This is another post in the “Destroyer of Quackery” series. As a refresher, the intent of these is to take select news items, decipher them, and help you read between the lines so as to understand what’s really being said. I hate bullshit corporate quackery that preys upon the public’s lack of education in a certain area. Which means I hate all corporate quackery.
This is a long post, but I swear randomly, so it’s worth reading.
On Feb 19th, Krispy Kreme introduced a whole wheat donut that somehow is supposed to be acceptable for health-conscious consumers. I am not making this up. From the KK press release:
“The Krispy Kreme Whole Wheat Glazed doughnut delivers the delicious taste that our customers have come to expect from us,” said Stan Parker, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. “This sweet treat is an alternative for health conscious consumers with the benefits of 100% whole wheat and only 180 calories,” he added.
First rule — when a Sr. VP of Marketing of a garbage food company is quoted in a press release saying anything about “health,” your bullshit detector should go insane. 95% of the time when you see this, you can immediately scream “BULLSHIT” at the top of your lungs while throwing random objects out the nearest window and enjoy the warm, satisfying glow of being completely crazy and correct.
The latest build of Mac OSX Leopard (build 9A343) is in the wild, and it offers some interesting things that haven’t surfaced before, mainly in terms of fit-and-finish. Think Secret still pegs Leopard’s final release at end of March, but that’s something I like to call bullshit. My call is, and has been, late May/early June. March seems an awfully aggressive timeframe to reach GA quality, especially when “stability remains questionable, with many applications experiencing unexplained hangs or crashes”. That doesn’t tell me we’re 30 days away from GA, but what do I know? I’ve only been in the software business all of my professional career.
Nonetheless, there are some curious highlights:
Considerable gains in performance and responsiveness, including the dreaded “window resize” delay that has always been a nit with OSX. I’ve always hated it, so it’s nice to see something to simple yet so frustrating finally fixed. And, as is Apple’s tradition, performance only seems to get better release-to-release.
The icon for Terminal, instead of having a black background, is now all Matrix-ey with what appears to be green characters suspended in vertical freefall. [link]
Yesterday, the Red Wings acquired forward Kyle Calder from the Flyers, who is struggling this year but lead the Blackhawks in goals, assists, and game-winning goals last year. And, as of a few moments ago, Todd Bertuzzi has joined the Wings from the Panthers.
As a hardcore hockey freak, I like this…if Bertuzzi is healthy. If he’s not, then he’s a paper tiger at best, a liability at worst.
Anyway, good day today. The NHL trade deadline is usually like Christmas if you’re a Red Wings fan.
The New Yorker has an excellent piece about Al Gore and his lack of plans and expectations to run for President in 2008. This has been speculated, somewhat fancifully, for a few months now, and it remains such, although I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be intrigued on some level by his entry.
Today, with the illumination of hindsight and the clarity of contrast, Gore seems downright prescient, knowing what we know about Bush’s ability to govern and the path of his two terms. The contrast in their respective ideologies and leadership potential has never before told such a incisive story: Al Gore really has won, and George W. Bush really has lost.
It is worse than painful to reflect on how much better off the United States and the world would be today if the outcome of the 2000 election had been permitted to correspond with the wishes of the electorate. The attacks of September 11, 2001, would likely not have been avoided, though there is ample evidence, in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, that Gore and his circle were far more alert to the threat of Islamist terrorism than Bush and his. But can anyone seriously doubt that a Gore Administration would have meant, well, an alternate universe, in which, say, American troops were sent on a necessary mission in Afghanistan but not on a mistaken and misbegotten one in Iraq; the fate of the earth, not the fate of oil-company executives, was the priority of the Environmental Protection Agency; civil liberties and diplomacy were subjects of attention rather than of derision; torture found no place or rationale?
Make no mistake: hindsight’s blade is double-edged. It’s easy to look back on the follies and cement-footed missteps of the Bush administration and speculate that yes, goddamn it, Gore would have been better. It’s equally easy to transfer our frustration with Bush into breathless idolization of Gore, to assume that Gore would have found every right to Dubya’s wrong.
Here’s a casual narrative of some Google Mac converts who go to visit Apple’s Cupertino campus and coincidentally get buzzed by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive in Apple’s cafeteria. That had to be fairly cool.
