Download the Android SDK 1.0 release 1.
Walt Mossberg: "The first real competitor to the iPhone ... the software is slick ... the G1 is a powerful, versatile device."
But the sui generis: Android is open to developers, open to consumers, and open to handset manufacturers. Cannot wait to see what's next.
The Journal has a great primer on this morning's compromise bailout bill.
Do read the article, but the gist is this: The Treasury will initially have $250b, and up to $700b, to buy either directly or via auction bad loans and assets from financial institutions, in return for warrants for equity. Compromise language includes disincentives for high CEO pay, additional congressional oversight, and a surprising requirement for the president "to submit a legislative proposal to seek reimbursement from the financial institutions that participated" if the value of the purchased assets yields a net loss.
The best analogy I can come up with to describe the crisis is the lemon problem, exasperated by mark to market accounting: Balance sheets are full of mortgage-backed or otherwise related assets, the popping of the housing bubble resulted in a revaluation of these assets, and capitalization requirements are driving banks to liquidate the assets. Enter the lemon market. Is the bank selling the assets because it needs cashflow, or because the assets are full of subprime contagion? Is this the firm's best or worst assets? The information asymmetry has snowballed to the point of credit market implosion. Thus the government's first solution, improving lending opportunities. When that was found insufficient, as the last few weeks have witnessed, we enter this second round, where the government actually buys the troubled assets.
It is hard to comprehend how dire this situation is as the economy still "feels" okay. Gas prices might be high, but unemployment is not at 30%. Yet while the societal ramifications are not as bad, the financial conditions are worse than those that kicked off The Great Depression.
If you are not reading my food blog, Food Tastes Good, you are missing out on recipes such as …
If not the actual dishes, at least the pictures are ambrosial.
The greatest Wondermark ever, if not the greatest thing, ever:
Slightly switching gears, David Leonhardt on Obamonics in the Times.
And, in case you missed it, we released version 0.9 of the Android SDK. Its dreamy.
Via Google's Open Source Blog, this Google-sponsored project to study Linux I/O scheduler behavior is quite interesting, yielding unexpected results—for example, deadline is actually best for some workloads and CFS, while ideal for others, has awful worst-case performance.
Curious about I/O schedulers? Check out chapter 13 in my favorite kernel book. Want to optimize your code's file I/O and understand scheduling from the perspective of user-space? Read chapter 4 in my favorite system programming book.
Hat tip to loyal reader for making me a billionaire:
Somewhat unrelated, Amazon is running a special this month wherein you can try Amazon Prime Free for One Month—in other words, get a month of gratis two-day shipping. US only, unfortunately.
Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion banknotes, each valued at one US dollar.
In all seriousness, for posterity, I would love to get one or two of these new bills. If anyone can help, I will pay handsomely.
The line of 3G-hopefuls outside of Boston's Apple Store:
The fervor Apple instills in their customers, particularly compared to their competitor, is impressive.
Incidentally, down the street, the line outside of the decidedly-less cool AT&T Store was only ten or so folks deep.
To date, clearly poised to surpass $1 billion before the cycle is over, the campaigns have spent a whopping $900 million. The New York Times, again proving that their core competency is in producing remarkably-informative graphics, has this rad little interactive visualization:
See also the related article, Cashing In on Obama and McCain .
Collected by the Boston Globe, these photos of Martian skies are without peer. There is a romance to exploring the unexplored, about going somewhere new simply because that's what's next.
It reminds me of President Reagan's speech, quoting from the poem High Flight, later cribbed by The West Wing, on the night of the "Challenger" disaster. Scheduled to give his state of the union, he spoke in lieu from the West Wing:
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."
Slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
Anyhow, beautiful pictures.
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