January 2012
30 posts
Not a race, but a series
It’s hard to write about Apple’s most recent earnings report—let alone the reports on how 55% of the total smartphones sold by Verizon were iPhones, or the evidence that all iOS devices combined slightly outsold all Android devices combined last quarter—without sounding biased. If you like Apple, you’re going to be tempted to say “I told you so” (even if...
ExtremeTech: "Google is FUBAR" →
Sebastian Anthony:
[Google] wants to be more like Facebook and Apple, both of which have a completely-unified, walled-garden approach — and both of which are enjoying huge leaps in revenue and profits, while Google falls short of quarterly expectations. Nothing happens on an Apple device without Cupertino’s knowledge, and as a result Apple can perfectly tailor its devices for its...
DRM on the Cloud →
Nilay Patel:
A quick scan of the market reveals DRM is making a startling comeback as the media industry turns to new cloud-based distribution models. Scores of modernized DRM systems are behind some of the most successful media services on the market: Spotify, Rdio, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple all still use proprietary and incompatible DRM for music, movies, books, and apps, and the movie...
Physibles and piracy →
Ray Walters, Extreme Tech:
With the digital media arena all but conquered by piracy, the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog, TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.
While the bombastic TPB tone...
Facebook Coalition To Google: Don’t Be Evil →
The “coalition” is mostly Facebook, as far as I can tell (it looks like the original headline on John Battelle’s blog left out the word “coalition,” in fact). This is a neat hack to take places Google has hardcoded in Google+ results and to instead use Google’s own tools “to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are...
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Don't mess with The Dodd →
MG Siegler quotes Chief MPAA Extortionist Chris Dodd:
“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”
...
xScope 3 →
If you’re a Mac web nerd, this is a fantastic—if slightly obscure-seeming—design tool for (in IconFactory’s words) “measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts.” I’ve been thinking about buying xScope for over a year and have waffled for over a year, because its $30 price tag seemed too high for what, for me, would be an...
The enemy of my enemy
Yesterday a huge file sharing site, “Megaupload.com,” was taken offline due to a criminal conspiracy indictment. Do the copyright wars have a new martyr? At first glance, maybe! Everybody gets to blame their favorite villain: the evil media industry, the draconian federal government, or both. It becomes a political a Rorschach Test. Ultimately, the fix is either upending the...
Dan Wineman: “Unprecedented Audacity” →
Dan Wineman is (understandably) less than pleased with one aspect of Apple’s new iBooks Author.
Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable. Here’s the problem: I didn’t agree to it.
Wineman is right, in that if you export your...
Information wants to be expensive
I’d been working on a post about SOPA, but Franklin Veaux’s post (the quote in my last entry) says just about everything I was trying to get at. (And upon review, I’d probably be repeating myself from a post last year, anyway.) SOPA is a terrible law, yet the fundamental tension that the old “information wants to be free” quote references won’t go away. The full...
“People who create things of value deserve to be rewarded for that creation, no...”
– Franklin Veaux
Coyote Tracks looks at Yahoo!'s press release re:...
Yahoo! Announces Resignation of Jerry Yang
Yahoo! Inc., the premier digital media company,
Remember when you used us? We do, too. ∗sigh∗
today announced that Jerry Yang has resigned from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company, effective today.
Okay, we’ve finally gotten rid of him. Happy?
In a letter to the Yahoo! Board Chairman Roy Bostock, Yang...
Business Insider: "RIM Is Pushing Really Hard To... →
I link to this only to point out the crucial flaw in this headline, the bit that guarantees you can ignore the article, that Business Insider’s Jay Yarow apparently missed. Can you spot it?
[ Jeopardy music plays ]
If you said it’s the last two words — “says BGR” — you win!
(Unfortunately, you win a Blackberry Playbook. Sorry.)
