May 2013
27 posts
4 tags
"Yahoo to hold Monday press event in New York as... →
Cripes. Here come the third-party, non-revenue-creating ads in our Tumblr blogs.
4 tags
"Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Is Releasing an Album... →
”I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee. I’m really happy with the results and look forward to sharing them as soon as I figure...
6 tags
4 tags
"We should be building great things that don’t... →
Like:
Google Search
Gmail
Google Maps
Google Shopping
Google News
Picasa
Google Video (before buying up YouTube, of course)
Google Reader
Google Offers
Google Toolbar
Google Chrome
Android
Bookmarks
Google+ (and Orkut before that)
Google Drive
Google Play
and now, TA DA!
Google Play All Access
Ohhhhhhhh wait, these all existed before you created them, Larry. My bad.
(These are...
2 tags
How do you silence the critic? →
Hire the critic.
Classic.
Not a devastating loss of criticism of Google — it’s not like they hired John Gruber.
4 tags
3 tags
6 tags
"Mobile malware exploding, but only for Android" →
“However, F-Secure’s new report for the latest quarter shows Android now accounts for 136 out of 149 known threats, or 91.3 percent of all malware activity (up from 79 percent in 2012).” Walled gardens are the worst.
1 tag
9 tags
"A metal frame that functions as an antenna. This,... →
John Gruber has a long memory that corporations do not enjoy. In this case, Nokia, who is introducing today a concept that Apple introduced years ago — external antennas.
This is why I read Gruber.
Even if he’s funky with punctuation. Grammar lesson: Periods are, 99.9999 percent of the time, to be placed within quote marks, not without.
5 tags
"The critics said his writing was clumsy,... →
“Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown,” which is making the rounds, but I was feeling this particular paragraph.
3 tags
Mexican food in the Bay Area →
We think we have great Mexican food in the Bay Area. We don’t, really.
Beyond some taquerias in SF, taco trucks in the East Bay and the oft ignored restaurants in the South Bay, we have rice and beans stuffed into tortillas, decorated with skinny strips of protein, and we call it a burrito.
Blah. Fuck that shit.
Chicago has far more great Mexican food than the Bay Area — I ate a lot...
6 tags
Apple designs for the mass market but sells at a premium price. Android designs for geeky configurability but sells to the mass market.
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) May 13, 2013
4 tags
5 tags
"Facebook Home is a flop: Employees know it and... →
From Business Insider:
In a clear sign that sales are pretty weak, AT&T and HTC dropped the price of the First, the only phone to ship with the new Facebook Home Android app right of the box, to $0.99 from $99 this week.
The phone launched less than a month ago….
According to sources, analysts, and user reviews in the Google Play store for Android apps, Home is a dud so far.
After...
2 tags
"The court cannot help but note the irony that... →
“Open always wins.”
Oh Google, you cad — you’re just sooo lovable in that mischievous way of yours.
No wonder everyone trusts you!
2 tags
4 tags
IBM
“In August 2008, Netflix’s technology infrastructure melted down. This was when the company was still known for DVDs-by-mail, and for three days it could not send discs because a crucial Oracle database kept malfunctioning. Reporters and customers took notice. Netflix traced the problem to an expensive, third-party storage system that went haywire after a software update. The incident...
2 tags
That's cray cray →
Sorry.
1 tag
1 tag
"My Valiant Return to Reading" →
Yes!
But the real thing has pictures.
4 tags
"You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle... →
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, telling it like it is.
And always remember, people — we initial cap “Internet.”
4 tags
9 tags
Dumb bloggers and the commenters who call them...
Janko Roettgers posted a piece called “Take that, Apple TV: Smart TVs twice as popular as dedicated streaming boxes.”
Of course, the headline is traffic bait:
“Roku boxes and Apple TV streaming devices may be on everyone’s mind, but smart TVs with internet apps are actually a lot more popular.”
Oh, Roku, yeah, you too — TAKE ALL THESE UNIT SALES, BITCHES!
...
3 tags
How to lose your audience, again →
SFGate:
“Please note: This year the Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants will not appear on SFGate. You can get the guide in Sunday’s Chronicle. If you are a print, iPad or www.sfchronicle.com subscriber, you can also access the guide online at www.sfchronicle.com.”
Nope.
3 tags
Space Monkey: Taking the cloud out of the data... →
Time to decentralize the cloud.
I want this.
2 tags
How useless is Klout?
My Klout score went up because of all the birthday wishes I received on Facebook.
