Marissa Mayer in Tech Executives See Paths for Women, Especially Geeks - WSJ.com. This impresses me, too.
We’ve now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who’ve worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they’re that much older.
The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative. It’s hard to say how much is because big companies made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first place. But certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I’ve seen it burn off.
Daniel Bogan runs The Setup, a series of interviews about what hardware and software people use to get their jobs done. I answered his questions for the Flickr code blog a while back. Here’s my answer to the question ‘What is your dream setup?’
What would be your dream setup?
We’re at a really fascinating point in hardware development right now, which makes it difficult to answer this question. My knee-jerk answer is that I want the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer combined with an iPad combined with the Cintiq combined with, you know, a Cray supercomputer or something else equally powerful.
The problem is, really, handwriting recognition; if you’ve ever tried to use the iPad with an external keyboard, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Switching from typing to writing or drawing and back is a pain. Regular notebooks allow you to draw and write without changing your hand position, which doesn’t seem like a luxury until you try actually working on a tablet and then find you need to input text.
Steve Jobs may think that styli are inelegant, but the fact is, using a pen to write or draw on paper is both comfortable and easy; it’s just not as fast as typing. Most people are content with inputting data via a keyboard, and this makes sense for a lot of jobs: marketing, business development, finance, and programming, for example. But for the designers, there’s a big gap between starting the creative process and executing the product design *because* it’s much easier to sketch out your ideas on paper, with a pen, than a computer. And this is unfortunate; in the future, we should have computers that allow us to keep contexts for different stages of product development. The iPad and ThinkPads are steps in the right direction, but they’re still awfully clumsy, which is why, in part, people criticize the iPad as a product for mere consumption.
I want a Moleskine that is a blindingly superfast computer. That’s my dream setup.
—Timoni
Douglas Adams on How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, via @kevinmarks
Wow! Douglas Adams wrote this paragraph ten years ago, and it exactly summarizes why I find it extremely odd/uncomfortable that Twitter is being treated like a news source (and positioning itself as a news source, if their homepage redesign is any indication). Sure, you might found out the news from Twitter, but it’s just a bunch of people talking. There’s no journalist code of ethics involved.Should Starbucks ban laptops?, in CNET
There’s a general assumption in articles like these that it would be better—not just financially beneficial to coffee shops, but flat-out better, say, for humanity—if folks socialized more, and typed less, in coffee shops. This assumes a few things.
I think that most folks who have worked on laptops in coffee shops for any period of time would know most, if not all, of these assumptions aren’t true. The coffee shops that I have known and loved best, the ones with the strongest community, are those that allow people to comfortably do whatever it is they’d like to do at that coffee shop.
‘scuse the language, but I kind of feel the same. Actually, the variety of malware and recently-discovered vulnerabilities has been increasing (job security for me?), and the only solution I can see to protect the normal user is education.
What’s an 0-day?
So some guy calling himself “Hacker Croll” stole hundreds of confidential documents from the Twitter founders, and he sent copies to TechCrunch. That blog’s founder, Mike Arrington, says the documents include people who interviewed at Twitter, floorplans, and security passcodes.
So of course once Mike (a former lawyer) saw this was some heavy illegally-gotten shit, he stopped reading, right?
Nope! He and his team read the docs all night. And MIKE PLANS TO PUBLISH SOME OF THEM.
I’ve never liked TechCrunch, but before now it was mostly personal preference or distaste. Now it’s major. IF YOU EVER, EVER, EVER READ OR LINK TO TECHCRUNCH, YOU ARE NOW SUPPORTING A SITE THAT UTTERLY DISRESPECTS ALL PRIVACY AND RULE OF LAW. THEY ARE SCUM.
Oh come on. This is the a ridiculous tempest in a teapot. If anyone believes this is rare, unique, or even remotely unorthodox, you may as well stop reading the news. How do you think we learned about yellowcake, or the pentagon papers, or that Apple is planning a tablet PC? Someone, somewhere, broke a law to learn these things or leak these things. This is how news WORKS. Do you think Steve Jobs like forgot to get a factory to sign an NDA or just called up the China Times and said “hey we’re gonna build a tablet PC. Don’t tell anyone I told you?” Do you think that however the WaPo learned about Cheney’s plans for an assassin squad was LEGAL? The shit was TOP SECRET. Someone broke the law to tell them. The only difference here is that Arrington is being on the up and up of where he got the info, and letting us judge the motivations of the hacker as well. And to call them illegally-obtained documents is disingenuous. Arrington didn’t break any laws. They landed in his inbox. — rickwebb
Agree with rickwebb & lauraglu, although for my money, Techcrunch is doing the best it can to be open and it’s laudable they’ve decided to only publish the “newsworthy stories.” They’re not being slimy, but they’re certainly being treated as if they are. People really like to hate Techcrunch.That said, Mike no longer gets to question why people spit in his face. —lauraglu
Thanks to digital technology, designers can squeeze so many functions into such tiny containers that there is more computing power in a basic cellphone…than at NASA’s headquarters when it began in 1958. That is why the appearance of most digital products bears no relation to what they do.
