I announced here on Scripting News that the final RSS 2.0 spec was out. But! – no one had a problem with it. I guess we were ready to go to the next stage, with a clear way forward. And RSS would go on to eat the world, to steal a phrase from a well-known tech pioneer.

I started using RSS via Safari when macOS Tiger was released in April 2005. I then moved to NetNewsWire in March 2006 when the number of feeds was slowing my browser. My news, blog, and web reading have changed for the better. I now use Reeder on all my devices via Feedbin sync.

Cheers to Dave for creating RSS and another 20 years of a decentralized web.

The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.

Shiny new tools are irresistible and can sometimes solve problems in a better and more elegant way, but most times a proven and limited stack is what you need.

In a matter of minutes after setting up, I was able to get 3x better performance with a single device than with two Amplifi HDs or with enterprise-grade UniFi equipment (UniFi Security Gateway, Switch, and AP) both on iPhone 11 Pro, which has Wi-Fi 6 support and devices without it.

Chris Hoffman from HowToGeek on Wi-Fi 6:

As usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds. If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5.

Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work.

Better battery life for your devices through Target Wake Time and better performance in crowded areas:

When the access point is talking to a device (like your smartphone), it can tell the device exactly when to put its Wi-Fi radio to sleep and exactly when to wake it up to receive the next transmission. This will conserve power, as it means the Wi-Fi radio can spend more time in sleep mode. And that means longer battery life.

[…]

Wi-Fi tends to get bogged down when you’re in a crowded place with a lot of Wi-FI enabled devices. Picture a busy stadium, airport, hotel, mall, or even a crowded office with everyone connected to Wi-Fi. You’re probably going to have slow Wi-Fi.

The new Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, incorporates many new technologies to help with this. Intel trumpets that Wi-Fi 6 will improve each user’s average speed by “at least four times” in congested areas with a lot of connected devices.

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

Inspiring examples from many different industries and types of entities. Motivated people can do almost anything.

Everything I’ve talked about so far is infrastructure we’d run and pay for regardless of our programming language or web framework. Whether we run on Python, PHP, Rust, Go, C++, or whatever, we’d still need databases, we’d still need search, we’d still need to store files.

So let’s talk about what we spend on our programming language and web framework. It’s about 15%. That’s the price for all our app and job servers. The machines that actually run Ruby on Rails. So against a $3 million budget, it’s about $450,000. That’s it.

Let’s imagine that there was some amazing technology that would let us do everything we’re doing with Ruby on Rails, but it was TWICE AS FAST! That would save us about ~$225,000 per year. We spend more money than that on the Xmas gift we give employees at Basecamp every year. And that’s if you could truly go twice as fast, and thus require half the machines, which is not an easy thing to do, despite what microbenchmarks might delude you into thinking.

“Ruby can’t scale” or “Ruby is too expensive” my ass.

The term work-life balance has taken a beating lately. It seems to be a favorite punching bag for grandstanding about what you really need is integration or that balance is a mirage anyway. Wat?

Balance simple means that each portion of the system has a sustainable weight which keeps the composition in harmony. Going down a pedantic, semantic rabbit hole of “well, actually, work is part of life, ergo seeking balance is wrong” is some perfidy circular logic.

As a founder you can choose to look at an obstacle as something that keeps you from moving forward (a roadblock), or as something that slows you down for a minute as you continue along your path (a speed bump).

[…]

Roadblocks put stress on your mind. Stress on your body. Stress on your relationships. It’s no way to live, especially for folks who are building startups to improve our lives rather than re-arranging our lives around our companies.

This seems easy and obvious, but it’s not.

When you’re in the middle of a crisis it can feel overwhelming and almost impossible to surmount. I always try to keep my head down and keep working on the problem.

If working on a problem doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere, then walk away and do other things.

Let your mind do the thinking in the background. Once you are ready, you’ll come back to solve the issues wiser and stronger. A calm mind will take you further than you can imagine.

Paragraf is producing graphene ‘wafers’ and graphene-based electronic devices, which could be used in transistors, where graphene-based chips could deliver speeds more than ten times faster than silicon chips; and in chemical and electrical sensors, where graphene could increase sensitivity by a factor of more than 30. The company’s first device will be available in the next few months.