The best part:
When you start work at Google, you get to choose whether you want a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. For many new employees who have never used a Mac (or who haven’t used one for a long time), this choice represents a chance to try living in Mac OS X. Google provides a supportive environment for users of various operating systems, so newbie Mac users can count on something of a comfort zone. And, just as elsewhere in the world, new Mac users at Google are often won over by Apple’s excellent combination of hardware and software.
Interesting that a technology company offers its employees a choice of computing platform for their personal machine. Where I work, you’d get the stinkeye big time if you asked for a Mac or Ubuntu for your machine. I suppose that’s a luxury that working at a web company affords: the platform, ideally, should be inconsequential. Well-designed web technology is agnostic to all but the browser and what it can/cannot support.
Worth a read, if only for their account of the Jobs/Ive sighting.
It’s rare, but this year the Academy didn’t totally blow it: Martin Scorsese, his film “The Departed“, and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” all won Oscars. Best director, best picture, best documentary, respectively.
Allow me to indulge a wee bit o’ hype for a second: IGN’s Matt Cassmassina hints at some games to come for the Wii, and he’s not coming up short on superlatives.
There are some potentially crazy-awesome games coming down the pipeline for Wii, by the way. You guys have no idea. I know that’s vague — has to be, but I’ve seen some stuff that you simply have no idea even exists and frankly, if you did, you’d flip out.
When you have a system like the Wii that is religiously devoted to gameplay above all else, doors start to open. No longer confined to a dozen buttons and two triggers, innovative development houses can really make some games that break the mold and provide a truly new user experience.
Remember, we’re seeing first-gen games for the Wii. As the console matures, we’ll have games that not only are infinitely more polished, but also find ways to use the Wii’s control scheme to dramatically change how you experience the game. It won’t just be better graphics and framerates. Look at Gears of War on the Xbox 360 — a far better title than the games that were available upon launch, and that’s sans any control paradigm revolution.
(I said paradigm. Heh.)
Now, if I could only find a Wii I’d be set. I went into a local Target today (Troy, MI) and asked one of the clerks in the electronics section if she happened to have any Wiis in the store. She looked at me as if I was giving birth to a baby goat from my forehead.
Tonight during the Oscars, Apple will air the first iPhone commercial, intended to be a teaser spot more than something truly informational. According to Macworld, the content of the ad was developed specifically for the Oscars.
The audience will be oceanic: last year, 38.9 million people watched the Oscars festivities on ABC.
Yet another proof point that Apple knows advertising better than any of its competitors, bar none.
Any guesses on how much people will be talking about the iPhone tomorrow? The ad video will be everywhere.
Thanks to the fine folks who brought you Science vs. Faith: How an idea stays alive, we now have a flowchart that masterfully captures and crystallizes the byzantine, seemingly-insane logic of George W. Bush. Never before has such an underpowered interesting mind been mapped with this level of precision.
On an entirely, completely, totally dissimilar, unrelated note, I bet my father $100 that George W. Bush will go down as one of the worst presidents of all time, and the Iraq swamp in which we find ourselves mired as the biggest foreign policy fuckup in the history of this country.
I think I’ll spend that money today and not think twice about it.
This is making the rounds on the blogs, and for very good reason: you simply don’t get a chance to see something so cool, so well done, that you feel like standing up and applauding afterwards.
This is that good.
It’s a scene from Pulp Fiction done entirely as typographic motion graphics. I’m betting you haven’t seen anything like it before. This is first-rate work.
Here is a Quicktime link. Click it now and be blown away.
Once you’ve seen the movie linked above, check out the one below — it’s the same idea, just done a little differently (and not as well as the original, in my opinion, but it’s still good).
The nightly news would be more palatable if this kind of story made headlines more often. How often do you hear about a 70-year old unarmed tourist jumping to the defense of his tour bus, which is in the process of getting robbed by three armed assailants?
Not very often, and that’s why it’s that much more heartwarming to hear about a 70-year old, ex-military, senior citizen wrestling with an armed mugger, breaking his collarbone, and eventually asphyxiating him to death.
Adams was with 12 American tourists who hired a driver to explore Costa Rica for a few hours. They were climbing out of the van to visit a Caribbean beach when three men wearing ski masks ran toward them, she said. One held a gun to her head, while the other two pulled out knives.
Suddenly, one of the tourists, a U.S. military veteran trained in self defense, jumped out of the van and put the gunman in a headlock, according to Limon police chief Luis Hernandez.
