This is good to hear, as I believe the current state of steady entropy as it relates to the open Internet isn’t sustainable (as most entropy isn’t).
The key thing with Obama — at least at this early stage — is that while other candidates are “interested” in the NN issue, Obama’s the only one pledging that he’d make NN a law.
Affixing his signature to federal Net neutrality rules would be high on the list during his first year in the Oval Office, the junior senator from Illinois said during an interactive forum Monday afternoon with the popular contender put on by MTV and MySpace at Coe College in Iowa…
He went on to explain the issue briefly: “What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites…so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites,” he went on. “And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet–which is that there is this incredible equality there.”
I’ve been out of town for the past few days, and I just now upgraded to Leopard. So far, so good. Utterly flawless install. I chose the Archive and Install option.
(Despite John Gruber’s advice that most users should simply opt for the standard upgrade installation, I can’t do it. I still think the Archive and Install option is somehow a bit cleaner. It might be seeing ghosts on my part, but that’s what I do.)
More thoughts to follow. For now, let me just give my first impressions:
I like the new look quite a bit. The translucent menu bar doesn’t bug me in the least, and since my dock is on the side, it retains a relatively sane look.
Leopard is faster than Tiger, at least using completely unscientific gut-feel testing.
Sub-pixel font rendering seems improved. Text looks very, very good under Leopard.
Mouse movement seems more Windows-like, which I prefer. Is it just me or has this changed, especially insofar as the gradual acceleration curve is concerned?
Update: Scoble says this is not true at all and that FSJ (and the blogosphere, by proxy) is entirely wrong. See here.
Is PodTech, the post-Microsoft startup that Robert Scoble joined, going under? Fake Steve seems to think so:
Well, they’ve had a good run but apparently the Casa de Scoble is heading for the big sleep. Or is it the dirt nap? I can never remember. No announcement yet but we hear it’s imminent. Word is that Scoble was planning to bail in January anyway but now he won’t have to. Hard to believe PodTech is going under, because they seemed to have such a solid business model. Find people who don’t have much of anything significant or entertaining to say; film them doing this; then sell advertising against the content. What’s not to love? Everybody in the Valley is just really bumming out. Except that of course everyone is also really heartened by this because it really confirms that the Web 2.0 model is viable and is really going to be huge. It’s the whole creative destruction thing. Podtech flames out, but not before showing what’s possible with this new medium. And of course having such a high-profile failure on your resume just makes you incredibly valuable in the Valley. Much love, Podtech. Peace.
Interesting.
I like Scoble’s blog, but frankly, I’ve never gotten into his near-endless streams of videos and interviews. I just haven’t. My online video content comes from either YouTube or Google Video, which essentially are one in the same.
When Scoble went to PodTech, I didn’t get it. I still don’t. Seems they’re neither fish nor fowl, and therefore misbegotten in the constant churn of the Web 2.0 world. There’s a ton of interesting things being done with video content (YouTube, TED talks, etc.), but PodTech never hit it with me.
If true, best of luck to Scoble. Anyone placing odds on whether or not he winds up back at Microsoft?
An amazing talk by Sir Ken Robinson on whether or not today’s schools and educational systems kill creativity. More accurately, Robinson asks if we’re educating our children out of their innate creative capability. He argues that we stigmatize mistakes and breed a fear of being wrong — even when the cost is lost innovation and creative capacities. (From firsthand experience, I know this to be true.)
Do we grow out of creativity, or are we educated out of it? Has the educational system stripmined our minds out of commodity knowledge the way we have our natural resources? How much longer can we tolerate such static, fixed-dimension educational curricula?
One of my favorite bands of all time is Dream Theater. If you don’t know them, you should: they’re musician’s musicians. Their technical skill is on par with Rush (perhaps even better), and the lyrics border on philosophical.
One of their best songs is The Silent Man, the video to which I’ve included below, along with the lyrics. Enjoy.
A question well served
Is silence like a fever,
A voice never heard
Or a message with no receiver?
Pray they won’t ask
Behind the stained glass
There’s always one more mask
Has man been a victim
Of his woman, of his father?
If he elects not to bother
Will he suffocate their faith?
