Pinboard (guardiantech)

From July 2008: iPhone: The bet Steve Jobs didn’t decline >> Counternotions

guardiantech — 2014-06-02T01:30:30+00:00

From July 2008, pointing out (among other risks for Apple of building a mobile phone) that

If you fail, it would be a public fiasco of the first order, likely lopping off at least a third of your market cap and seriously eroding financial sector confidence in your company’s ability to grow and diversify beyond the Mac and the iPod businesses.

What's also interesting, looking back, is that "a huge and risky bet" is precisely how Apple staff have described the iPhone - both in personal recollections and in court cases (against Samsung).

Man behind the first computer password: it’s become a nightmare >> WSJ Digits blog

guardiantech — 2014-05-26T19:16:53+00:00

In the early 1960s, Fernando Corbató helped deploy the first known computer password. He acknowledges the password’s flaws — there seems to be a major breach each month — and the public’s frustrations, having to remember strings of code for dozens of digital accounts. “Unfortunately it’s become kind of a nightmare,” he says. But at 87 years old today, he isn’t sorry.

Then again, think how many times he's had to change his passwords.

A love letter to Twitter >> Stopdesign

guardiantech — 2014-05-09T22:20:08+00:00

Doug Bowman is leaving Twitter, and this is his farewell blogpost:

As Biz says, Twitter is not a triumph of technology, it is a triumph of humanity. It all comes back to people like you and me who use the service, and what we continue to do with it. There is no other platform that offers what Twitter offers, and there is no other service that continuously reveals the collective pulse of our planet.

Quite a contrast to his farewell letter to Google in 2009:

I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

July 2006: Odeo releases Twttr >> TechCrunch

guardiantech — 2014-03-21T22:32:38+00:00

Michael Arrington in July 2006 (four months into Twitter's incarnation as Twttr):

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.
If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.
But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder – what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling?

The comments (look for the ones marked "eight years ago") are gold.

What’s next for the makers of Candy Crush Saga? >> The New Yorker

guardiantech — 2014-03-14T14:06:50+00:00

James Surowiecki:

In the gaming industry, success has always been highly unpredictable. Parker Brothers, according to a history of the company, found that there was no secret formula: products that tested well often flopped in the marketplace, while “an in-house flop could become the hit of the industry.” It says something that King, which has been making games for a decade, had profits of just $7.8m in 2012. The company didn’t make eighty times more in 2013 because it had cracked a code; it just caught lightning in a bottle.
It’s true that a few companies—Disney, say—have been able to consistently ride the Zeitgeist. But King has the misfortune to be in an industry where this is especially difficult, simply because it faces so much competition.

The illustration is especially wonderful.

The 17 designs that Bell almost used for the layout of telephone buttons >> The Atlantic

guardiantech — 2013-09-10T05:36:40+00:00

Megan Garber:

If you look at the number buttons on a phone - smart, cell, landline, what have you - those number buttons will feature, almost inevitably, a uniform layout. Ten digits, laid out on a three-by-three grid, with the tenth tacked on on the bottom. The numbers ascending from left to right, and from top to bottom.
This layout is so standardized that we think about it as almost inevitable. But the layout was, in the 1950s, the result of a good deal of strategizing and testing on the part of the people of Bell Labs.

See the diagram: it's amazing what was considered. They also identified those with lower error rates, and those where it was quicker to key the number.

The surprising history of the pencil >> Brain Pickings

guardiantech — 2013-06-25T05:49:20+00:00

An interesting question is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometers and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometers, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick.

Fact of the day. (Or most days.)

London in 1927 >> Vimeo

guardiantech — 2013-05-17T22:00:27+00:00

Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Friese-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving.

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

Eighteen and Abandoned >> The New Yorker

guardiantech — 2013-04-11T15:31:14+00:00

Matthew JX Malady (that's him):

when I recently logged into an old Yahoo e-mail account I still use for ordering flowers and entering N.C.A.A. basketball-tournament bracket contests, a message from “Google Account Recovery” greeted me with a cold reminder of my past e-mail-related shenanigans. It offered no salutation, cutting right to the chase: “To initiate the password-reset process for your eighteen@gmail.com Google Account, click the link below.” I followed the instructions and found myself in the in-box of a Gmail account that had not been checked since George W. Bush was serving his first term as President and “Thefacebook” was something available only to certain college kids. What I discovered was a treasure trove of bizarre and ridiculous e-mail messages.