[…]the real lesson of the Soviet experiment has been lost on us, and the corporations of the world should take note: Planning doesn’t work.

Corporations must and do plan, of course. Their leaders call these plans “strategic” to give them gravitas. But typically strategic plans are just budgets and goals. Budgets and goals are important, but they are not “strategy” if by strategy we mean the logic that drives action.

…after working through common arguments and misconceptions, such as that the RISC (ARM) instruction set architecture is inherently inferior to CISC (x86), that the benchmarks spruiking excellent ARM performance are inaccurate, that the performance gap is explained by different operating systems, and more, I’ve found that the central claim of these articles largely holds true: ARM processors, particularly those produced by Apple, have caught up to high-end x86 processors in most perspectives of performance.

I am looking forward to two things from Apple this year: ARM based Macs with desktop optimized CPUs and iOS 13 optimizations for iPad, that allows all that processor power to be fully utilized.

There are three big things that remain before the first feature-complete build (which will be 5.0a1): searching, the app icon, and syncing with FeedBin.

NetNewsWire got me hooked on RSS over 12 years ago. Now it’s open source and rewritem from scratch in Swift. I have been using the alphas for a while and it’s the same great app from all those years ago. Can’t wait to get the Feedbin sync feature, it’s my preferred sync service.

You’ve probably seen them used to describe software products. Maybe you use them to describe your own product. They seem like great descriptors, because you know they’re truthful, and what’s true must be convincing, right?

As we enter a new year, one in which technology promises to move faster than ever, it’s worth considering what our 23 problems might be.

Good starting point for what we need to work on as a species.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier unveiled what it claims is a patented customer-service program on Wednesday called Team of Experts. Subscribers who call or message for assistance will be assigned a group of employees to fix the issue.

This might sound like a corporate joke, but the few times I’ve had to interact with T-Mobile support have been via iMessage for business or their in-app chat. My experience has been incredible so far.

For now, no matter how good your AI or chatbot is, a well-trained human with full authority to get stuff done for you will outperform any tech out there. Glad they are investing in customer support as a differentiator.

The social media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

This sounds like an all-around bad idea. Glad to hear some banks are walking away from these conversations.

If you’re still worried about it, don’t sit on your router, and use your speaker function on your iPhone.

You can always buy tons of tin foil.

Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

Being evil is now encouraged at Google?

VPNs are for everyone. This is why.

Yes. End of story. Stop reading and get one. Do it. Now.

Summarizes in relatively simple terms why you do need a VPN, especially if you use any type public Wifi.

The researchers suggest, for example, that graphene could now be used to create new types of superconducting quantum devices for high-speed computing. Intriguingly, it might also be used to prove the existence of a mysterious form of superconductivity known as “p-wave” superconductivity, which academics have been struggling to verify for more than 20 years.

It amazes me how much research is being done on possible commercial applications for graphene—everything from electronics to structures stronger than steel.

Developing an in-house OS is fine as a bargaining chip during Android contract negotiations, but a new OS with no apps won’t resonate with customers when Android is available from every other OEM. Tizen hasn’t been able to compete with Android on smartphones, but Samsung has used it almost exclusively on smartphones and other “smart” electronics that don’t have much of an established app ecosystem.

How good of a bargaining chip could this be if it didn’t work for Windows OEMs back in the 90’s and Samsung recently. Google knows this. Not sure why Huawei doesn’t yet.

As you may already know, existing iPhones start taking photos the moment you open the app. This is how Apple provides the camera with the ability to take photos instantly, with none of the delay (‘shutter lag’) you see with some digital cameras. The camera has already taken and temporarily stored a whole bunch of photos, and it simply keeps the last one taken as you press the button and discards the rest …

Additionally, there’s good info on what the camera does for the new Live Photos.

Researchers from Palo Alto Networks have discovered that a piece of iOS malware successfully stole more than 225,000 Apple IDs and passwords from jailbroken phones, using them to make purchases from the official App Store.

