“As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.”
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future
“As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.”
Posted inUncategorized
The Pixel Painter
“When I lost my eyesight I thought my painting days were over.” Our video pick of the day is this 8-minute documentary on Hal Lasko, a 97-year-old man whose family introduced him to Microsoft Paint 15 years ago and “he took off with it.” Lasko, who suffers from macular degeneration, works in a style that’s a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain
A look at the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has invested $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science with the goal of decoding how the human brain works: “Four years later six brains have been donated and four analyzed to some degree. The project is due to be finished this year, but the first […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Obama’s CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell
How Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina is using technology and advice from high-profile mentors to prepare for November: “The day after Jim Messina quit his job as White House deputy chief of staff last January, he caught a plane to Los Angeles, paid a brief visit to his girlfriend, and then commenced what may be […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Goldman Sachs Blew the Facebook IPO
An inside look at how banks jockey for “left lead” status on an IPO—especially one as big as Facebook’s: “For the past couple of decades, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have ruled the tech IPO business, with one of the firms serving as lead manager on most of the hottest deals. “Goldman took Microsoft, Yahoo, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System
[Not single-page] IBM and Microsoft teamed up on what was supposed to be the operating system that changed everything. It didn’t turn out that way: “Meanwhile, Microsoft was two-timing the operating system it had co-created. In May 1990, it released Windows 3.0, the first version that was sort of decent. In terms of technical underpinnings, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die
Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars: “Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Perceptionist
“Everything at Apple is as much about perception as about reality,” the company’s former C.E.O. John Sculley said to me a few days after his old partner and rival, Steve Jobs, unveiled the alliance he had engineered with Microsoft. Since Sculley was deposed, in 1993, after running Apple for ten years, he has rarely spoken […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Autumn and the Plot Against Me
Going deeper, a file called “Autumn Properties” reveals only that it’s a five-kilobyte Windows Theme File. When I try to find out what a theme file is, the Windows Help and Support Center suggests, “Check your spelling.” Well, hell, somebody at Microsoft ought to know. As it turns out, if they do, they’re not telling. […]
