August 2009 Archives
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Bob Dylan: The enigmatic troubadour said on his satellite radio program that he is negotiating with two car manufacturers to be the voice of their in-car navigation systems.
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Fox is still flacking the OMG It's the Death Book! line re: Your life, your choices. Here solid pushback from Ed Brayton
Here is the first SprintCam v3 showreel, made for NAB 2009 exhibition.
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"As TiVo’s customer base has shrank, Netflix’ subscribers have been growing at an annual rate of around 25 percent for the past several quarters. Cheaper, if less sophisticated, DVRs from cable and satellite providers hurt TiVo’s prospects."
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How many have you seen?
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Story includes a tally of all jobs lost in my town.
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Out Friday, the pricing is interesting: "And then there’s the price of Snow Leopard: $30.
Have they lost their minds? Operating-system upgrades always cost a hundred-something dollars! ($30 is the price if you already have Leopard. If not, the price is $170 for a Mac Box Set that also includes two suites of Apple software: iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and the GarageBand music studio), and iWork (the Numbers spreadsheet, Pages word processor and Keynote presentation software)."
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Says Fred, "I do not believe we should criticize a company that operates like this. We should learn from it. Of all the Internet companies out there, the one that serves as the most iconic for our firm is craigslist, not Google. We dream of funding a company that can be worth a billion dollars with only 30 employees. We've never done it and I don't know if we ever will. But we are going to try again and again and again."
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New chip design improves low light performance
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Cool clock concept. You build it.
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Back and forth on Li-ann Thio cancelation at NYU. The defense of Li-ann Thio is better than the opposition (though, obviously, I agree with the decision to rescind the invitation).
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Argues Newspapers are more vulnerable as single large target needing advertisers than are distributed bloggers.
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details of Megan Wants a Millionaire and So You Think You Can Dance contestant/participant scandals
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Microsoft has shifted its priorities, though. Unlike past versions of Exchange, Microsoft developed Exchange 2010 as a service first, and only later has it done the work on the server product. That server product, which has been in testing for some time and reached the beta stage in April, is now ready in a near-final "release candidate" form.
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Quotes Nathan Glazer: "Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs."
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"...the Journal and the Times are engaged in a pitched but unusually quiet battle for readers outside the New York metro area who might be persuaded to abandon their local dailies."
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A bunch of folks have been submitting two separate stories about why the newspaper business is failing. Much of the stories cover ground that we've covered before, but they do so in such a nice, well-argued package, that I wanted to mention them here.
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Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.
I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth (and that of everyone you interact with) for an entire day. And then record every facial expression and gesture. You will most likely find what communications scholars found long ago - people are social creatures and a whole lot of what they express is phatic communication. (Phatic expressions do social work rather than conveying information... think "Hi" or "Thank you".)
Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you've said. I think that you'll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes "pointless babble" to a third party ear.
In foreign policy, liberals often believe that disputes with foreign actors can and should be settled through negotiation and compromise. That’s because international relations isn’t a zero-sum affair. Conflict is costly to both parties, good relations bring benefits to both parties, so disagreement is generally amenable to compromise. Ideological disagreement isn’t zero-sum either. Neither conservatives nor progressives are wedded to principles that require defense of wasteful Medicare spending. But partisan politics is zero-sum. A “win” for the Democrats is a “loss” for Republicans. And I the predominant thinking in the Republican Party at the moment is that inflicting legislative defeats on Democrats will lead to electoral defeats for Democrats. That makes the GOP hard to bargain with.
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It happened on July 7, 2009. I'm only now catching up.
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Facebook has decent privacy controls, but most users don't realize how to take full advantage of them. Ars guides you through Facebook's privacy settings so that you can be both social and respectable at the same time.
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EXCERPT: At his more placid town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday, the president had to explain that he did not intend to “pull the plug on grandma.” He said that the specter of death panels had spun out of a proposal from a Republican, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has long espoused helping Medicare patients learn about options for care at the end of their lives. In an interview with The Washington Post on Monday, Isakson diagnosed Palin’s interpretation of his suggestion as “nuts.”
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The Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign is a new British organisation devoted to helping photographers whom the authorities have busted or harassed for being potential terrorists, kidnapping innocent photons with deadly light-sensors.