Apple's education event is getting seriously... →
Philip Elmer-DeWitt:
The goal is to sell more iPads to schools, not to destroy the textbook industry. “This whole event is being blown out of proportion,” [said] a former Apple executive talking about the media drumroll for the education announcement the company is scheduled to make Thursday.
Excessive media hype being generated around an Apple event? Perish the thought.
Also:...
Foursquare gets into the recommendation engine... →
Jennifer Van Grove, VentureBeat:
Chances are that the insights gathered from one-and-a-half billion check-ins and 15 million tips are better than your own eyes and ears at sleuthing out the best places to eat, drink and see nearby or afar. At least that’s the logic and science behind Foursquare Explore, a popular recommendation feature migrating from mobile to web today.
While this is an...
The Galaxy Nexus and CBS vs. HBO
A few commenters mentioned the availability of Galaxy Nexus phones that don’t have the carrier logos on them, and said that even the ones that do don’t show enough carrier interference to be annoying.
I’ll concede that point, but it’s somewhat missing the forest for the trees—the crux of the issue is a point I’ve mentioned before: you, the end user, are not...
Game streaming service OnLive to be preloaded on... →
Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat:
It’s going to get a lot easier to play cloud-based games on your television soon. Game streaming service OnLive announced today that its viewing service will be preloaded on the Google TV service.
Choose your punchline:
And all of the twenty-eight people using Google TV are thrilled.
And adding in the twenty-eight people using Google TV, this doubles...
Your Facebook news feed, now with ads →
Alicia Eler, ReadWriteWeb:
“Sponsored Stories are regular stories that people may see in their News Feeds already, but that a marketer has paid to feature on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson tells us. Featured stories that users might see in the news feed include new posts from the Facebook Page, when a friend likes something, when a friend checks in, plays a game, or uses an...
Google: "Search, plus Your World" →
The Official Google Blog:
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box. We’re...
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MG Siegler: "Why I Hate Android"
MG Siegler:
Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become. And more specifically, what Google has done with Android.
This is a brilliantly-written piece. Anyone who’s actually read more than a few articles by Siegler has learned that the criticism of him as...
Dan Lyons: "Enough with the Samsung bashing" →
Proving that he hasn’t lost his sense of humor since he stopped writing the “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, Lyons pens a clearly satiric article in which he pretends to come to the rescue of poor, beleaguered Samsung in the face of all those withering attacks from “Apple fanboys” like John Gruber. Brilliant!
I do wonder how many people think Lyons is being serious here,...
Android as we know it will die in the next two... →
While the headline of Antonio Rodriguez’ blog post is incendiary linkbait, he’s more thoughtful than the title suggests. The “fragmentation” danger for Android isn’t technological—it’s about inter-corporate warfare.
(Fragmentation has always been overstated, I’ve come to believe: the PC market has been “fragmented” for three decades. If...
Ubuntu TV (a/k/a the new BeIA?) →
The Verge:
Ubuntu TV is a brand new derivitave of Ubuntu, with a full-in TV-optimized UI inspired by Unity, and full-on media center and DVR features. There’s a movie, TV and music store, a YouTube app, and of course it’s all optimized for a lean-back remote experience. The software will be free for manufacturers to package with their TVs, and Ubuntu says there will be TVs on...
Lenovo launches first Ice Cream Sandwich TV →
This is just a weird story: it’s not running Google TV, it’s running Android 4.0, and it’s designed to “access Lenovo’s yet-to-be-launched cloud services to stream personal media stored in the cloud.” All of the complaints one might have about Gene Munster’s Unicorn, the Apple smart television, are present here—namely, that we still haven’t...
QuirksBlog: The Java ME nonsense story →
Peter-Paul Koch:
Earlier this week Net Market Share released numbers that allegedly show the Java ME operating system is gaining ground at the expense of iOS and especially Android. Unfortunately the story isn’t true, and I suspect it’s a good example of headline grabbing aimed at those who don’t have deep knowledge of mobile browsing statistics, a group that seems to include...
