Linked List: June 1, 2015

Monday, 1 June 2015

Web Decay Graph 

Tim Bray:

I’ve been writing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way over a million words, 12,373 hyperlinks. I’ve noticed that when something leads me back to an old piece, the links are broken disappointingly often. So I made a little graph of their decay over the last 144 months.

It’s absolutely depressing how many of the links from the early years of Daring Fireball now point to 404’s. I’ve long thought about hiring someone to go through my archive and try to fix all those broken links by updating them to point to the Internet Archive’s cache of their contents.

The Asus ZenWatch 2 

Abdel Ibrahim, writing for Watch Aware on the fresh-off-the-rip-off-express Asus ZenWatch 2:

It get worse, though. The video they’ve put together resembles so much of the video Apple used to debut the Apple Watch it’s not even funny. Seriously, just watch it.

Looking at The Verge’s photo gallery, the bands don’t even fit the watches well. Asus managed to make it look like a shameless rip-off and a complete piece of junk at the same time. Bravo.

Golf Tips From Steve Jobs 

Regarding Avie Tevanian’s promotion from SVP of software engineering to Chief Software Technology Officer, a relevant excerpt from chapter 16 of Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs:

“Steve kept people in a box,” says Avie. Tevanian had talked to his boss several times about his itch to do something new, and in 2003, Steve had moved him into a role as the company’s “chief software technology officer.” It was unquestionably a promotion, but it turned out to be a job without much of a portfolio. Tevanian found himself with little concrete responsibility. He felt out of the loop, and realized that his new role would not work. “Being a pseudo individual staff person working for Steve doesn’t work, because he already has all the answers. He didn’t like it when I would be in a meeting where he was reviewing a product, and I would have an opinion. He just didn’t like it. And he grew to not like that I could be a senior person like that without having day-to-day responsibilities to deliver something,” he says.

“Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, says that he worried about Tevanian leaving, and urged Steve in 2004 to figure out another challenge to keep the brilliant software engineer at Apple. “Steve looked at me,” Cook remembers, “and goes, ‘I agree he’s really smart. But he’s decided he doesn’t want to work. I’ve never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn’t want to work hard to work hard.’ ” Another time, shortly after Steve had learned that Tevanian had taken up golf, Steve carped to Cook that something was really amiss. “Golf?!” he thundered incredulously. “Who has time for golf?”

The TSA Is Even More Useless Than You Thought 

David Kravets, writing for Ars Technica:

Transportation Security Administration screeners allowed banned weapons and mock explosives through airport security checkpoints 95 percent of the time, according to the agency’s own undercover testing.

ABC News reported the results on Monday, but Ars could not independently confirm them. According to ABC News, a Homeland Security Inspector General report showed that agents failed to detect weapons and explosives in 67 out of 70 undercover operations.

Just shut them down.

(I was going to link directly to the ABC News page, but in Safari on my Mac, it doesn’t let me scroll and the video autoplays, so screw them.)

Topolsky on Android M’s Now on Tap 

Speaking of Josh Topolsky, his new column for Bloomberg is on Google’s Now on Tap, announced last week at I/O:

This is a major move for two reasons. The first is that it really brings Google back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds your digital life together. The web has thrived and grown in no small part because of Google’s ability to track, organize, and understand all of its disparate pieces. Now it’s able to do the same thing with every app running on your phone. It allows Google to get back into the search game by speaking the common language of apps. It gives the company a second life with access to user behavior and needs.

That’s a great way to think about Now on Tap. Google rose to prominence/dominance through their superior ability to (a) index the web and (b) make sense of what they’ve indexed. Everyone gets this — it’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that Google’s ability to index the web matters less in a world where people spend more and more of their time in native apps. Now on Tap is a step toward Google indexing the content we see in native apps.

Yours Truly Guesting on Josh Topolsky’s New ‘Tomorrow’ Podcast 

Speaking of podcasts I appear on, I’m on the latest episode of Josh Topolsky’s Tomorrow. I always dig talking with Josh, because we disagree — to some degree — on so many things. Fun show.