Linked List: July 21, 2009

Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Claim Chowder: Mike Elgan on the Zune and Soapbox 

Mike Elgan, in a piece titled “Why Microsoft’s Zune Scares Apple to the Core” in September 2006:

Microsoft will make the movement of media between Windows, Soapbox and the Zune natural and seamless. […] Apple faces the prospect of competing not with the Zune alone, but with a mighty Windows-Soapbox-Xbox-Zune industrial complex.

Soapbox, of course, is the video sharing site Microsoft killed today.

Apollo 11 Source Code 

Yes, yes, we all know that one iPhone has many times more raw computing power than the entire Apollo program. But here’s how they made it work. (Via Lambda the Ultimate.)

Matt Gemmell’s iPhone Development Emergency Guide 

Excellent fundamental overview of iPhone software development.

Microsoft Closing Would-Be YouTube Rival 

CNet:

Microsoft is closing Soapbox, its onetime video-sharing rival to Google’s YouTube, the company said Tuesday.

I don’t recall ever having heard about this service.

Apple Reports Third Quarter Results 

Revenue and profits are up, Mac unit sales are slightly up, iPod sales are slightly down, and iPhone sales are way way way up.

(On the conference call, Apple stated that iPod Touch sales are up year-over-year, so regular iPod sales must be way down. They don’t usually break out iPod sales by model.)

United Arab Emirates Blackberry Update Was Spyware 

Odd story from the BBC:

An update for Blackberry users in the United Arab Emirates could allow unauthorised access to private information and e-mails. The update was prompted by a text from UAE telecoms firm Etisalat, suggesting it would improve performance.

Instead, the update resulted in crashes or drastically reduced battery life.

Snow Stack — 3D CSS Visual Effects Demo 

Amazing demonstration of 3D CSS transformations from Charles Ying. You need a recent WebKit nightly build (or a recent seed of Snow Leopard) to get the full effect — otherwise, you can watch the movie. What makes it amazing is that it barely budges your CPU meter — almost all the computation is done on the GPU. Source code, and a CoverFlow implementation for MobileSafari, are here on Google Code.

More info, and several other demos, are on the WebKit blog.

Update: Fireballed at the moment; here’s the main link in Google’s cache.

Alex Payne: ‘Fever and the Future of Feed Readers’ 

Thoughtful essay from Alex Payne on Shaun Inman’s new Fever web-based feed reader and the state of feed reading software, including the big question of whether it’s even a good use of one’s time to bother tracking a pile of feeds in the first place.

(For what it’s worth, though, the feeds at DF are more popular now than ever.)

Newsrooms vs. Newspaper Companies 

Mark Bernstein argues that newspapers aren’t overstaffed:

The heavy staffing of traditional newspapers was not the fault of management bureaucracy. It was the fault of technology and distribution.

But he’s talking about the newsrooms. The vast number of reporters and editors and support staff focusing on producing the actual content of the papers. And of course there are a lot of them, and the operation looks unnecessarily large compared to a web-only publication, because a newspaper is a hell of a thing to have to fill up with content 365 days a year.

I’m saying that for however many people there are working in a newspaper newsroom, there are several times more people working for the company in non-editorial positions. The size of the newsroom staff is the least of their problems.

NYT: In 2003, U.S. Withheld Data Showing Cellphone Driving Risks 

The U.S. Department of Transportation withheld information showing just how dangerous it is to use a mobile phone while driving:

That letter said that hands-free headsets did not eliminate the serious accident risk. The reason: a cellphone conversation itself, not just holding the phone, takes drivers’ focus off the road, studies showed.

The research mirrors other studies about the dangers of multitasking behind the wheel. Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content.

And:

But “my advisers upstairs said we should not poke a finger in the eye of the appropriations committee,” he recalled. He said Mr. Flaherty asked him, “Do we have enough evidence right now to not create enemies among all the stakeholders?”

Those stakeholders, Dr. Runge said, were the House Appropriations Committee and groups that might influence it, notably voters who multitask while driving and, to a much smaller degree, the cellphone industry.