Horror from the deep. The Economist on the Gulf coast oil spill.
The Lovecrafty title seems particularly appropriate.
“Spill, baby, spill!”
Horror from the deep
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: business
Don’t hire this guy!
Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and the long road to the iPad
The iPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over the company’s co-founder Steve Wozniak
Jobs believes in perfection, not muddling through. He would seem as much at home in Victorian England as behind the counter of a sushi bar: a man who believes in a single best way of performing any task and presenting the results. As one might expect, his ideas embody an aesthetic philosophy as much as a sense of functionality, which is why Apple’s products look so good while working so well. But those ideas have also long been at odds with the principles of the early computing industry, of the Apple II, and of the Internet. The ideology of the perfect machine and open computing are contradictory. They cannot coexist.
This a follow-up to The other side of the iPad, where a friend commented: “Microsoft is big and doesn’t play well with others but at least it plays. Apple has somehow gotten everyone else blocked out. “
The other side of the iPad
Deceptive commercials
A win for the good guys, and all of us
An e-book is not a book
From How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow
When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”
Now I worked as a bookseller for a number of years in this city, and I never had to make that promise to any of my customers when they bought books.
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Slashdot.
“There’s a map for that.”
It is still true
What is the difference between a computer salesman and a used car dealer?
The used car dealer knows when he is lying to you.
I bought something at an office supply store today. As I finished signing the credit card list the manager there said I could bring in a computer, any computer, for a free checkup. I immediately asked: “Linux?” and he said yes.
Afterwards I checked the slip of paper he gave me. I was not the least surprised to read “Must have Windows XP Service Pack 2 or newer.”
Not that it really matters to me: I can take care of our Linux systems (and the Windows ones as well).
It is still true
What is the difference between a computer salesman and a used car dealer?
The used car dealer knows when he is lying to you.
I bought something at an office supply store today. As I finished signing the credit card list the manager there said I could bring in a computer, any computer, for a free checkup. I immediately asked: “Linux?” and he said yes.
Afterwards I checked the slip of paper he gave me. I was not the least surprised to read “Must have Windows XP Service Pack 2 or newer.”
Not that it really matters to me: I can take care of our Linux systems (and the Windows ones as well).
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 