An Immobile, Inactive Youth: But Is It All That Bad?

This is a cameo by Mariana Ashley from onlinecolleges.net. I'm pleased to have her comment here.

In The Productive Student's recent post The Passivity Of Young People, Simon Kuper illuminates some of his concerns about the inactivity of today's generation of young people. Kuper discusses how revolutions that have changed the world and society in the past were initiated by an outraged youth. Today, however, he points out, our young generation of "rebels" are too busy sitting quietly at computers, "studying something that won't lead to much," or waiting tables to ignite a revolution. The central thesis is that our current generation of movers and shakers are too passive and immobile to really care (or maybe notice) that they are being shafted by today's economy.

While no doubt some of the points that Kuper makes in this excerpt are accurate, there's obviously more to the story. Today's young generation is, as Kuper, states "the best-educated generation in history" and "is ceasing even to think in terms of careers anymore". Why is this? As a member of this "inactive" youth generation, I find the concept that we no longer "think in terms of career" extremely interesting.

He's right. Our educations are no longer necessarily about preparing us for our future bread-winning careers. Where at one time education completely focused on teaching money-earning skills, today this is not the case. There has been a shift that has taken place in the relationship between education and employment. A liberal arts education means pursuing knowledge for the pure sake of intellectual advancement. We spend four (sometimes more) years exploring academic concepts, developing deep critical thinking skills, and analyzing philosophical musings. We are taught in college that education is about expanding one's own intellectual growth. We don't think in terms of employment or economy necessarily.

However, this doesn't mean that we are out of tune with the injustices of our current economic situation. Trust me. We know that we are being shafted—that we are a group of highly qualified, talented individuals forced by our society into unemployment and, therefore, deemed by the "real world" useless. The difference today is that our activity, our mobility, our revolution looks different. As our lengthy educations have drilled into us, our pursuits for change are intellectual and internal rather than active. Maybe this is a fault. Maybe it is simply something new within our society. Either way, Kuper is right—the youthful generation of today is not storming the Bastille as they did in 1789.

We are sitting quietly at our computer screens writing about our injustices, typing up our anger for others to see, exploring our opinions on the dilemma of unemployment on our blogs, Facebook feeds, and Twitter pages. No, this action does not look the same. And, so far, it is not necessarily as productive or successful as storming the White House with bayonets. But we are not totally inactive and we are not completely passive. Our aggression and activity is intellectual. We think and discuss changes, problems, and solutions.

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

White Bread, Our Killer

Libby Copeland for Slate:
He also points out how often our choices about what we eat get mixed up with our perceptions of what is moral. “Today,” Bobrow-Strain writes, “showing interest in healthy eating is an essential piece of the performance of eliteness.” That’s why celebrities call their crash diets “cleanses,” and vegetables are confused with virtuousness. Food is shorthand for values. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s felt self-conscious buying artificially-flavored cake mix, as if the purchase of such a non-nutritious food made me a less wholesome person. Instead of bringing us all together, the dinner table is the means by which we define ourselves against everyone else.

Food is more than fuel.

The Passivity of Young People

Simon Kuper for FT.com:

Mostly, though, computers produce quietism. Despite Occupy Wall Street, a striking fact of the great recession in developed countries has been the passivity of young people.

Historically, revolutions are made by the young: few of the Parisians who stormed the Bastille in 1789 came on Zimmer frames. And today’s youth ought to be rebelling. About a fifth of under-25s in western countries are unemployed. Their luckier peers are mostly either studying something that won’t lead to much, working as underpaid interns or waiting tables. The best-educated generation in history is ceasing even to think in terms of careers anymore: entry-level positions in sought-after industries such as fashion and media are now typically unpaid. If that were me, I’d be angry.



It's times like these where platforms such as the St. Gallen Symposium, which I work for, become more important than ever.


Why Microsoft Must Include Explorer

Previously, on Daring Fireball:

"But why not write a file manager using Metro? Same for the decision to include both the desktop and Metro versions of IE — if the desktop version of IE has certain essential features, why not just add those features to the Metro version?

I still don’t get it."