The puzzle is how many of those apparently real emails were some subtle form of spam or phishing.

Back when not every question had an answer >> Hyperorg.com

guardiantech — 2013-04-02T20:46:56+00:00

David Weinberger:

My program was going to look for anything between a “[[" and a "]]”,, which would designate an in-place end note. The manual assumed I knew more than I did, what with its file handlers and strange parameters for what type of file I was reading and what types of blocks of data I wanted to read.
I spent hours and hours and hours, mainly trying random permutations. I was so lacking the fundamental concepts that I couldn’t even figure out what to play with. I was well and truly stuck.
“Simple!” you say. “Just go on the Internet…and…oh.” So, it’s 1982 and you have a programming question. Where do you go? The public library? It was awfully short on programming manuals at that time, and S-Basic was an oddball language. To your local bookstore? Nope, no one was publishing about S-Basic. Then, how about to…or…well…no…then?…nope, not for another 30 years.
I was so desperate that I actually called the Boston University switchboard, and got connected to a helpful receptionist in the computer science division (or whatever it was called back then), who suggested a professor who might be able to help me. I left a message along the lines of “I’m a random stranger with a basic question about a programming language you probably never heard of, so would you mind calling me back? kthxbye.” Can you guess who never called me back?

In the Clouds: Inventing Chromebook >> Jeff Nelson

guardiantech — 2013-03-23T22:15:32+00:00

An ex-Googler:

Here's a few interesting tidbits about the invention of Chromebook.
First, Chromebook was initially rejected by Google management. In fact I wrote the first version as early as July 2006 and showed it around to management. Instead of launching a project, the response was extremely tepid. My boss complained, "You can't use it on an airplane." Actually, you could as, under the covers, it was still a bare-bones Linux distribution and could execute any Linux program installed on it.
Second, Google OS was not originally written for Chrome or called "Chrome OS". The first versions were all based on Firefox. When I wrote the first version in 2006, Google had not yet started developing a web browser of its own, nor did the name "Chrome" exist as a Google product. Chrome versions followed in 2007, after internal beta test versions of Chrome started to be passed around inside Google.

Engadget 1985 >> Engadget

guardiantech — 2013-03-20T11:50:30+00:00

All the tech news that was fit to print in 1985. True in every way.

An early tale of the internet >> NYTimes.com

guardiantech — 2013-01-18T23:27:59+00:00

Peter Hart:

SRI International, where I was the director of the AI Center, was periodically visited by US government auditors. One day I got a call from an internal contracts administrator telling me to expect such a visit– in other words, I was supposed to be on my best behavior.
The government auditor soon appeared in my office, armed with a no-nonsense demeanor and a bulging briefcase. He pulled up a chair, pulled a file from his briefcase, and without preamble said in an authoritarian tone of voice, “Dr. Hart, it says here that you’ve received 2,493,786,916 packets of bits. Is that correct?”
I certainly hadn’t expected that question, but I was on my best behavior, so I politely replied, “Well, I’m not sure of the exact number, but that sounds about right.”

Now read on.

The web we lost >> Anil Dash

guardiantech — 2013-01-01T22:16:04+00:00

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.
So here's a few glimpses of a web that's mostly faded away.

Late to linking to this, but it's good to think about as the new year dawns.

Fun Places on the Internet (in 1995) >> Paleofuture

guardiantech — 2012-12-15T21:49:40+00:00

Matt Novak:

The Internet was a precious commodity to me then — a metered experience that I had to track diligently so as not to waste a single minute. That is, until AOL offered flat-rate unlimited monthly billing in 1996.

Just look at that scenery!

Night and the City >> Eurogamer.net

guardiantech — 2012-10-23T05:12:10+00:00

"One of the nicer tech stories I've read over the weekend," says @ponk2k (who provided the link). The story of someone playing LA Noire with his dad; it is.