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Is the Kundra dust-up a Dvorak traffic scheme? Dvorak's done it before.
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EXCERPT: When I read one page from a book (385 words), it made just six errors, including mistaking "provenance" for "products" and "traversed" for "drew first." But these were easily fixed. And for those of you who can't live without spell-check, Dragon doesn't misspell any words in its vocabulary.
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A benefit to living where I do: "The study is one of dozens, if not hundreds, documenting the positive cognitive and psychological effects of green space on our minds. Other research has demonstrated that kids with attention-deficit disorder are better able to focus when placed in a natural setting, that domestic violence occurs less frequently when homes have a view of trees or fields, and that hospital patients recover more quickly when provided glimpses of nature. "
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Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, "I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product."
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Excerpt: "Blogs, by their nature, invite conversation,” Mr. Mittell says. “So I figured, if I have the forum, I should use it.”
After receiving his provost’s blessing, he added a blog post about the job opening on a Monday evening. By Tuesday, traffic to his Web page had nearly quadrupled. By Thursday, he noticed that at least 10 people had “retweeted” his post on Twitter, adding a link and words of encouragement, and several people had posted questions about the position.
Random roadside checks show that the percentage of people driving under the influence of alcohol appears to be declining, but many weekend drivers test positive for drug use.
Michelle Obama did not "fake" the White House kitchen garden with mature plants to fool the public (another conspiracy theory), and it does not contain deadly levels of lead. (Her press office continues to patiently issue this assurance.)Mrs. Obama always wanted to have a garden. She planted one at her new home. She is using it to promote healthy eating because unhealthy eating is at the root of so much suffering among city dwellers and the poor. Her family often has its produce for dinner.
This is Occam's razor, the principle Aaronovitch uses to dismantle history's favorite conspiracy theories: The simplest explanation is usually the right explanation.
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A benefit to living where I do: "The study is one of dozens, if not hundreds, documenting the positive cognitive and psychological effects of green space on our minds. Other research has demonstrated that kids with attention-deficit disorder are better able to focus when placed in a natural setting, that domestic violence occurs less frequently when homes have a view of trees or fields, and that hospital patients recover more quickly when provided glimpses of nature. "
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Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, "I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product."
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Excerpt: "Blogs, by their nature, invite conversation,” Mr. Mittell says. “So I figured, if I have the forum, I should use it.”
After receiving his provost’s blessing, he added a blog post about the job opening on a Monday evening. By Tuesday, traffic to his Web page had nearly quadrupled. By Thursday, he noticed that at least 10 people had “retweeted” his post on Twitter, adding a link and words of encouragement, and several people had posted questions about the position.
Random roadside checks show that the percentage of people driving under the influence of alcohol appears to be declining, but many weekend drivers test positive for drug use.
Michelle Obama did not "fake" the White House kitchen garden with mature plants to fool the public (another conspiracy theory), and it does not contain deadly levels of lead. (Her press office continues to patiently issue this assurance.)Mrs. Obama always wanted to have a garden. She planted one at her new home. She is using it to promote healthy eating because unhealthy eating is at the root of so much suffering among city dwellers and the poor. Her family often has its produce for dinner.
This is Occam's razor, the principle Aaronovitch uses to dismantle history's favorite conspiracy theories: The simplest explanation is usually the right explanation.
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Moses and Jacobs clashed during the 1950s and ’60s over three of the huge public works projects Moses tried to force on Manhattan. ...
There was his plan to build a four-lane highway through the middle of Washington Square Park. Another project would have razed 14 blocks in the heart of Greenwich Village under the guise of urban renewal. There was also a plan to plunge a 10-lane elevated superhighway, to be called the Lower Manhattan Expressway, through SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side.
Each of these projects is, from today’s vantage point, clearly insane; each would have had cataclysmic effects on the quality of life in Manhattan. But their flaws were less obvious to many at the time. It took an accidental activist, Jacobs, and her ability to marshal popular support and political will, to stop them. The battles over all three projects form the spine of “Wrestling With Moses.”
Blog post debunking the Mashable report on Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet.
FT.com executives are considering introducing a pay-as-you-read model loosely based on Apple’s iTunes to increase its digital revenues further. FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told paidContent:UK in an interview that the site is “exploring the possibility of pay-per-view” and could introduce some form of micropayment model within 12 months, as long as it’s easy for readers to pay and at the right price.
