Linked List: March 1, 2010

Monday, 1 March 2010

Y Combinator Looking for iPad Startups 

Y Combinator:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Scrollback in Instapaper Pro 2.2 

Imagine sweating every single detail like this. That’s what it’s like to develop great iPhone apps.

Pwn2Own 2010: Interview With Charlie Miller 

From an interview with Charlie Miller, winner of the Pwn2Own contest two years running:

Q: In your opinion, which is the safer combination OS + browser to use?

That’s a good question. Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7 with no Flash installed. There probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!

Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce 

From the days when Apple’s about boxes gave credit to developers.

Update: Fireballed, but cached here.

PS3s Unable to Access PlayStation Network Due to Clock Bug 

Patrick Seybold, PlayStation Blog:

We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.

Attic: iPhone App for Forgotten Albums in Your Library 

Great idea, clever interface. $1 well-spent. (Via Beautiful Pixels.)

Kontra’s Case Against Opera Mini on the iPhone 

Kontra:

It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different for Opera Mini to proxy the entire web through its own proprietary servers. Yes, you read it right. Opera gets in between you and every single URL out there, from your bank to your school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it.

Here’s the pertinent entry from Opera’s FAQ:

Q: Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?

A: No. If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full Web browser such as Opera Mobile.

I think it’d be better if Opera Mini simply refused to handle HTTPS requests on its own.

AT&T Says Its Network Will Be Ready for SXSW This Year 

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic’s Redesign 

Andrew Sullivan:

I understand that advertisers like “verticals” to pitch certain kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers with style. I also know in this media climate how vital advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat, that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius here, congrats to all involved.

But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity.  I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous “channels” gain some editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg aren’t treated as random fodder — anchors! — for “channels”. I believe in the Atlantic as a place for writing. The redesign seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect that individual writers deserve.

If you’re not a regular reader of The Atlantic’s online content (if you’re interested at all in politics and national affairs, I recommend it highly), prior to their new redesign, they hosted about half a dozen individual writers’ weblogs. They looked and felt like separate blogs under The Atlantic’s parent umbrella. The redesign throws all but Sullivan’s together into a hash.

Count me in with Sullivan that this is, from a reader’s perspective, a change much for the worse.

(Noteworthy: Sullivan states that his Daily Dish accounts for 55-60 percent of The Atlantic’s online traffic; hence the exception.)

iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader 

Shawn Blanc on the state of iPhone feed reading apps. In short, there are a bunch that are pretty good, but not one that’s great. (I’m still using NetNewsWire, but I keep trying all the others when they release new versions.)

Magazines Double Down on Print 

Rafat Ali, writing for Paid Content:

Five of the leading publishers — Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media, and Meredith — have banded together for this “power of print” campaign, reminiscent of a similar campaign by newspaper publishers a few years ago, when the world was slightly rosier. […] One ad says: “The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

Sure, that’ll do it. Also, I did not know this:

And of course who else but the troglodyte Jann Wenner to “orchestrate” this campaign, the guy whose magazine Rolling Stone can’t figure out how to keep a domain name up; and oh wait, who outsources the running of the mag website to RealNetworks, until late last year. That Wenner. Good luck, the other four.

Sure enough, look at this “sign up for our newsletter” page on Rolling Stone’s web site:

This site is operated by RealNetworks, Inc. (“Operator”) in partnership with Rolling Stone L.L.C.

Jon Stokes on the Apple A4 

Jon Stokes:

But it turns out that the A4 is a 1GHz custom SoC with a single Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. The fact that A4 uses a single A8 core hasn’t been made public, but I’ve heard from multiple sources who are certain for different reasons that this is indeed the case. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can’t.)

Clifford Stoll Pooh-Poohs the Web in 1995 

Clifford Stoll, writing for Newsweek, did not foresee a bright future for the Web in 1995:

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Update: It’s not that the problems Stoll pointed out weren’t very real in 1995. It’s that he saw them as unsurmountable rather than as opportunities. They’ve mostly all been solved.