Spotify Unlimited Streaming Ends For Some Free... →
In one week, all those users who signed up for the free all you can eat desktop music will find out they’re going to be limited to just 10 hours per month now. Spotify’s unlimited music on your desktop feature, which is ad-supported, [was] only a limited time offer. Now the question is: will Spotify users start paying up once the party’s over?
I know it wasn’t a...
Nokia Lumia 900 To Get $200M Marketing Campaign in... →
While I give Nokia a higher chance than some others do (some of whom are admittedly far better analysts than I), it’s hard not to suspect this will prove to be too little, too late. A do-or-die push for Windows Phone needed to be starting in mid-2011 (if not earlier)—not mid-2012.
One thing I’m fairly sure of: Tomi Ahonen should knock off the constant screaming for Nokia CEO...
Vint Cerf: "Internet Access Is not a human Right" →
From Cerf’s op-ed in the NYT:
There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.
NY Mag: Keith Olbermann Feuds With Employer, Again →
Modest proposal: after Olbermann leaves Current in a huff later this year, he and Glenn Beck go on a road show together, a la G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary. Maybe Charlie Sheen could moderate.
When all you have is the GPL, all problems look...
OS News kvetcher-in-chief Thom Holwerda writes “Richard Stallman was Right All Along”:
I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right.
But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for...
December 2011
4 posts
Back from the smoke break
Earlier this year I wrote “Text Editor Intervention,” in which I compared TextMate’s author to a dad who said he was going out for a smoke break five years ago and never came back, and suggested that people who were increasingly distressed about TextMate’s future should stick with TextMate as long as they felt practical, then switch to one of three other editors: BBEdit,...
PHP Redux
Pardon the light (i.e., mostly non-existent) blogging for this last half of December.
I wasn’t quite expecting the “PHP is not an acceptable COBOL” post to be picked up the way it was. It circulated parts of the PHP community and, apparently, parts of the .NET community.
Most of the comments were interesting and, even when not agreeing with my admittedly dismal conclusion,...
PHP is not an acceptable COBOL
(See a followup posted December 20th.)
You may or may not know I’m an (underemployed) web programmer. I’m mostly “back end,” which means I mostly program the server, not Javascript or Flash. Over the last year “front end” has become very hot—if you merely know what AJAX stands for, you may get interviews for $100K+ positions—so I’d be better...
Paypal: feel the love
You’ve probably read about (or even felt) the anger over Paypal “stealing money” from Regretsy, which is only the latest in a series of things they’ve done that have pissed the Internet off. I suspect, given the attention this is getting, they’ll fix this. (Unlike them cutting off Wikileaks, this time Paypal is as coming as close to stealing from orphans before...
November 2011
9 posts
No, Michael Arrington, you are not Jack Sparrow
Our Kindly Uncle Mike “Uncrunched” Arrington told us recently that “startups are hard, so work more, cry less, and quit all the whining.” He quoted journal posts from former Netscape engineer Jamie “jwz” Zawinski back in 1994 to make the point that startup life has always sucked, or as Zawinski put it in his rebuttal:
[Arrington] is trying to make the point...
Chocolate Martica
At singlebarrel in San Jose last night, I was introduced to a fantastic rum and brandy cocktail called the Chocolate Martica. The reference recipe on the web appears to be the one at Bittermens, where it’s credited to Phil Ward while he was at Death + Company in NYC.
1 oz. aged Jamaican rum (Appleton V/X)
1 oz. cognac (Courvoisier VS)
1 oz. sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica)
¼ oz....
Boxee Box "Live TV" →
Engadget:
The Boxee Box Live TV dongle will allow North American users to connect an antenna to their Box to watch channels like ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in HD with no monthly fee — assuming you’re close enough to an OTA tower to receive said signals, of course.
Fantastic! Except, uh, if you have a “Boxee Box” which is connected to your TV, the chances are extremely...
