tbolt
Google Knows Water
Benedict Evans on Google’s evolving business:
The key change in all of this, I think, is that Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.
5,200 Days in Space
Fascinating article on the lives of astronauts onbord the ISS:
Sleep position presents its own challenges. The main question is whether you want your arms inside or outside the sleeping bag. If you leave your arms out, they float free in zero gravity, often drifting out from your body, giving a sleeping astronaut the look of a wacky ballet dancer. “I’m an inside guy,” Hopkins says. “I like to be cocooned up.”
I really have a hard time imagining what it would be like in space for an extended amount of time.
BlackBerry CEO Wants Legislators To Make Developing BlackBerry Apps Mandatory
BlackBerry CEO John Chen, however, thinks this is unfair. In fact, he thinks it is so “discriminatory” that he wants legislators to widen the definition of net neutrality to include “application neutrality.”
In other words, if a company makes an app for iOS and Android, they must also make a version for BlackBerry and all other operating systems.
Call him out of “touch.”
Esports Growing Popularity
Not quite apples to apples but the League of Legends World Championship drew an impressive number of viewers:
Over 32 million fans watched SK Telecom T1 earn the Summoner’s Cup in front of a sold-out Staples Center. At peak, more than 8.5 million fans were watching at the same time.
Compared to the NFL Divisional playoff games:
The NFL announced today that the four divisional round playoff games averaged 34.3 million viewers.
I’ll be keeping an eye on Esports.
That’s The Spirit
Microsoft has just revealed its next great innovation: Windows Holographic. It’s an augmented reality experience that employs a headset, much like all the VR goggles that are currently rising in popularity, but Microsoft’s solution adds holograms to the world around you. The HoloLens headset is described as “the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen.” It’s a self-contained computer, including a CPU, a GPU, and a dedicated holographic processor. The dark visor up front contains a see-through display, there’s spatial sound so you can “hear” holograms behind you, and HoloLens also integrates a set of motion and environmental sensors.
Don’t count Microsoft out just yet.
The Human Side of Automation
Excellent perspective on autonomous cars by Don Norman:
But why do we make it so humans are second-class citizens? Shouldn’t it be the machines that are second-class? Shouldn’t we design by considering the powers and abilities of humans, asking the machine to pick up the remnants? This would be true human-machine collaboration.
Note that there is a wonderful possibility for collaboration. People are especially good at patterns recognition, and dealing with the unexpected, and at setting high-level goals. People are especially bad at dealing with repetitive operations, producing highly accurate, precise actions over and over again, and at vigilance, long periods of monitoring with nothing to do until or unless some unexpected critical even occurs.
Machines are superb at all those tasks people are bad at. So why not devise a collaboration whereby each does what it is best at. The real advantage of this is that the person can always be involved, but at a level appropriate to their abilities. When something goes wrong, the person is in the loop, cognizant of the current state, ready to act.
I recommend reading the entire article.
Putting Thought into Things
Structuring websites is painful because thinking is painful. It is less painful to just rely on a technique. It is less painful to blame the client, the method, or the organization. You can wail about this and make snarky comments as much as you want, but no technique or technology is going to solve a lack of thought. On the contrary! Adding stronger, faster, more technology is going to amplify our thoughtlessness. And that’s why the plastic soup of data we’re fouling our online oceans with is not making us any better at solving tangible problems.