“As I said months and months ago – “jiska koi nahin uska Android”. No product line to convince MS to license you WinMo? There’s Android. No cash to pay for licenses? There’s Android. Want to convince market and customers that you have something up your sleeve? There’s Android”.

WIRED Magazine today takes stock of Android today and its future “explosive growth”.

The manufacturers of the 12 Android devices on the market are Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Dell, Huawei and Acer. Except for the first three, none of the manufacturers had a product line with a mainstream mobile OS – they’ve hitched their smartphone fortune to Android. The case with Moto, HTC and Samsung is more dramatic – they’re all developing a strong Android product line (Moto in particular) in spite of their Windows Mobile backgrounds. I cannot find one smartphone manufacturer that is betting on Windows Mobilee, and I strongly suspect that most of Android’s growth will come at WinMo’s expense.

But my comment was to point out that a commitment to Android implies a lack of coherent strategy for manufacturers. That certainly seems true with Moto, HTC, Samsung and LG. In my opinion, Moto has suffered from terrible hardware design. HTC and Samsung have tried without success to hide Windows Mobile’s ugliness under their customizations. LG’s proprietary OS strategy means few, if any, third-party apps.

For the rest, Android *is* their first strategy. That’s brave. But it’s also evidence that Android’s features are exactly what smartphone users want today – touch-screen support, strong integration with Google’s applications, a capable browser and support for other installable applications. This is also true of Mac OS X on iPhone, but what if you want another phone? Android’s looking like a very, very attractive alternative.

Why do you oppose the income tax?
Because I have a right to the fruits of my labor, and government does not. If you concede the principle of the income tax, you concede the principle that the government owns all your income and permits you to keep a certain percentage of it. (emphasis added) God-given rights to our life and our liberty don’t come from government.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Also, this nugget about time:

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true… all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

The committee’s most-controversial prize was probably the 1973 selection of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, for their efforts to end the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese negotiator declined the award, the only recipient to do so in the prize’s 108-year history.

Delicious. Then,

Mr. Kissinger, who guided war policy in the Nixon administration, accepted, prompting musical satirist Tom Lehrer to respond: “It was at that moment that satire died. There was nothing more to say after that.”

Update: 14th October 2009 – Al Jazeera has more about this. (Saying ‘No thanks’ to Nobel)

There seems to be widespread consensus that Windows 7 has to be a hit because Microsoft needs it to be a hit. I wonder how much this assumption has colored the reviews.

By necessity she mostly sticks to books 250 to 300 pages or fewer — Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid primer “The Crying of Lot 49,” for example, rather than the weightier, in all ways, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But on March 1, she made it through all 560 pages of “Revelation,” by C. J. Sansom, a murder mystery set in Tudor England.

She’s partial to high-intensity fiction, but also reads memoirs, mysteries, science fiction, graphic novels and general nonfiction, with niche interests including punk rock (“Please Kill Me,” by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain) and tennis (“A Terrible Splendor,” by Marshall Jon Fisher).

Shashi Tharoor did this when he was very young, and didn’t get as much publicity for it:

I read eclectically, and I must say, indiscriminately. Remember that reading was my principal activity outside schoolwork. I loved the game of cricket and I played it very badly, but also I wasn’t often well enough to go out and play. And so that and the absence of television, computer games, and all the distractions that my children now enjoy, meant that if I wasn’t writing I was reading. And actually there was one particular year, the year of my thirteenth birthday, that I decided to set myself a challenge of finishing three hundred and sixty-five books in three hundred and sixty-five days. And I did and I kept a list at that point to prove it. So I was a voracious and rapid reader, and with that kind of volume, I obviously read all sorts of stuff.

The ‘follower count’ is the number of politicos who follow that user.

More Republicans than Democrats there.

(via the New York Times).

Here’s the thing. I didn’t read his (William Safire’s) op-ed column because I agreed with him; I read it because I didn’t agree with him. Though I seldom agreed with his politics (and when I did, it was in favor of individual privacy and liberty), Safire was always thoughtful and his writing always playful. I feel it’s important to read the opinions of those with whom you tend to disagree, politically or otherwise.

But even if your politics and constitution are such that you could not abide his op-ed column, I don’t see how anyone who loves U.S. English didn’t cherish his Sunday ‘On Language’ column as the national treasure that it was. 30 years! And he kicked ass until the very end

(responding to readers’ complaints about how Gruber could say anything positive about the Nixon speech-writer who also supported the Iraq War).