Hernandez said the American, whom he refused to identify, struggled with the robber, breaking his collarbone and eventually killing him. Police identified the dead man as Warner Segura, 20. The other two assailants fled.
Bravo Mr. Anonymous Senior Badass. You bring honor to grandpas everywhere.
Apple has always been known for its excellent laptop displays, and it’s looking to carry that tradition into 2007.
ThinkSecret is reporting that at the next opportunity to refresh its laptop hardware, Apple will introduce LED panels into its notebook lineup. Currently, Apple’s laptops use high-quality cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlights.
The forthcoming displays will feature backlights illuminated by light emitting diodes (LED), a more energy efficient solution than the traditional cold cathode fluorescent backlights (CCFL) found in most LCD displays on the market today. In addition to their energy saving properties, LED backlights are also brighter and display superior color and consistency compared to CCFL backlights. In addition, the LED backlights are even thinner than today’s already-thin CCFL backlights, which wil enable Apple to trim the width of its laptops even further.
Very few machines use LED backlight technology now, so the sooner Apple can get this wrapped into their portable lineups, the further ahead of the competition it will stay.
A bonus: LED backlights run cooler, use less energy, and are physically thinner than CCFL-based panels. All of this is great news for a company that claims that 60%+ of its computer sales are laptops.
I think it’s about time someone stated the obvious.
All of the next-gen consoles are out: the Xbox 360, Ninendo Wii and Sony PS3. Everyone’s seen what they can do, and I’m ready to make a prediction: the death-spiral of gaming PCs has begun. In fact, it’s in full stride.
Here’s the thing: consoles have grown up. They are no longer just gaming consoles — they’re full-blown entertainment hubs, and their functionality is only expanding. Generally speaking, they have massive amounts of power, online offerings, HD-DVD/Blu-ray capability (excepting the Wii), a growing array of excellent titles and — the coup de grace here — they’re a fraction of the cost of a full gaming rig. Modern consoles are kicking traditional gaming PCs’ collective ass right into anachronism-land.
To continually upgrade a bleeding-edge gaming PC costs bucketloads of money. You’ll periodically need a new CPU, which probably needs a new mainboard, which might require another type of RAM. Then you’ll need the newest video card (GPU), and, if you like to be on the bleeding edge, a PPU (physics processing unit). You might need a new soundcard. And game technology is such that, generationally-speaking, your technology will continue to be pushed as far as it can go. This cycle is more or less perpetual, with tiny little stops along the way so you can actually enjoy a game or two before getting back to worrying about what your next upgrades will be.
You’ve never seen billboards like these. Unlike most, these are not horrible eyesores that litter the landscape like garish metal-and-polyurethane zits and that have almost no effective value.
Instead, these are made from a semi-transparent Lexan resin, which creates the effect of speed-blurring regardless of day/night, weather or season. They make their point about the Mustang’s capability for speed better than any copy + graphic ever could. This is an intelligent marketing idea executed well — something you don’t see too often, because concepts often fall apart during implementation.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Second Life, a website where you re-create yourself in the form of a custom-made avatar and walk around a virtual society and economy and pay real money to get fake money (called Lindens) to advance your virtual life and buy virtual things. Sound confusing? It really isn’t.
Second Life is massively popular. Massively. Popular. It’s a more adult-themed Club Penguin. I will have to admit that I haven’t played Second Life, as I have some preternatural aversion to spending real money to get fake money that I can spend on fake things. But lots of you like to go do this, to reinvent yourself as a fat waiter who works at a diner or a DJ who works at a strip club or a construction worker who jackhammers various things all day. You can be almost anything you want to be except a prostitute or a violent criminal, the latter of which, admittedly, reduces my overall interest in the game considerably.
So I’ve never played it, but I’ve read many reviews and experiences with it (including the periodic musings of Robert Scoble on the topic). Most are pretty positive, mainly intimating a mild-to-acute level of excitement for the game and a keen interest in evolving an avatar’s life as much as possible and paying real money so you have access to fake experiences that, somehow, manage to be interesting. Overall, it has seemed like a fairly clever marriage of the modern social web and digital entertainment.
But before you click away to get your own Second Life avatar and start walking around aimlessly and charging your credit card to get fake money for the game, you might want to read Toothpaste’s (as in the creator of the Toothpaste for Dinner comic) account of his adventures in Second Life. His review is…well…not so positive.
