Aware 11

LIVE: Cisco’s Epic Announcement That Will “Change The Internet Forever” (CSCO)

aware — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Last month, Cisco told the world to get ready for a major announcement that would "forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments."

Well, the wait is finally over. Will Cisco live up to its hype?

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First iPad Ad Premieres During Oscars Broadcast (AAPL)

aware — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:34:00 +0000

The first commercial for Apple's iPad tablet aired during tonight's Oscars telecast. Engadget posted the video, which we've embedded below. It looks sexy.

Also, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is apparently attending the awards ceremony in L.A., perhaps because Pixar's "Up" is nominated for five Oscars. (And already won one.)

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How To Run Windows In OS X, The RIGHT Way

aware — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:49:00 +0000

If you're anxious about switching from a PC to a Mac, consider this: There are a multitude of ways you can virtualize Windows within OS X, and they all work uniquely well. Here's how to choose the right one.

There are three major virtualization products for Mac, and at their core, they're all quite similar. Each creates a virtual machine, which is to say, crudely, a software implementation of a separate computer. When you install Windows in a virtual machine, Windows thinks it's installed on a PC with a somewhat generic set of hardware. In fact, the hardware it thinks it's installed on is a software construct, and any time Windows utilizes what it thinks is a hardware component, its requests are actually being passed through to your Mac's real hardware.

Anyway! What's going on under the hood is conceptually similar among the most popular virtualization apps, but the ways they install, run and integrate Windows inside of OS X vary wildly. So, assuming you're ready to take the virtualization dive, which app should you use? VMWare Fusion 3? Parallels 5? Sun VirtualBox? They're all different, but in a strange way, they've ended up falling out of direct competition — each one is right for certain kinds of users. So which one's right for you?

Find out the right way to run Windows in OS X >

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Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, And Screwing Customers

aware — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:17:00 +0000

There's been a battle going on between the "broadcast" TV networks and the cable networks over something called "retransmission fees." Cable networks have traditionally paid for "cable network programming" but not "over the air programming." But that is changing and the broadcast TV networks are demanding these retransmission fees from the cable companies.

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Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page Still Pulling Token $1 Salaries (GOOG)

aware — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:16:00 +0000

Google's billionaire founders and CEO will continue to receive token $1 annual salaries this year, Google revealed in a SEC filing this afternoon.

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Four short links: 4 March 2010

aware — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Achievement Design 101 -- advice from the guy who designs the site-wide achievement awards for Kongregate. 7. Achievements will thrust their subject matter into the spotlight; make sure it's worthy. This can be good or bad. In most cases on Kongregate, adding achievements to games will cause the user rating to drop. There are many theories about why this is — my best guess is that there's a difference in psychology between people who play a game just to have fun (how weird!) and people who play a game to earn achievements. For the latter category, the whole game can be viewed as merely an obstacle. (via diveintomark)
Fundamental Constants and the Problem of Gravity -- huge variation uncertainty in different fundamental constants: we know one to 1 part in 100 million, but another to only 1 in 10 thousand. Led me to wonder whether anyone's done project estimation with error bars, analysing past projects to figure out the error rates in estimates of programmer time, etc.
How to Download an eBook From The Cleveland Public Library -- aka "Why DRM Doesn't Work". The usability of this 22-step process is appalling. (via BoingBoing)
Defining Ubiquitous Computing vs Augmented Reality -- not arbitrary terms but there are some interesting concepts that ubicomp has which don't seem to be coming out in the current AR fad. (via bruces on Twitter)

The implications of a money-making Android app

aware — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000

There's been plenty written about the App Store gold rush, but this is the first rags-to-semi-riches piece I've seen about the Android Market. Edward Kim, creator of the Car Locator app, saw his daily revenue jump from around $100 per day to more than $400 per day when the $3.99 app claimed a featured spot in the Market.

It's only one data point, but I'm interested in the broader implications here. Those early "there's gold in iPhone apps!" stories fueled interest in the platform. And while a lot of that iPhone excitement was later tempered by the realities of a hit-driven business, that first flush of exuberance was an important step.

If similar stories pop up in the Android universe -- legit stories, I'm not advocating lies and fabrications -- I see that catalyzing more developer interest, more competition, more refinement (something that's sorely needed in the Android Market), and ultimately, a more robust Android app ecosystem. That's a lot of "mores," I know, but after three-plus months of using an Android device, my enthusiasm for this platform continues to grow. Apps like Google Goggles and Google Sky Map are amazing. What I'd like to see, however, is broader Android experimentation by companies not named Google.

Internet Passes Newspapers To Become Second-Most Popular Source Of News (After TV)

aware — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:15:00 +0000

[A] new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examin[es] how people consume news. Ninety-nine percent of American adults get news each day, but they are getting it from a wider variety of sources and in many different forms.

The Internet now outranks print newspapers and radio in popularity as a source of news. Sixty-one percent of Americans said they read news online, while 54 percent said they listen to news on the radio, 50 percent read a local newspaper and just 17 percent read a national newspaper. One-third of cellphone owners read the news on their phones.

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Code review redux (good news from GitHub)

aware — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:36:40 +0000

I wrote in 2008 about Review Board, a code review package I'd tried and liked. Unfortunately our developers didn't like it as much as I did, and having learned my lesson (thanks, FogBugz), I declined to impose a tool choice on them. They chose Gerrit, instead, which is more tightly bound to Git, and has some nice features related to that (such as pushing to master from a button in the UI when the review is complete). The rest of the UI is very unpolished, but has been getting progressively better.

Code review caused some frustrations for us -- the immediacy of "code, check in, ship" was lost, and it took some time for us to get to a new running pace. The benefits, though, were very obvious: we had dramatically fewer periods of downtime or instability after introducing reviews, and the overall quality and consistency of the code went up a lot. The mutual obligations created by asking for reviews changed the social dynamic for the better. Peer pressure caused people to report that they were much more hesitant to check something in with poor test coverage or an embarrassing hack. While anything that slows the pace of development kills me, the net payoff was high. (See Cedric Beust's 2006 post, "Why code reviews are good for you," for a great discussion of code review models and tradeoffs.)

When looking for a tool we also considered GitHub:FI, the "behind the firewall" version of GitHub. It wasn't really up to par when compared with Review Board, Crucible, or Gerrit. But so many things about GitHub are so appealing that we all wanted it to work. That's why I was excited to see today's announcement from GitHub, "Introducing GitHub Compare View" -- especially this note at the bottom of the post:

Compare View is the first of many code review related features we plan to introduce this year. We'll be incorporating Compare View into other areas of the site and developing entirely new features with Compare View as a core component.

Great. That's awesome. Can't wait to see what's coming.

Newspaper Paywalls

aware — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Evolutionary history shows us that doubling-down on your defenses is effective against predators but useless against environmental change. Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be effective if Google were merely a predator. But this is the Internet, where copies are free, everyone could be a customer, your competitors are just a click away, and customer loyalty isn't merely a consequence of geography. To treat the Internet merely as just another competitor is to miss the point that it's a new medium which favours some business models and hurts others. To move your content behind a News Corp-style paywall is to be a dinosaur that knows the comet is coming but thinks, "I need thicker armor because I've heard that it has a big tail."