Desperate to fall
Behind the great wall
That separates us all
When there is reason tonight I’m awake
When there’s no answer arrive the silent man
If there is balance tonight he’s awake
If they have to suffer there
lies the silent man
Sin without deceivers
A god with no believers
I could sail by on the winds of silence
And maybe they won’t notice
But this time I think it’d
be better if I swim
When there is reason tonight I’m awake
When there’s no answer arrive the silent man
If there is balance tonight he’s awake
If they have to suffer there
lies the silent man
There lies the silent man
The fish rots at the head. Always. If the fish cannot give up control, no amount of underling shuffling or puppet committees that, once in place, simply execute the fish’s demonstrably failure-ridden management dogma will make the slightest bit of difference.
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
“When we’re sleep deprived, it’s really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions,” researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
Anyone who has ever gone without a good night’s sleep is aware that doing so can make a person emotionally irrational. While past studies have revealed that sleep loss can impair the immune system and brain processes such as learning and memory, there has been surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects emotions, Walker said.
Ever play a sports video game on a console? Without fail, every single one has some logic loopholes that allow you, over time, to utterly dominate the game. You will eventually be whipping any other team in hockey, 22-4, on the hardest difficulty. Or you’ll have a QB who throws for 470 yards and 6 TDs while rushing for 4 more. When games get to this point, they get silly, because you just utterly dominate with almost no effort. It’s a practiced Zen. It’s completely ridiculous, but it’s still very fun to watch.
That’s Apple these days. Apple is the tech world’s Tom Brady. Apple is the custom player you create in Tiger Woods 2007 who shoots 59 all the time and buries drives 360 yards down the pipe against the wind. Apple is Sidney Crosby getting 6 goals and 2 assists on a bad day.
Apple’s financial performance has become a video game, and that’s about the highest compliment on the planet.
I said earlier today that Apple’s earnings would be stellar, and that’s with about as much knowledge as you could clean from the mainline news sources. Princeton Mac usage topping 40%, just under 10% campus-wide at Harvard, speculation of over 2M Macs being sold, blah blah mwah mwah. The only thing touchy about this quarter’s performance expectations was the Mac whisper number, which had the street insistent upon a >2M Mac unit sales number. These are ridiculous expectations. Utterly fucking insane. Applied to any other company, it’d be cruel and unusual behavior on behalf of The Street.
Whatever. Apple utterly crushed them:
Apple profits up 66% to $904M, or $1.01 PDS (.86 expected), on sales of $6.22B. The year-ago quarter saw $4.84B and quarterly profit of $542M, or .62 PDS.
Over 2.16M Macs sold. That’s 34% growth over the year-ago quarter. It also destroys the previous quarterly record for Macs by, oh, a mere 400K units.
10.2M iPods sold, which represents 17% growth over the year-ago quarter. And as far as iPods go, this next quarter is the big gun. The new iPods are just getting started.
Quarterly iPhone sales were 1.119M units, bringing total iPhone unit sales to 1.389M.
For fiscal 2007, Apple generated over $24B in revenue and $3.5B in net income.
Apple ended the fiscal year with $15.4B in cash and no debt. Given Apple’s management and ability to execute, that’s a terrifying war chest.
Today, during standard trading, Apple closed up $3.94 (2.31%) to $174.36. Its market capitalization was $151.63B.
After hours, the AAPL is up $11.99 (6.88%) to $186.35.
If that holds at all, AAPL will have more market cap than IBM, which is $154.23B.
I know the fundamentals investors hate this, but let all of that that sink in for a second.
Apple is a video game.
And here’s something that’s either really honest or really scary: EPS guidance for the next quarter is $1.42. Typically, Apple guides very conservatively. With $1.42 hanging out there, Apple has either decided to do away with the lowball guidance numbers, or it’s poised to beat the living hell out of expectations coming off the holiday quarter (its fiscal 1Q).
I’m betting on the latter. This holiday quarter is going to be insane. Watch.
Just a heads up for all of you to watch the best company in tech tonight when it reports its quarterly numbers. For the uninitiated, it’s amazing to see a company execute so flawlessly. The first few times I heard these calls, I was blown away. You want to hear what awesome sounds like? Listen in.
For the seasoned veteran, it’s expected, which is a bit sad. Here’s Apple at the absolute top of the tech world (right alongside Google), and if it doesn’t report absolutely absurd numbers, AAPL takes a beating.