But it’s an absolutely hilarious read. If you don’t agree, then there’s a very strong chance you’re brain-damaged. Sorry you had to find out via my blog.
Second Life is free to play, and I keep seeing people referring to it in the news, so I had to take one for the team and just dive on in. I knew it probably wasn’t going to be intriguing when I got to the signup part and couldn’t even make a one-word name. I had to use some fantasy-ass last name and I couldn’t even use cusses. The best I could do was call myself Wenis.
Wenis Swindlehurst: How do I hit people
Foxbrand Leprechaun: You can’t
Wenis Swindlehurst: I need that shit you drive.
And:
After a half-hour of pulling on sliders, I had transformed from Wenis Cybergoth to Wenis Pale Corpulent Bulldog-Man. I shortened my torso and gave myself man-handles. I made my hands puffy. I enlarged my jowls to the maximum, and beaded my eyes down to… well, little beads.
Just go read it. You’ll be glad you did. This post’s title will make much more sense then.
Nice catch: Apple recruited Rebecca Van Dyck, Nike ad director for the firm Wieden + Kennedy, for its Director of Worldwide Advertising post. Van Dyck has already started working with Apple.
A representative for Wieden said that Van Dyck left on “great terms” and the the offer to work for Apple was a “can’t-pass opportunity.” I would think this goes without saying — is there any brand out there hotter than Apple right now, except maybe for Google?
This is interesting news, and it furthers the notion that Apple is one of the few companies left that knows how to advertise and whose marketing department doesn’t get grouped into those that are bastions of unchecked corporate spending (apologies to Google’s Eric Schmidt). Apple not only knows how to market and advertise products, but also a corporate brand. Because marketing like this is one of Apple’s core competencies, they can lure the very best.
How many companies can boast that they have retail stores in which customers come in and ask if they can buy the shirts the retail salesepeople wear? How many can say that their customers actually want to become willing advertising and marketing vehicles for their products or brand?
When’s the last time you saw a Microsoft sticker in the back window of a passing car? How about a Lenovo one? Target? IBM? Hell, even Google?
Van Dyk must be an ace, because Apple doesn’t screw around when it comes to having intelligent direction for its worldwide advertising efforts.
I know you have to Purple Cow your idea to get it recognized above the din, but this is ridiculous.
Nothing like a huge fearmongering Red Cross billboard that predicts a bio-chemical attack on November 9, 2009 to get your point across. I think we’re crossing a social responsibility line here. Just guessing.
Numerology bonus: in 2001, it was 9/11. In 2009, it’ll be 11/9. <Cue Twilight Zone theme>
Yesterday, Apple released an update that provides 3rd-party WWAN wireless card support for the three largest carriers in the United States. Verizon, Cingular and Sprint all have models that are covered by this update.
The 350KB update is available only for Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.8.
If you can’t see the writing on the wall for PPC Macs (and the writing says, “PPC is dead and we’re doing our best to keep it alive by a hair while moving PPC customers to Intel machines, so hurry up, because this is getting pretty tedious and, like, the divide is growing, so unless you want to be all old school for no good reason just bite the bullet and upgrade even though you and I both know the Intel transition is a pain in the ass for lots of people but it will all be worth it with Leopard, OK?”), you’re not looking very hard.
A Mongolian teen who had desperately asked for a Mac for Christmas but instead inherited his father’s old Dell PC had a tantrum that is sure to make even the most hardened rager envious.
The 16 year old boy, Dam Enkhbayar, threw out the computer after it froze while he was downloading video files online. The boy said, “If this had been a Macintosh, I would never have had this problem.”
On one hand, you have to want to shake the little jerk until his head comes off for being such an insolent brat. On the other, when’s the last time you heard of anyone even sniffing this level of passion for a Windows PC?
Too bad this is so absurd, because the marketing would write itself for Apple if this could be bubbled up into a bizzaro switcher story. But, seeing how FURIOUS MONGOL THROWS FREE PC OUT WINDOW IN FIT OF MOLLYCODDLED RAGE probably wouldn’t be the brand reinforcement Apple wants, we’ll just have to let it go.
Varioussources are reporting that a new build of OSX 10.4.9 has been seeded to developers and is most likely the last seed before release, as quality for the update is high.