“But that means you actually affect and influence social media in a significant way” you might say.
No, not really. It means I had a birthday and my friends wished me well. Do I influence them in a manner that matters? This cannot be determined by Klout — so Klout is useless.
April 2013
21 posts
5 tags
"Android notebooks? Yep, Intel says, and they'll... →
“Notebooks”? More like “netbooks 2.0.”
Amirite?
Everybody wants a netbook. Everybody.
3 tags
6 tags
"Microsoft slams Google" →
Jim Dalrymple quotes Microsoft’s “Scroogled” website:
When you buy an Android app from the Google app store, they give the app maker your full name, email address and the neighborhood where you live. This occurs without clear warning every single time you buy an app.
If you can’t trust Google’s app store, how can you trust them for anything?
My biggest problems with Google,...
6 tags
"Samsung’s dirty tricks" →
Philip Elmer-DeWitt posted a story about Samsung paying people to talk shit about Apple, then this happened.
Pretty frightening stuff for any business to be a victim of Samsung’s “holy war.”
Apple seems to be weathering the worst of it. Despite an apparently sabotaged stock price, the company is selling more units and making cash-money.
Yeah, depressed margins, wah wah....
6 tags
"When I learned to be a journalist, we had one... →
Ian Bettridge, a journalist, continues:
By those standards, David Gewirtz’s piece over at ZDNet entitled “iOS developers abandoning sinking Apple mothership: biggest drop ever” isn’t just bad journalism. It’s beyond that. It’s anti-journalism. Where journalism is about fact, Gewirtz brings us speculation. Where journalism adds context to make things clearer, Gewirtz removes it in order to make...
5 tags
"iPhone 4 owners begin receiving their $15... →
I never had a problem, so I never bothered claiming mine. Besides, $15? Please. Why bother?
Oh, that’s right:
Apple paid out a total of $53 million in the settlement, which was lawyers took a hefty $16M chunk.
I know, the writer doesn’t know what English is. He meant “…of which lawyers took $16 million.”
And now you know why there was a lawsuit in the first...
3 tags
3 tags
Google Fined $189,230 Over Wi-Fi Data Collection... →
That’ll teach ‘em.
5 tags
Czech Republic is not Chechnya, diplomat points... →
Sigh.
4 tags
I'm at the Warfield,
And it needs to be disrupted. Music doesn’t sound good in venues that are old because music has changed. The problem is that bands that make money end up at venues that make money BUT are old. And you aren’t going to skip your favorite bands just because the venue sucks.
Maybe you should.
(I do, because I’m pretty awesome. I won’t go see The National at the Fox in Oakland because the sound...
8 tags
Coming clean, maybe: The Dan Lyons story →
Dan Lyons reveals the dirty truth of today’s media and the people who work in the industry:
I’ve… spent the past few years writing “articles” that were less and less interesting — they were basically just SEO chum thrown out onto the internet in hopes of catching traffic.
“Articles” is another way of saying “Everything I ever wrote about Apple before...
4 tags
"How low has Apple’s valuation dropped? As of... →
Insane.
4 tags
3 tags
Oh really, another email app that solves a problem... →
Emails apps have become the next photo apps.
3 tags
4 tags
It won't be called iRadio →
That is all.
2 tags
3 tags
11 tags
Moon Shots
This doesn’t start off as a rant but don’t worry, it is.
The words “moon shot” (or moonshot, whatever) first described shooting a spacecraft off Earth and on to the moon. Merriam-Webster says it was first used in 1957, when the idea of a moon landing was perhaps, just maybe, feasible if there were enough money thrown at the project.
After monkeys had already been there,...
2 tags
4 tags
Rodney Dangerfield and Microsoft have a couple... →
They can’t get no respect, and they’re old.
March 2013
16 posts
4 tags
Your Phone vs. Your Heart →
indefensible:
parislemon:
Barbara L. Fredrickson for NYT:
So the next time you see a friend, or a child, spending too much of their day facing a screen, extend a hand and invite him back to the world of real social encounters. You’ll not only build up his health and empathic skills, but yours as well. Friends don’t let friends lose their capacity for humanity.
I tend to think a lot of...
5 tags
I wonder what other words Google® objects to? →
The Language Council of Sweden tried to include “ogooglebar“ — meaning “ungoogleable” — into its official list of words that aren’t in the Swedish dictionary but have entered common parlance.
Their definition? “Something that cannot be found on the Web with a search engine.”
“But Google® objected, asking for changes showing the expression...
