Linked List: March 2, 2017

Thursday, 2 March 2017

How Poor Typographic Design Contributed to the Oscar Fiasco 

The first problem is that the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant in charge of the cards was distracted tweeting photos from backstage, and handed Warren Beatty the wrong card. But this piece by Benjamin Bannister is right — the design of the cards themselves made it hard to tell at a glance that it was the wrong card.

Update: I forgot to mention that the design of the envelopes was even worse than that of the cards — small gold type on a deep red background, very hard to read.

Polygon Reviews the Nintendo Switch 

Polygon:

Compared to the Wii U on its merits, the Switch is a slam dunk. It takes the basic concept of the Wii U, of a tablet-based console, and fulfills the promise of it in a way Nintendo simply wasn’t capable of realizing in 2012. It’s launching with a piece of software that, more than anything in the Wii U’s first year, demonstrates its inherent capability of delivering what Nintendo says is one of the Switch’s primary missions: a big-budget, AAA game that exists across a handheld device and a television-connected portable. The hardware lives up to its name in how easily and smoothly it moves between those two worlds, in how dead simple it all is to make something pretty magical happen.

Amazon Reveals Cause of S3 Service Outage: a Typo 

Amazon:

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.

That’s one hell of a typo.

We are making several changes as a result of this operational event. While removal of capacity is a key operational practice, in this instance, the tool used allowed too much capacity to be removed too quickly. We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future.

A lot of system administrator tools are written without the equivalent of guardrails. Think about how much collective damage has been done from mistakes using the rm command alone.

Samsung’s Leader Is Indicted on Bribery Charges 

Choe Sang-hun, reporting for The New York Times:

The head of Samsung, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges on Tuesday, becoming one of the most prominent business tycoons ever to face trial in South Korea.

The indictment of Lee Jae-yong, the company’s de facto leader, came at the end of a special prosecutor’s 90-day investigation of a corruption scandal that has already led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. When huge crowds took to the streets in recent months to demand that she leave office, they also called for the toppling of Mr. Lee and other corporate titans.

Mr. Lee was arrested on Feb. 17, a dramatic development in South Korea’s struggle to end collusive ties between the government and the family-controlled conglomerates, or chaebol, that dominate the economy.

Twitter Now Lets You Auto-Mute Eggs and Other Sketchy Accounts 

Napier Lopez, reporting for The Next Web:

In that vein, you’ll now have the option to filter out posts from accounts without a profile picture (the ones with the default “egg” photo), as well as unverified emails or phone numbers. It’s a feature that’s been requested for some time, as it’s previously been easy for trolls to leverage new or unused accounts to harass people.

I suggested just this back in December.

Rob Cox’s Brutal Assessment of Snap’s IPO 

Rob Cox, writing for Reuters:

Investors have effectively just done what no self-respecting person ever should: wear sweatpants in public. With Snap’s $3.4 billion initial public offering they have simply given up giving a damn. They handed their money over to an immature company and in the process abrogated their rights to fair treatment, good governance and reasonable valuations. If the $24 billion self-styled “camera company” run by a 26-year-old fails to achieve its ambitions, shareholders have only their capitulated selves to blame.

Snap founder Evan Spiegel’s disappearing-message application has many things going for it. One of these attributes — its virtual inaccessibility by anyone over the age of 30 — may have helped its IPO. Few seasoned portfolio managers wagering on the maker of rainbow-vomit photo filters will have properly vetted the product, though they will have perhaps gauged its popularity by monitoring their children’s mobile-data usage.

Tell us what you really think.

Ming-Chi Kuo Says All 2017 iPhones Will Have Lightning Connectors 

Ming-Chi Kuo:

New 2H17 models may all support fast charging. We believe all three new iPhones launching in 2H17 will support fast charging by the adoption of Type-C Power Delivery technology (while still retaining the Lightning port). A key technical challenge lies with ensuring product safety and stable data transmission during a fast charge. In order to achieve that goal, we think Apple will adopt TI’s power management and Cypress’s Power Delivery chip solutions for the new iPhone models. We note the OLED version may have a faster charging speed thanks to a 2-cell L shaped battery pack design.

As noted by MacRumors, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro already offers USB 3.0 speed and fast charging via a USB-C-to-Lightning cable. It looks like The Wall Street Journal botched their story Tuesday.

YouTube TV: $35/Month ‘Skinny Bundle’ of TV Networks to Launch in Spring 

Peter Kafka, reporting for Recode:

Like other new digital TV services, YouTube TV won’t offer every network that cable TV services provide; instead it will feature a “skinny bundle,” composed of the four broadcast networks — Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC — along with some of the cable channels related to the broadcasters. Which means you’ll also get networks like Fox News, ESPN and Bravo; YouTube execs says the base package will include about three dozen channels.

Sports are still a problem:

Also be aware that all of the digital TV services still have gaps in their coverage, usually around pro football: Deals — or lack of them — with local affiliates may affect your ability to watch your local NFL team play next fall. And none of the streaming TV services will let you watch football on your phone, because those rights, for now, are exclusive to Verizon.

YouTube TV’s pricing will make it hard/impossible for YouTube to turn a profit, given the carriage fees it has to shell out for the four big networks, but YouTube doesn’t seem concerned about that: Right now it wants to work on turning some of its billion-plus users into paying subscribers.

Seems crazy that Google, a company famous for providing its services free of charge, would have a paid bundle of video content before Apple does.

Uber Has Hired a Law Firm to Investigate Susan Fowler Rigetti 

Susan Fowler:

Uber names/blames me for account deletes, and has a different law firm — not Holders — investigating me. I have hired bakerlp.com

Last week she wrote:

Research for the smear campaign has begun. If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report asap.

I don’t know who is doing this or why. If someone contacts you, please send me their contact information immediately.

The message to other women at Uber is clear: stay silent or we will come after you. Uber claimed last week that it was “in no way involved” with these phone calls investigating Fowler Rigetti’s personal life.

Update: Uber has issued a statement:

“The law firm Perkins Coie is looking into the specific allegations raised by Susan,” Uber said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “They will report into Eric Holder, who is responsible for the overall investigation into Uber’s workplace practices. To be clear: they are investigating Susan’s claims, not Susan personally.”