Author: garrick

Fast Fooled

“What is the Fast Web? It’s the out of control web. The oh my god there’s so much stuff and I can’t possibly keep up web. It’s the spend two dozen times a day checking web. The in one end out the other web. The web designed to appeal to the basest of our intellectual palettes, the salt, sugar and fat of online content web. It’s the scale hard and fast web. The create a destination for billions of people web. The you have two hundred twenty six new updates web. Keep up or be lost. Click me. Like me. Tweet me. Share me. The Fast Web demands that you do things and do them now. The Fast Web is a cruel wonderland of shiny shiny things.” – Jackie Cheng

EFF’s Computer Owner’s Bill of Rights

  1. Installation of arbitrary applications on the device.
    If the user wishes to, they should not be limited to what is included in one particular proprietary “app store.”
  2. Access to the phone OS at the root/superuser/hypervisor/administrator level.
    If consumers wish to examine the low-level code that is running in their pockets, to check for invasions of privacy, run the anti-virus software of their choice, join VPNs, install firewalls, or just tinker with their operating systems, phone and device companies have no legitimate basis for preventing this.
  3. The option to install a different OS altogether.
    If people want to install Linux on their iPhones, Boot to Gecko on their Windows phones, or just run a different version of Android on their Android phones, the company that sold them the hardware must not prevent them. Using a cryptographic bootloader to defend against malware is a fine idea, but there must be a way to reconfigure this security mechanism to (1) allow an alternative OS to be installed; and (2) to offer the same cryptographic protections for the alternative OS.
  4. Hardware warranties that are clearly independent of software warranties.
    Apple denies warranty coverage to users who have jailbroken their iPhones. While nobody is asking Apple to support jailbroken or modified software, it is inexcusable that the company threatens not to cover, say, a faulty screen, if the customer has chosen to modify the software on their device.

John Cleese on Creativity

“…You have to create some space for yourself away from [your usual] demands. That means sealing yourself off…” – John Cleese

Off

“Perhaps one of the biggest advancements technology can make in our lives comes when we realize the power of simply turning it off for a while.” – James Shelley

(ht patrickrhone)

Personally, I keep my phone not in my pocket, but in my bag with the rest of my connectivity gadgets. When it’s charging on the wall, there’s a pretty good chance its in Airplane mode and I’m elsewhere.

When the telephone was first introduced, it was a synchronous medium. Today – with voicemail, text messages, and the like, it is much more of an asynchronous medium. Giving us the power to use it on our terms.

Everything Was Breakin’

Neal Conan: “You had solar panels (on your sailboat) for electricity.”

Matt Rutherford: “I did, but they broke.”

Neal: “They broke?”

Matt: “One by one.”

Neal: “I think you had a Kindle for reading books.”

Matt: “I did. It broke in a storm.”

If there’s a better betrayal of the weakness of our modern, connected, age – it is this story. The tools we are so entranced by are quite fragile and weak. A stark contrast to the relentlessness of our own will to survive.

CD-ROMs Part 2

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital. Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica.” – Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review.