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who should control the internets
Op-ed in the NYTimes from Damian Kulash Jr. of Ok-Go We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to…
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South by Southwest and Apple versus Dell
An old friend in the music business was visiting and we wandered around Austin’s gigantic South by Southwest music and film extravaganza and, of course, I was struck by the effects of Apple’s brilliant product design and marketing. IPods and MacBooks were everywhere and iPhones were rivaling Blackberries. Downstairs at the convention center, Dell had…
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Sorcerers apprentice at ATT: Security and privacy and reliability collide again
AT&T considers reading all the packets that cross its lines. Quite an interesting proposal. Tim Wu’s take The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such…
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Yale Patt on Abstraction
Abstraction’s a good thing? Abstraction is a good thing if you don’t care about the performance of the underlying entities. You know, so many schools teach freshmen programming in Java. So what’s a data structure? Who cares? My hero is Donald Knuth, who teaches data structures showing how data is stored in memory. Knuth says…
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Google’s engineering culture
Article in the New Yorker on Google contains a fascinating description of a product design meeting: Page and Brin had wanted an upgrade of an existing product, and they were unhappy with what they were hearing from the engineers. At first, they were stonily silent, slid down in their chairs, and occasionally leaned over to…
