tanya77:

themattsmith:

You guys.  Japanese CGI re-enactment of the Tiger Woods saga.

Sigh. The Japanese Chinese (yikes! how could we get that wrong?) really are five years ahead of us, aren’t they?

Americans like to think there is something about their culture that’s especially conducive to innovation—the open geography and frontier spirit; a flexible economy with limited interference by government; the Protestant work ethic; an immigrant workforce, constantly renewed by the next generation of talent from around the world. Other countries can perhaps emulate some of these traits, but none can replicate the creative cocktail that is America.

That might be true today. But could it be that American achievements reflect the past more than predicting the future? It’s important to remember that many of the metrics that place the United States so far ahead are actually lagging indicators. Nobel Prizes tend to be given to scientists in their 70s, toward the end of their productive lives. What’s happening among scientists in their 30s? Who’s making the discoveries today that will receive Nobel Prizes four decades from now?

Fareed, making us nervous.

Well?

Lyons on the future of Apple:

Back in 1984, Apple leapt way ahead in the PC market when it released the original Macintosh, the first popular computer to employ a graphical user interface. It took Microsoft six years to come up with something that could compare to the Mac, in the form of Windows 3.0. Six years! For all that time, Apple had the market to itself. Nevertheless, Windows took over the world and now holds more than 90 percent market share, while Apple squeaks by with less than 5 percent worldwide.

Cut to the mobile phone market, today. In June 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a device that was so far beyond everything else in the market that even now, two and a half years later, nothing can beat it. To be sure, Nokia and Research in Motion still hold a greater share of the smartphone market than Apple does, but their aging software platforms look obsolete next to Apple’s.

The question is, will Apple do with the iPhone what it did with the Mac? Will it leap out to a technological lead and then find a way to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory? Or has Apple learned from its previous experience and figured out a way to turn its superior design and wonderful technology into market domination?

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.

From Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful New Yorker takedown of the SuperFreakonomics proposal to combat climate change by building a big hose.

Yeesh. Also, We Will Be Much Nicer In Our Reviews From Now On

ncroal:

The Dark Side Of Yelp: http://is.gd/4MkmQ

Apparently, It's All Steve Ballmer's Fault

Microsoft has become a bit of a joke. Yes, its Windows operating system still runs on more than 90 percent of PCs, and the Office application suite rules the desktop. But those are old markets. In new areas, Microsoft has stumbled. Apple created the iPod, and the iTunes store, and the iPhone. Google dominates Internet search, operates arguably the best e-mail system (Gmail) and represents a growing threat in mobile devices with Android. Amazon has grown to dominate online retail, then launched a thriving cloud-computing business (it rents out computer power and data storage), and capped it off with the Kindle e-reader. Microsoft’s answers to these market leaders include the Zune music player, a dud; the Bing search engine, which is cool but won’t kill Google; Windows Mobile, a smart-phone software platform that has been surpassed by others; and Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing service, which arrives next year—four years behind Amazon.

How did this happen? How did Microsoft let tens of billions in revenue (and hundreds of billions in market capitalization) slip through its fingers? Hassles with antitrust regulators distracted Microsoft’s management and made the company more timid. But the bigger reason seems to be that in January 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO. It’s been downhill ever since.

—Lyons, on the fall of MSFT

Tumblr's "Read More" feature

nerdshares:

If you haven’t yet heard, Tumblr is experimenting with a “Read more” feature to truncate lengthy posts on your dashboard (or rather, give users the option to truncate their posts to make them suitable for dashboard viewing). But I was disappointed to find that once you click “Read more,” you’re directed away from your dashboard to the individual blog post; this seems like it might actually discourage the people who would read a longer, text-y post because it might mean losing their places in their dashboard reading. Doesn’t it make more sense for “read more” to reveal the rest of the post on your dashboard? Users who aren’t interested in the post can just scroll past, and those who are can read the entire entry without having to leave the one page where I suspect most people do their reading.

(Old-school bloggers: Does anyone remember how LiveJournal’s “Read more” feature worked on your “Friends” page? Did clicking direct you to the individual post?)

We assume this feature is more aimed at the people reading the post on the forward-facing blog, rather than in the dashboard. Still, we fully support this idea, and wish for an implementation like 538 does.

Found in the press room of the official Windows 7 launch event in Manhattan: a reminder of why we’re all very, very glad to be rid of Vista.

William Cheswick Helped Invent Internet Security. He'd Like to Say He's Sorry.

Nick Summers writes:

It’s a hot afternoon in July on the AT&T Labs campus in Florham Park, N.J., and William Cheswick, on staff as a principal researcher, has been asked to open the summer lecture series on any topic of his choosing. Cheswick is a polymath, an inventor, and a hacker, but he is best known as a network-security god; he wrote the book, literally, on firewalls, coined the term “proxy server,” figured out how to map the Internet. The auditorium is filled with graduate students and career researchers with terminal degrees, eager to hear whatever Cheswick dispenses. Upstairs, in and around his office, lie all manner of breakthrough ideas—for strapping wireless Internet boxes onto airplanes, not for the passengers aboard but the people in flyover country beneath; for arranging thumbnails of every frame of famous movies into gigantic 54-inch-by-5-foot murals, fit for a modern art museum; for unraveling the backup Internet architecture of Iran. But Cheswick doesn’t want to talk about that. Today, in front of all these bright minds, Cheswick wants to talk about something truly radical. He wants them to change their passwords.

As I wrote in last week’s issue of NEWSWEEK, there is a growing consensus among Internet security experts that the way we secure our stuff online is a shambles, and that innovation in the space is long overdue. Professors at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere in academia are leading the way, but─how to put this diplomatically?─the field is known more for magnetic tape than magnetic personalities. That’s where Cheswick comes in.

Barnes & Noble Wants to Crush Amazon's Kindle. And It Just Might Work.

Weston Kosova writes:

There is a lot of buzz that Barnes & Noble will release its anticipated e-reading device tomorrow. If the usual rumor sites are to be believed, it will have an e-ink screen, like Amazon’s Kindle, and it will have built-in wireless so you can buy books over the air, like the Kindle. It may do the Kindle one better with a touchscreen, and possibly Wi-Fi, and maybe some limited way of sharing books with other e-readers.

Maybe it will be better than the Kindle. Maybe it will be pretty much the same. Gizmodo posted some photos of the thing this week. It looks just fine. There is the customary hype over the device─you know, whether it’s a “Kindle killer,” etc.

But the truth is, as long as it isn’t a complete disaster, it doesn’t really matter. Barnes & Noble is clearly out to get Amazon, but it’s also clearly not counting on this device alone to do it. Instead, while the Kindle, and the Kindle 2, and the Kindle DX  have been getting all the attention, B&N has been quietly sneaking up to steal Amazon’s lunch.