Author of TFA here. Actually the guys behind Sparse are bootstrapping the company with their own money and "sweat equity" and one modest SBA loan. I don't think Colin Owen was whining at all. In addition to telling the story of a scrappy company with a cool product, I wanted to frame Owen's experiences in a way that might help tamp down some of the recent hype around hardware startups. They are still *a lot* harder to build than software startups.
My understanding is that Adam was one of the key people developing the AI behind Siri -- the contextual awareness stuff that makes Siri pretty good at figuring out what you want and relating your request to available resources. Sorry to snap at you earlier, sometimes Slashdot makes one surly.
Do your homework, please. Adam Cheyer was one of the lead investigators at SRI on the CALO project before the contextual-search technology was married with voice-to-text and text-to-voice technology and spun out as Siri.
Author of TFA here. So many people have mentioned the microwave that I had to respond. Yes, I still have a microwave! It's built into the kitchen and it belongs to my landlord, so I wasn't about to rip it out for the "after" photo. I should have made that clear in the original text, which has now been updated.
Thanks, (almost) everyone, for engaging seriously with the premise of the article. Of course it's anecdotal, of course I was writing about my own experiences. This is a given when you're writing a personal essay. But my guess -- and it seems to be correct, from a lot of the comments -- was that a lot of other people have also noticed that they're able to get along with fewer gadgets, especially since the new wave of touchscreen mobile gadgets are basically the Swiss army knives of electronics. Others haven't had this experience, and that's fine. My real point was that it's possible to get the same stuff done today with fewer tools.
Sorry if my preference for Apple products put off a bunch of readers, but the theme would hold up even if I were an Android or Windows customer.
Author of TFA here. Perhaps "debugging" was a dangerous word to use (clearly it has set off a lot of Slashdot readers). What Villareal is doing, mostly, is comparing the patterns and algorithms he developed on his simulator with the actual look of these patterns on the bridge, and tuning for what looks best. That was the part that couldn't be done until the lights were installed.
Sorry but I think you're wrong about this. The search engineers at Google are allowed, even encouraged, to come up with innovations that might break other parts of Google, including its main revenue engine, AdWords. See pages 4-5 of the article.
Author here. Yes, from 2009-2011 or so they had a Google Labs project called Google Squared that presented results in tabular form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Squared). I asked Shashi Thakur about this and he said they killed it because it wasn't deep enough to be useful. He told me there were actually pockets of structured, graph-like data popping up all over Google (in verticals like travel search and product search) but every team was doing it differently and it became clear the "the pockets were not coinciding." That's why they decided to take a top-down (or maybe you'd call it bottoms-up) approach and just buy Metaweb.
Author here, from Xconomy. I changed the headline to make it shorter and catchier, that's all. I'm not of two minds. I was impressed by the technology, but I said that Lytro needs to make some changes such as enlarging the screen before the value of the device will be completely obvious to consumers.
I'm glad you're enjoying RockMelt and I agree with your plaudits and criticisms. But dude. Why does it make me a moron to want more continuity between desktop UIs and mobile UIs? My point was that it seems like a bit of a shame to take $10 million and hire 30 engineers and put them to work for two years on really cool browser that *only works on the desktop,* when I'm trying to spend less time on my desktop, not more.
Hellfire, thanks for this great comment. Of the 350+ comments in this stream right now yours is the one that best points out the weaknesses in my original article. Here's how I would respond.
Yes, I am aware that I was stretching the definition of "cruft." As about twenty programmers have pointed out to me today, Neal Stephenson was using the term to refer to code, not to features....and specifically to operating system code, not application code. Fine. I'm not talking about the code inside iTunes, because I've never seen it. I'm using "cruft" every so slightly metaphorically, and I don't think it's overstretching the concept to say that software can be crufty -- especially when it accumulates as many miscellaneous, unconnected functions as iTunes has.
The point's been well made elsewhere in this thread, but I just don't see why the same program that plays my MP3s should also be in charge of activating my cell phone. The question isn't whether iTunes crashes -- it doesn't. But this is only one measure of good software.
Bottom line: Apple is in the same position as Volkswagen in 1998. When they came out with the New Beetle in 1998, it made all their other models look intolerably boxy and dull and everyone just wanted a New Beetle. iPhone / iPad / iOS are breakthrough products from a UX perspective, and they make iTunes feel intolerably complicated and ugly by comparison.