Having worked in an enterprise Windows environment, I think the answer is simple: There are too many apps out there based on Internet Explorer and the old Windows Explorer architecture that Microsoft cannot test against comprehensively enough to say "We'll ditch it going forward in favour of this new and better thing." Many of these apps are proprietary developments by enterprises that rely on certain features of IE (even UI elements) that won't run on MetroIE, simply because Microsoft cannot plan for every eventuality. Even Microsoft's own apps such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint or control panels for various server apps such as Lync probably heavily rely on DesktopIE features.

Truth is, Microsoft needed to ship Windows on ARM this year. Testing against all these options would simply have not been possible.

I guess the reason why Microsoft has dug itself into this whole is two-fold: First, enterprise customers have come to expect decade-long support for Microsoft apps on practically any architecture. This is Internet Explorer 6 all over again. Second, Microsoft developed IE as a proprietary engine instead of making it standards-compliant. While this was great for a number of "enterprisey" features such as ActiveX and various other goodies for .NET applications, it basically meant that an application built for DesktopIE cannot easily translate into a different engine altogether, which in this case is MetroIE.

And, in the end, this might have been a smart move. I don't think Microsoft has a product compelling enough to "do an Apple and drop Flash", and I also don't think that ARM tablets with Windows 7 will primarily target consumers. Consumers have the iPad. Microsoft needs to go after the enterprise, where iPads are growing in popularity, but breaking the heads of many IT departments because iPads are absolutely awful at supporting existing apps - you have to write new ones.

As Final Cut Pro X showed, business customers tend to react aggressively to feature cutting, and in Microsoft's world an ARM Windows machine (i.e., a Windows 8 tablet) without full support for existing enterprise apps will be shoved away like a toy in favor of a laptop. By doing this, Microsoft actually has a chance of not only getting users to demand Windows tablets, but rather get IT departments deploying them en masse.

The State of Indian Cricket

I wrote this post some time in August of 2011, and for some reason decided not to publish it. In the light of recent developments, I think it deserves to be published all the same. Enjoy.

You should know that all Indians, including myself, share a insanely irrational affection for the sport of cricket.

Thus, it hurts to have lost a test match series against England 4-0, have lost the No. 1 ranking in test cricket to them, and to have lost all this just months after winning the ICC Cricket World Cup, which is played in the One-Day format.

A quick primer on formats of cricket: The original format of test cricket is now played over five days, with each team batting and bowling twice. The one-day format has dominated the scene since the 70s with an innings a side and being limited to 100 overs, i.e., 600 balls played.

And more recently, Twenty20 Cricket, or T20 for short, has experienced a surge in popularity after England began using the format for its domestic championships and the ICC introduced the World Twenty20 Championship. Of course, all of this was dwarfed by the success of the Indian Premier League. Twenty20 cricket lasts just a few hours, is limited to 240 balls played and, by holding almost everything else equal, crams in the same amount of action of a one-day match into just under four hours.

It's a blast. It's fun. They have colorful team kits, cheerleaders and all the drama and money that you would expect from a European football league. The broadcasters love it, of it fits into evening TV time slots perfectly. Indian families no longer rifle over whether to watch news or soap operas. The entire family watches the IPL instead. It changed what Cricket means in India, a country with over a billion people and about a quarter of them rich enough to own HD TV sets and understand English commentary on TV. It also helps feed the Indian complex of world dominance, or lack thereof, by having Australian and English greats work on Indian payrolls for Bollywood starlets who mostly own the franchises in the IPL.

It fits today's India like a glove.

At the same time, even after the 1970s uprising of one-day cricket, the test match format has still been heeded as the premier, "true" form of the game. I have yet to read any serious journalist proclaiming test cricket as "dead". Decimated, maybe, but definitely not dead. Among the hundreds of millions of Indian cricket fans, the couple of millions that are still willing to go to the stadium on day one of a test match are enough to uphold this core value, that test cricket is still the ultimate pinnacle and only comprehensively testing competition in the sport.

