From the Wall Street Journal, on Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post: At Amazon, Mr. Bezos has instilled a culture of extreme focus on customer service and low prices. Amazon executives fly coach class, and some desks at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters are fashioned out of repurposed doors to remind employees to be frugal. Those … Continue reading
Faux News
I finally got around to watching this, and have come to the conclusion that Fox does harm to three groups, but benefits one niche in the process. Continue reading “Faux News”
The Runoff from Streaming
John Paul Titlow has a neat piece on Fast Company about the conundrum Spotify faces with streaming. It’s hard for the service to afford its hefty payouts to traditional record labels while adequately compensating the up-and-coming artists or indie bands who – ideally, at least – use Spotify to gain exposure. Titlow suggests a potential route:
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
The verdict in the Trayvon Martin case brings to mind the Casey Anthony trial from two years ago. In response of the public’s displeasure, Alan Dershowitz wrote a stirring and even-handed article in the Wall Street Journal, where he examined the nature of “not guilty:” A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If … Continue reading Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
There’s an App for That
IFTTT just released an iOS app, which brings all the great features of the website to iPhones and iPads everywhere. One “recipe” that the blog post mentions is the ability to automatically upload pictures from your iPhone to Dropbox or Google Drive. Pretty cool, huh?
Only thing is, many Android phones have had the feature for years, and in fact, I take it for granted that when I snap a picture on my EVO, it pops up in my Dropbox ten seconds later.
New York, New York
From the Times: The average price for a Manhattan apartment this spring was a stratospheric $1.425 million. Stratospheric indeed. It was only four years ago that landlords and leasing agents were providing perks to push buyers to move into vacant apartments. Pretty crazy how fast the real estate pendulum swings. Continue reading New York, New York
Over the Hillary
From The New York Times:
At a conservative conference earlier in the year, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ridiculed the 2016 Democratic field as “a rerun of ‘The Golden Girls,’ ” referring to Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is 70.
A Metaphor, Not a Skeumorph
From the always-proper Economist: The iPhone’s notification panel, with its imitation linen effect, was not descended from an object that was once made of linen. The switch that, say, allows you to switch an iPhone into Airplane Mode is not an on-screen replacement for what used to be a physical switch. In the early days of … Continue reading A Metaphor, Not a Skeumorph
Fifteen Seconds
Facebook has decided to shorten Warhol’s “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” to “Fifteen Seconds,” thanks to the new video functionality added to Instagram, which allows the user to take up to fifteen seconds of video – a full nine seconds longer than Twitter’s Vine app, and certainly one giant leap for mankind. That said, we would … Continue reading Fifteen Seconds
WWDC
Virtually the entire internet is speculating talking about what Apple will roll out in its hotly anticipated – and badly needed – refresh at WWDC 2013. I could repeat all the claims about OS X 10.9, iOS 7, Mac Pros, and Retina Macbook Airs. Instead, I’ll just link you to Justin Williams’s CarpeAqua, which provides … Continue reading WWDC
Silicon Spatula 