John Debay

Kara Swisher on the timing of Ballmer’s departure:

Interestingly, Ballmer actually indicated that he had planned on staying in his letter about his impending departure, noting: “My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our transformation to a devices and services company focused on empowering customers in the activities they value most.”

That sentence spurred much chatter inside the company, including the persistent rumor that Gates had dropped the bomb on Ballmer. That sentiment was further underscored when Ballmer’s letter contained no reference or thanks to Gates, with whom he has been tightly tethered over the last several decades. Its absence has been much discussed internally at Microsoft, where it has been seen as an unusual slight and a sign of a rift.

Gates also did not reference his longtime business partner in any celebratory manner in Microsoft’s announcement. “As a member of the succession planning committee, I’ll work closely with the other members of the board to identify a great new CEO,” said Gates, in the entirety of the quote about Ballmer’s retirement. “We’re fortunate to have Steve in his role until the new CEO assumes these duties.”

This is what people who have been baffled that Ballmer’s been able to keep his job as long as he has haven’t understood: it’s always been Bill Gates keeping him there. Even as Ballmer shifted to becoming the laughing stock of the tech industry, Gates was his protector.

All the Google things are lumped into one folder, which includes the amazing labels “Play Music” alongside “Play Movie…”, “Play Maga…”, “Play Books” and “Play Store”. The hesistant newbie has to make the cognitive leap that “Play” is not a verb here—despite the tacky golden rapper headphones—rather than conclude that Google has weird taste in words, or that this is a phone for children.

The action verb they were looking for instead was “Buy Music” and “Buy Movies”. It seems they replaced the media player with a shop you can keep your own tunes in. My advice: get rid of the advertisements posing as widgets and use DoubleTwist instead.

Actually presenting functionality is a job left for the App Drawer, paralyzing you with choice by Pokémon. There’s two Mails, three Googles, three Messengers, a whole Play-set as well as assorted circles, pins and triangles. You’ll find yourself dragging every app you’ll use regularly somewhere more convenient. Open App Drawer. Pan. Draaag. Repeat.

Great roundup on the UI confusion and poor design that continues to plague Android. I find it very reminiscent of the mediocrity of Windows, back in the late 90s/early 2000s when I still had Windows boxen in my life.

I recently spent some time with an HTC One and was shocked at how muddled the interface is. No animations, confusing stock Android apps, and that horrible vertical menu button inside every app that developers seem to use as a junk drawer for functionality they couldn’t otherwise cram into the UI. The best designed apps were those from big services like Tumblr and Foursquare whose UI seemed to be a direct clone of the iOS version.

After every major Android release, the refrain of “now it’s as polished as iOS” is heard. This has never been more true than in the last year. I can honestly say that after spending a non-trivial amount of time with a flagship Android phone, nothing could be farther from the truth.

In 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.

In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.

The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.

Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.

The most pernicious part of this trend in my opinion is the anti-vaccine movement:

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.

The list goes on. North Carolina has banned state planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.

This has real consequences in terms of illnesses and deaths that are completely preventable. Babies are once again dying of whooping cough for the first time in decades.

I view this movement as the equivalent of communism during the Cold War: what’s needed is a concerted, mult-decade intellectual assault to widdle its backers down to a nub of discredited extremists. Instead, we’re giving these anti-intellectual clowns their own hosting gigs on prominent television talk shows.

Glenn Greenwald’s partner was detained during a layover in the UK on his way to Brazil. The used detention powers provided under an anti-terrorism law to question him not about terrorism, but his involvement with Greenwald’s reporting on the NSA’s surveillance programs:

The detention power, claims the UK government, is used “to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop “the terrorists”, and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

On meeting Steve Jobs:

Tell the story about your visit with Steve Jobs when he was trying to sell NeXT, the computer company he founded after Apple.

I was working at Sun Microsystems, and one day, I went to present Sun’s offer to acquire NeXT Computer.

This was the early ’90s. NeXT was in a nondescript office building in Silicon Valley. I went over by myself, walked in and the receptionist said, “Mr. Jobs is waiting for you in the boardroom.”

I walked into the boardroom, and there was Steve sitting at the end of a table with a spotlight on him, but otherwise the room was dark.

So I sat down in the dark in the chair next to him, and I started making a comment on the latest Pixar movie, which I think was “Toy Story.”

He cut me off and said, “What’s the number?” I told him. He said: “Congratulations. You found the right number. That’s what I would pay if I were Sun. But I want my number, and someone will pay it. Goodbye.”

And that was it.

Steve was Steve.

What do you mean?

He was in­cred­ibly smart, incredibly brilliant and in­cred­ibly eccentric.

There’s a lot alike between Sean Parker and Steve Jobs. They could see things other people couldn’t.

Human beings’ horizons are limited by their experiences. Theirs weren’t. Most people hit a brick wall when they try to look farther ahead.

Steve and Sean don’t hit the brick wall. It makes them unique minds. Steve said himself several times that his greatest strength was understanding when something wasn’t ready. He killed multiple tablet ideas at Apple because he said it wasn’t good enough.

[AOL co-founder] Steve Case had the same abilities to understand what would work with consumers and what wouldn’t. What would succeed and what would fail. How much consumers could absorb. It’s an uncanny skill.

Andrew Cohen in the Atlantic:

What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime. But this curious result says as much about Florida’s judicial and legislative sensibilities as it does about Zimmerman’s conduct that night. This verdict would not have occurred in every state. It might not even have occurred in any other state. But it occurred here, a tragic confluence that leaves a young man’s untimely death unrequited under state law. Don’t like it? Lobby to change Florida’s laws.

If we understand and accept these legal limitations – and perhaps only if we do – the result here makes sense. Purely as a matter of law, you could say, it makes perfect sense. Florida’s material, admissible, relevant proof against Zimmerman was not strong enough to overcome the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The eye-witnesses (and ear-witnesses) did not present a uniformly compelling case against the defendant. The police witnesses, normally chalk for prosecutors, did not help as much as they typically do. Nor was there compelling physical evidence establishing that Zimmerman had murderous intent and was not acting in self-defense.

The case was “not about standing your ground; it was about staying in your car,” the prosecutor cogently said during closing argument. But in the end, under state law favorable to men like the defendant – that is, favorable to zealots willing to take the law into their own hands – Zimmerman’s series of deplorable choices that night did not amount to murderous intent or even the much more timid manslaughter. The defense here wisely understood that and was able consistently, methodically, to remind jurors that prosecutors had not adequately explained (or proved) how exactly the altercation started and how precisely it progressed.

Steve Coll writing about the recent revelations of N.S.A. spying on the European Union:

The most likely explanation is that President Obama never carefully discussed or specifically approved the E.U. bugging, and that no cabinet-level body ever reviewed, on the President’s behalf, the operation’s potential costs in the event of exposure. America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently.

Ever wonder about the origin of the Mac command key symbol?

One day, late in th afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something. This was not unusual. I think he had just seen MacDraw for the first time, which had longer menus than our other applications.

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”