The law of diminishing returns is in full effect.
But don’t you worry: Apple will amaze once again. Don’t worry about it. Trust me.
Side note: Apple is approaching IBM’s market cap. Crazy? Yes, because the fundamentals aren’t there to support this valuation. So what’s driving it? Greater fool theory? A little, but mainly it’s the street knowing that Apple has several growth engines humming along perfectly at once, and potential is being priced in today.
Previous Apple earnings coverage here, here and here.
The Successories guys have to be laughing right about now and saying, “Yeah, that about sums it up. Buy hey, thanks for the millions. We’ve been living in sandals since the late ’80s.”
LONDON (AFP) - Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.
It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.
Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.
We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.
Steve
My decision to go to an iPhone is almost complete. It’s either that or Verizon’s upcoming Blackberry Pearl.
This fall, the internationally known seminary — a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists — began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking. The academic program, open only to women, includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies.
Philosophical courses such as “Biblical Model for the Home and Family” teach that God expects wives to graciously submit to their husbands’ leadership. A model house, to be completed by next fall, will allow women to get credit toward bachelor’s degrees by learning how to set tables, sew buttons and sustain lively dinnertime conversation.
It all sounds wonderful to sophomore Emily Felts, 19, who signed up as soon as she arrived on campus this fall.
Several relatives have told Felts that she’s selling herself short. They want her to become a lawyer, and she agrees she’d make a good one. But that’s not what she wants to do with her life…. “My created purpose as a woman is to be a helper,” Felts said firmly. “This is a college education that I can use.”
Yay for Felts. Too bad it sets modern gender roles back about 60 years.
Whatevs. It’s getting harder and harder to surprise me these days.
Chances are you’re bored with the standard fare we’ve been hearing for about a year now, so here’s a full list of all 300 features that Leopard will introduce.
Among the most notable from a quick glance:
Google Map Addresses. View a detailed map of any address in Address Book. Just hold down the Control key while clicking any address and select “Map of” and Safari will show you its location in Google Maps.
Read/Write Property Lists. Create and edit Mac OS X property lists. Support is built into Leopard.
Copy Files Between Mac OS X and Windows. Copy, open, modify, or delete files in Mac OS X that you saved to your Windows partition. Leopard understands the Windows FAT32 disk format.
Restore to Mac-Only Partition. Easily delete Windows and restore the disk space being used by the Windows partition back to Mac OS X.
Wikipedia in Dictionary. Harness the power of Wikipedia when you’re connected to the Internet — built right into it’s Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results.
Icon Preview. See files for what they really are. Leopard displays icons that are actual thumbnail previews of the documents themselves.
Path Bar. See the path of a file when you view it in the Finder. Just choose Show Path Bar from the View menu and the path is visible at the bottom of the Finder window. You can also drag files to any location in the Path Bar.
I’ve not heard of Sigur Ros, but from what I can tell they’re a fairly interesting post-rock band that makes some pretty interesting, flowing and haunting music. They sing in a totally made up language called Vonlenska, or Hopelandic in English. Somewhere — certainly outside of my musical awareness, which is limited to begin with — they’re quite popular.
Recently, NPR’s The Bryant Park Project interviewed Sigur Ros in-studio. The hosts of the show, Alison Stewart and Luke Burbank, make it clear that they absolutely love the band, hence the invite into the studio for a casual chat.
Instead of an informative chat with some cutting-edge musicians, what happened is easily the worst interview ever given.
Maybe it was a language barrier. Maybe it was the fairly complex question structures. Maybe Sigur Ros is four Rainmen who are too busy counting wires and buttons to talk. I don’t know. What I do know is that this is almost too painful to watch all the way through — it’s like watching a guy giving a presentation totally lose his way and crash and burn.
About six weeks ago, I posted an quasi-existential piece about getting let go from my previous job and starting things anew as I began to look for something better. Well, I found something better, and I couldn’t be happier.
I’m the new Director of Marketing for MiPro Enterprises, a group of four companies. The bulk of my energy will go into MiPro Consulting, a professional services firm focusing on PeopleSoft and Workday applications. The partners owning these four firms are incredible, and the fit I found with this job — especially in contrast to what I had at my previous employer — is simply amazing. I didn’t know what to expect from this opportunity (and especially given that I had something at Google that was looking pretty good), but once I sat down and interviewed with the management team, I knew I had something to think about.
