Linked List: June 2, 2010

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

Answers From AT&T on the New iPhone Data Plans ★

Good look at the details of the changes from Erica Sadun at TUAW.

Blown Call Ruins Armando Galarraga’s Perfect Game ★

Two outs in the ninth inning of a perfect game by Armando Galarraga, and first base umpire Jim Joyce blows the call on what should have been the final out of a perfect game. For a perfect game I say you give the pitcher the call on a truly close play, but this wasn’t even close — the runner was out by a full step. A travesty.

HP CEO Mark Hurd: ‘We Didn’t Buy Palm to Be in the Smartphone Business’ ★

Uh, what?

Jackass of the Week: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson ★

iPhone customer sends two emails in two weeks to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson; gets phone call from AT&T’s Executive Response Team and “a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter”.

Analytics and Unannounced Products ★

Matt Drance on Steve Jobs’s D8 comments regarding detailed app analytics and privacy.

Walled Gardens ★

Neven Mrgan:

I’m assuming we’re supposed to compare this approach to the freer alternatives such as community gardens and city parks. Ignoring for a moment the fact that these gardens are also regulated by serious restrictions on what one can and can’t do, it still puzzles me that the “walled garden” is presented as an obviously undesirable structure.

Jason Snell on Jobs’s D8 Appearance ★

Good summary

Why Obama Should Put BP Under Temporary Receivership ★

Robert Reich:

It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped.

How to Check Your AT&T Data Usage ★

Great tip from Jeff Gamet.

Wired’s iPad App: Pictures of Text ★

Joe Clark on the severe shortcomings of Adobe’s “digital viewer technology”, as presented in the Wired magazine iPad app:

There’s no live text, meaning there’s no search. It also means there’s no accessibility on the first computers that are accessible by default if you the developer do no extra work at all. (Follow the spec exactly and your app is accessible right away.) Think of how much effort it takes to blow an opportunity like that.

No copy and paste, either.

Smokescreen — Pure JavaScript/HTML Flash Player ★

Kind of amazing — a Flash player written in JavaScript by Chris Smoak. Here’s Simon Willison’s description:

It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

BP’s Dismal Safety Record ★

ABC News:

BP’s safety violations far outstrip its fellow oil companies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the “egregious, willful” violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Steve Jobs Introduces the Death Star ★

Hilarious.

Objective-C Moves Into Top 10 of Tiobe Programming Language Index ★

Up from #39 one year ago.

Sarah Palin, Punctuator Extraordinaire, Blames Environmentalists for BP Oil Spill ★

This, from the woman who just two months ago called for the Obama administration to allow for more offshore drilling and loosen environment regulations. “drill,baby,drill” indeed. (Via TPM.)

BPGlobalPR Billboards ★

“Some of BPGlobalPR’s tweets, in billboard format.”

Google Chrome for Mac Disregards Accessibility ★

Yet another way that Chrome for Mac fails to support important Mac OS X technologies:

Despite being built on the open source WebKit HTML rendering engine, which itself provides accessibility support for the Mac OS X platform with VoiceOver, Google’s final release provides no accessibility to web content whatsoever. Indeed, apart from menus and a handful of standard controls, Google has apparently not given any consideration to accessibility in Chrome.

(Thanks to Joe Clark.)

Nice Report From Monocle on The Impossible Project ★

The company that brought back Polaroid instant film.

‘Not Going to Let It Slide’ ★

Jim Dalrymple has assembled a slew of clips from Steve Jobs’s interview at D8 last night. One of many interesting quotes:

When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got advice from people who said ‘you gotta just let it slide, you shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property and they tried to extort you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world, is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that.

The extortion angle: Gizmodo refused to return the unit to Apple without a written acknowledgement that the device was Apple’s, so that they could publish it, and Brian Lam’s email to Jobs strongly suggested that Gizmodo would do this again if they weren’t granted better access.

What’s the “core value” at play here, though? “Nobody fucks with us”, perhaps.

AT&T Changes Data Plans, Claims iPhone Tethering Is Coming at OS 4 Launch ★

They’re switching to two plans: $15/month for 200 MB, and $25/month for 2 GB. In the latter plan, each gigabyte of overage costs just $10. Sounds fair. And, finally, one year late, official support for iPhone tethering, for an extra $20/month. If you have a current “unlimited” plan, you can keep it if you want.

Personally, I’ve used about 2 GB total on my iPhone over the last four months, about 500 MB per month on average. I could blow past that easily, though, if I made heavy use of tethering — like, say, using it in lieu of $15/day hotel Wi-Fi for a week. These new rates aren’t cheap, but they seem reasonable, especially the overage charges. Sprint, for example, charges $50/GB over your limit.

This also means that people who think they can get by with 200 MB per month can cut their monthly iPhone bill significantly.

‘A Review of Sex and the City 2 by Someone Who Doesn’t Know Anything About It’ ★

Tim Siedell:

First off, ladies, I get it. It’s your Star Wars. The opening credits make your tummy tickle the same way the Star Wars theme, to this day, gives me a boner. I understand.