The Personal Computer Is Dead

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

For decades we've enjoyed a simple way for people to create software and share or sell it to others. People bought general-purpose computers—PCs, including those that say Mac. Those computers came with operating systems that took care of the basics. Anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, e-mail, and games. That software ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous to the dangerous—and there was no referee except the user's good taste and sense, with a little help from nearby nerds or antivirus software. (This worked so long as the antivirus software was not itself malware, a phenomenon that turned out to be distressingly common.)

Choosing an OS used to mean taking a bit of a plunge: since software was anchored to it, a choice of, say, Windows over Mac meant a long-term choice between different available software collections. Even if a software developer offered versions of its wares for each OS, switching from one OS to another typically meant having to buy that software all over again.

That was one reason we ended up with a single dominant OS for over two decades. People had Windows, which made software developers want to write for Windows, which made more people want to buy Windows, which made it even more appealing to software developers, and so on. In the 1990s, both the U.S. and European governments went after Microsoft in a legendary and yet, today, easily forgettable antitrust battle. Their main complaint? That Microsoft had put a thumb on the scale in competition between its own Internet Explorer browser and its primary competitor, Netscape Navigator. Microsoft did this by telling PC makers that they had to ensure that Internet Explorer was ready and waiting on the user's Windows desktop when the user unpacked the computer and set it up, whether the PC makers wanted to or not. Netscape could still be prebundled with Windows, as far as Microsoft was concerned. Years of litigation and oceans of legal documents can thus be boiled down into an essential original sin: an OS maker had unduly favored its own applications.

When the iPhone came out in 2007, its design was far more restrictive. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple's. What made this unremarkable—and unobjectionable—was that it was a phone, not a computer, and most competing phones were equally locked down. We counted on computers to be open platforms—hard to think of them any other way—and understood phones as appliances, more akin to radios, TVs, and coffee machines.

Then, in 2008, Apple announced a software development kit for the iPhone. Third-party developers would be welcome to write software for the phone, in just the way they'd done for years with Windows and Mac OS. With one epic exception: users could install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple's iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and then each individual app was to be vetted, at first under standards that could be inferred only through what made it through and what didn't. For example, apps that emulated or even improved on Apple's own apps weren't allowed.

The original sin behind the Microsoft case was made much worse. The issue wasn't whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone without Apple's Safari browser. It was that no other browser would be permitted—or, if permitted, it would be only through Apple's ongoing sufferance. And every app sold for the iPhone would have 30 percent of its price (and later, that of its "in-app purchases") go to Apple. Famously proprietary Microsoft never dared to extract a tax on every piece of software written by others for Windows—perhaps because, in the absence of consistent Internet access in the 1990s through which to manage purchases and licenses, there'd be no realistic way to make it happen.

Fast forward 15 years, and that's just what Apple did with its iOS App Store.

by Jonathan Zittrain, MIT |  Continue reading:
Image:  Wikipedia

Michel Thompson (French, 1921-2007)
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Teardrop

[Fiction]

Nick pulled Olivia’s arm over his shoulder as she stood. She had stubbed her toe during the hike they took that morning. He set her into the side opening of the Teardrop.

‘I know it’s a little early to hit the hay, but the outdoors wears me out.’ She took the mug of cowboy coffee he handed her. Her nightcap. Caffeine was nothing to her. After learning to sleep through prison nights, nothing could keep her awake. She gave him a pinch under his ribs. Olivia dispensed affection in athletic gestures – arm punches, noogies, little flicks of a damp towel in the bathroom – as though they were teammates rather than husband and wife.

‘I’m just going to hang out up here.’ He hoisted himself past her, up onto the roof of the trailer. ‘Like Snoopy.’ He loved this – lying on top of the camper, looking through his very old Nikon binoculars, the ridges on the focus wheel nearly worn away from a million rubs of his forefinger. He could watch the lazy way he did when he first noticed stars, before he saw them up close through a Newtonian reflector, or read them by their radio waves, before he knew their chemical composition, the weight and age of their gases, the rate at which they were burning themselves up – back when they still held a blinky mystery.

He read the heavens like a worn page of a favourite book. He picked out constellations of the summer northern sky – Scorpius, Hercules with its brilliant star Vega, the harder-to-find Corona Borealis. Arcturus, a showman star, burning its heart out. And even though he knew better, knew that what he saw was still roiling and burning and exploding and being born, also dying an icy death, he could still calm himself by doing this sort of casual Boy Scout survey, finding everything superficially, temporarily in place.