Playing for five days exponentially multiplies the facets and intricacies the game brings with it. When all of a sudden, you need to care about cracks in the pitch, humidity and dew factors, triple centuries, slip fielders and athletes required to endure days of heat and play, well, that is when cricket becomes Cricket.

It is in this added complexity that mass popularity obviously decreases. It's like teaching the Solow-Model to someone who just wanted basic demand and supply theory. Thankfully, there are ample "economists" in cricket to retain interest in the format.

But we're beyond that discussion in India. Indians want to be No. 1 in all formats of the game, for it is probably the only sport in which we stand a chance of dominating in the near future. It is all the more agonising to lose this dominance to the Empire of Britain, as archaic as that may sound - these fears still linger in Indian hearts.

The Board of Control for Cricket is at a crossroads now. They have to decide whether they want to answer this distress signal and rekindle Indian test greatness by building the talent, of to go the more profitable route of turning India, and the entire game, into a T20-primed mess. Ricky Ponting knows of these troubles and sums them up nicely:

Good state players these days are averaging 35; if you were averaging 35 when I was playing your dad would go and buy you a basketball or a footy and tell you to play that.

With all due respect to basketball and football, that is what serious cricket is about. It's not everyone's game, you can't just "grab a bat and ball" and have a serious go at it. It isn't the kind of sport you see being played in third world countries by poor kids on the road (Galli cricket notwithstanding). It's a game with high intensity, intellect, and sophistication.

Sambit Bal, probably my favourite cricket writer, encapsulated all that is wrong with Indian cricket quite aptly:

The biggest problem with Twenty20, and particularly with the IPL, is that it provides disproportionate rewards for too little work and limited skills. Who would pass up the chance of earning in six weeks what might otherwise take a couple of years?

His entire piece is gold, I wanted to quote almost all of it.

Timothy Lee on Bitcoin Privacy

Timothy Lee for Forbes
In other words, Bitcoin’s alleged privacy benefits mostly reflect the fact that the government isn’t really trying to spy on Bitcoin users. It hasn’t built the kind of surveillance infrastructure the government has for tracking dollar-denominated transactions. And to be clear, I would rather that infrastructure not exist. But if Bitcoin becomes popular, the government will build precisely the same infrastructure for spying on the Bitcoin network. And when they do, it will become clear that for ordinary users, Bitcoin is, if anything, less surveillance-resistent than traditional cash.
And that concludes our hopes for Bitcoins.

If Italy Goes Bust

The Economist:
Consider the stakes. Italy has the biggest sovereign-debt market in Europe and the third-biggest in the world. It has €1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) of sovereign debt outstanding, 120% of its GDP, three times as much as Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined—and far more than the €250 billion or so left in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the currency club’s rescue kitty. Default would have calamitous consequences for the euro and the world economy.
Disturbing and shockingly imminent.

The Home Button Issue

Lukas Mathis cogently demonstrates one of the iPhone’s worst shortcomings:

If an iPhone user gets confused about what’s going on, it’s never quite clear how to get the phone back into its default state. If you’ve just opened a folder, the home button will close it. If you’re in Springboard, but no folders are open, the home button will move you to the first screen. If you’re on the first screen, it’ll move you to the Search screen. And so on. The home button does different things, depending on the current state of your iPhone.

He also linked to this process map of how the home button works, and followed up:

It’s not clear to me why Apple does this at all. If I launch an app from the fifth home screen, is it highly likely that the next app I want to launch is also on that home screen? If I launch an app from inside a folder, is it highly likely that the next app I want to launch is also inside that folder? Probably not. So why not just send me to the first home screen when I hit home? That way, I always know where I end up when I hit «home».

Excellent stuff. This is just one example, in my opinion, of how much innovation is yet to come in mobile OS design. This competition hasn’t even got started yet.