Slideshow: A History of the Smartphone in 20 Handsets >> Reg Hardware

guardiantech — 2012-10-17T16:43:06+00:00

With the news that world smartphone usage total has passed the billion mark in 20 years, we present 20 of the most important smartphones from the past 20 years.

Nice gallery. Wonderful what you can do when you're not constrained by having 350 words for a print article. (Thanks @angusthebull for the link.)

'It smelled something like pizza': how the iPhone was made >> Slate Magazine

guardiantech — 2012-09-12T05:30:53+00:00

Good compression of the rambling testimony from the Samsung-Apple trial to tell the tale of the iPhone's genesis:

Jobs himself was particularly taken by two features that Bas Ording, a talented user-interface designer, had built into the tablet prototype. One was “inertial scrolling”—when you flick at a list of items on the screen, the list moves as a function of how fast you swipe, and then it comes to rest slowly, as if being affected by real-world inertia. Another was the “rubber-band effect,” which causes a list to bounce against the edge of the screen when there were no more items to display. When Jobs saw the prototype, he thought, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” he told the D Conference in 2010.

History of the MP3 by Jonathan Sterne, reviewed >> Slate Magazine

guardiantech — 2012-08-29T20:58:33+00:00

And there is the famous story of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” the song used by audio engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg to fine-tune the MP3 encoder. Brandenburg was putting the finishing touches on his compression algorithm when he heard Vega’s hit playing down the hallway. “I was electrified,” he later explained. “I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.”
He listened to the song thousands of times, eventually figuring out a way to convert it into an MP3 while preserving the warmth of her performance. As reporter Hilmar Schmundt remarks, in an article noted by Sterne: “When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”

An unexpected ass Kkicking >> Blog Of Impossible Things

guardiantech — 2012-08-19T17:12:34+00:00

Joel Runyon thought the old man who sat next to him and dissed his MacBook Air was just another person with an opinion. Turns out he wasn't.

Twitterrific firsts >> furbo.org

guardiantech — 2012-08-17T22:12:31+00:00

A few of the ways in which third-party apps paved the way for Twitter - including the first use of "tweet" to describe an, er, tweet. Other things (including using the @ and # systems) were first used by users, not Twitter itself.

From the archives: Apple's chief in the risky land of the handhelds >> New York Times

guardiantech — 2012-08-14T12:34:14+00:00

Obviously, this comes from the time when Steve Jobs was alive. But see if you can guess which year this story appeared before you click the link.

And now come signs that Mr. Jobs means to take Apple back to the land of the handhelds, but this time with a device that would combine elements of a cellphone and a Palm-like personal digital assistant.
Mr. Jobs and Apple decline to confirm those plans. But industry analysts see evidence that Apple is contemplating what inside the company is being called an ''iPhone.''

Kim Scheinberg's answer to: Apple Inc.: How does Apple keep secrets so well? >> Quora

guardiantech — 2012-06-11T07:38:32+00:00

Amazing story. The finish:

I've lost track of the many reasons that have been given for the switch to Intel, but this I know for sure:
No one has ever reported that, for 18 months, Project Marklar existed only because a self-demoted engineer wanted his son Max to be able to live closer to Max's grandparents.

Quora, proving its worth.

All-time US box office takings by film, adjusted for ticket price inflation >> Box Office Mojo

guardiantech — 2012-06-06T22:17:52+00:00

OK, it's not tech, but it's fascinating to see how good stories tend to win here. See if you can guess which is top before you click. (Hint: it's not Titanic.)

The World's first computer password? It was useless too >> Wired.com

guardiantech — 2012-02-01T11:56:40+00:00

This may not come as a surprise. But it goes back a long way.

Browse your old tweets >> Twimemachine.com

guardiantech — 2011-12-01T21:52:28+00:00

"Use TwimeMachine to easily browse through your old tweets (max 3200). Read what you said ages ago." Depending how often you tweet. But it does show up Twitter's lack of a good archive.

A brief history of Palm >> Pocket-lint

guardiantech — 2011-04-21T05:26:18+00:00

It's not that brief, but Pocket-Lint argues that if Samsung was copying anyone, it's Palm. And so was Apple with the icon arrangement.