That complexlity and ugliness are the product of years of feature creep -- what I called cruft. Whatever the terminology -- can you seriously argue that this is the program Apple would build if they were setting out to create a modern set of media management and device syncing applications?
Thanks nine-times. You've captured the point of my article exactly -- What's this sound equalizer doing in my social network? It's just seems clear that if Apple were starting over with its software for selling and managing media and syncing its mobile devices, it would never do it this way. At some point they'll have to start fresh.
iTunes is a bucket of spit...I just find it remarkable that Apple has created such a monstrosity that it central to their ongoing strategy. They've created real duds before, but iTunes is... just a mess.
Thank you. This was exactly the point I was trying to make in TOA. It's been nice to hear today that so many people agree with me. (It's also nice to hear that iTunes works great for some people. Wish I were one of them.)
Thank you. I'm the author of the Xconomy article referenced in the original post, and your comment offers a nice answer to my original question. Which was, basically: How does Apple get away with being so closed -- with hording information -- when, for so many of its customers, the essence of computing is *sharing* information?
I think the "cloaking device" you speak of is a real and deliberate strategy on Apple's part, and it seems to pay off most of the time. As someone remarked today somewhere in the blogosphere (I can't recall where), Apple can dominate a conversation without saying anything. But I think this strategy also misfires some of the time. It leaves the company seeming inhuman.
I can't help thinking that if another company came along that made devices that just work the way Apple's do and that fade into the background the way you describe, while being less monolithic and cloistered and more transparent and accessible and conversational as an organization, it could steal away Apple's customers fairly quickly.
Defenders of the Wikimedia Foundation say the images are in the public domain (even though they aren't under UK law) and applaud Coetzee as if he were some kind of Robin Hood. Unfortunately, it's a case of the poor stealing from the poor. If all museum images were simply appropriated by file-sharers under the rationale that they *should* be in the public domain, pretty soon there wouldn't be any museum willing to pay for the digitization of important works, and we'd all be worse off.
See the rest of my argument here: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/07/17/art-isnt-free-the-tragedy-of-the-wikimedia-commons/
Dalroth: The new My Location feature only works when you're visiting Google Maps using Firefox 3.5+ or Google Chrome 2.0+ (or any browser equipped with Google Gears).
I'm the author of the original article. Several commenters here have pointed out that the tutorial that I originally cited in the article was about cross-eye stereo viewing (in which the right image is intended for the left eye, and the left image is intended for the right eye), whereas these 19th-century stereographs are designed for parallel viewing (in which the left image is the for the left eye, etc.). That's absolutely correct -- my mistake. I've revised the article to link to a different tutorial, on parallel free-viewing. I've never actually tried cross-eye viewing, which sounds a lot harder.
If you try to cross-eye free-view these images, they will indeed look inverted or flat. But once you get the trick of parallel free-viewing, the images should pop out at you, especially the best ones like the Brooklyn Bridge pictures at the beginning of the photoset.
Xconomy was one of the sites hosted at "H1," as The Planet calls it. After waiting all day Sunday to see whether we'd be back up on Monday, we decided to move the site back over to Media Temple, our previous hosting provider, at least temporarily. (Ironically, one of the reasons we left Media Temple in the first place was that they couldn't handle the traffic when our flying car stories got slashdotted.) We published a post about our experience with the outage this morning.
Here at Xconomy we were pretty surprised by the overwhelmingly negative, skeptical tone of the Slashdot community's comments on our article last week about Terrafugia's drivable airplane, the Transition. We decided to boil down the comments to about a dozen commonly-voiced criticisms and put them directly to Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia's CEO. Today we've published Dietrich's responses to the criticisms. It's a worthwhile read for anyone seriously interested in the future of general aviation.
Slashdot Mirror
Author of TFA here. Actually the guys behind Sparse are bootstrapping the company with their own money and "sweat equity" and one modest SBA loan. I don't think Colin Owen was whining at all. In addition to telling the story of a scrappy company with a cool product, I wanted to frame Owen's experiences in a way that might help tamp down some of the recent hype around hardware startups. They are still *a lot* harder to build than software startups.
My understanding is that Adam was one of the key people developing the AI behind Siri -- the contextual awareness stuff that makes Siri pretty good at figuring out what you want and relating your request to available resources. Sorry to snap at you earlier, sometimes Slashdot makes one surly.