His early stargazing had evolved into a narrowed vision that was his strong suit in the groves of astronomy. Although he could construct a decent equation, map out the Doppler shift of a star’s spectra to calculate its mass – that sort of thing – his real talent lay in being an astronomer rather than a physicist. He could look through a telescope, or read a radio image and see something others had missed, particularly what hid within the shadows of stars. He read the heavens like a worn page of a favourite book. This had put him on the receiving end of a lot of material, stuff that had stumped someone and someone else, who then, as a last-ditch gesture, fielded it off to Nick. This ability allowed him, in spite of a spotty attendance record and a few unfortunate incidents at school social occasions, to still occupy a place in the scientific academy. He would never get tenure. He’d run off the rails of that track. He had his doctorate now, but his recommendation letters overflowed with faint praise, and held between their lines warnings about his unreliability, his unpredictable behavior. He wouldn’t get an important job anywhere, ever. They kept him on part time down at the University of California. He might turn out to be a credit to them. In the meantime, they let him teach a basic astronomy course every semester, kept an eye on his student evaluations.

Nobody else wanted him. He was too much trouble. But a lot of people wanted his findings, that was what kept him on the game board. Recently he had scored a succession of grants to go down to Arecibo, the big dish radio scope in Puerto Rico. At the moment he could find what he needed through radio waves. But optical astronomy was still a big player, and poised for huge discoveries. Next year, 1993, NASA was launching a telescope – Hubble – that would linger in space, clicking away, capturing pictures not blurred by the earth’s atmosphere, and then the whole of cosmology would probably break wide open. It was a great time to be looking around, but also – for Nick – a little spooky. Like being the first people to stick their toes in a deep and unknown lake of water that was purple, or peach.

And now he didn’t have drugs to buffer this anxiety. Now he had to fall back on carpentry and Olivia as his calming forces. He was a married man now, half of a two-income couple. He worked construction four days a week, taught one day. She cut hair at a neighbourhood beauty shop and had a good base of clients. She made decent money. They owned a condo on Addison, near the lake. He drove an Impala that was only two years old. He was getting extremely close to respectability. He had Olivia to thank for this.

by Carol Anshaw, Granta |  Continue reading:
Photo: Rock Mixer

Job Announcement

NASA is hiring.
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James Everbag Two Rabbits 1926
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The Sex Addiction Hype

The Newsweek cover model’s bare shoulders and protruding clavicles seem to signal weakness, vulnerability, illness. She’s captured turning away from the camera and a pull-quote is stamped across her head: “I lost two marriages and a job. I ended up homeless. I was totally out of control.” The all-caps headline dramatically spells out her troubles: “THE SEX ADDICTION EPIDEMIC.”

The sexy alarmism of Newsweek’s latest cover story is irresistible — but it should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Mental health experts haven’t come to the consensus that sex addiction even exists, let alone that it’s an epidemic. The cultural phenomenon of sex addiction, which I first wrote about in 2009, is just that: A cultural phenomenon, not a legitimate medical diagnosis, and the release this week of the much buzzed-about “Shame,” a sex-addiction drama starring Michael Fassbender, further secures the concept’s place in the zeitgeist. Never mind that it was rejected from the upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s bible.

Supporters of the sex-addiction paradigm will point to the current umbrella category of “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified,” which recognizes “distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers” — but the term “sex addiction” is unscientifically applied to a vastly greater range of behaviors, including subjectively excessive masturbation and porn-viewing. An entry on “hypersexual disorder” is being considered for the DSM revision — for the appendix — but it’s important to note that the concept of sex addiction is but one approach to conceptualizing and treating hypersexuality.

In the interest of countering the Newsweek narrative, I gave clinical psychologist David Ley a call. I figured he might have a thing or two to say on the topic, given that for the past year he’s been working on the upcoming book “The Myth of Sex Addiction” — and did he ever.

by Tracy Clark-Florey, Salon |  Continue reading:
Photo:  Newsweek/Salon

It Could Be Old Age, or It Could Be Low B12

Ilsa Katz was 85 when her daughter, Vivian Atkins, first noticed that her mother was becoming increasingly confused.

“She couldn’t remember names, where she’d been or what she’d done that day,” Ms. Atkins recalled in an interview. “Initially, I was not too worried. I thought it was part of normal aging. But over time, the confusion and memory problems became more severe and more frequent.”

Her mother couldn’t remember the names of close relatives or what day it was. She thought she was going to work or needed to go downtown, which she never did. And she was often agitated.

A workup at a memory clinic resulted in a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s disease, and Ms. Katz was prescribed Aricept, which Ms. Atkins said seemed to make matters worse. But the clinic also tested Ms. Katz’s blood level of vitamin B12. It was well below normal, and her doctor thought that could be contributing to her symptoms. (...)

B12 is an essential vitamin with roles throughout the body. It is needed for the development and maintenance of a healthy nervous system, the production of DNA and formation of red blood cells.

A severe B12 deficiency results in anemia, which can be picked up by an ordinary blood test. But the less dramatic symptoms of a B12 deficiency may include muscle weakness, fatigue, shakiness, unsteady gait, incontinence, low blood pressure, depression and other mood disorders, and cognitive problems like poor memory. (...)