The Save Icon

John Gruber, in March 2010:
Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.
David Friedman, last week:
Not only don’t people use floppy disks anymore, but the options for saving are even more varied now than simple disk format. You might save to your own computer, or a drive on a server somewhere off in the cloud. You might even be using a program that autosaves in certain intervals without you needing to think about it.
Marco Arment, yesterday:
With the sophistication we have in modern hardware and software, there’s no reason anyone should ever lose any work to crashes or power outages because they forgot to hit Save for a while.
Here’s the case in favour of a save button: I do some web publishing for an organization at my university. We provide “normal” students with the ability to update club sites on their own. In this scenario, I have encountered countless examples where people inadvertently saved & published content to their website. In Web publishing, versioning is a big deal. In fact, often the publishing process jumps between many people, and if you’d have to navigate automated versions of every text on a website, mayhem would ensue. There is value in manual saving, or versioning.

That Second Camera

One quick note on the iPad 2: I, like many others, was skeptical that it would, or should, have a back-facing camera. John Gruber, in a footnote, wrote back in February:

I’m skeptical that the iPad would have two cameras, both front- and rear-facing. The purpose of a front-facing camera on the iPad is obvious: FaceTime. Would anyone actually use a rear-facing camera on an iPad, though?

Now the iPad is here, and it has a back-facing camera. But Gruber wasn’t wrong. I believe that this camera is in the iPad for the same reason as the first one: FaceTime. As we know, the FaceTime experience includes the ability to share what you’re seeing with a single tap. It works this way on the iPhone 4 and the iPod touch1.

I think Apple didn’t want to sacrifice this functionality, and these cameras are reportedly not of the best quality, so Apple clearly either didn’t intend them to be used for recording proper HD videos, or it was too expensive to include a better camera. I would argue its the former.

The fact that it isn’t the same camera makes sense as well: Shooting close up faces may not require such a great camera as one that shoots an entire scene, and beyond that, a camera that shoots “HD video” sounds good on a bullet-point list of features.

FaceTime, according to Apple, needs two cameras. And from how I use it with my family, it’s a well-used feature and important part of the FaceTime experience.

1. It doesn’t work on a Mac, but a back-camera on a Mac would raise a lot of other issues related to privacy, I think.

Backups

There are no good online backup solutions out there.

Back in 2004, I lost all of my data because of a fried motherboard. Back then, I was fledgling through high school, high-speed internet had just become widespread in Switzerland and Facebook was still a college-only network.

I didn’t try to recover my data from the hard drive. My “computer was broken”, so I threw it away as a single entity. Luckily, I didn’t have many pictures, as digital cameras were just getting traction. In other words, I didn’t care much. If the same thing were to happen to me today, though, I’d be devastated. More than 10’000 pictures, a legally bought iTunes collection of over a thousand songs and a lot of important documents in my paperless filing system. Backups were needed.

I worked for an organisation of roughly 40 people, being in charge of IT systems. We ran a simple backup strategy: Hourly backups of the most critical and dynamics data (our CRM system), daily backups to hard drives on a separate server of all data, and weekly/monthly backups of all data to LTO Tapes. We also shipped off the monthly tapes to a safety deposit box at a local bank. Seemed like pretty advanced stuff for an organisation that small. The major flaw in this system was the lack of continuous off-site backup.

I believe it to be so vital to have a proper backup strategy, as it helps keep a peaceful mind, especially in a disaster scenario. Countless friends and family members have not only lost valuable data, but totally freaked out about it. I don’t need that kind of stress in my life.

Three Questions.

For my private backup strategy, I needed to clarify three things:

  1. What data do I need to back up?
  2. How often do I need to back up?
  3. What are the required restore scenarios?

The toughest part in devising such a strategy is figuring out where all your data is. I have data on an iPhone, an iPad, the Mac, and a lot of places in the cloud. I needed to gather and consolidate this mess. My first move was to move completely to Mobile Me. I consolidated calendars, e-mail and contacts completely to Mobile Me. And since Mobile Me integration with my Mac is great, all my Mobile Me data was available on my Mac locally as well.

Second, I bought docks for my iOS devices. Because without docks, I don’t remember to sync my devices with the Mac. Now, I sync them every day, as this is where they charge and … well, look nice on my desk. This ensured that I had full backups of the iOS devices on my Mac.

A third strategy for gathering data was more of an effort in housecleaning. I went through my deleted e-mails of the past week and waded through old accounts and newsletter subscriptions, canceling and deleting all those I didn’t use anymore. Now I do this with any e-mail I get: I just cancel all accounts, ensuring control of my data. Not directly essential to backups.

