Since 2006, Nokia brand development has been a playground for marketing people and some fashion designers based in Soho, London. At the same time external marketing offices from London have been creating campaigns and Web visuals for Nokia basically without no relevant definition or guidance from Nokia's side. Nokia brand directors, under SVPs and VPs, are from Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney and Nike, from companies without any connection to technology, gadgets, functional products or 'rocket science' visions - without competence, visions and customer understanding.

Good article for those who care.

And what Apple is doing violates Postel's Law which says you should be liberal in what you accept. Another reason Postel was wise. It helps keep the web from breaking.

All that sounds nice, but I changed my mind about the issue after hearing the argument from Jobs that convinced me: supporting Flash is a significant effort. Apple decided that it wants to put its limited resources on technology that looks more promising – and that's HTML5. They have done before with floppy drives on iMacs and other technologies considered to be “standards” at the time are now totally forgotten.

Also, applying internet ”laws” to something as closed and self-contained as Flash doesn't really buy me.

Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

So, even Apple was affected by the mania of ridiculous productivity metrics.

This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.

1990's techniques make their way back with HTML5 and mobile devices.

My eyes puked from the motion sickness of not-knowing-where-to-look-oh-my-god-everything-is-everywhere-ness of the page. It’s a typical case of ‘designed for developers, by developers’, and I’m sure most regular Stack Overflow users have got used to it and don’t mind.

Outsider's attempt to pinpoint and fix design mistakes on Stack Overflow. Being an avid listener of Stack Overflow podcast and knowing how much though, testing and data-driven adjustments were put into design of this website, I was rather amused to read the analysis. While there might be some valid points, a lot of the advice doesn't take into account the target audience and well-thought community focus of the site.

Consciously or subconsciously, women do seem to take their future prospects into account when deciding when to start having children. At a meeting last year, Sarah Johns at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, reported that in her study of young women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in Gloucestershire, UK, those who perceived their environment as risky or dangerous, and those that thought they might die at a relatively young age, were more likely to become mothers while they were in their teens. "If your dad died of a heart attack at 45, your 40-year-old mum has got chronic diabetes and you've had one boyfriend who has been stabbed, you know you've got to get on with it," she says.

Why early pregnancy in poor areas is an adaptation strategy and why current efforts to fight it are largely misguided.

Since the close of the eighth D: All Things Digital conference, we’ve been inundated with requests for a downloadable version of Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s opening-night session with co-hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Great audio interview with Jobs. One may hate him, but this man HAS charisma.

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

A puzzling question, though I think the estimate from the article is widely underestimated.

Two decades making games. I've seen a computer fly through a window, I've seen an ex employee trying to sledgehammer through from one companies adjoining wall to ours so he can get to his office and get his "stuff" back, I've seen one of my friends, a long time game vet kill himself on his birthday because nobody would listen to his brilliance

Disturbing comment to a good article on computer game industry. Great material for a book indeed.

The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the "official" repository. There are many maintainers looking after various subsystems, but every patch they merge must eventually be accepted by Linus Torvalds if it is to get into the mainline.

It's surprising to read that the flagship of Open Source has so centralized development process. And scary bus factor.