Take the iPod Shuffle. How could you be expected to guess what that tiny metal box does by looking at it? There are no clues to suggest that it might play music. Like most other digital devices, the Shuffle is (literally) an inscrutable box of tricks. Apple’s designers conceived the latest model as a subtle joke on the demise of “form follows …” It is so small, half the size of its predecessor, that they could make it in the same shape as one of those pins that clip on to clothing. This means the Shuffle’s form does reflect one of its functions, albeit the very minor one of attaching itself to a jacket, but gives no hint as to its more important role of storing and playing hundreds of songs.
[ The Demise of ‘Form Follows Function’, in the New York Times ]
Most conceptual or fantastic ‘designs of the future’ have heralded this change for quite some time—generations, in fact. There seems to be a general assumption that, as humanity prospers and has time to focus on the creation of beautiful objects, designs will be streamlined. Forms will be functional, but cleverly so: designs will move from intuitive to intuiting. There are tons of examples of this:
Broadly speaking, it’s only in dystopian futures or societies (Terminator, Brazil, War of the Worlds, Alien, Blade Runner, Metropolis, Ghost in the Shell) that future objects are primarily functional. And usually they’re a visual indication of turmoil, indicating humanity hasn’t yet reached that state of happy utopian resource-sharing philosophical bliss that results in skylines like this.
So many questions.
—Timoni
![[ This is not the correct way to to reblog. ]
506 reblogs at last count, and not a single direct link to the source of this photo. Folks, the point of a reblog is easy attribution and sourcing. Link to posts in blogs, not the blog itself. Give dates, times and locations, if they’re available. The steps from one reblog to another don’t matter so much as the original post.
Here’s the source post of this fantastic photo, if you’re curious. It’s an interior shot of a villa near Gordes, in France.](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/timoni/114025739/1/fklSMu12Uo09qpuiz0JgYOq6)
[ This is not the correct way to to reblog. ]
506 reblogs at last count, and not a single direct link to the source of this photo. Folks, the point of a reblog is easy attribution and sourcing. Link to posts in blogs, not the blog itself. Give dates, times and locations, if they’re available. The steps from one reblog to another don’t matter so much as the original post.
Here’s the source post of this fantastic photo, if you’re curious. It’s an interior shot of a villa near Gordes, in France.
The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines.
…
But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like.
[ Mr X, Lead IA Guy at American Airlines, from Dear Dustin Curtis ]
It strikes me that websites may be a good visual indicator of the internal workings and philsophy of a company. It certainly shows more about a company’s processes and values than, say, their letterhead or offices.
Also, Mr. X makes an excellent point about redesigns on large sites. They are a _huge_ pain.
benw:
From the front page of Amazon.com:
Wireless Reading Just Got Bigger
Hmm.
…
Really? What were they think… oh!
- The wireless Amazon Kindle for ‘wireless reading’! Now carry books wherever you go!
“Wireless” was a poor word choice on Amazon’s part. The awesome thing about the Kindle is not so much the wires or lack of them (you still have to plug it in to charge it, anyway), but that you can download the book you want, anytime. There’s no wait, and you don’t have to go to a bookstore or pay for shipping, either! Finish one book and you can download the next at three in the morning! On a bus! In China! Without internet!
That’s the concept Amazon is trying to push with the repeated use of the word “wireless,” because “wireless” can mean either “something without wires” or “something transmitted through the air with energy”. The latter is the less obvious meaning, but the only one that makes sense in Amazon’s marketing here. Unfortunately for them, it’s easy to misinterpret—and, clearly, easy to mock.
San Francisco Meetup Thursday June 11th with a special guest from the East Coast. Location is not set yet but we’re aiming for walking distance to the Moscone Center and the nearby BART. Any suggestions?
Sweet! I’ve been wanting to meet Marco.
—Timoni
Twitter recently made some changes to their @-replies that mean you wouldn’t see my replies to any of the above folks unless you were following them as well. Why did they change this from a user setting to a mandatory filter? From the Twitter blog:
[R]eceiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.
Strongly put, but wrong, Twitter. Exploring one-sided conversations is my primary way of finding new, interesting followers and overhearing fascinating conversations I otherwise wouldn’t be privvy to. “One-sided fragments” aren’t undesirable to me or other Twitter users that previously opted in to see all followees’ @-replies; it’s the jam & cake to my regular Twitter stream.
Biz said they’ve been studying users’ “usage patterns and feedback”, and I have no doubt they’ve done their homework. I suspect this decision was similar to Netflix’s earlier move to eliminate user profiles back in September. It’s an honest mistake: if only a small number of users use a feature, it’s reasonable to think they may not miss it when it’s gone. But Netflix reversed their decision once they realized how important the feature was to a small number of users, citing listened to the “well-reasoned, sincere responses of loyal members who very much value this feature.” Diplomatically put, and incidentally the reason my roommate and I didn’t cancel our Netflix account.
At this point, only a few hours after the changes, there’s been a lot of negative feedback from the Twitterverse. A lot. The fact that the official blog post has been rewritten from its earlier breezier (and more condescending) tone indicates that Twitter underestimated the reaction they’d receive.
It’s an easy fix: change things back, Twitter. If you’d like to do us one better, take a tip from Troy’s Twitter Script and give us inline context for @-replies. Here’s a visual example of how it easily removes the whole “one-sided [conversation] fragments” without removing functionality:
Lovely.
—Timoni
