And that basically is the business Appe is in, taking advantage of people who employ obsolete ways of thinking. TVs are not ultimately about picture quality. In fact picture quality isn’t even number one. Integration, connections — that’s the first thing. If I can get great picture quality, and you can be sure Apple will give it to us (probably made by Samsung) that’s fine. But first I want to use the tool the way I want to use it.
Source: Scripting News
Daniel Jalkut on Fixing the Sandbox:
I toss all my Mac app ideas that require more than the default sandboxing rules — no matter how cool the idea is.
The sandbox has a chilling effect on at least one developer. I’d be surprised if it were just me.
[This is quite a mess.]
Source: inessential.com
Lists of Note: Thelonious Monk’s Advice:
- Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
- Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play.
- Don’t play the piano part, i’m playing that. don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!
- Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. what you don’t play can be more important that what you do.
- A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
- When you’re swinging, swing some more!
- You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
- Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
- They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
[A picked a few faces. Can’t have enough Monk. Can. Not.]
The illusion of privacy (and what we actually care about):
You probably have very little privacy at all, giving it up a long time ago.
If you’ve got a charge card, the card company already knows what you do, where you go, how you spend your money, what your debt is like. If you use a cell phone or a computer, someone upstream already has access to where you go, what you buy, what you type, and on and on.
No, you don’t really have a privacy.
[This bugged me a lot for years, but the system is rigged against you, and I decided that it wasn’t worth fighting. I’ve nothing to hide. But that doesn’t mean I like it… or wouldn’t change it if I could.]
Source: Seth’s Blog
Just like with Lion, Mountain Lion is evolving in the direction of the iPad. But, just as with Lion last year, it’s about sharing ideas and concepts with iOS, not sharing the exact same interaction design or code.
[Good stuff… interesting spin.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’:
My complaints are about outright technical inaccuracies, and getting the man’s work wrong. The design process, the resulting products, the centrality of software — Isaacson simply misses the boat.
You could learn more about Steve Jobs’s work by reading Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine piece than by reading Isaacson’s book, but even then we’re left wanting for the stories behind any of Apple’s products after the iPod. Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
[There’s another aspect of all this success. Using UNIX via Next as the basis for OS X was huge in that there was a sudden switch. For years developers looked down their noses at Macs. Whether with good reason ro not I’ll leave aside for now. But there was an explosion of developers buying MacBook Pros (think the titanium era) with OS X. Once they realized that all the favorite tools and utilities, consoles and compilers were there and easily accessible, they all tossed aside their hard to configure (at that time) Linux running on whatever laptop and got Macs. And while the total number might have been small, I feel that the mindshare thing had a significant impact which continues today. If you’re going to talk about Jobs’ work. That mindshare acquisition, which came with Next was huge. Another little known fact. The web was born on a Next computer. The guy who created the web as we know it did it on Next. Not a direct link, but only one degree of separation.]
Source: Daring Fireball
What I’m saying is that Jeremy Lin is a head-case in the positive sense: he’s broken through into a zone where his head is level and his emotions are positive. He believes in himself, and he believes in his team. He has the poise of a player who’s been a starter for ten years. The other players he makes look good include Bill Walker, Landry Fields, Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak, none of whom are big stars.
Can’t help loving it. The story is too good not to.
[It’s the most fun a Knicks fan has had since the Ewing/Starks years]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
All these fake startups need us to let them have our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into AAA securities. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don’t think there’s going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.
All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.
It’s all connected. The fact that they’re pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they’re not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.
[Yup.]
Source: Scripting News
Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled:
Yes, the price is $4.95, but nonetheless, a long-lasting, efficient LED bulb for $4.95 is a win! The announcement was just made a few minutes ago, as Lemnis unveiled three new lines of its Pharox LED replacement bulb. The 200-lumen Pharox BLU is the bulb selling for $4.95, and the 350-lumen PHarox Blu is selling for $6.95. They are, apparently, only sold through the Pharox website.
[That’s a small step. More please.]
