Oil games
Thursday, 22 July, 2010. Tagged with: technological failure, current-events
BLDG Blog looks a BP-developed offshore oil board game. There were several others with tiles like: Cartel: The International Oil Game and Gusher.
Apple and the Media: Links for July 17, 2010
Saturday, 17 July, 2010. Tagged with: journalism, apple, iphone
Why Steve Jobs is (legitimately) pissed at the media
The Angry Drunk, in a brief bout of non-swearing:
More than once in my career I’ve been in a situation where something has gone wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. During situations like that, when every available hand is on deck trying to fix the problem, the most enraging thing in the world is a chorus of people who have no data, no real understanding of the issue, or even an understanding of the principles involved with the issue demanding answers NOW!
That’s the role that the press has taken during this debacle. Unquestioningly repeating the claims of anyone who was willing to make a comment, speculating about technical issues that they were patently unqualified to comment on, and demanding that Apple act NOW NOW NOW to resolve the issue. And speaking of just horrible reporting; the less said of Consumer Reports embarrassing flip-flopping the better.
My frustration is many media outlets take the easiest possible course of quoting competing experts or (ugh) industry analysts and do very little to independently and competently quantify a complex issue. And it’s not just tech journalism that exhibits this tendency. Much of our political coverage is the same quality.
We have met Antennagate, and it is us
Devin Coldewey writes:
The signal drop heard ’round the world was followed by many more reports of launch issues. It was rough, and because of the way the internet has set itself up to instantly propagate exactly this kind of thing, soon people were hearing about iPhone 4 issues before they even knew there was an iPhone 4. The launch problems became a bigger story than the launch. Why? Because we liked it that way.
The appetite for this kind of thing is bottomless. Reasons for interest include fanboyism, professional interest, idleness, schadenfreude, legitimate concern… there was something for everybody. Then Apple, knocked off-balance by their own unpreparedness, gave a response that simply made things worse. “Non-issue. Just avoid holding it in that way.” I can’t think of a response that could have garnered a more comprehensively varied response. Shock! Defensiveness! Rationalizing! Minimizing! The circus became a feeding frenzy. And then the official statement, in which they revealed that iPhones had been using a ridiculously inaccurate signal display for years, and that they were going to make the bars bigger? My god!
Links for July 15, 2010
Thursday, 15 July, 2010. Tagged with: software, links, travel, government
Why governing Americans is so hard
Howard Gleckman in the Christian Science Monitor:
The conventional wisdom is that Americans are fed up with their government. But our demands on policymakers are so inconsistent and irrational that we make governing nearly impossible. We hate big deficits, but oppose the actual tax increases or spending cuts that we need to dam the flood of the red ink. We are furious that government passed an $800 billion stimulus last year, but feel lawmakers are not doing enough to get the economy going. We want government to “do something” about the gulf oil spill but reject government interference in private business.
…
We are, collectively, four. We want what we want, and we want it now. And we want somebody else to pay for it.
James Fallows:
… I got up before 5:30am today to get an 8:15am flight out of Dulles, only to find an email from the airline saying that the flight had been delayed to 10:45. The inbound flight – from Dubai! – is late, and there are no spare planes to go on to San Francisco. OK – gladder to know now than before leaving the house for the airport, though ideally it would have great to know last night. Nothing to be done. But it was a serendipitous intro to the very next item in the email inbox: a report on how substantially airline capacity continues to be cut. There just are fewer flights anywhere, and more of them are full, than in yesteryear.
Microsoft opens source code to Russian secret service
Tom Espiner, ZDNet UK:
Microsoft has signed a deal to open its Windows 7 source code up to the Russian intelligence services.
Russian publication Vedomosti reported on Wednesday that Microsoft had also given the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) access to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server source code, with hopes of improving Microsoft sales to the Russian state.
The agreement will allow state bodies to study the source code and develop cryptography for the Microsoft products through the Science-Technical Centre ‘Atlas’, a government body controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Press, according to Vedomosti.
What I'm expecting Apple to announce at WWDC
Thursday, 27 May, 2010. Tagged with: apple, iphone, ipad
A little while back, I talked about what I hoped Apple would announce as part of the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. I didn’t do particularly well, But there’s still a lot of room for surprises when all of the features in iPhone OS 4.0 become publicly known.
In a little more than a week, Steve Jobs is going to take the stage at Moscone West at the Worldwide Developers Conference and … say some things. Drawing from some of the speculation I’ve seen floating around, here’s what I’m anticipating:
- The iPhone 4G formally announced
- I suspect Steve is going to acknowledge Gray Powell from the stage in a never-to-be-repeated moment
- Apple responds to Google I/O by fleshing out the iPhone OS 4.0 feature set
- Faster MobileSafari performance. Apple and Google are going to race (and likely swap leads frequently) in terms of tuning WebKit’s performance for mobile devices
- Free MobileMe – or a free, syncing, subset of MobileMe – for iPhone and iPad customers. This addresses Google’s cloud strategy with Android and hopefully improves the experience of setting down a laptop and picking up an iPad for apps like iWork
- iTunes in the cloud – Based on Lala.com, if you’ve purchased the songs, you can listen to them from elsewhere
- The last two items are facilitated by that giant Apple data center in Maiden, NC, even if they aren’t strictly developer related, they’re demonstrable technologies. I think I see a Dropbox-type, Document-centric thing happening that’ll improve how users work across multiple devices
- Safari 5 announced. Plug-in/extension support, better recovery from quit/crashed sessions. And about damned time
- A 27-inch LED Cinema Display, replacing the 30-inch Cinema Display as the 24-inch LED Cinema Display gains audio via Mini DisplayPort and a lower pricetag
- Modest refresh of the Mac Pros (newer CPUs, no Blu-Ray). These will be announced by press release. As might the LED Cinema Displays
- No demo of Mac OS X 10.7. Apple’s clearly focused on the iPhone OS this year. That’s fine, Snow Leopard kicks ass. A refreshed GUI can wait for next June
RDU firing out-of-shape public safety personnel
Saturday, 10 April, 2010. Tagged with: fitness
A number of both police and fire & rescue personnel at Raleigh-Durham International Airport have been terminated for not meeting physical fitness test standards.
Emergency response agencies all have similar standards for recruits - but they have different ideas about keeping workers in shape.
Like other employers trying to curb health costs, RDU has stepped up its emphasis on employee wellness. Fitness testing for police, fire and rescue workers started in 1996. Those employees were told in 2007 that merit raises would be postponed for those who could not meet an evolving standard.
In 2008, they were told they could be fired. That year, 11 police employees and 10 fire-rescue workers failed the test several times. [Lt. Billie C.] Rose was one of them, and she says the pressure was intense.
Rose doesn’t sound happy to be let go:
It’s not fair to measure a person’s overall performance by just one or two sections of a physical fitness test.
… I’ve been an excellent employee. I have the evaluations to show it.
Except, every job has key criteria and employers can say, “this is essential.” A multi-year warning seems quite ample to get compliant, particularly in a public safety situation where the fitness of the responder can be a significant factor in their ability to act successfully. Further, as the article states, RDU kept the criteria lenient. I’d find the standard challenging right now, but if my job depended on it, I’d get there.
I can see this happening elsewhere, in the not-too-distant future.
Physical fitness is only tangentially related for most white-collar work, but I can definitely see companies being more vocal in encouraging employees to get into shape to keep company-borne health-care costs down. Currently, there’s mild encouragement to improve health and bring issues like obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes under control. I can see companies setting fitness targets (body fat percentage, cholesterol balance, blood pressure, run time) in order to stay in a particular cost tier. Out-of-bounds? Your share of the premium is higher.