The Data

Having corralled all this data, I had made sure that everything that mattered to me was on one hard drive, inside my computer. Going further, the data on my hard drive was structured as follows:

  • Documents, Pictures and Music (in the default OS X folders)
  • Critical App data
    • Calendars, contacts, e-mail
    • Things database
    • 1Password database
    • (Think of all your critical apps - Yojimbo, Omnifocus, Evernote etc. Look at your dock right now for a quick idea about “critical apps”.)
  • Applications and Settings
  • OS X and all the overhead I don’t care about.

Some clarifications: The documents folder contains anything from PDFs to text files, my papers, any research and so on. By backing up my pictures folder I just make sure I have iPhoto safe, and analogously my music folder contains the entire iTunes database.

Backup Scenarios

Here’s where the paranoia sets in. The real question is: How far can I afford to fall back if my computer just blew up completely? The answer varies depending on which data you look at. You also need to gauge how often your data changes.

The most common scenario, Scenario 1, is that a file has gone missing, or deleted by mistake, and needs to be brought back. This should be supported by a fast, simple and stable system.

Scenario 2 involves a disk failure. When your hard drive fails, you need a fresh drive with all your data on it.

Scenario 3 is disaster. This means that the primary location of my data has undergone some sort of wipe-out by a natural disaster, burglary, etc.

The Tools, and Why Online Solutions Simply Suck

I already pointed out that all my data was on my Mac hard drive. This enables me to use Time Machine for full, continous backups. And it works like a charm. I encourage everyone to use it, and to not read further before getting a drive and activating Time Machine. I personally use a very nice LaCie Starck Mobile Hard Drive. Looks great on a desk, and it’s really small and quiet. Its USB cable is a bit short, and just about reaches the iMac port, but on the upside, it doesn’t have an extra power cord. This little drive, with Time Machine, covers Scenario 1.

For Scenario 2, disk failure, I clone my disk with Super Duper once a week. Beyond that I use Apple’s still-existent, updated and supported MobileMe Backup software for making daily backups of my Documents folder to MobileMe. And, I have Dropbox installed with a Symlink to my documents folder. I only use DropBox because it offers a user-friendly way to access your data on the go; it’s not a real Backup system, rather than a file system in the cloud.

Scneario 3 is where I’m undecided. Personally, I feel the most economical way would be to have another Super Duper Clone that I take to my friend’s or parents’ place each week. Again, drives are handeld by me and may fail in transport or otherwise. Online solutions seem to have a major selling point here, in that they use high-redundancy data centres, automate the process for you and offer a variety of restore options.

I have some issues with these services though. I’ve tested SugarSync, CrashPlan, BackBlaze and DollyDrive.

  • Sugarsync’s Mac client is hideous and unusable. I have a real problem with SugarSync’s approach: It tries too hard to be both a backup solution as well as a file sync service, very much like Dropbox. Unfortunately, it falls short on both ends. The web interface of Sugarsync is fair, but not as good as Dropbox. The native clients are really unusable and badly implemented. Beyond that, SugarSync doesn’t feel like it’s designed as a backup solution from the ground up; the focus on flashy features such as online galleries and a “Magic Briefcase” doesn’t let me trust SugarSync to handle my backups.

  • CrashPlan, similar Sugarsync, has a unversal client that runs on Java, and works quite well. It isn’t a completely native experience, but does a good job and offers a number of unique backup options, such as backing up over the internet to another computer, being your own or a friend’s. Truly, Crashplan is purely a backup solution, and offers a variety of features built for that single purpose. Pricing is around USD 5 a month.

  • Backblaze is, in my opinion, the best solution out there. The native client lives within System Preferences on a Mac, and you can easily control which files are backed up. You can even throttle the bandwidth used.

  • Both Crashplan and Backblaze offer the option of sending you a USB drive home in case of disaster, for a fee of slightly above USD 100. Crashplan only ships within the US.