10.4.9 is said to correct over 100 bugs, specifically in the areas of Bluetooth, DVD burning, Audio, Bonjour, Disk Images, FireWire, Fonts, Graphics, iCal, iChat Video Conferencing, iSync, Rosetta, USB and .Mac Connectivity.
I suspect this will be the final point release before Leopard is made available to the general public sometime this spring.
Look for 10.4.9 very shortly in your Software Update.
Tom Mabeprank calls asks for technical support from his cell provider to help solve the problem of why his voice is echoed back to him through his phone — as an African-American’s.
Worth watching more than once, if only to catch the nuances of what the echo is saying. “That ain’t hittin’ no nothin’.”
Graceful Flavor isn’t some hootin’ and hollerin’ money-savin’ deal blog, but I just found a pretty amazing offer and you probably want to know about it.
I’ve been looking for a good wireless mouse for my MacBook Pro for a while now. After reading many reviews, I settled on the Logitech VX Revolution Cordless Notebook Mouse, which is a smaller, notebook-sized mouse with tons of features and seven buttons to propel you further down the RSI road.
Vista sales are slow, and Steve Ballmer knows why: it’s those goddamn pirates sitting around in developing nations like China, India, Brazil and Russia, texting one another on cellphones and piratin’ his OS.
Ballmer admitted to financial analysts that the predictions for Vista had proved ‘overly optimistic’ and he blamed the pirates in China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets.
He said his final solution would be to increase the intensity Windows Genuine Advantage as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from developing nations.
Ballmer believes that one way Microsoft can bump up Windows sales is to tighten the screws on pirates. “Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth, and I think we’ll make some piracy improvements this year.”
Just throwing this out there: maybe Vista sales are slow because, to the average Joe consumer, there’s not much in Vista that XP doesn’t offer. And WGA already is a bitch to swallow. And the EULA makes you gnaw off your own arm if you even think of transferring your license more than once (among other things). And UAC throws a warning dialog at you every time your mouse hits a red pixel.
Nah. It’s the pirates.
And yes, ratcheting up WGA is the answer. Because that won’t annoy honest users any further than it already does. No. Not one bit.
Pretty soon Vista’s going to be so locked down that it will Tazer you the minute you try to do something it doesn’t like.
Interesting, although it’s been speculated to death for the past 2.5 years. Wonder if the FCC and DOJ will step in and prohibit the proposed merger of equals? If so, what will become of XM Radio and Sirius, both of which are and have been (and likely will continue to be) unprofitable?
I personally see this passing regulatory requirements, but we’ll see.
Beme: a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers. Those mainly responsible for spreading bemes are — get ready — called “bemerz.” Note the “z” at the end of the word, which denotes unsuckiness.
Habari is still-gestating blogging software that’s already getting some buzz on several prominent blogs. I agree with Robert Scoble that the key takeaway from this is that there’s a feeling out there that Automattic (makers of WordPress and WordPress.com) and Six Apart (makers of TypePad, MoveableType, Vox, and LiveJournal) aren’t good enough and can be improved upon.
It’ll be interesting to see where Habari goes. Will it offer a managed service as well as a private install?
My biggest complaint with WordPress.com — where I’m hosted now — is that true direct revenue opportunites are nearly impossible to wrap into your blog. I’m no ad whore, and I focus on content, but I’d like to be able to move GF in a more commercial direction.
Anyway, competition is always good, and I’ll be watching Habari’s progress and market reception as more and more people participate in its development.
I think we’re on the verge of two things here. I can feel it.
Learning more about what OSX Leopard will offer in full, and
Getting a sense of its timing
Right now, we partially know what Leopard will offer. Jobs told us when he unveiled Leopard at WWDC 2006 that there were things he couldn’t show, features that remain “top secret.” Whether that was true or just shrewd salesmanship remains to be seen, but my hunch is that we’re going to learn more about Leopard, and what we don’t know will be more impressive than what we do. And this will start happening soon.
Vista is out. Its launch is over. Many Apple blogs speculated that Jobs would finalize Leopard’s announcement on top of Vista, to take away from its buzz. I never liked that idea, as Hollywoodian as it seemed. Drama like that doesn’t often find a home in real-world business.
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It’s rare, but this year the Academy didn’t totally blow it: 
Second Life is massively popular. Massively. Popular. It’s a more adult-themed 