In its natural form, B12 is present in significant amounts only in animal foods, most prominently in liver (83 micrograms in a 3.5-ounce serving). Good food sources include other red meats, turkey, fish and shellfish. Lesser amounts of the vitamin are present in dairy products, eggs and chicken.

by Jane E. Brody, NY Times |  Continue reading:
Illustration: Yvetta Fedorova

What's a Swap Line?

[ed.  Article from Sept. 2008 explaining swap lines, the transactions that are central to the coordinated efforts lifting markets today (along with China's easing of reserve ratios).  Other than noting the date of this article and reflecting on how well this worked out last time, what is this likely to accomplish?  Hard to say, it will certainly inject more dollars into the Eurozone and increase liquidity thereby (hopefully) freeing up lending, but the problem is not so much liquidity as debt, and possible insolvency.  Lack of liquidity is a function of a lender's concern about the ability of a borrower to pay back their loans.  So, has this changed anything?  Only that risk has now been transfered from individual banks to a new set of lenders - the Fed and Central banks around the world as they throw money at the crisis and hope something sticks.  At least that's my take on it.  We're still very far from seeing the edge of the woods, let alone being out of it.]

*****

This morning the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) authorized a $180 billion expansion of its temporary reciprocal currency arrangements (swap lines). According to the Fed’s press release, the changes allow for “increases in the existing swap lines with the ECB and the Swiss National Bank” and for “new swap facilities…with the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Canada.”

“These measures…are designed to improve the liquidity conditions in global financial markets,” the release continued.

What did the Fed do and how will this action address some of the strain in liquidity conditions that recently have emerged?

A good place to start is by looking at what, exactly, a currency swap line is. A currency swap is a transaction where two parties exchange an agreed amount of two currencies while at the same time agreeing to unwind the currency exchange at a future date.

Consider this example. Today the Fed initiated a $40 billion swap line with the Bank of England (BOE), meaning that the BOE will receive $40 billion U.S. dollars and the Fed will receive an implied £22 billion (using yesterday’s USD/GBP exchange rate of 1.8173).

Currency Swap:

An underlying aspect of a currency swap is that banks (and businesses) around the world have assets and liabilities not only in their home currency, but also in dollars. Thus, banks in England need funding in U.S. dollars as well as in pounds.

by Mike Hammill, Federal Reserve Bank Atlanta (2008) |  Continue reading:

Current Events: National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

[ed. Yeah, because Guantanamo worked out so well.  And Manzanar.  For background on this egregious bill read this.  I don't know how Congress found the time to divert their attention from pimping copyright law in favor of media conglomerates, but I'm beginning to believe EVERYTHING they do will always end up worse than the status quo (which is already bad, for the same reason).]

Today, the Senate voted 37-61 to reject an important amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have removed harmful provisions authorizing the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world [ed. including America]. The amendment offered by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), would have replaced those provisions with a requirement for an orderly congressional review of detention power.

The Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the FBI and the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the NDAA are harmful and counterproductive, and the White House has issued a veto threat over the provisions. We’re disappointed that, despite robust opposition to the harmful detention legislation from virtually the entire national security leadership of the government, the Senate said ‘no’ to the Udall amendment and ‘yes’ to indefinite detention without charge or trial.

The next opportunity to remove the harmful detention provisions from the bill will be when House and Senate conferees meet in conference committee next week.

If the conference committee fails to remove the detention provisions, President Obama should follow through with his veto threat. Today’s vote on the Udall amendment shows there’s more than enough opposition to these provisions to sustain a veto. Stay tuned for more information.

by Ategah Khaki, ACLU

[ed.  Oh man, I would love to have a pair of these.  Especially if they were like real bamboo or something, and didn't cost more than $11.95.  Sunglasses and hats, my weaknesses (I don't look good in either, but keep hoping).]
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The FBI Plot Against "Louie Louie"

In the winter of 1963-64, a team of FBI agents spent their days hunched over portable record players, struggling to decode a message that threatened the morality of America’s youth. It wasn’t from the Russians or Castro, but a band of white-bread Portland teenagers called The Kingsmen.

“J. Edgar Hoover felt we were corrupting the moral fiber of America’s youth,” Mike Mitchell, guitarist and founding member of The Kingsmen, tells me. “The FBI guys came to our shows, and they’d stand next to the speakers to see if we were singing anything off-color. It was a different time.”