  • Dollydrive has a different approach altogether: You configure Time Machine to use a network drive provided by Dollydrive instead of a locally connected drive. Your local drive is then used for a bootable disk clone, much like SuperDuper. Unfortunately, networks aren’t perfect, and having my primary, most continuous and easiest to use backup system rely on my internet connection is not only a risk in itself, but it didn’t work for me while testing. Dollydrive kept losing its connection and my initial backup would have taken months at the rates and reliability I was seeing.

My issue with all of these solutions is that none of them offer proper restore abilities. Backup drives sent home are not bootable drives; you will need to use another computer to recover this data. It’s a hassle. Restores across the web fail miserably as well in most cases: If I lose my photo library, it would take ages to restore via the web. Before that, I have Time Machine and a SuperDuper clone that would both have my data. And, if I want to restore a single image or a set of images from within my iPhoto library, I’m completely lost: iPhoto’s library folder is practically unnavigable1.

A second argument to conclude a point is, that for single item restores, not only do I have two physical backups at hand, but also use Dropbox for all my documents except music and photos.

So, here’s my point: online backups only make sense if I use them for a full restore. And this scenario is (a) extremely unlikely (b) only relevant for my photos and music, as documents are in Dropbox, and (c) expensive at USD 5 a month plus the cost of shipping a USB drive.

There are better (offline) options.

Conclusions

There is no compelling reason to use online backup systems. They charge monthly fees, suffer from dependence on network speeds and offer abysmal restore options. Intended as a last line of defense, you will probably never make use of it. Invest the money in making sure your house doesn’t get burgled or catch a fire. Reduce your insurance premium by reducing your risk in the first place.

Before I go for online solutions, I would opt for a Drobo, which uses a RAID-like system for data redundancy (in English: It spreads your data over many drives so that if one fails, it can automatically re-puzzle your data using very cool mathematics) and I would take my SuperDuper clones offsite every week, testing their bootability once a month.

The initial investment in local backups is that of a few drives. Not costing the world, it’s a better feeling to have the data in your hand rather than relying on a data center, however secure, that’s far away and at someone else’s mercy.

1. Granted, this is Apple’s fault. But as it stands, there is no suitable backup solution except for Time Machine.

The Real Issue With Television

In September of 2006, Apple unveiled a secret project code-named “iTV”, a device that would run a variant of the previously released Front Row application from your Mac on a TV set. Released as “Apple TV” and subsequently called “a hobby”, the product enjoyed mediocre success and suffered a few embarrassing attempts to upgrade storage (“Take Two”), increase choice of content and decouple it from a computer among other things.

In the meantime, Google released Google TV, which, in a word, failed.

This morning, news of the Apple TV surpassing the iPad as a Netflix device in terms of viewing hours broke. Shawn Blanc aptly points out that this is a striking number, as there are roughly 15 times fewer Apple TV devices than iPads worldwide. I must add that this is magnified by the fact that Netflix is a US/Canada-only service.

Along with great sales numbers of a million devices in four months, let’s make the assumption that Apple has a winner with this new Apple TV. It is the first version of the device I bought myself and I love it. But here’s the deal: It hasn’t replaced our cable package, nor have I stopped watching regular Free TV. And this is where I personally have an issue with television, and hope for a comprehensive solution.

Apple TV’s approach to television is simple: “We have lots of content, and you pay per view.” In fact, I believe it is this simple business model that has made it a success. But this only works under a couple of assumptions:

  • One can define a single “view”. In Apple’s case, it’s an episode of a TV show, a movie or a podcast.
  • I, the viewer, know what I want to watch, or at least have to make a choice of a single TV show, movie or podcast.
  • I watch this content on a (big) screen at home where my Apple TV is hooked up.

Let’s tackle these issues. A single “view” for me can be congruent with Apple’s definition of a single movie, episode or podcast. But sometimes I have more time than that, say, two hours, which I can’t fill with just one episode. I could buy a second episode, but that would cost me an extra 99c, which is cheap. But remember, I have not canceled my monthly cable package. And then, sometimes, I have less time, like 15 minutes before I need to leave for an appointment. I’m not inclined to go through an entire buying decision, spend 99c only to start something I can’t finish right now. Regular TV solves this because I’m subject to whatever is being broadcast, and I can be entertained or informed just by a “peek” of 15 minutes on CNN. The issue here is that I have to constantly choose and buy singular units of television, which leads directly to my second problem.

