power consumption of our devices down even after Moore’s law grinds to a halt: and once Moore’s law ends, the only way forward is to commoditize the product of those ultimate fab lines, and churn out chips for pennies. In another decade, we’ll have embedded computers running some flavour of Linux where today we have smart inventory control tags—any item in a shop that costs more than about £50, basically. Some of those inventory control tags will be watching and listening to us; and some of their siblings will, repurposed, be piggy-backing a ride home and casing the joint.

The possibilities are endless: it’s the dark side of the internet of things. If you’ll excuse me now, I’ve got to go wallpaper my apartment in tinfoil …

[Know your sources folks, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And since I am one of those folks that for years has been waiting for all these devices to talk to each other for my good, it’s obvious that I’ll have to do stuff to make sure I understand how they’re doing what they’re doing and if anyone else has joined the party without my knowing.]

Screen Shot 2013 12 31 at 9 29 41 AM

The Surveillance Age

The Cassandra Version:

My hope — my expectation, even — for 2014 is that the fog starts to lift.

As much as I like using the fog metaphor, the thing about surveillance is that there is no actual fog. You can’t see it. It’s everywhere and gets in everything, and it still looks like a sunny day on the internet.

But still.

[Now that are our eyes are open, and we continue to add to the piles of data companies like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc. know about us and of course, the vast amounts of data the Government knows about us what do we do? As a technologist I have a few ideas of where I can make things better for some people. And that’s what I’m going to do.]

Glasshole?

★ Thoughts on Google Glass:

Imagine too, how such glasses would affect something like the proctoring of an exam. A cheater could use their glasses to read the questions (OCR) and give them the answers. It’s not practical to administer all tests within Faraday cages, and for some subjects, like math, you wouldn’t even need network access to facilitate the cheating: just the camera and HUD. ↩

[Up until this last paragraph of the footnote I was in agreement. I find the single use versions much more compelling than the walk about town version. Riding my bike with a HUD? Nice. Operating heavy machinery with an overlay of whatever’s important? Sure. Exam proctoring? Tests taken in a classroom? That’s not the future.]

screwed

2014:

There are industries of people throwing money at other people saying they’ve found a breakthrough way of doing X for Y, where X is Instagram and Y is something that couldn’t possibly be a dishwasher because that wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. There are companies like Everpix who try to fulfill what some other companies are promising and what we all want, but they run out of money. To the extent that they can’t survive because no one wants to pay and all the funding’s gone to Twitter-optimized coupon sites that don’t know five years in how to turn a profit, yeah, we’re screwed.

But we’re not screwed because no one wants to pay for anything and would rather file status updates during Christmas dinner. We’re screwed because no one dares to actually break the mold. No one wants to unhinge everything and fucking fix it. No one wants to stop making photo library apps for 2001 where it’s just cool that you can have those family photos on the computer or the photo sender app for 2006 where you can send pictures to people outside of the room(!) and make the photo library app that will be needed as everything will be going digital, everything will be kept forever and accessible from everywhere and no one will even remember there being a discussion about no one remembering paper copies or rolls of film.

I promised some ideas and there’ll be ideas, but I can’t do this alone. Stop wondering about what version numbers the next versions of Windows and OS X will have. Start wondering about how the hell we’re even getting along with what we have.

[+1]

Source: Brent Simmons

ongoing by Tim Bray · More Things About TV

ongoing by Tim Bray · More Things About TV: Said by “Bob” in the comments:

If con­sumers are going to be given 4k or 8k, then to “see” that res­o­lu­tion they need to have the frame sub­tend a large angle at the eye. Either they sit very close to the screen or they have very large screens. Viewers will re­sist this so long as im­ages con­tinue to be com­posed for small-screen view­ing.

[ I think this is well said, but I suspect there’s an age related aspect to this. Noah cannot possibly sit/stand/play close enough to the screen regardless of size. (I grant that the largest screen in the house is a 42″ diagonal). Still I doubt that a larger screen would change his desire for immersion and ability to ignore the pixels. So at some collection of distance/acuity/lighting etc. a 4k 80″ screen may not have value, but it certainly does for other cases.]

‘Today, the Process Is Faster. It’s Your Brain, a Button, Then Millions of Reactions.’

4 Easy Ways to Grow Your Twitter Followers. by Mark Saldana

Steve Martin: ‘Today, the Process Is Faster. It’s Your Brain, a Button, Then Millions of Reactions.’ quoted by DF who then writes:

“…after a misquotation of a joke he tweeted was spread by Salon. Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” It’s a lot faster now.”

