January 2012
72 posts
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How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon →
futuramb:
There are lots of ways of publishing content onto the web, and if you look at the relative popularity of, say, WordPress vs Tumblr vs Twitter, then it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the easier you make it to publish, the more popular you’re going to be. But at Tumblr, at least, there’s something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every...
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How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the... →
parislemon:
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced...
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AT&T Punishes Its Customers For T-Mobile Merger... →
parislemon:
GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard:
After blasting the Federal Communication Commission for “picking winners and losers” in the wireless industry by scrutinizing every deal, Stephenson claimed AT&T is now in a mobile capacity-constrained environment which has forced it to raise prices and manage connection speeds (aka throttle) for its highest volume subscribers.
As I wrote back in...
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Education on a Digital Scale
dbreunig:
Felix Salmon provides us with an update on Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, which wrapped in last year:
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of...
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“The webOS dev community is so reminiscent of the early Mac dev community. A...”
– From the Enyo forums… (via adora)
“Palm’s problem was that the mobile Web was not ready for devices. We are just...”
– Rise of Mobile Web Apps Will Give webOS A Time to Shine (via adora)
“Journalists, I find, tend to come quite late to sites like Tumblr and Pinterest....”
– How sharing disrupts media | Felix Salmon (via markcoatney)
“At Sundance, Weinstein Co.’s Bob Weinstein got a first-hand taste of the...”
– Attention, Wall Street Journal archivists: Please file this anecdote under “Things that probably didn’t happen.”
(—The Web’s Growing Muscle - WSJ.com)
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Here's your backup phone →
stevespinello:
. . .
via FastCoDesign:
$50 does seem a teensy bit pricey for the cell-phone equivalent of an MRE, but just like those indestructible emergency rations, the SpareOne can sit in a box for 15 years and still be ready to go when you need it. (Since it runs on an AA, the phone will hold a “charge” as long as the disposable battery itself will.) That works out to a little more...
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The Brilliant "Don't Be Evil" Bookmarklet →
parislemon:
Kudos to Facebook (with some help from Twitter and MySpace) for having the balls to do this. It’s a bookmarklet that replaces Google’s new “People and Pages” area, the hardcoded social search area, and the search completion drop-down, with organic results.
In other words, it makes the new Google behave more like the old Google.
There has been a lot of back and forth in recent...
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[Infographic] What are the Best Times to Blog? →
digital-diva:
By Dan Zarrella
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“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S....”
– In this NYT piece about Apple and why, as much as we love tech companies, they are not the economic drivers in the United States that their industrial brethren are/were. A telling paragraph from the same article:
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small...
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deltamualpha:
Here’s something that I don’t think a lot of people working in what are euphemistically referred to as “content industries” — books, movies and television of all kinds, and more specifically the delivery of those said items to consumers — are aware of:
Customers don’t care about your excuses.
They don’t want to have to understand what an mpeg4 file is, or that there are two...
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maxistentialist:
New York Times:
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products...
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How the US lost out on iPhone work →
aulia-m:
This incredible investigative report by the New York Times takes a look behind the scenes on why Apple outsources its manufacturing work to Chinese companies and workers.
The company held out for as long as it could to maintain manufacturing within US borders but eventually caved in and in 2004 shut down its last US plant in Elk Grove, California, which was making Macs. The former...
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Bringing Apple's Jobs Back To America →
neontommy:
In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.
Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the...
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DING DING: How WhatsApp delivered RIM's final blow
allthingsconnor:
We’ve seen this for a while – it’s not a new story. It’s the beginning of an end. Here is why I think that it was a number of startups and a series of mistrials and tribulations, and not a Fortune 500 company, that really led to RIM’s demise.
We’ve seen it in it’s messaging. We’ve seen it in its advertising. For many years now, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) has been considered...
European Politicians Didn’t Like SOPA Any More... →
Emily Banks, mashable.com
European politicians should be happy today. The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act barely breathing (some would say they’re dead), after both sponsors delayed and withdrew their respective bills. European politicians would likel…
Interesting in light of how the U.S. tried to pressure Spain.
“Many in the industry say the legislation began to stir suspicion as early as...”
– Nice piece from Jenna here:
Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling - NYTimes.com
(via markcoatney)
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"This Is Apple At Its Absolute Worst: It Thinks It... →
mattpoststhings:
“In addition to announcing new textbooks for iPad, Apple also released a new free Mac App that lets you create and publish your own books for sale in the iBooks store. It’s called iBooks Author.
It seems like a neat tool. Until you read the user agreement.
Dan Wineman pointed out on his blog that Apple’s End User License Agreement (EULA) states that books made with the iBook...
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Instead of offering any sort of constructive ideas...
oscarraymundo:
— What if the culture industry shut down for one day?
Seriously? You’re going to Atlas Shrugged us? (or should that be Atlas Shrug us?)
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Considering the FTC is now probing Facebook over...
oscarraymundo:
— Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Facebook or Google When They Come Out Against SOPA
These companies want to own the Internet, not “keep it open.” Their intentions are way more self-serving than protecting “global creative expression” but they sure do have a heck of a public relations team.
Money, power, and Congress: how lobbyists will... →
vistatecnologica:
Some frightening things in this post on The Verge:
According to Politico, Allison Halatei, former Deputy Chief of Staff to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, and Lauren Pastarnack, a Senate Judiciary Committee Senior Aide, just accepted jobs with two of the lobbying firms backing SOPA and PIPA. Halatei and Pastarnack helped write the bills. Halataei is now the National...
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SOPA/PIPA aren't a failure to understand the... →
Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net
Writing in the Guardian, Dan Gillmor argues that SOPA and PIPA aren’t foolishly extreme because their proponents don’t understand the net; rather, they are extreme because their proponents understand that the net breaks the…
“So, why do they make unsupportable statements?
Because they don’t dare make an honest argument. If...
Numbers Cited By SOPA Supporters May Be Fictitious →
Ignoring, momentarily, that the U.S. has already adopted international law which seeks to curtail online piracy (see, e.g., DMCA), and that these new bills seek to do little more than enact what amounts to police powers over foreign companies, it looks like the studies cited in support of piracy-gone-rampant may have never have existed. Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute, did...
Livescribe Appoints HP EVP Gilles Bouchard As New... →
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barackobama:
“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
- The White House, responding this morning to a petition on SOPA and online piracy
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Can Technology Transform Education Before It’s Too... →
world-shaker:
Why is higher education overvalued?
It’s because our primary and secondary education systems suck and are thus shifting the burden of educating our population to college. Of much greater concern to me than the college bubble is that 18 years of almost every American life are wasted learning nothing in primary and secondary public schools. By now we’ve become habituated to the...
annoyed with my laptop. does anyone know how to...
nutella—wh0re:
dell inspiron netbook
You’re trying to make a video on a netbook. That is, unfortunately, your problem.