Android update woes visualized
“7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.”
Long Term vs Short Term Thinking Pt 1 - Hypberbolic Time Discounting
Sometimes it’s hard to make decisions about the future with a clear head. Life is full of opportunities to make trade-offs between short term and long term pain/gain. The closer the short-term, and the farther the long-term, the better your chances of making a short-sighted decision. This kind of thinking is well-understood in behavioural psychology, and they even have a term for it: hyperbolic time discounting. The further an event is from you, the more you discount the anticipated effects of that event, with a strong bias to favouring things that are happening very soon.
What does this mean in practice? Well consider the classic example, something which may have affected a large portion of the “99%” who are currently occupying Wall Street. If you need a TV today, but you also need to retire comfortably 20 years from now, its easy to discount the importance of an event 20 years in the future and buy that TV instead of saving for retirement. Compound decisions like that over a number of years and when that 20th year arrives, there may be some difficulties.
Caught in the Google Nexus
“The best Android phones available are probably going be the hardest to find, and the least promoted in phone stores. Thanks to Google’s partners, the most open version of their open OS is the one you’re least likely to see.”
Siri, The Final Frontier
” Is it hyperbole to put Siri on the same level as the graphical user interface, or multi-touch? It might seem so, but Siri brings us strikingly close to the future promised in Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video from 1987, which was strangely enough, set in 2011”
Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On
“The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.”
Techcrunch iPhone 4S Reveiew
“ Apple focused on the other thing they do best: refining already great products to make them better. The iPhone 4 was a great product. The best smartphone ever made. Now it cedes that title to the iPhone 4S.”
Steve Jobs: Nothing to Lose
A fitting tribute to a great man.
Steve Jobs - Greatness Personified
When I wrote this it wasn’t meant to be a eulogy…
Why 4S is Good Enough For Me
There may soon be blood in the streets over the lack of an iPhone 5. The ThisIsMyNext crew (soon to be the Verge) went on record before the Apple event saying that they would be “extremely dissapointed” if Apple announced an iPhone 4S and nothing else. Other tech pundits seem to be dissapointed (even if they still plan to get the phone) with what Apple has put on offer. I think that they are missing the point, and I’ll tell you why.
A Rose In Any Other Casing
Apple could literally have taken the exact same phone, put it in a new case made of some other material, called it an iPhone 5, and most of the dissapointed masses would have been satisfied. The upgrades in the iPhone 4S are substantial, and are a marked improvement over the iPhone 4. While Apple may have signalled that they’re not ready to call this a next generation device, the spec bump alone is remarkable, and will make a big difference in day-to-day use for anyone with this phone. And since the design of the iPhone 4 is breathtaking already, why change what ain’t broke? *
