February 2012
56 posts
Names
Jim Dalrymple on ViewPhone 4s (in a lineup with 3, 4e, and 5e):
Oh come on, you can’t be serious. Now companies can’t even come up with their own names?
I agree. How dare they imitate Apple’s use of Arabic numerals! Even though iPhone 5 hasn’t come out yet, Apple should preemptively sue any other company that uses the number 5 in their product names. How unoriginal of these...
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Eavesdropping
Yo, my BFFs Max and Will made a podcast together.
Since I’m an old fogey who has no idea how to listen to podcasts, I am having trouble accessing the direct download version. But I’m sure it’s worth a listen. Check it.
While you’re at it, check out Will’s reflection on thinking and writing about tech. My feelings are not dissimilar (except I have no idea how to...
More on Nightline's Tour of Foxconn
Mike Daisey responds to David Pogue. Particularly noteworthy:
Factory work can lift people out of wretched situations. No one, NO ONE, who is on the side of equitable labor standards disagrees with that. NO ONE.
That’s why this is so disingenuous for Mr. Pogue to print it this way. It’s one thing for the writer of the letter, who probably isn’t following this situation...
Nightline's Tour of Foxconn
What Apple enthusiast John Gruber wrote:
I thought it was both fair and fascinating.
What I read: It was a fluff piece; don’t bother.
(But if you really care, you can read The Verge’s summary.)
Credit Card
MG Siegler at parislemon:
Google now asks you to enter your credit card as part of the Gmail signup flow. Bold. twitter.com/rmatei/status/…
— Robert Cezar Matei (@rmatei) February 22, 2012
This is going to go over well.
First, as the image above clearly shows, entering your credit card information is optional. You don’t have to sign up for Google Wallet if you don’t want to. I...
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Reader Mail, Edition #6
From a reader who I’ll call “Dustin”, on Gruber:
It’s like he studied at the Joe Morgan School of Baseball Analysis.
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Wakefield
Yankees enthusiast John Gruber:
And if you want numbers, let me give you these two:
0: number of World Series championships the Red Sox won during the 77 years preceding Wakefield joining the squad in 1995.
2: number of World Series championships the Red Sox won during Wakefield’s career.
I’m not saying Wakefield was the linchpin of the 2004 and 2007 teams. But he was there, right in the...
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Black & White
Shawn King:
Apple does not have a “Black List” (Jason O’Grady’s whining notwithstanding) but they most certainly do have a White List of favored outlets.
Yeah, okay. And Cracker Barrel doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals and African Americans, they just most certainly favor heterosexuals and whites.
Don't Behave
The NYTimes has a fascinating article on behavioral economics in retail and other places. I wanted to talk about this when I first read it, but now that my frenemy Will has posted about it, well, I want to talk about it even more.
I would be amazed if any serious corporation — Apple, Google, you name it — does not have a few behavioral economists on its staff. Being able to predict...
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Armchair Sciences
Dustin Curtis, on legacies of the original Android design:
On all major competing platforms, scrolling performance is given priority over other tasks by the operating system, and is accelerated by the GPU. Not so on Android. This is important because the interfaces on touch screen devices are treated as tangible, physical objects by the human brain. When a physical action you make with your...
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Misdirection
Oh, that MG Siegler at parislemon, always be misdirectin’:
Mims argues that investments make us unreasonably biased and conflicted, yadda yadda. Same argument, different day. He even cites this tweet:
Reporters in Silicon Valley get scoops on the startups THEY HAVE THEIR OWN MONEY IN.It’s hilarious, like if ESPN also owned the Lakers
— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) February 14,...
Psychopathy and Grandiosity
More fun with the super-authoritative Wikipedia, on another trait correlated with psychopathy—grandiosity:
Psychopaths often have grandiose, self-centered goals, and they believe that they can become anything they want to be. However, they often fail to appreciate the talent, dedication, and effort it would take to achieve such goals. […] Psychopaths are unashamed and dismissive of...
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Psychopathy and Impulsivity
Michael Arrington:
If I was the person that Dan Lyons says I am, I would be a psychopath. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t even consider the fact that I’m simply speaking my mind. That I’ve always just spoken my mind. That I’ve never been the type of person to not speak my mind.
Of course, logically speaking, being a psychopath and always speaking one’s mind are not mutually...
Public Service
As an act of public service, I’ve summarized MG Siegler’s response to Dan Lyons at parislemon in graphical form again:
You’re welcome. Get more at the MG Siegler Meme blog.
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↯ Dan Lyons: Silicon Cesspool →
The sheer hatred makes this an amazing read. Just one highlight:
What makes this so hilarious is that Siegler is by far the biggest click-whore in all of tech blogging, a guy whose only real skill, in fact, is the kind of page-view-chasing he now derides.
Siegler is constantly mocked by readers as a laughable troll – a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s...
Anonymous asked: Same guy (I should really set up a tumblr of something). Actually, my original iPhone was the first cell phone I ever owned that I did not utterly loathe. I got it on day 2, after playing with a coworker's to be sure I could at least tolerate it. After using it long-term, I liked it a lot. I was also involved with an early jailbreak group. Talk about revisionist history. Within days of...
Anonymous asked: Same anonymous as the chart. Apple only sometimes follows the function others offer. E.g., the original iPhone, entered a sea of smartphones that had "plenty" of third-party software and launched with no support for so much as rearranging icons on the screen. Going purely by the list of capabilities, it was closer to feature phones of the day than smartphones. That's part of why it...
A Tale of Two Airs
Will Kujawa:
It was Apple’s response to the netbook, but that doesn’t make it a netbook. It was bigger, better and more expensive, yet just as light and portable, which is really the only similarity between the two, and I guess why it could be confused with a netbook. The big difference however, was the Air didn’t suck to use, it was clearly better in almost every way.
...