Choice.

To me, TV boils down to three categories:

  • Periodical series. A classic TV show with episodes, seasons, and usually fiction or “reality TV”.
  • Movies
  • News and Information. Documentaries, Daily News, and Sports Broadcasts.

Apple TV covers the former two very well. It fails miserably at the latter.

TV shows just work. They exist in chunks across seasons, and Apple TV’s model works very well. For movies, Apple TV’s experience is different from regular TV in a few key ways: Regular TV allows me to tune in to a channel and be surprised. I can tune into Sky Horror and be surprised, though I have made a partial choice of wanting to watch a horror movie. I prefer horror movies at the moment, but am rather indifferent to what exactly I want to watch.

This issue deepens in the third category of news. I want news to be live and current. I don’t want to rent it and “watch whenever I want”. There is a positive comforting aspect to the fact that every day, at 7pm, the country sits down to listen to the evening news. It is good that I’m forced to switch on the TV set at a given time every day. It’s a family ritual and limits my intake of news to those 30 minutes. That, in my opinion, is much better that the constant stream of headlines on the internet.

Then there’s the entire quadrant of “infotainment”. I don’t watch the History channel for a specific show. I watch it because it’s the History channel. I switch on the Biography Channel to learn about someone new. Surprise me. Regular TV retains the element of surprise, and that is a good thing.

On episode 1 of “Hypercritical”, a new podcast by Dan Benjamin and John Siracusa, the concept of TV channels was dismissed as old-fashioned and useless, solely existent due to technical limitations of analog TV frequencies. Well, I believe there’s more to it. A constant stream of random content is what made TV so successful in the first place. Let’s embrace that and bring it into the digital age. Compare it to musical genres: Sometimes you’re just in the mood for Jazz music, and want a variety of songs and artists rather than that old Louis Armstrong album.

So, to sum up, I can’t get rid of my cable package because it’s good. I like my Apple TV because it’s good, too. Bring them together. Let’s bring channels into the digital world along-side pay per views.

Apple pulls VLC because of GPL

Apple pulls VLC media player from the App Store

MacNN:

Apple has finally pulled Applidium’s VLC video player app from the iTunes store due to a licensing discrepancy. The situation is one of the prominent examples of conflict between the open-source GNU General Public License, which is tied to the VLC player, and the terms detailed in Apple’s own App Store licensing.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the app got pulled because the world’s most free license won’t let them publish it? And, am I misinformed that the GPL can itself be modified? Why didn’t they just republish the app with a modified license?

How Lifehacker Got Your Password

Lifehacker Password Hacked

Mark Shead:

When you login, LifeHacker’s servers took your password, ran it through the hash function and then compared it to what they had previously stored.  If the values match, then you can login.  If not, then you don’t have the right password.  As you can see this meant that LifeHacker didn’t have to keep a copy of each users password on their server.  However, you can get dictionaries of common words mapped to their hash value.  This is how the hackers were able to get my password–they simply looked for a hash.

Read the whole article for a great explanation of how online passwords work.

 

On 2011

2010 was a good year. While a mixed bag emotionally, I did accomplish some key things this year:

1. I deployed an entire CRM system for 30 people, relieving a 10-year old legacy system.
2. I started the year in Abu Dhabi, ending a successful stint with the Swiss embassy.
3. I lost 15 pounds in a small experiment in June. I gained it back during exam period.
4. I helped organise the 40th St. Gallen Symposium.
5. I interned with a global technology consulting firm.
6. I spent a lot of effort retooling my financial situation towards financial freedom.

Most of all, intangibly, I managed to figure out a lot of things about where I'm headed next. It was a year of reflection.

In 2011, I will:

1. Lose 40 pounds.
2. Restart playing the guitar and developing a project there.
3. Finish the final bulk of my bachelor's degree.

This is going to be good.