If you wanted to start a successful software company today, you wouldn’t want to follow Bill Gates’ playbook. Creating a new desktop operating system, and an expensive office suite of applications to run on top of it, won’t work in 2015. It worked for him in the 80’s and 90’s, but that was a different time.

Understand what others did, but don’t try to copy. It usually never works for many reason. I learned this the hard way.

The companies will also work together to make new digital payments experiences possible, though neither side had many details to discuss. Lastly, Visa plans to help Stripe expand quicker in emerging markets where the credit card company has strong relationships with other financial institutions.

Credit card processors could you more competitive in emerging markets. In Colombia, you need to pay close to $1k to enable recurring payments - ridiculous.

At least 14 companies, including Google, Amazon, Verizon and Harris, have signed agreements with NASA to help devise the first air-traffic system to coordinate small, low-altitude drones, which the agency calls the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management. More than 100 other companies and universities have also expressed interest in the project, which will be needed before commercial drones can fly long distances to deliver goods, inspect power lines and survey crops.

Hopefully this system will have government oversight but not be operated or controlled by it. Decentralization of the system is key to foster innovation in a quickly evolving space like this.

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

Decisiveness is so critical to a company’s success that I worry when a decision falls through the cracks at Koombea or when we’re working with a founder or product manager who can’t make up her mind.

The most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to live with most business decisions for a long time. If you do things right, most decisions will be obsolete within days or weeks.

The idea behind the talks is a universal standard for embedded SIM cards (“e-SIM”) that are built into the phone and not user accessible. These subscriber identity modules would allow customers to sign up for service on any network they wanted, then allow them to switch at any time (obviously with some limitations placed by the carriers).

The one caveat is that most carriers suck at anything software. Case in point: Movistar in Colombia hasn’t implemented visual voicemail eight years after iPhone’s debut.

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $49.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $10.7 billion, or $1.85 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $37.4 billion and net profit of $7.7 billion, or $1.28 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.

Compared to Microsoft and Google’s $22.2 and $17.7 billion(respectively).

When you look at the landing pages (or homepages or marketing sites, however you want to call them) of today’s SaaS companies, they usually look quite beautiful. They typically have a clean, simple and friendly look, with very little text and a lot of images or videos. In many cases, these websites could just as well advertise a consumer product. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since the consumerizaton of enterprise software has been one of the most important driving forces in the software world in the last years. But B2B software websites haven’t always looked like this and it’s fascinating to see how much things have changed.

Google likes to have multiple, competing products that go after the same user base. That way, if one product doesn’t work out, hopefully the other one will.

Throwing shit at the wall to see if it’ll stick will work eventually but not the best strategy.

This multi-product approach is good for Google’s long-term health, but it also wastes a lot of resources. There is duplicate work going on all over the place, but if Google is flush with anything, it’s resources. Adsense and Adwords bring in so much revenue that, for now at least, the company can afford to be wasteful.

Guess it didn’t take long for this strategy to become wasteful. This reflected a lack of focus, not a “hedging your bets” strategy. Curation is the most important thing about product design. Having multiple products you offer competing against each other is not “healthy competition.” It’s a sign of a lack of unified product vision across the company.

Google revenue grew 19% in 2014, down from 21% in 2013, 22% in 2012 and 29% in 2011. But operating expenses grew 31% last year, according to S&P Capital IQ; spending on research and development soared 38%.The result: operating-profit margin declined to 32%, from 38% in 2011, according to Goldman Sachs.

The company has matured and still relies on a single product for the overwhelming majority of its revenue. In contrast, Apple has diversified much of its revenue - even though much of its growth is still tied to iPhone.

Initiatives like Google Glass, Project Loon, Google Fiber, robotics, and self-driving cars are the future. With that said, they are far from being able to monetize them, plus the sheer amount of these moonshot-type projects makes them look unfocused. Pressure from investors was bound to happen as growth started to slide.

When I try to watch the video it, I get this:

FAIL!!!!

As the Saber Pyramid tablet is to the iPad.

The sad part, is that only one was meant to be a joke.

