The (Not So) Beautiful Game

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It’s been a bad shocking year for football news, with the World Cup just months away: 

 “The alleged fixer arrested earlier this week claimed he fixed World Cup games and matches in Europe and Australia.”

(The Telegraph)

 

“A wide-ranging match-fixing investigation has uncovered more than 680 suspicious matches — including World Cup and European Championship qualifiers and two Champions League games — and found evidence that a Singapore-based crime group is closely involved in match-fixing…”

(National Post)

 

“Last Sunday, an amateur soccer match in Brazil came to an unbelievably gruesome end when a referee was murdered by outraged fans. His head was then cut off and placed on a spike. The beheading was retaliation; the ref initially stabbed a player to death.”

(Deadspin)

 

“A crane installing a part of the roof of the stadium that will host the opening soccer match of the 2014 World Cup here collapsed on the arena on Wednesday, killing two people and injuring a third.”

(Wall Street Journal)

Power Consumption in Perspective

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When reading reviews on the next generation game consoles that were released over the past two weeks, one benchmark in particular caught my eye. Anandtech measured the power consumption of the new Xbox and Playstation, which are not terrible when compared to previous consoles. In comparison to an Apple TV however, their consumption seems gargantuan.

It’s astonishing how graphics cards (and by extension game consoles) continue to evade the constraints of performance-per-watt nearly a decade after every other silicon chip has been designed around this metric. When, if ever, will AMD and Nvidia have a Pentium 4 style crisis of thermal efficiency?

That Adobe Hack

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130 million accounts. 38 million active users. 3 million credit cards. Source code for Acrobat, Reader, Cold Fusion and Photoshop. All of it protected by encryption so flawed it has literally become a game.

The most frightening part? What the decrypted passwords reveal about our general state of digital security: millions of people, including government agencies, using passwords like “123456” on their accounts.

Like leaving your house, car or wi-fi unlocked, the time has come to stop using the same easy password for everything. You simply must use a password manager such as 1Password to be a responsible person with a digital life. Still not convinced; think there’s security in large numbers? Read the very scary security breach story of Mat Honan and think again.

The Gravitational Effects of Parenthood

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“And so, like a grown-up, I went and yelled about it on Twitter. ‘Could we get a moratorium on young, childless male critics bitching about how phony and manipulative the Bullock backstory is in GRAVITY?’ I wrote, and as soon as I hit ‘tweet,’ I realized: I’ve become one of those ‘I see things differently now that I’m a parent!’ assholes.“

Insightful article by Jason Bailey on how quickly his perspective has changed since becoming a parent.

That Blackberry Article

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Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.”

A couple of weeks ago The Globe and Mail published an article by a team of reporters that provided insight into what happened at RIM Blackberry since the iPhone launched. Well worth the read, the article is full of retrospective quotes and anecdotes about Blackberry’s reaction to competitors’ products and their approach to leadership and decision making.

To me, the article paints a clear picture of Lazaridis confusing his product, tiny keyboards, with his business, communications. Over and over, from shelving the SMS 2.0 project to renaming the company, Blackberry failed at recognizing value beyond its hardware products. Now those hardware devices have negative value and are bringing down the whole company. This is effectively where Apple would be if you imagine that they had stopped at the iPod.

Ocean’s 1911

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“The shocking theft of the Mona Lisa, in August 1911, appeared to have been solved 28 months later, when the painting was recovered. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors suggest that the audacious heist concealed a perfect—and far more lucrative—crime.”

Vanity Fair excerpts a new book alleging the truth may be stranger than fiction when it comes to high-profile theft.

Related: The shockingly tragic and unusual end of the stolen Rotterdam masterpieces.

The Supplemental Draft

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Dave Pell is the author of Next Draft, the one newsletter you won’t unsubscribe from. Next Draft provides a daily news overview for those of us too busy to be plugged into the internet Matrix-style.

Dave’s a busy person just like you and me though, which in a one-man operation means occasionally there are days without a newsletter. Below are my go-to supplements when I need a Next Draft style summary of the day:

  1. Evening Edition – The day’s top five global stories.
  2. 90 Seconds On The Verge – Daily video with the day’s top tech news.
  3. Kottke – Because Dave was going to link it anyway. The liberal arts 2.0 blog.

New Era In Web Design

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Last year, The New York Times made some news of its own when it published Snowfall featuring an innovative page layout. That layout combined media formats and motion to tell a story as if it were a newspaper out of Harry Potter’s world. The success of this  multimedia approach led to a growing list of articles in a similar style, now coined “Snowfall.“

Elsewhere, the standard of website design is also reaching a higher level of sophistication using the latest coding techniques. The subtle change to user input driven animations is impressive and often delightful to discover (though it is not without its detractors). Here are a few of the best examples I’ve noticed that drive home the idea that we are in a new era of input-responsive website design.

  • The new Mac Pro site debuted, showcasing the newly announced product with a series of 360 degree animations.
  • The just-announced Pencil stylus by FiftyThree is disassembled as you scroll, like an iFixit teardown.
  • The Hövding, an airbag for cyclists, has an adorable formula that solves itself. 

Finder Tabs Suggestion

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Newly built into the Finder for OS X 10.9 is the ability to have tabbed windows. It took me a couple of days to even remember that this feature was there. Once I did, I realized there was a lack of discoverability. There was no “new tab” button unless you already had at least two tabs open. This makes the tabs function reserved for those curious users who happen to already know it is there. Even when customizing the toolbar, there is no new tab button, unlike Safari.

Hopefully an update will add the ability to have a new tab button in the Finder toolbar, otherwise this function will never be widely used.