Martin goes on to say in his original post:

Comedy is treacherous. I used to try out jokes in clubs and the audience’s feedback would tell me when I had crossed a line, or how to shape a joke so it is clear. Today, the process is faster. It’s your brain, a button, then millions of reactions. But it’s my job to know.”

[When you edge up against the line, which is an essential job of comedy atmo, the modern social networks raise the cost of being wrong to an incredible level. The part that everyone needs to know is that the world is listening, that you can’t really delete things, and the consequences for making a mistake could well be far in excess of the level of the transgression. Tweets are generally treated as the expression of an individual and so the “blow back” is personal and vindictive.]

Source: Daring Fireball

So why did she get fired?

A Twitter Message About AIDS, Followed by a Firing and an Apology – NYTimes.com:

By Saturday afternoon, Ms. Sacco was no longer an employee at IAC. The company’s statement also said:

There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally. We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core.

[Yes, I know why she got fired. But I’m askin’ “why did she get fired”. If they know her to be a “decent person at core” then shouldn’t they have forgiven this misstep? Nah, it’s clearly expedient for the company to remove a social liability… Jobs are complicated things but it always concerned me that most companies have no moral compass of their own. Might there not have been an alternative to “off with her head?”

And BTW, don’t join a mob, you cannot control the outcome and it’ll rarely be what you expect.]

Shameless Carriers

Shameless Carriers:

I don’t know if Stephenson is speaking out of cultural deafness or cynicism, but he’s obscuring the point: There is no subsidy. Carriers extend a loan that users pay back as part of the monthly service payment. Like any loan shark, the carrier likes its subscriber to stay indefinitely in debt, to always come back for more, for a new phone and its ever-revolving payments stream.

I was told as much by Verizon. In preparation for this Monday Note, I went to the Palo Alto Verizon store and asked if I could negotiate a lower monthly payment since Verizon doesn’t subsidize my iPhone (for which I had paid full price). Brian, the pit boss, gave me a definite, if not terribly friendly, answer: “No, you should have bought it from us, you would have paid much less (about $400 less) with a 2-year agreement.” My mistake. Verizon wants to be my loan shark.

In the meantime, AT&T has finally followed T-Mobile’s initiative and has unbundled the service cost from the handset. If you pay full price for your smartphone, an AT&T contract will cost you $15 less than with a subsidized phone on a 2-year agreement. This leads one to wonder how long Verizon can keep its current indifferent price structure.

All this leaves carriers with conflicted feelings: They like their iPhone salesman but, like short-sighted bosses who think their top earner makes too much money, they angle for ways to cut commissions down.

On the other side, Apple’s teams must be spending much energy finding ways to keep generating high monthly revenues for their “victims”.

[This system remains quite a mess. Almost as bad as the same folks supplying us our Internet connectivity….]

Jim Hall, Jazz Guitarist, Dies at 83

Jim Hall - Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Jim Hall, Jazz Guitarist, Dies at 83 – NYTimes.com:

Jim Hall, a jazz guitarist who for more than 50 years was admired by critics, aficionados and especially his fellow musicians for his impeccable technique and the warmth and subtlety of his playing, died on Tuesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 83.

The list of important musicians with whom Mr. Hall worked was enough to earn him a place in jazz history. It includes the pianist Bill Evans, with whom he recorded two acclaimed duet albums, and the singer Ella Fitzgerald, as well as the saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Paul Desmond, the drummer Chico Hamilton and the bassist Ron Carter, his frequent partner in a duo.

But with his distinctive touch, his inviting sound and his finely developed sense of melody, Mr. Hall made it clear early in his career that he was an important musician in his own right.

He was an influential one as well. Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and John Scofield are among the numerous younger guitarists who acknowledge him as an inspiration. Mr. Hall, who never stopped being open to new ideas and new challenges, worked at various times with all three.

[Looking at the list of musicians mentioned here, it as impossible to ignore Jim Hall as an influence while taking Jazz and guitar playing seriously 30+ years ago. He was incredibly melodic, musical, and minimalist and remains refreshing to listen to all the time. Sure Pat, Bill, Sco, Mike and others were great influences, but they all pointed back to other players, especially non-guitarists. but one guitar player they all mentioned was Jim Hall. Finest Kind.]