Do your homework, please. Adam Cheyer was one of the lead investigators at SRI on the CALO project before the contextual-search technology was married with voice-to-text and text-to-voice technology and spun out as Siri.
Author of TFA here. So many people have mentioned the microwave that I had to respond. Yes, I still have a microwave! It's built into the kitchen and it belongs to my landlord, so I wasn't about to rip it out for the "after" photo. I should have made that clear in the original text, which has now been updated.
Thanks, (almost) everyone, for engaging seriously with the premise of the article. Of course it's anecdotal, of course I was writing about my own experiences. This is a given when you're writing a personal essay. But my guess -- and it seems to be correct, from a lot of the comments -- was that a lot of other people have also noticed that they're able to get along with fewer gadgets, especially since the new wave of touchscreen mobile gadgets are basically the Swiss army knives of electronics. Others haven't had this experience, and that's fine. My real point was that it's possible to get the same stuff done today with fewer tools.
Sorry if my preference for Apple products put off a bunch of readers, but the theme would hold up even if I were an Android or Windows customer.
Author of TFA here. Perhaps "debugging" was a dangerous word to use (clearly it has set off a lot of Slashdot readers). What Villareal is doing, mostly, is comparing the patterns and algorithms he developed on his simulator with the actual look of these patterns on the bridge, and tuning for what looks best. That was the part that couldn't be done until the lights were installed.
Sorry but I think you're wrong about this. The search engineers at Google are allowed, even encouraged, to come up with innovations that might break other parts of Google, including its main revenue engine, AdWords. See pages 4-5 of the article.
Author here. Yes, from 2009-2011 or so they had a Google Labs project called Google Squared that presented results in tabular form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Squared). I asked Shashi Thakur about this and he said they killed it because it wasn't deep enough to be useful. He told me there were actually pockets of structured, graph-like data popping up all over Google (in verticals like travel search and product search) but every team was doing it differently and it became clear the "the pockets were not coinciding." That's why they decided to take a top-down (or maybe you'd call it bottoms-up) approach and just buy Metaweb.
Author here, from Xconomy. I changed the headline to make it shorter and catchier, that's all. I'm not of two minds. I was impressed by the technology, but I said that Lytro needs to make some changes such as enlarging the screen before the value of the device will be completely obvious to consumers.
I'm glad you're enjoying RockMelt and I agree with your plaudits and criticisms. But dude. Why does it make me a moron to want more continuity between desktop UIs and mobile UIs? My point was that it seems like a bit of a shame to take $10 million and hire 30 engineers and put them to work for two years on really cool browser that *only works on the desktop,* when I'm trying to spend less time on my desktop, not more.
Check out Xconomy's coverage: Skyhook, Fighting for Its Life in Suit Against Google, Cries Foul: “Call in the Referees and Review the Tape” http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/09/16/skyhook-fighting-for-its-life-in-suit-against-google-cries-foul-%E2%80%9Ccall-in-the-referees-and-review-the-tape%E2%80%9D/ What's really at stake is who gets control of the anonymized consumer-level data generated each time a mobile device performs a location lookup. In a world of hyper-targeted advertising, this data could be worth billions, which is more than enough reason for Google to see Skyhook as a threat.
Hellfire, thanks for this great comment. Of the 350+ comments in this stream right now yours is the one that best points out the weaknesses in my original article. Here's how I would respond. Yes, I am aware that I was stretching the definition of "cruft." As about twenty programmers have pointed out to me today, Neal Stephenson was using the term to refer to code, not to features....and specifically to operating system code, not application code. Fine. I'm not talking about the code inside iTunes, because I've never seen it. I'm using "cruft" every so slightly metaphorically, and I don't think it's overstretching the concept to say that software can be crufty -- especially when it accumulates as many miscellaneous, unconnected functions as iTunes has. The point's been well made elsewhere in this thread, but I just don't see why the same program that plays my MP3s should also be in charge of activating my cell phone. The question isn't whether iTunes crashes -- it doesn't. But this is only one measure of good software. Bottom line: Apple is in the same position as Volkswagen in 1998. When they came out with the New Beetle in 1998, it made all their other models look intolerably boxy and dull and everyone just wanted a New Beetle. iPhone / iPad / iOS are breakthrough products from a UX perspective, and they make iTunes feel intolerably complicated and ugly by comparison. That complexlity and ugliness are the product of years of feature creep -- what I called cruft. Whatever the terminology -- can you seriously argue that this is the program Apple would build if they were setting out to create a modern set of media management and device syncing applications?
