January 2010
41 posts
Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make... →
A new printer was just delivered yesterday, and I hooked it up last night. It is as if The Oatmeal was there!
The printer is indeed cheaper than it has any right to be. I looked for more expensive printers, but in the end, I went for the $100 model.
Fortunately, I’m a geek, so I have USB cables (and every other cable a computer might possibly use) stored around the house.
I was very...
“The New York Times quotes an industry insider as saying that Amazon pulled these...”
– Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties
I guess this answers the question about what Steve Jobs meant when he said ebooks would cost the same on Kindle and iPad. The iPad books aren’t getting cheaper; the Kindle books are getting more expensive.
More iPad Notes
Steve Jobs gave a post-Stevenote interview in which he said a few interesting things.
Specifically, when asked why people would pay $13-15 for best-selling books for iPad when the same books are $10 for Kindle, Jobs replied, “that won’t be the case,” and, “the prices will be the same.” Jobs declined to clarify whether that meant that books will be similarly cheap for...
Roundup
Sometimes I write things that, for whatever reason, are published elsewhere.
Like What iPad Says About Apple, in which I respond to John Gruber and suggest that iPad represents a fundamental shift in how Apple believes computers will work in the year 3000. Or something. It’s three pages on Technorati.
While I’m at it, I don’t think I ever mentioned something I wrote for...
iPad
Six different models?
A day later, having now watched the keynote presentation, that’s still my strongest reaction. It’s irrational, since there are three models of iPhone available today, and that doesn’t seem overwhelming, but six different SKUs with a price range of $330 seems something other than simple.
It looks like an impressive product, aimed squarely at people who are...
4 tags
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-24) →
Soundgarden (51)
Audioslave (40)
Chris Cornell (30)
Jon Foreman (26)
Alicia Keys (17)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
– It’s flashback time. When Senator McCain proposed a spending freeze in 2008, Senator Obama mocked him, saying that would be like “using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.”
Now, 16 months later, apparently we need a hatchet after all.
via Obama Liquidates Himself - Paul Krugman
“As a business-strategy it makes sense: why repay loans secured by assets that...”
– Corporate developers abandon “underwater” property — why not individuals?
This line of reasoning seems faulty to me, and I suspect that a different administration in Washington, D.C., might have provoked a different response. Cory Doctorow is asking the question one way: “If...
Is The World Ready For The Successor of the MP3? →
Reuters asks the ludicrous question, and what amazes me is that the 41 comments so far are universally negative. Not mostly negative. Completely and totally, absolutely every single comment is negative.
That ought to serve as some sort of wake-up call, but clearly most music publishers are far too comatose to hear anything.
The article (press release) is not even worth tearing apart.
Nice Try!
Last night two of my children tried to convince me that the reason they don’t like certain foods is because they have better taste than I do.
They each, separately, explained that by the time someone is 35, they’ve lost half their taste buds. Therefore, they each reasoned, they are much more sensitive to strong tastes, which is why they don’t like, say, spicy sauces, or whatever...
My Friends are Weird
A friend of mine asks me this question:
so, let’s say you have a Christian man, who is married, and something happens to separate him from his wife. Perhaps he loses her at sea, assumes her dead. He mourns her and takes another wife. If his first wife proves to be alive, and then returns…is polygamy the most biblical solution?
That’s a straight-up copy and paste, not one...
4 tags
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-01-17) →
Lot of time spent on “Shuffle” last week, though I did roll through Hello Hurricane once, giving Switchfoot a twelve-track headstart!
Switchfoot (15)
The Beatles (9)
Depeche Mode (7)
John Mellencamp (6)
Elton John (6)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
4 tags
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-10) →
Pearl Jam (102)
Death Cab for Cutie (63)
Kings of Leon (48)
The Strokes (36)
Sheryl Crow (33)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Google's Nexus One and Apple's iPhone
Rather than drawing the same old battle lines and choosing sides, wouldn’t it be nice for Android innovations to find their way into iPhone, and iPhone innovations to find their way into Android? Of course, Android already owes quite a bit to iPhone, but some day the student may become the master!
What should iPhone learn from Android? One interesting result of considering that question is...
Empty Words
This story on Obama’s plan to “take responsibility” for the botched Christmas Day air terrorism triggered another in a long series of thoughts about how differently liberals and conservatives can see the world, despite being so much alike in so many ways.
To admit responsibility for something, but have no actions (aka firings) flowing out from that, is empty rhetoric. When Bush...
Roger Ebert speaks truth
As Roger Ebert puts it, “Have you noticed how many American mainstream films are about stupid people who are presented as normal?” Or, again, “Have you noticed how many stupid people are presented as normal, especially in mainstream comedies?” It’s a brilliant observation, well worth repeating.
I avoid stupid people in life, so why would I enjoy spending several...
Google's Lame Blog
I might take the official Google blog more seriously if it weren’t written in NewSpeak. The most recent post as I write this is all about Our new approach to buying a mobile phone, but the one just before that had this to say about Google Wave:
Wave-mania struck after we introduced a new product for collaboration and communication at our Google I/O conference.
The statement is certainly...
“[N]ewspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the...”
– Cut This Story!
Michael Kinsley gets to the point, suggesting that newspapers are following outmoded conventions, which are as much to blame as anything else for the state of the newspaper business.
It’s impossible to write about a story like this one without second-guessing every editorial...
How does one break a vacation?
Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook: all quiet since Christmas Eve. The expectations are obviously high, so what to do?
A simple and out-of-context observation!
Apple scheduling their next event on a Wednesday rather than the traditional Tuesday suggests that it will focus on books rather than music or movies. New albums and DVDs are released every Tuesday. New books are released every Wednesday.
That is...