“’Louie Louie’ was kept out of the Number One spot on the charts by the Singing Nun,” recalls Kingsmen keyboardist Don Gallucci. “That ought to tell you the mentality of the country back then. I thought, ‘Gee, I know the lyrics. What’s the deal?’ It never occurred to me how repressed teenagers were sexually. They were hearing all this stuff in the song. That was the state of America. The genie was getting out of the bottle.”

by Bill DeMain, Mental Floss |  Continue reading:

Huang Yongyu
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The Inventor in Hollywood

Imagine that, on Sept. 12, 2001, an outraged Angelina Jolie had pulled out a pad of paper and some drafting tools and, all on her own, designed a sophisticated new missile system to attack al-Qaida. Now imagine that the design proved so innovative that it transcended weapons technology, and sparked a revolution in communications technology over the next half-century.

Believe it or not, this essentially happened to Hedy Lamarr. Often proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the 26-year-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood when, in mid-September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down and sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Seventy-seven drowned in the bleak north Atlantic. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, was horrified. She decided to fight back, but instead of the usual celebrity posturing, she sat down at a drafting table at home and sketched out a revolutionary radio guidance system for anti-submarine torpedoes.

This unlikely tale is the subject of Richard Rhodes’ new book, Hedy’s Folly. Compared to his other works, like the magisterial (and quite hefty) The Making of the Atomic Bomb, this book breezes by in 272 chatty pages. Rhodes succeeds in the most vital thing—capturing the spirit of a willful woman who wanted recognition for more than her pretty face—but he skims over the deeper questions that Lamarr’s life story raises about the nature of creative genius.

by Sam Kean, Slate |  Continue reading:
Photograph courtesy the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The Xinjiang Procedure

Beijing's 'New Frontier' is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.

One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.
With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.

Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.

by Ethan Gutmann, Weekly Standard |  Continue reading:

Moon at Matsushima
by Kawase Hasui, 1930
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Google Search Secrets

[ed.  Great resource, if I could just remember all these tricks.  Large infographic after the jump.]

Among certain circles (my family, some of my coworkers, etc.) I’m known for my Googling skills. I can find anything, anywhere, in no time flat. My Google-fu is a helpful skill, but not one that’s shrouded in too much mystery — I’ve just mastered some very helpful search tricks and shortcuts and learned to quickly identify the best info in a list of results.

Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don’t understand how to best find the information they seek using Google.

Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my “secrets” are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it’s a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master.

by Josh Catone, Mashable |  Continue reading:

Casanova's Memoirs

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was a gambler, swindler, diplomat, lawyer, soldier, alchemist, violinist, traveler, pleasure seeker and serial seducer.

He was also a prolific writer who documented his adventures and love affairs in a steamy memoir that is one of the literary treasures of the 18th century.

Born in Venice, he considered France his adopted country but was forced to flee Paris in 1760 after seducing the wives and daughters of important subjects of King Louis XV and cheating them out of their money.

Now Casanova is back in France, celebrated by the French state. The original manuscript of his memoirs, “The Story of My Life,” and other writings of his are on display for the first time at the National Library of France in the exhibition “Casanova — The Passion for Freedom.” He is even being called a feminist.

The story of how more than 3,700 pages of Casanova’s papers ended up in one of France’s most prestigious and proper institutions is one that Casanova himself would have loved.

He wrote the memoirs in the last years of his life. Just before his death at 73 in Bohemia in 1798, he bequeathed his papers to his nephew. In 1821 Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, one of Germany’s most prominent publishers, acquired them from the nephew’s descendants. It was assumed in literary circles that the documents had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in World War II. But they were carried on a bike and hidden in a bank vault in Leipzig. An American military truck drove them to safety in Wiesbaden.

by Elaine Sciolino, NY Times |  Continue reading:
Photo: Emmanuel Ngyen Ngoc/Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Current Events: European Debt Crisis 'Metastasizing'

The three main gauges – M1, M2, and M3 – have each begun to decline in absolute terms after slowing sharply over the Autumn.

The broad M3 measure tracked closely by the European Central Bank as an early warning indicator shrank last month by €59bn to €9.78 trillion, a sign that Europe's long-feared credit squeeze is underway as banks retrench to meet tougher capital requirements.

"This is very worrying," said Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. "What it shows is that the implosion of the banking system on the periphery is now outweighing any growth left in the core. We are seeing the destruction of money and it is a clear warning of serious trouble over the next six months."

"This is the first sign of an emerging credit crunch," said James Nixon from Societe Generale. Banks cut their balance sheets by €79bn in October, while mortage lending saw the biggest drop since December 2008.

Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors said "narrow" M1 money – which includes cash and overnight deposits, and signals short-term spending plans – shows an alarming split between North and South.  (...)
 
The grim monetary data came as Moody's warned that Euroland's crisis is metastasising, with risks of a chain of sovereign bankruptcies unless Europe "acts quickly" to stop the rot. "The probability of multiple defaults by euro area countries is no longer negligible."

The agency said defaults would threaten to break up the euro itself. "Any multi-exit scenario would have negative repercussions for the credit standing of all euro area and EU sovereigns."

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph |  Continue reading:

Leo Kottke

Paris (Paris) on Flickr by JulienB.
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