2023s
The Rise and Fall of the ‘IBM Way’
Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic: IBM has a history of more than a century of innovation.
The company was the Watson family business for 60 years, and offered lifetime employment, though it’s recently been sued for age discrimination.
The System/360 mainframe, announced in 1964, was one of the greater products of the 20th Century, as important as the Model T. The System/360 introduced computing architecture that ran across a line of computers—some bigger and more powerful, and others smaller, meaning users could re-use their software between different models in a line.
The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end. A mashup of progressivism and paternalism, communalism and cutthroat competition, the once ballyhooed “IBM Way” was, for better and worse, inextricably intertwined with the family at the top.
JULIE: “I’m going to try a new herb and rice.”
ME: “I don’t think I should be eating rice.”
JULIE: “Not rice. Spice. Urban spice.”
ME: “Oh, ok. Sounds good.” (pause) “What’s urban spice?”
JULIE: “Not urban spice. Herb. And. Spice.”
Julie, exhausted, fainted.
Threads is getting an API. This seems to be separate from ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to this being implemented—I haven’t been posting to Threads as much as I do elsewhere, because doing it manually is inconvenient . @manton, have you seen this?
I am quite enjoying John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watch movie list and have added about half the titles to my to-be-watched-list.
I’m done with challenging and important entertainment for a while. The news is challenging enough nowadays.
We went to the San Diego Natural History Museum Sunday, which proved to be a personal milestone for me—my first time receiving a senior discount.
My chagrin at having the word “senior” applied to me was offset by getting a discount. So, um, yay I guess?
The Everywhereist: Every Relationship In Love, Actually, Listed In Order of How Dysfunctional They Are.. I love this movie and agree with every criticism against it, including this one.
RIP Luiz Barroso, who pioneered the modern data center for Google and made the modern internet possible. Until Barroso, data centers were populated by enormously powerful and expensive computer servers. Barroso instead used massive numbers of relatively inexpensive, disposable machines.
“… we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer,” Barroso said.
Barroso was one of those immigrants that Republicans say are vermin polluting America’s blood.
Sivraj and Me. Phil Gomes created a personal AI advisor using GPT Builder, with a sarcastic personality based on Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
This is brilliant. I’m going to try something like it.
Humans are a basically civilized species. We know not to go barefoot in restaurants, treat our friends’ living rooms like landfills or nap on the shoulder of our office cubicle mate. And yet, as soon as we step inside an airport or onto a plane, our manners seem to vanish. Perhaps it’s the delirium of travel or the belief that everyday rules do not apply to vacations, much like calories don’t count on holiday and foreign currencies aren’t real money. Or maybe there has never been a canon for proper passenger behavior — until now.
Amazon would rather ask its workers to humiliate themselves instead of paying living wages.
Meanwhile, founder and chair Jeff Bezos is worth $172 billion, and the company tripled its profits to $9.9B in its most recent quarter.
John Scalzi has a delightful short essay on “Die Hard," a movie that works so well because of its wonderful cast. Even small parts get their moments to shine.
And of course “Die Hard” created thousands of variations and ripoffs. My favorite “Die Hard” variation is “Paul Blart, Mall Cop.” The way I remember it (it’s been a few years), Paul Blart is a hero–and he was a hero all along: Courageous, loyal, and ingenious.
Thankfully, Scalzi spends only a little time on the question of whether DH was a Christmas movie. That was a good joke the first year it came up but enough already. Sometimes the Internet can be like a four-year-old that just wants to keep telling the same knock-knock joke over and over and over and over…..
The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence.
If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.
Alexandra Petri: GOP baffled that ‘We Don’t Care if You Die’ is not a winning slogan
Jason Snell @jsnell@zeppelin.flights makes the case for clipboard managers—software that saves a history of what you copy to your clipboard.
I find clipboard managers to be essential. The lack of a clipboard manager on the iPad is a big reason why I find it difficult getting real work done on those tablets.
My earliest memory of using a clipboard manager was the late 1980s. 35+ years later, a clipboard manager should be standard on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Instead, it’s a third-party add-on for the Mac and you can’t get one at all on the iPad and iPhone.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How the NYPD defeated bodycams. “NYPD leadership were accountability’s adversaries, not its partners.”
Police control bodycams in New York—as they do in other cities, including Minneapolis (site of the George Floyd murder); Montgomery, Ala.; Memphis—and they use that control to protect murderous, brutal cops.
Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that’s exactly what will happen.
And it’s exactly what does happen.
I hate to say I told you so but Death’s hand rests on the shoulders of some of the largest Western telecom equipment cos. Steve Saunders predicts imminent shake-out in the telecom vendor market.