A leading authority on type, Mike Parker is convinced that William Starling Burgess created the font we now know as Times New Roman
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"she took on copyright, noting that it is a gov't granted monopoly that deserves antitrust scrutiny. She said, "Let's face it, copyright extension these days is 'limited' to the life of Mickey Mouse." And yes, there was sarcasm in her voice over the word "limited." The guy sitting next to me who works at Disney started shuffling uncomfortably.... Lofgren went on to say that copyright is being used to put up barriers to competition and innovation and is an issue that antitrust regulators really should be scrutinizing"
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"There were so many violations that one could readily assert that they had no business walking through the door."
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A bunch of good points. One of them: " I've already mentioned some of the overlap between Pete and Tyler. But those are only two of the beat writers. There are also Yankee beat writers from the NY Post, the NY Daily News, Newsday, the New Jersey Record, WFAN, MLB.com and perhaps some others as well. I follow a bunch of their blogs and Twitter accounts, and there's a tremendous amount of overlap. I am not saying to just dump them all and have a single beat writer. But at some point you do have to wonder about why it makes sense to have so many reporters effectively reporting the exact same thing."
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At 80 years old he's not able to walk, read, write or speak, nor can he eat or drink on his own. Justice Ministry officials said doctors had told them that Mr. Biggs was unlikely to recover.
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The Ebay listing has since been removed, but one has gone up in its place, offering a replica of the original signed 360 with the descriptors “This replica has been painstakingly recrafted using detailed photographs of the original signed Xbox 360 and imagery of Palin’s signature on the infamous “helicopter-wolf-hunting” bill from 2003.”
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Why use TwitterSnooze...? It's a good tool to avoid a blast of tweets from a conference you are not attending... just snooze the conference goers for a few days. It's a nice way to get back at someone for saying something stupid... give them the silent treatment ;) It's a good way to ignore someone that just flooded your timeline for no good reason... but it was just a one-time offense and doesn't merit permanent unfollowing.
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Alaska's per capita funding under the stimulus bill was $1,024.28. No other state came close, though DC rang in a strong $878.02.
On a related note, you might recall that wingnuts like Sean Hannity have claimed that President Obama was using the stimulus to deliver political favors to states that supported him, but Pro Publica's numbers debunk that myth, showing that while the average McCain state received $448 on a per capita basis, the average Obama state received $421.
Via Pogue tweet: "The whole thing is especially galling since text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found "free capacity on the system" in an underused secondary cellphone channel: http://bit.ly/QxtBt. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip."
Old but still true, "Of the twenty men arrested, all were married except for the priest." Out proud gay people do not live lives of shame.
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Michael Pollan's latest. EXCERPT: "To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of elements.” So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by Balzer’s none-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a storm — 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s."
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birthers busted
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I'm not overly concerned, but Rotenberg makes good sense: While Acxiom, Datran and some of their partners address their use of tracking in their privacy policies, such policies have become worthless, Mr. Rotenberg said. “Real transparency means that the user gets access to the information, not to a policy about the information,” he said. Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor and privacy expert at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, said the unwitting participation by consumers makes online marketing different from offline. “Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making," he said. “We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”
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In the Georgia university system... "More cuts are coming. Perdue announced July 21 that the state must cut spending by an additional 5 percent because of revenue shortfalls. In response, each public college and university must develop plans for what it would cut if its budget was reduced by 4 percent, 6 percent or 8 percent. The state Board of Regents is scheduled to vote on the budget amendments later this month."
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We simply don’t see how the AP’s proposed system would allow both widespread beacon enforcement and compatibility with existing formats like RSS. Compatibility means that current RSS tools remain usable. Obviously, these tools do not currently perform the AP’s rights enforcement, so how could they magically be made to start phoning home now?
That said, there is an interesting nugget in the AP’s proposal, one which we encourage them to pursue: tagging content with rights, origin, and means of attribution is a good proposal.
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"If Barack Hussein Obama's family was really all that sneaky and wily and part of some Big Secret Conspiracy to have him slither in and take over the United States, wouldn't they have been crafty enough to name him Chris?"
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