What would you do if Microsoft paid you to blog?

Posted by William Gallagher

I mean, as a freelance writer rather than some Microsoft employee, what would you do if you got the reported/alleged #IEbloggers email?

Or put it this way, put it in a murkier and less immediately risible way: what would I do if Apple rang up offering me cash to keep going on about them?

It wouldn’t happen. You know Apple wouldn’t do that, not with me and not with anyone. If you like the company, you know they have more class than that. If you don’t like them, you know they think they have more class than that.

It also wouldn’t happen because I wouldn’t take the money. I know I wouldn’t take payment for promoting things here because I haven’t: I had a little spate of offers a few months ago and automatically rejected them all. So automatically that I can’t even tell you what they were supposed to be promoting. I think one was a bed. But I’m guessing, I didn’t read all the way through all of them.

But hypothetically, what would I do if Apple paid me money to endorse something – and I already wanted to endorse it? If I really like my iPhone, is there anything wrong in saying so for cash?

Yes.

The dilemma for me would not be over taking cash because I just wouldn’t. The dilemma would be over whether to stop saying I liked something. And I wouldn’t. If I think you’ll like something as much as I do, if I think it will be useful to you, I will and I do say so.

If Apple did this then I would feel that the firm was tarnished. I would wonder why they felt they needed to do it. I think I would even reevaluate what I thought of the product. Hopefully if I liked it before, I’d still like it but I can’t pretend I wouldn’t wonder.

So. This is what I would do. First, reject the money. Second, reevaluate the product. Third, report on how naff Apple has become.

But fourth, I would say if I really did like something.

Just wanted you to know. Listen, I‘ve got this great bed , did I mention that?

How to stop anyone believing you

Posted by William Gallagher

Microsoft is reportedly/allegedly paying bloggers to write favourable prices about Internet Explorer. As part of the deal, you also tweet with the hashtag #IEbloggers.

Go take a look: click or tap on that hashtag and you’ll go to a twitter search that returns a lot of tweets. Deliciously, by far the majority are from people mocking Microsoft (and innocently asking if they’ll still get paid).

But every now and again there is a real one. A genuine one. Well, a tweet that isn’t mocking and is promoting Internet Explorer.

Doubtlessly, some of them are true in the sense that the tweet writer really does like IE. But you can’t help it: now you know Microsoft is paying and now you see so many others ridiculing it, everyone who praises IE looks caught.

No one I’m following has done this or I’d be un-following. Wouldn’t you?

Sorry, the first 36.8% of candidates, you’re out

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s great that life can be expressed in hard and fast numbers, isn’t it? Whatever would we do if the world were a damn sight more difficult to fathom?

But recently we learnt that the best number of people to have in a meeting is seven. Specifically, that for contestant number 8 and each person thereafter, the group’s effectiveness is reduced by something like 10%. I am as wary of bandying numbers about as you are, so let me just point you at that story: Sorry, Snow White, You’re Out

Now there’s more. Specifically this: don’t hire anybody from the first 36.8% of candidates you interview. Seriously.

America’s National Public Radio (via Lifehacker) describes what’s reportedly known as either the Marriage Problem or the Secretary Problem. It’s a thing. It’s been a thing from sometime in the Stone Age where these two issues were considered to boil down to the same thing: how a man (always a man) should choose the perfect woman (always a girl) for him and nuts to whether she’s got her own sliderule equation about him.

NPR’s story is based on a tale told by author Alex Bellos in The Grapes of Math (UK edition, US edition) – his new and so-gorgeously-titled book that I’m going to buy it right after we’re done.

Alex writes: “Imagine that you are interviewing 20 people to be your secretary [or your spouse or your garage mechanic] with the rule that you must decide at the end of each interview whether or not to give that applicant the job.” If you offer the job to somebody, game’s up. You can’t go on and meet the others. “If you haven’t chosen anyone by the time you see the last candidate, you must offer the job to her,” Alex writes (not assuming that all secretaries are female — he’s just adapting the attitudes of the early ’60s).

So remember: At the end of each interview, you either make an offer or you move on.

If you don’t make an offer, no going back. Once you make an offer, the game stops.

According to Martin Gardner, who in 1960 described the formula (partly worked out earlier by others), the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don’t hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who’s better than the best of that first group — that’s the one you choose! Yes, the Very Best Candidate might show up in that first 36.8 percent — in which case you’ll be stuck with second best, but still, if you like favorable odds, this is the best way to go.

How To Marry The Right Girl: A Mathematical Solution – Robert Krulwich, NPR (15 May 2014)

It’s easy to mock the way men think there’s logic to dating, so let’s.

But the 36.8% figure has some solid reasoning and also an interesting mathematical history. So do read NPR’s article for more and then do buy Bellos’s book (UK edition, US edition).

Best news all day – an end to ads bumping you to the App Store

Posted by William Gallagher

Previously… we’ve had a recent spate of websites whose ads run some code that registers you’re on a mobile device like, specifically, an iPhone or iPad, and then jumps you to the App Store.

If you haven’t seen this, you’re not following me. You’re on your iOS device, you got a website in Safari and before you’ve begun to read whatever it is you wanted to read, wallop, you’re out of Safari and into the App Store. You are at the same point you would be if you’d found an app and opened its page to have a look. So you’re looking at an app that longs for you to buy it and it is usually a game and it invariably has no chance whatsoever of getting my cash, so help me god.