[Image credit: The Verge and The Huffington Post]

Thomas J. Watson in 1943:

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

John Battelle 2011:

Right now, I’d wager that the handful of brands leading the charge to win in this market might be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and….IBM. About five or so. Maybe Watson will be proven right, even if he never was wrong in the first place.

Things change really fast in this industry.

Amazon is not going to create a Kindle/iPad hybrid. Jeff Bezos knows that LCD technology can’t match e-ink for real reading. That is why I wouldn’t expect the current Kindle form factor to go out the door like most analyst are predicting. If anything Amazon could release a brand new competing product, which brings me to my next issue.

Where do analyst get their data? Predicting Amazon is going to sell 3-5 million of a product they haven’t seen yet is just plain stupid. Even for them.

This is great strategic thinking:

So when we make any big decision, whether in fund-raising, or product design, or partnership strategy, we ask, “would this make it more or less likely that we’ll be around in a hundred years”, and if the answer is less we don’t do it. This financing is just one more solid step in building the hundred year company.

Robert Scobles’s vision of Android tablet future is of single app devices for business and institutions. Apart from the low margins the device manufacturer earns(if they’re lucky), who else gets to win here?

Do developers get to sell dozens of apps? Does Google make any money?

Nope.

Then how is this sustainable?

Why go back to the silly notion that market share is everything. It has to be the right market share: People or business who buy apps. Dozens of apps. No just a large installed base that is virtually useless to the developer ecosystem.

Brad Feld:

Often these entrepreneurs think their idea is brand new – that no one has ever thought of it before. Other times they ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect their idea. Occasionally the emails mysteriously allude to the idea without really saying what it is. These entrepreneurs think their idea is special and magic. And they are wrong. The great entrepreneurs are already focused on the implementation of their idea. They send me links to their website or software. They describe the business they are in the process of creating (or have already created). They point me to what they’ve done to implement their idea and show real users who validate that the idea is important. And they quickly move past the idea to the execution of the idea.

As part of working with entrepreneurs, I see this all the time. People that don’t share their idea freely usually have never built anything before, and thus don’t know how hard it is to build and scale a unique product that pay love or pay for(which ends up being the same depending on you’re market) .

Here’s Google full use of it’s infrastracture to blast past competitors.

Ben Kuchera from ArsTecnica:

In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It’s not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

Software(or video game development) is not like wine. Don’t forget to release early and often. This fiasco could have easily been avoided.

The Economist:

But [Apple] has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price.

I think Apple applies this principle very effectively, but completely disagree it charges a premium. iPhones, iPads and Macs compete on features and price with their competitor’s products.

Robert X. Cringely on iCloud:

The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

I really don’t pay attention to what Cringle usually says, but this time he’s kind of right. Apple really dosen’t have much to loose if the PC becomes just another device with iCloud. Microsoft does.

The mobile revolution is about data, not files. Until iCloud is released, all data in mobile apps rest in silos, unlike desktop apps. iCloud frees that data and makes it available to other devices in the ecosystem. It’s the bold move and it’s worth it for whoever controls it.

As we’ve said a few times in the past, the only way to decrease piracy is to compete with it and offer products that are superior to its pirated counterpart.

It appears that for (older) movies Netflix is on the right path here.

Now that there’s proof, how do we get studios on board on releasing movies to Netflix, iTunes and Amazon at the same time as their DVD counterparts? It’s all about convenience and sadly right now pirating is so much easier than having to wait for a just released movie to arrive via snail mail.

After reading Freakonomics 2, my respect for Paul Allen and his team skyrocketed as they try to solve big problems like hurricanes, global warming and malaria(with mosquito killing laser beam-not a joke). But now, in my eyes, he’s just a plain old patent troll(like the one near his office).

Does HP genuinely want 3PAR or do they just want Dell to spend as much money on it as they can trying to buy it? When I saw Dell had upped the bid this morning, I thought it had been a brilliant move on HP’s part, by forcing Dell to pay more. Now I am not sure what their real intentions are. Maybe they really need this company to compliment their services, or they just don’t want to loose against Dell in any front. No matter how this pans out, there’s going to be some very happy investors on 3PAR’s side.