Alas, poor CSSEdit
I’ve been a huge fan of MacRabbit’s visual CSS editor, CSSEdit (wonder how they came up with that name). If you’re a web designer/developer and you use the Mac you’ve probably come across it in the past—I think it was an Apple design award winner, and it was all around awesome.
I speak of it in the past tense because, as you may not know, MacRabbit has decided that...
David Tate: How to work from home without going... →
When you work at a location of your choice you can control what distracts you. If you want to work for 4 hours and not use the bathroom you can do it; if you want to work with 2 lbs of nachos taped to your face like a beard while wearing a sombrero filled with nacho cheese for snacking you can do this. Most people think they will be far more productive due to being able to control large blocks...
Zynga: "Hey, we were kidding about those stock...
Justin Scheck and Shayndi Raice, writing in the WSJ:
Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Mark Pincus often gave shares rather than high salaries to his top talent as he built his online-game start-up. But as Zynga grew into a multibillion-dollar company, Mr. Pincus appears to have developed giver’s remorse. Early last year, as Mr. Pincus began preparing to take Zynga public, he and several other...
Sorry, Charlie
Security consultant/gadfly Charlie Miller wins an annual “speed crack” security challenge each year with essentially the same trick: finding a new flaw in Safari before the contest, setting up a web site that takes advantage of the flaw, and when the contest starts going to that website with Safari. These are genuine flaws that need to be addressed, so Miller is certainly doing Apple a...
Steve Jobs’s Real Genius →
Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, in which Gladwell makes the case that
Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him and ruthlessly refining it. […] “I’ll know it when I see it” was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.
I...
A passing thought on the new Google Reader
I can only surmise that after SPECTRE broke up, Blofeld went into UX design.
Are you sure that's an edge case?
Instapaper’s Marco Arment recently wrote a blog post in which he said, in part,
I bought my first iPad magazine last weekend: one issue of The New Yorker.
It was $4.99. Most entire apps (including mine) cost $4.99 or less, once, and this magazine is $4.99 for just one issue. Ignoring what content and apps “should” cost, and despite knowing that this is a very good magazine, this felt...
October 2011
14 posts
You Can't Hire a New Bill
(Warning: personal reflection lies ahead.)
My career trajectory in Silicon Valley has been less developer than billiard ball: short-term contract/consulting jobs, and two full time employee positions that both came to a premature end due to economic blues. I’ve been thinking about a contract-to-hire gig that not only never reached the “-to-hire” stage, it lasted such a short...
Two less cables
There’s a lot of questions being asked about the Apple-branded full shebang TV set that’s being feverishly rumored right now: What content would it give you? What connections would it have? Would it be upgradeable? How would they service it (if it’s a 42″ or bigger HDTV, it’s not like you’re going to throw it in your car and bring it down to the Apple Store if...
Facebook and Amazon: the difference between...
Mike Arrington at his classily-named new “Uncrunched” writes:
In the first six month [sic] of 2011 Facebook had $1.6 billion in revenue and abou [sic] $800 million in operating income, says a source I trust a lot. That revenue number has been reported before. And the 50% profit margin is in line with last year’s $2 billion in revenue and $1 billion in operating income.
To put...
“It’s probably too late to make the user experience on Android as consistent as...”
– Andy Ihnatko on Android 4.0
"A feature, not a product" →
MacRumors quoting Forbes:
Jobs smiled warmly as he told [Dropbox] he was going after their market. “He said we were a feature, not a product,” says [Dropbox co-founder Drew] Houston.
While this comes across as a typical bit of Jobsian hardball—and a lot of commenters point out the differences between Apple’s new iCloud and Dropbox, starting with the obvious one on...
Samsung Lawyer Cannot Tell Samsung Tablet From... →
John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:
Fielding questions from U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, Samsung attorney Kathleen Sullivan was asked if she could distinguish between Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, which Koh held up for all the court to see. Her reply, as first reported by Reuters: “Not at this distance, your honor.”
The distance in question was ten feet.
I bring this up not...