Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s thoughts on their competition (or lack thereof) with Microsoft (via Network World):

Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.

With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.

“I think we just don’t care that much [about Microsoft] anymore,” Zemlin said. “They used to be our big rival, but now it’s kind of like kicking a puppy.”

I would say the puppy analogy isn’t needed. Microsoft has become it’s own analogy. They are becoming less and less relevant in almost every industry they’re still in. He should have said, “Competing with Microsoft is, well, like competing with Microsoft.”
As Aziz Ansari said in his story of the girl who gives a guy a blowjob for a half-hour for sold out concert tickets only to find out they were selling tickets at the door:

There’s no other way to complete that analogy because that’s the shittiest thing that could happen to you.

NYTimes: Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges

ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.

Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.

Unless you’re being subsidized by your parents or crashing on couches, unpaid internships are impossible.
I was lucky enough to intern at an art gallery on 57th & Madison from 1996-1998 when in college. When the second summer came around I insisted that they pay for my transportation from New Jersey in addition to the whopping $7 an hour they paid me.
Realizing the bargain they were getting for someone who could hang all the paintings and photography for shows, deliver packages to clients and purchase and configure all the computers in the gallery, they agreed.
Internships are extremely valuable for kids starting out their careers but while the head start they provide in establishing relationships and acquiring practical skills is great, many employers aren’t meeting students halfway when they don’t pay them.

From Business Insider:

The team of editors that has streamed away from AOL’s Engadget is going to start a tech site for new media startup SB Nation.

Engadget’s former editor in chief Joshua Topolsky announced the move on his blog and in the New York Times tonight.
Topolsky says he’s joining SB Nation because it, “believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam — a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”

It sounds like they really loved having AOL as their daddy at Engadget.

Declaring 2010 “the best year in safety performance in our company’s history,” Transocean Ltd., owner of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded, killing 11 workers, has awarded its top executives hefty bonuses and raises, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

That includes a $200,000 salary increase for Transocean president and chief executive officer Steven L. Newman, whose base salary will increase from $900,000 to $1.1 million, according to the SEC report. Newman’s bonus was $374,062, the report states.

What a bunch of bullshit. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. Business as usual.

Instead of asking people directly how to be creative, they have examined the psychological conditions of creativity. It’s like instead of looking directly at the sun to work out where it is, you watch the shadows thrown across the ground.

• From How to Be Creative by Jeremy Dean

A Brief History of Title Design

NYTimes: Designers Make Data Much Easier to Digest

In an uncharted world of boundless data, information designers are our new navigators.

In a Stamen graphic of Twitter traffic during an MTV awards show, the number of tweets about celebrities was reflected in the size of their photos. They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn them into innovative visual displays, like rich graphs and charts, that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data.

And:

Visual analytics play off the idea that the brain is more attracted to and able to process dynamic images than long lists of numbers. But the goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

Bingo. It’s great to see what we designers do get recognized by the mainstream press.

NYTimes: Paterson Teacher Suspended Over a Post on Facebook

A first-grade teacher in Paterson, N.J., was suspended on Thursday after she posted on her Facebook page that she felt like a warden overseeing future criminals, district officials said.

From some of the stories I’ve heard from people who teach, it’s very likely this woman wasn’t exaggerating. Just saying.
She just needs to work not broadcasting that inside voice of hers on the biggest social network in the world.

PSFK: John Gerzema: Edison Was Right

Two blocks off Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, inside an industrial building on Burroughs Street, a half-dozen engineers who work for Nextek Power Systems gather around a whiteboard where they have scrawled notes based on read-outs from a computer screen. They are analyzing data on the performance of an innovative power system based on Thomas Edison’s preferred form of electric supply–direct current. Also called DC, direct current is the juice that comes out of batteries, fuel cells, solar panels, and other sustainable energy sources. Because it is difficult and expensive to transmit over great distances, Edison’s DC lost out to alternating current–AC–when the electric age began. AC, promoted by George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, allowed for a single huge generating station to supply power for homes and businesses spread over hundreds if not thousands of square miles. To make use of this system, lights, appliances, and motors were all built to operate on AC, and it became the standard.

I find it interesting that the future of energy could potentially parallel the future some of proposing for farming – local. I’ve been hearing more and more about vertical farming in cities, now comes growing your own energy.
Sign me up.

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I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned how awesome Just A Car Guy’s site is.
There. I said it.

I remember seeing some of these illustrations by Josh Cooley a few years ago. They’re so awesome.
via Neven Mrgan