Back in April, I reported on what was then the only way to stop these. It was what you might call a brute-force solution. There isn’t a switch, isn’t an option, isn’t a UNIX Terminal command you can set, but you can always bitch about it all to whoever runs the website that has these ads.

I bitched.

One website owner explained to me that they loathe these too, that they were being slipped in without the site owner’s knowledge. That’s not just possible, it’s not even just probable, it has an extremely good chance of being true because of the way that ads are served to sites. Some of them are sold as network ads to companies which specialise in filling them. The site owner just knows this block will be filled by a client of that network ad company, they don’t know which until it’s live.

But then when it is live, you can see it and the site owner is bumped to these stupid games in the App Store just like the rest of us. So another site owner came to me to say they’d had it too and they had stopped it by banning those ads.

Sorry that this is a long Previously: you can tell it narked me.

Which is why I am delighted today. Because today we learn that Apple’s iOS 8 has a feature built-in to help us. I don’t know the fancy Cocoa or Objective-C feature name, but it’s effectively BollocksToThoseAdvertisers.exe because iOS 8 itself just stops them.

You can’t do much better than having the very operating system of the phone stick its fingers up at you.

Apple is expected to release iOS 8 this autumn and it will for certain be free, it will for certain run on any iPhone of the last many years and it will surely be taken up by the extremely vast majority of iPhone users immediately. (Because iOS 7, and 6, and 5… all were.) That means the number of people left who can be bumped out from a website to the App Store in this aggravating way won’t be zero, but it’ll be small enough that advertisers will give up on it.

I have nothing against advertising or advertisers, but I call this one a win.

Inside Amazon – no exposé, just riveting detail

Posted by William Gallagher

There is an element of this article that is for the productivity heart in you that wonders how true all these stories of absurdly pressured working conditions are.

But mostly it’s for the tinkerer in you who wonders how Amazon works. Wired Magazine goes inside:

The first thing I saw when I walked into Amazon’s Phoenix warehouse was a man riding on a giant tricycle. Behind him, yellow plastic tubs the size of office recycling bins whizzed by on a conveyor belt. On the wall above, six massive words called out to the 1,500 workers who pass through metal detectors each day as they enter this million-square-foot cavern of consumerism: “work hard. have fun. make history.”

Tricycle aside, the “fun” quotient was hard to spot. But I couldn’t help but register a certain historical significance to the operation humming inside this enormous building erected in the industrial flats of Phoenix. The Amazon warehouse–known in company jargon as a “fulfillment center,” or FC–is a uniquely 21st-century creation, a vast, networked, intelligent engine for sating consumer desire. The FC is the anchor of Amazon’s physical operations, the brick and mortar behind the virtual button you tap on your phone to summon a watch or a shirt or a garden hose or Cards Against Humanity or just about anything else to your doorstep.

A Rare Peek Inside Amazon’s Massive Wish-Fulfilling Machine – Marcus Wohlsen, Wired (16 June 2014)

Via The Loop

Cameras started lying in 1987

Posted by William Gallagher

You know that Photoshop is used to manipulate images of women but I didn’t know that was what was going on with the very first photo it edited. Why are we not surprised?

There is more to it than you think, if less than you’d hope, but first, here’s the image:

It’s called Jennifer in Paradise and was taken on film by John Knoll, one of the people behind Photoshop. I can’t find out what this Jennifer’s surname was at the time of the shot but she married the photoshop guy and is now reportedly Jennifer Knoll.

So they married, that happened, and somehow this one shot has become known as the first-ever Photoshopped image. No more than I can find her maiden name, I can’t prove what exactly was Photoshopped here. But I think the answer is nothing. This is, I believe, the original film shot and what has happened is that myriad people have subsequently edited it to produce whatever it is their heart desired.

Only, one fella has got seriously into this shot:

[Dutch artist Constant] Dullaart’s reverence for the picture may be extreme, but it is hard to overstate Photoshop’s importance. David Hockney, who was invited to test the program soon after its release, predicted that it would spell the end of film photography. And although, as Knoll is quick to point out, photos were being altered long ago in Soviet Russia, it was only Photoshop that democratised that ability. In a way Jennifer was the last person to sit on solid ground, gazing out into an infinitely fluid sea of zeros and ones, the last woman to inhabit a world where the camera never lied.

Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image -Gordon Comstock, The Guardian (13 June 2014)

There’s a lot more detail of Dullaart’s campaign to celebrate the shot in The Guardian’s whole story..

Two new AppyFriday deals today

Posted by William Gallagher

What do you mean, it isn’t Friday? By the time you’ve checked your calendar, these Mac software offers may be gone. They’re not earth-shattering and at full price they’re fine but if they’re of use to you, grabbing them while they’re free seems an idea.

The one I’ll get when we’re done is Duplicate Master: it runs across your Mac drives and goes ey-up, got five copies of the MIT lock picking guide. Do you want to delete four while I phone the police?

The other is a more specific productivity tool called Mindown. It’s for capturing notes and thoughts during the day, then organising them later.

Both of these are free but take a look at more details for Duplicate Master here and more for Mindown there.

Both of those links take you to pages on the AppyFridays site where, as you can see, they do deals all the live-long week.