Tab Dump: “Making some bets”

Reading is my favorite part of the job. It’s the mindless typing that turns me off. It doesn’t matter if you can say everything you need to say in less than one hundred words, Google isn’t going to index your work if it's not at least double that. Despite having multiple bosses during my career as a writer, let’s be serious, the only boss I truly ever had was an algorithm written by a team of search engine developers in California. Stefan Constantinescu

Great initiative – and pretty bold! Stefan is the co-host of a podcast I regularly enjoy, The Voicemail, and with his amount of experience in the mobile industry I’m sure this daily news digest will be very informative. I hope this bet pays off for him – because there’s no doubt it will pay off for the readers!

Foreign Policy: “Augustine’s World”

Syria is the Levant, the geographical core of Late Antiquity. And its disintegration, like the crumbling of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq, along with the chronic unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, signifies not the birth of freedom but the collapse of central authority. Rome could not save North Africa, and the United States will not save the Near East -- for as the opinion polls demonstrate, Americans have had enough of foreign military entanglements. Anarchy, perhaps followed by new forms of hegemony, will be the result.

Robert D. Kaplan

Interesting analogy between the collapse of the late Roman Empire and today’s political unrest. Of course, as the author himself emphasizes, because of global instantaneous communication, changes happen and spread much faster now than two millennia ago – there’s no telling what the next decades may bring.

Travelling with Apple Passbook

As I start the year with several travels abroad – heading again to Paris – earlier this week I got my first chance to try out one of Apple’s already old innovations, Passbook, dating back to the launch of iOS 6. There’s not that much to say about it: the experience is indeed nice and easier to use than a paper boarding pass. After checking in using Air France’s iPhone app, the card was added automatically to Passbook and it pinned itself on my lock screen. With just a swipe you can present it for controls or scan it when boarding the airplane. You don’t need to worry about keeping track of yet another item while you’re undressing, taking off your watch, belt and possibly shoes and taking out every electronic device you carry for inspection. I recently read an article describing all the wrong things about current boarding passes and a nice concept for an improved design and Passbook addresses many of the problems outlined there.

TechCrunch: “Lenovo To Buy Motorola Mobility From Google For About $3B”

TechCrunch has confirmed reports that Lenovo is buying Motorola Mobility from Google. This is the division within Google that the company purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion.

Matt Burns

It looks increasingly likely that this is not a joke, but an actual record of how the deal happened:

Post by 9GAG.

On a more serious note, one has to wonder who will buy HTC at this point, now that Lenovo has its mobile business group covered…

Alastair Reynolds - The Prefect

În lumea prosperă și plină de diversitate a miilor de habitate din Centura Sclipitoare orbitând colonia Yellowstone, un incident neașteptat amenință să declanșeze un război periculos cu grupul de nave Ultra parcat la marginea sistemului. Habitatul Ruskin-Sartorious a fost efectiv tăiat în două și din cei nouă sute șaizeci de locuitori n‑au mai supraviețuit decât trei simulări beta care nu‑și amintesc de nici un motiv suficient pentru un asemenea atac fără precedent. Toate indiciile implică nava Ultra Accompaniment of Shadows, dar prefectul Tom Dreyfus începe să bănuiască motivații mai complicate în spatele celor aparente. În timp ce tot aparatul Panoply încearcă să stabilizeze tensiunile și să împiedice un conflict armat cu grupul Ultra, adjuncta lui Dreyfus, Thalia Ng, pleacă într‑o misiune solo de a actualiza software‑ul de votare din nucleele a patru habitate, pentru a se trezi în mijlocul unei alte crize care‑i va testa ingeniozitatea și încrederea în sine.

