Linked List: May 19, 2010

Wednesday, 19 May 2010

Kontra:

Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.

What Happens When You Upgrade an HTC Hero to Android 2.1? ★

HTC:

Text and Picture Messages
Text and picture messages will be deleted with this software update. You can back up text and picture messages by forwarding them to an email address.

Open the Messaging application

Tap and hold on the desired text or picture message

Tap Forward

Enter an email address then tap Send

Applications
Applications will be deleted with this software update. You will need to re-download the desired applications from the Market after this update completes.

Investor Dave McClure at I/O: ‘Open Is for Losers’ ★

Anthony Ha, writing for VentureBeat:

Paul Graham of incubator Y Combinator took up the question again when asked about the viability of building a website that works on multiple phones through their mobile browsers versus native applications that are built for specific platforms like the iPhones. Graham said he hopes that mobile websites can win.

“I’m very afraid of a world in which we are all Steve Jobs’ slaves,” Graham said. “If anything can save us, it might be Chrome.” When Costolo asked whether he would invest in a company building for the iPhone versus Google’s Android platform, Graham answered, “Of course iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.”

Walt Mossberg Reviews the Sprint Evo 4G ★

Walt Mossberg:

My verdict: The HTC EVO 4G, when used on Sprint’s 4G network, offers the highest consistent downstream data speeds I have ever seen on a cellular network. It also has a number of other strong features: a front-facing camera for video chatting, and the ability to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot (for an extra fee of $30 a month) that can simultaneously connect up to eight laptops or other devices to the Internet.

However, the data speeds I got in my tests weren’t spectacular, or anywhere close to the typical maximum Sprint claims, even in Baltimore, where the company’s 4G network is mature. And, when using 4G, the EVO’s battery runs down alarmingly fast. In my tests, it didn’t last through a full day with 4G turned on. The carrier, in fact, is thinking of advising users to turn off the 4G network access when they don’t think they need it, to save battery life. This undercuts the whole idea of faster cellular speeds.

Life at a Foxconn Factory in China ★

Liu Zhiyi reports after having worked undercover for 28 days at a Chinese Foxconn factory, where Apple (and other) devices are assembled:

When chatting with them, I often struggled to respond, as I felt I was ridiculously fortunate. They actually envied those who could take a leave due to work injury, while casually joking about how their station’s been toxicated. When talking about their colleagues’ suicidal jumps, there was often a surprisingly calm reaction, and sometimes even a banter would be made about it, as if they were all outsiders.

‘I Want Choice, but Only if I Agree With Your Choice’ ★

Thomas Fitzgerald responds to Ted Landau:

I think Ted’s problem, like that of many analysts/bloggers/journalists/geeks etc on the issue is that they’re confusing fundamental flaws with not liking something. People like Ted don’t like the closed nature of the App store, but that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally flawed, or a lack of choice.

It occurs to me that the App Store’s restrictions and control are to this coming mobile era what Windows’s inferior user interface was to the PC era: something that offends some critics to a degree such that they will insist for years, despite the success and popularity of the platform, that it’s a fatal flaw that will ultimately doom it.

Apple to Keep the ‘Pro’ in Final Cut Pro ★

Jim Dalrymple:

According to an AppleInsider report, the Final Cut Studio team has been told to refocus its efforts “to more closely match the needs of the majority of its customers.” That would mean Apple would target customers moving to Final Cut Studio from the company’s more basic iMovie application, instead of continuing to offer more high-end features designed for video professionals.

But Apple said that’s not the case.

“Final Cut Pro is the first choice for professional video editors, and we’ve never been more excited about its future,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans told CNET. “The next version of Final Cut is going to be awesome, and our pro customers are going to love it.”

Google Storage for Developers ★

Now in beta — or, in Google-speak, “labs” — a service from Google to compete with Amazon S3.

Google Font Directory ★

Google:

The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.

The project is in collaboration with Typekit.

‘Undocumented’ Android APIs ★

Transcript of slide 34 from the “Beginner’s Guide to Android” session at Google I/O today:

Arrogance

Don’t use undocumented APIs

Seriously. Don’t use undocumented APIs

That should be easy advice to follow, since Andy Rubin told us that Android doesn’t have any private APIs:

A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t.

That’s Funny ★

Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard:

The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264.

As Arnold Kim quipped, it’s funny how companies like Mozilla are now open about how crappy Ogg Theora is now that Google has open-sourced VP8. E.g., here’s Christopher Blizzard just four months ago:

On the quality side what we’ve been able to do at Mozilla, with the help of the rest of the Xiph community, is to show that even though Theora is based on older, royalty-free technology, most people can’t really tell the difference between a video encoded with a decent Theora encoder and a video encoded with H.264.

Google’s Summary of Day One at I/O ★

Tomorrow is Android day.

‘You Complainers! Are You Saying People Shouldn’t Be Warm?!’ ★

So glad that BoingBoing has picked up Tom the Dancing Bug.

Technical Analysis of VP8 From an x264 Developer ★

Jason Garrett-Glaser:

But first, a comment on the spec itself.

AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.

The WebM Project ★

Google has open-sourced the VP8 video codec:

WebM includes:

VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license

Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec

a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

A bunch of companies are listed as supporting WebM, including Mozilla, Opera, and Adobe. There are two big ones that are missing though.

CBS Legal Department Sends Cease and Desist to 48 HR Magazine ★

David Carr:

In an editor’s note, the collective said that they wanted to test out a theory of the case that new technologies can produce analog glory: “We all want proof that it doesn’t take a bunch of money and lawyers to make something great. And you know what? It doesn’t.”

Well, yes and no. On May 11, Lauren Marcello, the assistant general counsel at CBS sent a cease and desist letter, noting that “CBS is the owner of the rights in the award-winning news magazine television series, ‘48 Hours,’ and its companion series, including ‘48 Hours Mystery,’” adding later in the letter, “your use is unlawful and constitutes trademark infringement, dilution and unfair competition …” along with a lot of other complicated, vaguely threatening legalese.

Everyone should buy a copy of issue zero to make up their own minds.

Androinica: ‘Google Blames Android Battery Woes on User Practices and Poorly-Designed Background Apps’ ★

Andrew Kameka:

When asked about Android’s weak battery life at the Google Zeitgeist forum, Google co-founder Larry Page said that if anyone is not getting a full day’s worth of battery, there’s “something wrong.” Page then went on to suggest it’s probably user habits and third-party apps causing battery woes. “When there is software running in the background, that just sort of exhausts the battery quickly,” said Page.

Update: Fireballed. (Guess which CMS it’s running?) Here it is in Google’s cache.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea on Data Lock-In ★

Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system.

Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers.

Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it.

How many other web sites can say that?