“ So where do you get the songs for your digital music library? You probably own stacks of music CDs. And you’ve probably noticed that a lot of these CDs feature — at best — only one or two songs you really like. Fact is, if you wanted to take your 100 favorite songs with you on your next vacation, you’d have to pack almost that many CDs.”
Apple, explaining iTunes in January of 2001.
Remember: the iPod wouldn’t arrive for 10 months and the store would take more than 2 years.
“ Last year, about 70 percent of its estimated $237 million operating profit went to pension contributions and interest costs, compared with 19 percent in 2007, according to company statements.”
Bloomberg on troubles at the New York Times.
There is no good answer to this problem that doesn’t involve a time machine. Better answers, yes, but not good ones.
Symantec's Source Code was Stolen 6 Years Ago
From Wired’s Threat Level:
The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.
Symantec said in its announcement that users should disable pcAnywhere until the company had time to update the software to ensure that hackers are unable to exploit holes they might find in the code…
What was unclear from Symantec’s disclosure, however, was just how long Symantec had known its source code had been breached. The statement left open the question of whether Symantec knew in 2006 that its source code was taken and only disclosed it this month after hackers claimed to have it.
Speaking of Symantec, here’s a screenshot of their software running on my last work machine which required it:
Good job keeping process-hungry malware off the machine, Symantec.
“ In this issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come.”
“ With regard to category interests, the demographic profiles easily pick up on things like travel searches. Our own Ryan Paul said Google captured him perfectly, with categories about computers and electronics, video games, and cats.”
Ars Technica editors share their Google ad preferences.
To be fair, “computers and electronics, video games, and cats” probably describes 75% of the internet.
To be unfair, Google pegs me as someone interested in “CD Audio Shopping”.
History as a List
NPR and Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich runs with my Frontiers through the Ages thought experiment, spinning it into a game we can play everywhere.
This makes my week.
What will phishing attacks against AI look like? Will they be the same or play off the computer/human tension?
The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss
The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.
It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.
Here’s a small snip:
In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.
Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.
I’m really, really excited about the impending release after Feb. 17, especially given the awesome essays that Vitorio Miliano and Jon Whipple are working on alongside me.
Anyone curious about social game design, behavioral psychology, or even just why FarmVille is so damn addictive should take a look at the full excerpt.
Really inspiring work.
I hope the buzz of ‘gamification’ wears off and we return to saying ‘Skinnerian’. It’s so much less rosy that way.
Education on a Digital Scale
Felix Salmon provides us with an update on Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, which wrapped in last year:
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
…
And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.
With the completion of the class, Thrun declared he “can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s walking away from his tenure and starting Udacity, an online university.
Education is finally starting to fully embrace digital. Developments like Udacity, Khan Academy, Code Academy, and Apple’s textbooks look to do to college what blogging and the internet have done to publishing, lowering the cost of entry to an almost negligible point and increasing the scale of participants by several factors.
Think back to how many newspaper and magazine columnists we had in 1995. Now think of how many people are writing frequently online. Imagine if we achieved such a shift in college education, with millions of people learning how to create search engines (Udacity’s first class) and more. Thrun’s numbers above feel about right, and he’s just getting started.
The potential of a population educated on a digital scale, not just made louder with access to publishing platforms, promises to be massive.
“”Remember back in October when after a rare “miss” by Apple (which was only a miss because analysts are stupid and lazy), the early signs pointed to the potential of a $40 billion quarter? Some thought that was insane given that Apple had never even had a $30 billion quarter before. Well, turns out that projection was a little insane — insanely low.
Try a $46.33 billion quarter.
MG Siegler on Apple’s beyond blowout quarter beyond blowout quarter. 37 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and 5.2 million Macs were sold.