Deși eu l‑am citit ultimul, cronologic The Prefect este primul din ciclul de cinci romane care formează universul Revelation Space – fără să puneam la socoteală povestirile care acoperă perioada de tranziție de la un singur Pământ către rețeaua disparată de colonii independente legate doar de comercianții Ultra. Plasat într‑o eră de prosperitate de câteva secole, când nimic nu părea să amenințe civilizația din jurul Chasm City, romanul are un ton și o structură diferită de următoarele. În loc de trei povești convergente, aici Reynolds se concentrează pe doar două fire concomitente, ancheta polițistă clasică condusă de Dreyfus și turul Thaliei printre habitate, cu mai puține excursii în trecut. Astfel ritmul este mult mai alert decât în celelalte romane, chiar furibund pe alocuri. Mie nu mi se întâmplă prea des să nu pot să las o carte din mână, dar Prefectul a avut acest efect, în special spre final. Atracția constă și în metoda lui Reynolds, care nu lasă nici un detaliu la voia întâmplării; sunt destule cazuri în care cititorul poate intui informații vitale înaintea personajelor, pentru că autorul oferise deja răspunsuri la problemele lor în capitolul precedent. Scenele dedicate Thaliei se desfășoară mai încet, în schimb introduc sau explică multe din conceptele pe care se bazează civilizația demarhistă și descriu culturile extrem de variate care s‑au dezvoltat la adăpostul autonomiei habitatelor orbitale, de la zone în care cetățenii s‑au supus de bunăvoie unor regimuri locale autoritare la alții care s‑au abandonat aproape complet lumii virtuale sau experimentează liber cu corpul și mintea umană.

asymco: “Google’s three Ps”

The deeper problem is in us knowing their intentions. The absence of a purpose rooted in profit makes Google resistant to analysis. There might be a purpose, known only to the founders^[3], but it’s one that is potentially naive, amoral or too abstract to be useful. Shareholders are aware of this and have agreed to entrust control to only three individuals. The purpose of the organization is in their hands alone and reflects their priorities. Bearing in mind that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they must be brave indeed.

This would not be too troubling if the effect would be restricted to the company stakeholders. The trouble lies in that organization also having de-facto control over the online (and hence increasingly offline) lives of more than one billion people. Users, but not customers, of a company whose purpose is undefined. The absence of oversight is one thing, the absence of an understanding of the will of the leadership is quite another. The company becomes an object of faith alone.  Do we believe?

Horace Dediu

Indeed, Google’s long term motives and ambitions are getting more opaque with each action: from buying Motorola to the Nest acquisition, from high-end products that nobody wants to online services with an ever shortening lifespan. One can’t stop wondering if there’s a method behind the madness…

What’s new in Chrome 33

After the big changes in Chrome’s graphics engine in the previous version caused numerous problems and complaints from users, this version could prove equally controversial, if not more, as Google pushes two changes many people are not happy about: restricting extensions to the Chrome Web Store and removing the previous New Tab page completely. Announced back in November, the new extension policy will be enforced starting with version 33, meaning that any extension not hosted in the Web Store will be automatically disabled and cannot be re-enabled as long as they’re not in the Store, as far as I understand. The only remaining option for running non-web store extensions is to use the Canary or Dev channels, but that exposes users to stability problems and bugs. Also, after being enabled by default in Chrome 32, the redesigned New Tab page based on the Instant Extended API cannot be disabled anymore, as the necessary flag has been removed. I don’t feel like commenting again; Google made up its mind and there’s nothing else to do than search for an extension that can restore the New Tab to some level of usefulness.

On a more positive note, Google Now notifications are now enabled on desktop. Users of recent versions of Android and in the US should be happy about this, for the rest of us the impact will likely be minor. Google Now is tied into the Google search app on iOS, but personally I don’t see the need to open an app for web search when I can do that faster from the Spotlight search box. Since I’ve been travelling with a work laptop for the past weeks and using the Dev version, I’ve used this feature for some time; and yet I see little use for Google Now. It does indeed highlight the amount of data Google stores on me or any other user; at some point it showed direction to a place that I searched a couple of hours before. On the other hand some cards are simply stupid: the temperature on the weather card is shown in Fahrenheit, even though I live and travelled inside Europe, where everyone uses Celsius. If it claims to offer relevant information, Now should at least make an effort on these little details; knowing my location it should be trivial to check which measurement unit the country is using. Even worse, there’s no visible setting to change this on desktop; apparently you can do that on mobile, but for me that would mean installing an app just to change a stupid default… I’m not going to bother.