Linked List: October 14, 2009

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

James Kwak, writing about Calvin Trillin’s “smart guys” theory on last year’s Wall Street collapse:

Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results.

That’s precisely what I meant about Trillin’s piece’s applicability to the difference between the old Microsoft under Gates (programmer), and the new Microsoft under Ballmer (sales guy). Ballmer is running a company whose products he doesn’t really understand.

The Lost Lesson of Instant Typing ★

Jens Alfke:

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it out in the next release.

I never mind instant updating when I use SubEthaEdit to collaboratively edit a text file, but I can’t think of a good reason Google Wave uses it other than the demo factor.

Disney Plans Extensive Overhaul of Mall Stores, With Design Input From Steve Jobs ★

Brooks Barnes, reporting for the NYT:

Mr. Jobs provided access to proprietary information about the development and operation of Apple’s highly successful stores, and Disney executives visited Apple’s research operation in Cupertino, Calif. Mr. Jobs, who declined to comment, also insisted that Disney build a prototype store to work out kinks, a costly endeavor that most retailers skip.

The company followed his advice, working for the last year on a full-scale, fully stocked store inside an unmarked warehouse in Glendale, Calif. The prototype was crucial to shaping an overall philosophy, Mr. Fielding said, noting that he discovered the shops needed more “Pixar-esque winks and nods.”

Apple did the same thing before opening its first retail store.

I Remember When It Used to Be Called ‘Fixing Bugs’ ★

Jim Dalrymple:

Apple has taken an unusual step in its efforts to stop groups from hacking its iPhone hardware — it changed the iPhone 3GS in mid- production.

The news of the modified iPhone 3GS BootROM was first reported on iClarified on Tuesday. The report noted that the new iPhone is no longer vulnerable to the so-called “24kpwn” exploit. As AppleInsider notes, it’s this exploit that hackers have used to jailbreak the iPhone. With the most recent update, they will have to find another way to hack the device.

The title of Dalrymple’s story is “Apple Ships Modified iPhone 3GS to Stop Hacking”. It wouldn’t seem unusual at all if the title were “Apple Fixes Exploitable Bug in Boot ROM”. The bugs exploited by jailbreakers aren’t sacred. They’re bugs.

Stay Out of the Middle ★

Director Brian Belefant on choosing projects:

You want my advice? Of course you do. Don’t aim for the middle. Make everything you can for nothing until something hits so big that Hollywood comes knocking.

I’d say this advice applies to more than just movies.

Wall Street Smarts ★

“If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.” So said a guy in a bar to Calvin Trillin.

I don’t want to spoil it, but I think the theory espoused by Trillin’s barmate applies to technology companies as well — e.g. Microsoft under Ballmer rather than Gates.

Petulance and the Prize ★

Garrison Keillor:

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.

Farhad Manjoo on Google Wave’s Complexity ★

Farhad Manjoo:

Live-typing illustrates Wave’s bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don’t need fixing.

Tracking Down Snow Leopard’s Apple Events Bug ★

Matt Neuburg on a devilish Apple events bug in Snow Leopard:

The bug sounds minor, but it is really very important because Apple events are crucial to so much of what goes on under the hood in Mac OS X, and in any case it has caused everyone’s scripts to break (whether written in AppleScript, rb-appscript, or anything else that sends Apple events). The underlying Apple event manager assigns a new return ID to every Apple event, and so sooner or later some Apple event is going to hit the magic FFFF value, and whatever sent that Apple event is going to error out, apparently randomly. You may even have seen such random errors on your machine without knowing it.

Seth Weintraub: Apple Is Building FM Tuner App for iPhone OS ★

I wasn’t even aware that recent vintage iPhones and iPod Touches had FM-tuning hardware.

(Sidenote 1: Why do so many of the sites reporting on this, including Weintraub at 9 to 5 Mac, decorate their article with a mock-up showing the iPod Nano’s FM tuner photoshopped onto an iPhone? See: Engadget, The iPhone Blog. There aren’t even any small-print disclaimers describing these mock-ups as artist’s renditions or whatever. Surely most casual readers of these sites are left with the impression that these are leaked screenshots of the actual app.)

(Sidenote 2: This scoop belongs to Weintraub. But yet TUAW gives credit to Engadget first, and Weintraub’s report at 9 to 5 Mac second. Crummy. Update: TUAW has changed the links in the post to make at least slightly more clear that 9 to 5 Mac is the original source for the story.)

Michael Dell Says Netbooks Disappoint Customers ★

They’re just cheap, small laptops.

App Store Non-Rejection Rejection of the Week: Trillian ★

Submitted 60 days ago, no response from Apple to date.