Linked List: March 18, 2011

Friday, 18 March 2011

TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests 

David Kravets, reporting for Wired:

The Transportation Security Administration is re-analyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results.

The TSA, which has deployed at least 500 body scanners to at least 78 airports, said Tuesday the machines meet all safety standards and would remain in operation despite a “calculation error” in safety studies. The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

Shocking.

Flash 10.2 for Android Shipped Today 

Sean Hollister, for Engadget:

First off, you don’t absolutely need a dual-core phone to take advantage of Flash 10.2 — Adobe VP Danny Winokur told us, and we confirmed in testing, that there are slight performance improvements on earlier devices too. With our trusty Droid 2’s 1Ghz OMAP3 chip, we saw a slight but noticeable boost in framerate when playing a YouTube trailer at 480p, which admittedly only took took that particular video from “unwatchable” to merely “fairly jerky.”

Sounds great.

With the Tegra 2-toting Motorola Xoom, however, 480p videos ran perfectly smooth, even as the tablet had trouble rendering 720p content as anything but a series of images.

Sounds great.

However, Adobe says even that will change soon, as this beta release doesn’t take advantage of full hardware acceleration — it’s actually turned off right now.

When will Flash not suck? The answer is always “soon”.

Felix Salmon on the NYT’s Pay Wall Pricing 

Felix Salmon:

Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.

The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.

I just don’t get the pricing, and I find it hard to believe there are many people willing to pay $455/year for digital access to a newspaper, no matter how good the newspaper is.

The New York Times Pay Wall 

I think it’s too expensive and too confusing: $15/month for unlimited web site access and smartphone app access; $20/month for the web and tablet app access; $35 for web, phone, and tablet access. (And they’re not really months — it’s a four-week billing cycle.)

Why not just $15/month for everything? Or $10/month for the website and an extra $5 or $10 for “apps”. The distinction between phone apps and tablet apps is just confusing. And The Times should get its software in order before charging extra for it. I might pay $5 extra per month for their iPad app — but not in its current state where it’s buggy, crashy, and too slow. I’m willing to pay for the NYT, but I don’t want to feel nickel-and-dimed.

The above is my take as a consumer and long-time daily reader of The Times’s journalism. Professionally, this pay wall is likely going to result in my linking to stories at nytimes.com far less frequently than I used to. They claim that referrals from blogs won’t count against your free article count:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.

But if they’re liberal in that regard, it’ll prove too easy to circumvent the pay wall. I sure hope this works out for them, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Talk Show, Episode 34 

Yours truly and Dan Benjamin, discussing SXSW, Netflix, Twitter’s move against new API clients, and the worst James Bond movie ever made, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Brought to you by two fine sponsors: Sourcebits and Audible.com.

Manton Reece: ‘Where Apple Went Wrong With Free Apps’ 

Interesting take from Manton Reece:

Apple is trapped by their original decision to shoulder the cost of free apps. They encouraged free apps and now they’ve got one band-aid on top of another — advertisements, in-app purchase, subscriptions — all trying to make free apps work for the App Store bottom line. These changes make developers nervous because all the power lies with Apple.

I don’t agree with Manton entirely, but I think he’s mostly right: free is hard.

A Plea for Baked Weblogs 

Brent Simmons:

And so, even in the year 2011, if your weblog gets Fireballed, there’s a good chance it won’t be able to handle it. That seems crazy. It’s not 1997 — it’s 2011.

It freaks me out that this is still an issue. Or, worse — sometimes it pisses me off a little, when I want to read something and I can’t. […]

I think the new technique web developers — or weblog developers, at least — ought to learn is static rendering: writing files to disk rather than building from a database on every request.

That’s how DF itself works — and has always worked — thanks to Movable Type’s default static publishing mode. I do run on a higher-end server today (thanks, Joyent), but software-wise, DF works exactly the same today as it did back in 2002, when it was serving 100 page views a day.

Ingredients 1.0 

Open source Cocoa developer documentation browser, by Alex Gordon and Jean-Nicolas Jolivet. Noticed it via Craig Hockenberry’s review of Xcode 4.

Jeff Carlson Reviews iMovie for iOS 

Jeff Carlson:

iMovie for iOS 1.2 could be the friendliest version of Apple’s video software yet, a welcome introduction to the process of turning raw video clips into movies that say more than just, “I pointed my camera at that place.”

Employee No. 8 

Chris Espinosa, on the 34th anniversary of his official start day at Apple:

Steve Jobs had been paying people out of the company checkbook, and not all that regularly. So Scotty lined folks up to make an official payroll. He picked employee number 7 for himself because he wanted it, and allocated the other 10 or so people in a nominally fair order. (I’m going to skip the legendary story of whether Steve Jobs is number 0 or 2 because I wasn’t there and have no direct knowledge.)

The reason I got number 8 was that Scotty did this in the middle of a weekday, and I didn’t get out of high school until 2:40. By the time Randy Wigginton and I got there the first five numbers were taken, so we got 6 and 8 respectively.

Netflix Confirms ‘House of Cards’ 

Netflix:

Hi, Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer here. We’re delighted to tell you that in late 2012 Netflix will be bringing to our members in the U.S. and Canada exclusively “House of Cards,” the much-anticipated television series and political thriller from Executive Producer David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. We’ve committed to at least 26 episodes of the serialized drama, which is based on a BBC mini-series from the 1990s that’s been a favorite of Netflix members.

AT&T Cracking Down on Unofficial iPhone Tethering Users 

OSXDaily reports:

Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs an additional $45 per month if they continue to tether. In the email, AT&T also notes that if customers discontinue the use of tethering, no changes will be made to their plan.

That’s not quite right. It’s not $45 “in addition” to whatever you’re paying for your data plan now — it’s $45 instead of your current data plan.

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee 

No surprise here:

We aren’t paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you’re not selling enough. We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

Google Translate for iPhone 

A month old, but I missed this when it was new. Jeff Richardson reviews the new Google Translate app for the iPhone:

For example, make sure the app is in English to French mode, press one button in the app, say to your iPhone “where is the train station,” and then a second later your iPhone displays “où est la gare” and you can tap one button to have that spoken in French so that the person in Paris can hear and understand you and point in a direction. You could even press one button to switch the translation from French to English, have the other person speak the answer in French, and then you can see the answer in English.

Life in a Solid State 

Khoi Vinh upgrades to an SSD:

It really is like getting a brand new computer.