Not long after my interview concluded, I was made an offer. And not long after the offer was made, I accepted. I never got to sit down with Google, and I don’t regret it one bit.
At MiPro Consulting, one of the first things you hear is that the people matter. The culture matters. Commitment to the customer matters. For quite a few companies, these are just cool things to put on mission statements and in employee handbooks. At MiPro, it’s the walk they walk every day, and you see it immediately.
So yeah, out of crisis comes opportunity. I found something far, far better than where I was.
Going back to my original question, I was in Chicago last week at a trade conference, so that’s why GF was dark. I suck and apologize profusely. I should have given you notice. I should have posted some funny pictures, or maybe some head-explodingly addictive flash games. Sorry about that. My bad.
So there’s the update. You can all quit emailing me now.
PS — thus far MiPro has been reluctant to get me a Mac. You need to comment vehemently to let them know that I need one. Go.
Yet another example of what happens to companies who try to be Apple but lack the basic understanding of why Apple can be Apple. And no, throwing a backwoods color like brown onto an otherwise copycat device doesn’t mean you’ve differentiated yourself.
Getting charged for 411 (aka directory assistance) is so 2006. I’m on Verizon, and they charge $1.25 every time you want the number to that Thai restaurant down the street. Over several months with a few calls per month, this adds up.
Google has a free 411 service called 1-800-GOOG-411, and it’s amazing. It’s entirely voice activated and works from any cell phone. It’s every bit as good as any carrier’s 411 service, but it doesn’t cost a dime.
Thus begins the end of paid 411 services. Later. We hardly knew ye.
Microsoft’s oft-delayed, long-awaited update to Windows XP was finally released in early 2007. Yet it has generated little excitement since then. Why the anticlimax? Web-based apps are making the OS irrelevant. After all, when your data is online and your programs run in a browser, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using Linux, OS X, or Windows. It took Redmond five years — and $6 billion — to get Vista out the door. Given how the world has changed in the meantime, this OS may be its last.
In just two years, Michael Arrington, a standoffish corporate lawyer, has gone from dotcom dropout to Silicon Valley kingmaker — and ka-ching-maker. His blog, TechCrunch, reviews startups and is a magnet for venture capitalists hoping to stumble upon the next YouTube; a kind word from Arrington routinely results in an avalanche of funding. Now he’s trying to expand his site into a mini-empire, complete with job boards, conferences, and 15 to 20 new blogs. It’s tempting to write Arrington off as overreaching, but think twice: Get blackballed by him and you might never do lunch in Palo Alto again.
Apple’s CEO is a mass of contradictions: A man sensitive to the needs of users and oblivious to those of employees. A respected marketer and an overrated hype machine. High priest of innovation and dark lord of secrecy.
At least two of Steve Jobs’ roles aren’t quite so oxymoronic: creator of Apple Computer and re-creator of Apple Computer. Born in 1955 and raised in Silicon Valley, Jobs cofounded Apple at 21. At 25, he raked in millions with its IPO. And at 31, he fled the company, selling all but one Apple share and founding NeXT Computer. When Apple bought NeXT for $400 million in 1996, Jobs and Apple began a second act: iMac, iTunes, iPod, and now the iPhone.
Along the way, he’s become a cultural pacesetter, giving us the “1984” Apple commercial, Pixar flicks, and the black mock turtleneck. But his greatest claim to fame is his business acumen. Nobody launches a product like Steve Jobs. He’s maintained his Reality Distortion Field — a force that turns new devices into objects of abject lust — for decades.
If you have a daughter, the message depicted in this video might be one of the most important she’ll ever hear.
Update: The more I watch this video, the more I’m moved. So I did some research.
The music — which is perfect, BTW — is “La Breeze” by the (now-defunct) band Simian. The line Here comes the breeze that’ll blow you away is a perfect narrative layer atop the video content and provides a somber counterpoint to the otherwise turbulent music.
Dove’s onslaught piece is the second one in a series produced by Dove’s ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. The first piece, called evolution, is equally powerful and fights for the same cause as does onslaught. It’s below.
Kudos to Dove for stepping outside its industry’s mainline messaging and (a) reaching out to young girls, and (b) differentiating itself from its competition.
