Itnow-sep14-sample. Tuckski : The new issue of #ITNOW has...
Good Code. The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Thursday, January 6, 2011 By Paul Ford I look forward to your feedback. I sometimes chat with people in the book- and magazine-publishing industries. They complain to me about the web. They worry about what is being lost. Books are not product. I call the people who say such things the Gutenbourgeois. “Look,” I say, “maybe you're doing it wrong.” “But,” they say, “we tweet.” That's when I tell them about the fundamental question of the web. The Fundamental Question of the Web One can spend a lot of time defining a medium in terms of how it looks, what it transmits, wavelengths used, typographic choices made, bandwidth available.
Here's one question: “I'm bored, and I want to get out of the house and have an experience, possibly involving elves or bombs. The answer: You could go to a movie. Here's another: “How do I distract myself without leaving the house?” You might turn on the TV. “I'm driving, or making dinner. Radio! “What's going on locally and in the world, at length?” Try this newspaper! M.guardian.co.uk. Inside the heads of the developers the mobile companies (Apple, Amazon, HP, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, RIM) are fighting over. Today Facebook will announce something new for mobile phones. Business Insider gives its guesses as to what’s coming.
At 10:30 a.m. today, Pacific Time, you can watch the Facebook press event live streaming on the Web. I’ll be there as well and will get a chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg after the event. To prepare for the event I wanted to get inside the heads of a successful mobile app development team. HighFiveLabs is it. They’ve published more than 10 mobile apps on the iPhone platform and just shipped a new app that got the coveted “featured” position on Apple’s iTunes store.
But there’s something bigger going on. Almost every developer I’ve visited lately says they’ve had a visit from either Nokia or Microsoft or RIM or all three. But that’s only one way to look at this interesting team. 1. Anyway, this conversation is long, but there’s lots of interesting insights into how mobile developers think and how they make their development decisions. Smarter Than You Think - The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You. Technology Review: New Chip Captures Specialized Immune Cells. A novel microfluidics chip developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will let doctors examine how white blood cells called neutrophils help the body cope with burns and other traumatic injuries. It may also shed light on why the immune system sometimes spirals out of control, resulting in dangerous inflammation. The chip lets scientists do something they’ve never before been able to do: quickly and easily capture neutrophils from a small volume of blood.
In the long term, scientists hope to use this technology to predict which patients are most likely to develop serious infections after an injury and therefore need the most aggressive treatment. “People have been looking for biomarkers for injury and sepsis [blood poisoning] for a long time,” says Steven Calvano, a researcher at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Calvano, who was not directly involved in the project, says, “This could be an extremely valuable clinical tool.” Technology Review: New Languages, and Why We Need Them. Creators of two dozen new programming languages–some designed to enable powerful new Web applications and mobile devices–presented their work last week in Portland, OR. The reason for the gathering was the first Emerging Languages Camp at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The designers included hobbyists eager to flex their development muscles, academics hoping to influence the next generation of computing, and researchers from corporations like Microsoft and Google who want new tools to address evolving applications and infrastructure. In dense 20-minute presentations, designers shared details of their embryonic languages. What all the designers had in common was a desire to shed decades-old programming conventions that seem increasingly ill-suited to modern computing–a desire shared by the tech industry at large.
“There’s a renaissance in language design at the moment,” says Rob Pike, an engineer at Google and codesigner of Go, a programming language being developed at the company. Should you be on Quora?
High performance computing. We should cover this. Interview suggestions.