People are beginning to ponder the idea that Donald Trump could actually be the next president of the United States. Historically, one wonders if the same fears surfaced when they elected a movie star to run the country.
The worst video game in history
February 22, 2016
The video game of Steven Spielberg's ET is considered to be one of the worst of all time and has even been blamed for triggering the collapse of Atari. Howard Scott Warshaw, the gifted programmer who made it, explains how it was rushed out in a matter of weeks - and how he feels about those events in California now.
"Things just started to unravel," says Warshaw. "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."
I remember hearing about the landfill story many years ago. I had no idea it was true.
Not a marketing strategy
February 22, 2016
Apple has shared a new Q&A page that explains why the company is opposing a court order to create a unique version of iOS that would bypass security protections and allow an iPhone to be unlocked by way of a brute-force attack.
Law enforcement agents around the country have already said they have hundreds of iPhones they want Apple to unlock if the FBI wins this case. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks. Of course, Apple would do our best to protect that key, but in a world where all of our data is under constant threat, it would be relentlessly attacked by hackers and cybercriminals. As recent attacks on the IRS systems and countless other data breaches have shown, no one is immune to cyberattacks.
Again, we strongly believe the only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it.
Lost Sounds of Antiquity
February 21, 2016
Great piece by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic:
History is mostly silent to us now. Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.
A 150 million dollar failure
February 21, 2016
Eli Stokols writing for Politico Magazine:
“The rules all changed this year. It was all about taking on the establishment,” said a Republican operative close to the Bush family. “When you’re the son and brother of former presidents, the grandson of a U.S. senator, how do you run in a year like this? It is just a year of personality, not message. All of a sudden, there was no path for him. They just kept falling back on his record as governor, which is all he has—and no one gives a shit.”
Surprising that it took the Republicans this long to figure that out. There was simply no way the public were ever going to tolerate a third Bush in the White House. It at least proves that money does not buy everything.