Link: Nvidia Latest to Claim Android and iOS Will Be a Repeat of the PC and Mac Market

Craig Grannell:

I find the argu­ment that there has to be — or even that there will be — one dom­i­nant player in the mobile mar­ket with­out foun­da­tion. If we look back through the his­tory of tech­nol­ogy, and even exam­ine the present, the PC/Mac mar­ket was an aber­ra­tion. You don’t have peo­ple argu­ing that only one com­pany will become dom­i­nant in TVs, cars, sound sys­tems, and so on.

I’ve made this argu­ment before myself. Trying to use the his­tory of the PC/Mac mar­ket as a model for any other mar­ket is stu­pid and doomed to failure.

Link: A Writer’s EULA

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Daniel Steinberg on the hideous and dra­con­ian iBooks Author EULA:

On the other hand, the work is my own. I’ve been told by a pub­lisher that they want a sec­ond edi­tion of one of my books. Their con­di­tions on me are that I drop this series of ebooks I’m work­ing on because it might com­pete with the title. When I said no they responded that that’s ok they’ll just get some­one else to revise my book.

My book.

It’s not really mine. Even though the copy­right is in my name, that turns out not to mean very much.

So am I both­ered by the iBooks Author EULA? No. But maybe that’s because I’ve been sign­ing con­tracts with tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers for so long.

It’s always fun to see how the tone changes once the blo­go­ratti stop bray­ing and the pro­fes­sion­als speak up.

via Daring Fireball

Fuck Me — Actual Journalism?

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Everyone and their cousin has linked to or blogged about this arti­cle in The New York Times about the rise of for­eign man­u­fac­tur­ing but I think it’s still wor­thy of point­ing out. It’s a rare treat to read an arti­cle on this topic that doesn’t appear to be writ­ten by com­plete fuck­tards. By all means, use Apple as an exam­ple of the issue — but don’t pre­tend that some hyper­bolic screed in ZDNet blam­ing all ills on Apple or some jack­ass online peti­tion is going to change shit.

But real change takes work, and work­ing is hard.

The Answer Is in the Name

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Today Apple held their much-anticipated edu­ca­tion announce­ment at the Guggenheim museum in New York. As you are prob­a­bly aware, Apple announced three new prod­ucts dur­ing the event: iBooks 2, iTunesU.app and iBooks Author. I’m not going to go into any deep analy­sis of the event. It’s been so long since I was even vaguely involved with the edu­ca­tion mar­ket that I really can’t muster up any deep insight into Apple’s ini­tia­tives. As usual, though, the reac­tion to Apple’s announce­ments by the blo­go­ratti does pro­vide a rich and fer­tile ground of annoy­ing stu­pid­ity which we can harvest.

One emerg­ing theme annoys me in par­tic­u­lar: the idea that Apple is exert­ing Draconian con­trol over how you can sell con­tent pro­duced with iBooks Author.


Continue read­ing The Answer Is in the Name


Drink With the Bastards

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I men­tioned before that the Angry Mac Bastards would be per­form­ing live at Macworld | iWorld again this year (details here). In addi­tion I’m happy to announce the inau­gural Angry Mac Bastards Drinkathon. If your going to be in town on Thursday, January 26th we’d love to get you shit-faced.

Link: Reflecting on Change

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Alex Brooks:

The site I want to read doesn’t churn out the same news and rumours that thou­sands of other sites have, the site I want to read doesn’t post fanat­i­cal rumours from idi­otic sources. To make mat­ters worse this churn effect often comes with a form of chi­nese whis­pers, led mainly by eccen­tric, traf­fic seek­ing ass­hole blog­gers who are unable to dis­tin­guish fact and fic­tion, unable to pick up the phone to a pub­lic rela­tions team to check a detail or more unbe­liev­ably spend the time to pro­duce some­thing thoughtful.

It’s nice to see yet another tech blog­ger see the light. It really doesn’t take much to rise above the morass of rumor-mongery and link bait. All it takes is a lit­tle integrity.

via The Loop

Really?

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Really BGR? Are you shit-bags so des­per­ate for fuck­ing table scraps that you’re going to actu­ally run with Jeremy Horwitz’s bull­shit claims that he’s seen an iPad 3? Congratulations fuck­wits, that swish­ing you hear is the sound of what tiny bit of cred­i­bil­ity you had left flush­ing down the toilet.

Boy Genius indeed.

Link: We Take for Granted What Has Already Been Invented. (The Impact of the Original iPhone.)

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Craig Grannell:

But we for­get. Multitouch is obvi­ous. Pinch-zoom is obvi­ous. Slide-to-unlock is obvi­ous. The man­ner in which Apple designed its iPhone, its iPad, and even iOS itself? Obvious. Then why didn’t any­one else do this stuff first? Why did it take Apple’s iPhone to kick­start a smart­phone and tablet rev­o­lu­tion? If the slew of clon­ers out there all argue Apple didn’t really invent any­thing new, why didn’t they have iPhone– and iPad-like devices in the mar­ket before Apple? Why did Google’s Android rather rapidly shift from being a BlackBerry to an iPhone if the iPhone was so obvious?

Exactly. Sometimes we for­get how much the world of con­sumer tech­nol­ogy has changed over a very short period of time — and many peo­ple con­ve­niently for­get exactly how much of that change was dri­ven by Apple.

AMB at Macworld | iWorld

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For the third year run­ning Angry Mac Bastards will be doing our schtick live at Macworld | iWorld. If you’re com­ing to the show, stop by and say hello. We promise to be only mildly abusive.

Link: Arpaio Running Again for Maricopa County Sheriff

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Fuck.