Thanks nine-times. You've captured the point of my article exactly -- What's this sound equalizer doing in my social network? It's just seems clear that if Apple were starting over with its software for selling and managing media and syncing its mobile devices, it would never do it this way. At some point they'll have to start fresh.
iTunes is a bucket of spit...I just find it remarkable that Apple has created such a monstrosity that it central to their ongoing strategy. They've created real duds before, but iTunes is... just a mess.
Thank you. This was exactly the point I was trying to make in TOA. It's been nice to hear today that so many people agree with me. (It's also nice to hear that iTunes works great for some people. Wish I were one of them.)
Thank you. I'm the author of the Xconomy article referenced in the original post, and your comment offers a nice answer to my original question. Which was, basically: How does Apple get away with being so closed -- with hording information -- when, for so many of its customers, the essence of computing is *sharing* information? I think the "cloaking device" you speak of is a real and deliberate strategy on Apple's part, and it seems to pay off most of the time. As someone remarked today somewhere in the blogosphere (I can't recall where), Apple can dominate a conversation without saying anything. But I think this strategy also misfires some of the time. It leaves the company seeming inhuman. I can't help thinking that if another company came along that made devices that just work the way Apple's do and that fade into the background the way you describe, while being less monolithic and cloistered and more transparent and accessible and conversational as an organization, it could steal away Apple's customers fairly quickly.
Defenders of the Wikimedia Foundation say the images are in the public domain (even though they aren't under UK law) and applaud Coetzee as if he were some kind of Robin Hood. Unfortunately, it's a case of the poor stealing from the poor. If all museum images were simply appropriated by file-sharers under the rationale that they *should* be in the public domain, pretty soon there wouldn't be any museum willing to pay for the digitization of important works, and we'd all be worse off. See the rest of my argument here: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/07/17/art-isnt-free-the-tragedy-of-the-wikimedia-commons/
Dalroth: The new My Location feature only works when you're visiting Google Maps using Firefox 3.5+ or Google Chrome 2.0+ (or any browser equipped with Google Gears).
jthill, on this theme of the optics of Monet's paintings, there is a lovely poem by Lisel Mueller, "Monet Refuses the Operation."
I'm the author of the original article. Several commenters here have pointed out that the tutorial that I originally cited in the article was about cross-eye stereo viewing (in which the right image is intended for the left eye, and the left image is intended for the right eye), whereas these 19th-century stereographs are designed for parallel viewing (in which the left image is the for the left eye, etc.). That's absolutely correct -- my mistake. I've revised the article to link to a different tutorial, on parallel free-viewing. I've never actually tried cross-eye viewing, which sounds a lot harder. If you try to cross-eye free-view these images, they will indeed look inverted or flat. But once you get the trick of parallel free-viewing, the images should pop out at you, especially the best ones like the Brooklyn Bridge pictures at the beginning of the photoset.
Xconomy was one of the sites hosted at "H1," as The Planet calls it. After waiting all day Sunday to see whether we'd be back up on Monday, we decided to move the site back over to Media Temple, our previous hosting provider, at least temporarily. (Ironically, one of the reasons we left Media Temple in the first place was that they couldn't handle the traffic when our flying car stories got slashdotted.) We published a post about our experience with the outage this morning.
Here at Xconomy we were pretty surprised by the overwhelmingly negative, skeptical tone of the Slashdot community's comments on our article last week about Terrafugia's drivable airplane, the Transition. We decided to boil down the comments to about a dozen commonly-voiced criticisms and put them directly to Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia's CEO. Today we've published Dietrich's responses to the criticisms. It's a worthwhile read for anyone seriously interested in the future of general aviation.
Yes, getting slashdotted creamed our server (and we have choice words today for both our blogging platform provider and our hosting provider) but the story is back up now, we think (http://www.xconomy.com/2008/05/08/from-the-runway-to-the-road-terrafugia-redefines-the-flying-car-make-that-drivable-airplane/). Our apologies for the inconvenience. -Wade Roush, Xconomy