What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than for maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.

(via Matt Mullenweg.)

My friend Rony and I were speculating about a true “distributed hotel” that would rent out your apartment when you’re gone, handling keys, cleaning, payment, maintenance, insurance, emergencies, and other details for you. Maybe it could even help you secure your apartment, removing personal papers and storing them offsite in your absence.

Any idea if anyone anywhere’s doing this?

In a survey of 2,001 information workers, only 10 percent of the people using Microsoft Outlook said they would be happy to have their e-mail switched.

(via @jeanmarsh)

“How about another change? Do you think we can get the TV networks to stop placing those annoying channel logos on the screens of our lovely HD TVs? And on widescreen TVs, those logos aren’t neatly tucked into the far corners, but are shifted more toward the center.”

He’s based this on readers’ complaints, who say that animated, looping logos are a massive distraction from the actual content. Couldn’t agree more.

Also, what the sponsor-saturated IPL could become.

… there was absolutely nothing new about what Indya.com offered. Anything that they had, people like Rediff, Sify, IndiaInfo, IndiaTimes, [insert favourite portal here] already did… Their very expensive advertising talked of their “attitude”, but this didn’t affect the content at all, which was pedestrian. They offered different colour schemes for their site, which was about all that was “new”. So, yes, the Times ad got people to their site, but there was nothing to keep them coming back; and certainly nothing to make people switch from their favourite site.

The story ended disastrously:

Indya.com had hired over 220 people since April 2000. In July, they fired 20% of them. Apparently, their profitability maths still didn’t work out, so in August, they fired another 35%. Oh, the things you have to do to save money. If only they had saved a bit of money from their wasteful advertising, it would have paid the salaries of some of these poor employees. And now, 80% more have “quit”…

(via Shamanth)

The tension on the hinge of the folder is perfect: not too tense, not too loose. It opens easily and will lay flat on any work surface. In case I didn’t actually know who they are or what it was, the words “welcome to apple” adorn the inner flap.

Tab separators along the tops of the section allow me to quickly find the files that I need. If you’re not familiar with paper technology, this is not unlike the “tab” widgets you might see along the top of a browser window such as Firefox and Safari. They work by placing your finger on top of the desired “tab” and lightly pulling. Perfectly intuitive.

The chip-and-PIN technology usually isn’t much of an issue when making purchases at a store, or paying for a meal in a restaurant, as most of those merchants still have credit card terminals that can read the magnetic stripes. Likewise, A.T.M.’s typically recognize and accept many cards whether they have a chip or a magnetic stripe.

But American cardholders have had their cards rejected by automated ticket kiosks at train stations, gas pumps, parking garages and other places where there are no cashiers.

… the grabbed his cellphone to arrange a new shipment, cradling it between his left ear and shoulder, and with his right hand e-mailed instructions to his staff from his laptop computer — all while driving his rental car in a construction zone on a two-lane highway in North Carolina.

According to the New York Times feature on the hazards of mobile multitasking, it gets worse:

“I’d be on my cellphone, writing notes in my planner, driving with my knee, and with a sandwich in my lap,” Mr. Hudson said. He felt he could not ignore his phone, he said, because he never knew which call or e-mail message would be one he could not miss.

Unlike France, America and Britain don’t tend to encourage public intellectuals. But if they did, Richard Posner would be their standard-bearer. Posner’s day job is as an appeals-court judge in Chicago—a career founded upon his reputation as America’s pre-eminent thinker on anti-trust law. But Posner is not just a lawyer. In his spare time he has written on sex, security, politics, Hegel, Homeric society, medieval Iceland and a whole lot more. The Wall Street Journal once called him a “one-man think-tank”.

Worth a read for conversations with living polymaths like Posner and Carl Djerassi, and why it’s hard to be one today:

Once you have reached the vanguard, you have to work harder to stay there, especially in the sciences. So many scientists are publishing research in each specialism that merely to keep up with the reading is a full-time job. “The frontier of knowledge is getting longer,” says Professor Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, where Young was a leading light for over three decades. “It is impossible now for anyone to focus on more than one part at a time.”

Simply slide your fingers across the squares and the lights will follow, emulating a turn or a twist… simply slide the lighted squares horizontally, vertically or even rotate a face with a touch of your finger.

(via Gadgetwise)