tech

→ The Swansea measles outbreak

→ The Swansea measles outbreak:

It’s sad, and scary, that anti-intellectual, anti-science superstition about common vaccines has made it more likely that our children will contract and spread these diseases than when we were younger. Anytime we make the world less safe against easily solvable problems, we need to seriously evaluate what we’re doing.

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[No arg, but this is a question of trust. And it proves just how little trust many people have that “everything is just fine”, when clearly for reasons not well understood something seems to have gone wrong. I can’t say and won’t whether there’s a correlation between autism and vaccines, or the preservatives used in long shelf life vaccines or anything else. But no one trusts them when they say “it’s fine” because in too many cases it turns out not to be accurate.]

Source: Marco.org

Forecast

Forecast:

Rather than cram these things into Dark Sky, we decided to do something grander: create our own full-featured weather service from scratch, complete with 7-day forecasts that cover the whole world, beautiful weather visualizations, and a time machine for exploring the weather in the past and far future. You can access it from all of your devices, whether it be your laptop, iPhone, Android phone, or tablet.

[Dark Sky has been amazingly accurate. And this looks like the the online weather forecasting service I’ve been waiting for… well worth the visit to Forecast, and dropping it on your phone or browser. For those of you who do stuff in the outdoors this will ease the planning burden… (the open source Skycons is a nice touch as well.]

Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader – Marco.org

Baby steps toward replacing Google Reader – Marco.org:

Like it or not, the Google Reader API is the feed-sync “standard” today. Until this business shakes out, which could take years (and might never happen), this is the best way forward.

We need to start simple. We don’t have much time. And if we don’t do it this way, the likely alternative is that a few major clients will make their own custom sync solutions that won’t work with any other company’s clients, which won’t bring them nearly as much value as it will remove from their users.

Let’s get Reeder and NetNewsWire to support the Hostname field ASAP so we can build alternative services to back them. Once they support it, other clients will need to follow from the competitive pressure of checklist feature comparisons. The result will be the easiest, fastest solution for everyone and a healthier ecosystem for feed-sync platforms.

[Seems like a good idea.]

★ Ceding the Crown

★ Ceding the Crown:

Samsung has had a remarkable run over the last few years. They make more money — profit, not merely revenue — from selling mobile phones than Google makes for all of its businesses combined. But by any measurable means other than market share what they’ve achieved is the number two spot, behind Apple. You can reasonably make the argument that they’re on their way to unseating Apple, that the momentum lead belongs to Samsung. (I would disagree, but cede that it’s possible.) But no facts today suggest that it has already happened.

But that’s how news reporters increasingly are treating the state of the industry. The desire for the “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned. It’s reported as true simply because they want it to be true. They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.

[It’s crazy? No?]

Source: Daring Fireball

Google: “There has been a shift in our thinking…”

Google: “There has been a shift in our thinking…”:

Above all, despite many examples to the contrary, Google appealed to manifest impartiality: its search results were algorithmically derived, untouched by human biases and thus fair. The list of grandiose promises and statements made by Google that turned out to be false and hypocritical is uncomfortably long. Unfortunately for the rest of us, regulatory capture being what it is and the rare penalties being laughable for a $275 billion company, there isn’t much of a black cloud left over Google to worry about, especially under the current U.S. administration.

[Shifting reality is ok. Making sure that everyone’s awareness remains in sync seems to be slippery slope toward evil.]

Source: counternotions

Facebook’s shark-jump advertising moves

Facebook’s shark-jump advertising moves:

I’ve been told by adtech professionals that a funny thing about their business is that Google and Facebook are terribly jealous of each other: Google is jealous of Facebook because Facebook can get especially personal with its users, while Facebook is jealous of Google because Google can advertise all over the Web. And yet both are missing real human relationships with their users, because the users are not customers. They are the products being sold to the companies’ real customers, which are advertisers.

What’s keeping Facebook from offering paid services to individuals — or Google from offering more than the few they do? Here’s one reason I got from a Google executive: it costs too much money to serve individual human customers. This isn’t verbatim, but it’s close: If our users were actually customers, we would have to support them with human beings, and we don’t want to make less than $1 million per employee (Yes, that was the number they gave.) And yet, all advertising-supported businesses could benefit a great deal by having at least some of their users become subscribers.

[What a mess…]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

→ Google admits WebM infringes H.264 patents

→ Google admits WebM infringes H.264 patents:

As usual, “open” is just lip service. And it works. It works damn well. You wouldn’t believe the amount of nasty feedback I’m going to get for writing this from people who think Google is contributing, out of the goodness of its heart, to the grand benevolent technical cause of whatever “open” means to each of them as they happily hand over more and more of their privacy and data to the very closed vaults of the world’s biggest advertising company.

[Well said.]

Source: Marco.org

Hypercritical: The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor

Hypercritical: The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor:

Halo cars also push car makers to their limits. Engineering teams must use all their skills and all their powers to create the very best car possible. This exercise inevitably leads to the exploration of new technologies. The failed experiments are forgotten, but the winners eventually find their way into more prosaic cars from the same manufacturer.

[Apple was never in “halo” product business. The MacPro used be the machine you needed to run big screens. It was the machine you needed when you were doing stuff like ProTools with a bunch additional processing cards, or large image Photoshop with giant screens. Of course, for most of us those things can be happily accomplished with the *laptops* Apple produces. Now I think it entirely possible that Apple can create a desktop machine that is priced for meer mortals but is extensible enough for that sliver of true high end that still exists. Whether or not that will add to a halo type device is in the eye of the “car guy”.]

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good:

And this is where our story takes a turn, toward a ramification that dwarfs every other issue raised so far on Google Glass. Yes, the glasses look dorky – Google will fix that. And sure, Glass forces users to be permanently plugged-in to Google’s digital world – that’s hardly a concern for the company or, for that matter, most users out there. No. The real issue raised by Google Glass, which will either cause the project to fail or create certain outcomes you may not want (which I’ll describe), has to do with the lifebits. Once again, it’s an issue of experience.

The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:

There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

[Mark nails it.]