“
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of
perception.
— Aldous Huxley
I Spy -
(via Instapaper)
Obama Risks Alienating Republicans By Using Facts:
Mr. Obama stirred controversy throughout the speech with his relentless references to facts, data, and things that have actually happened, all long considered the third rail of American politics
(Via Borowitz Report » Story)
No other company has inspired me more when it comes to marketing, design, focus, and even capitalism than Apple. Make the best damn product out there, charge a profitable price, and win the world.
(Via Signal vs. Noise)
“
Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist fanaticism so as to have power in the world of nerds. This is how it came to be that Jobs is so often remembered as an ‘inventor,’ though he rarely was one. His genius was not technical, but he was a genius at manipulating technical minds. …
My impression, based on a number of interactions I witnessed over many years, is that Jobs traded one form of obsessive, principled nerdiness against another. It was useless for a typical designer or marketing person to plead with engineers during the early years of personal computers. Engineers had airtight criteria and data, and that trumped mere opinions and intuitions. But Jobs didn’t plead. He declared even more rigid and exacting criteria.
Jobs won the arms race of control freakery. He remains the only figure in a non-engineering role I have ever seen win this race against engineers outright.
” — Jaron Lanier (via ayjay)
The Assclownification Of The MPAA
MG Siegler, pandodaily.comSOPA and PIPA are bad. On this, basically the entire web agrees. But not everyone does. Take The Wall Street Journal, for example. And they look like total jackasses as a result. Luckily for them, it’s impossible to look as bad as the…
Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s Sights and They’re Going to Kill Us”
Sarah Lacy, pandodaily.comWhen you see Snooki’s book on the New York Times Best Seller List, you know publishing is in trouble.
You can blame readers and say publishing is just giving the public what they want. But that’s only half the problem.
The rest is a…
Stop Sopa or the web really will go dark | Dan Gillmor:
These “fixes” are designed to wrest control of these tools from the masses and recentralize what has promised to be the most open means of communication and collaboration ever invented.
(Via Guardian Unlimited Technology)
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing - Boing Boing:
It’s tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved.
(Via boingboing.net)
Publishers buy into these two assumptions because “content” allows them to easily measure and analyze their output. Messy qualitative measures are hidden so output fits neatly within Excel cells. This is the allure of “content”: it allows comforting, structured data which simplifies the complexity of a large business and makes decisions less intimidating. Executives aren’t making qualitative picks regarding art or an artist, they’re merely signing off on whichever “content” produces more valuable metrics.
(Via drewb.org)
Me: Here are the photographs from the shoot yesterday Client: Nice shots - I like this one from…:
Me: Here are the photographs from the shoot yesterday
Client: Nice shots - I like this one from behind the man. Can you just flip the image so we can see his face and not the back of his head?
Me: You want me to turn him around in the photograph so you can see his face?
Client: Yes - and maybe we can make him black. Do you have Photoshop?
(Via Clients From Hell)
CES Day 2: the day the tablets took over - Chicago Sun-Times: “What lessons did tablet manufacturers learn from the beatings they received in 2010 and 2011? Mostly that they can’t compete with Apple by selling a slightly-inferior tablet for the same price as the iPad.
“Well, then let’s sell a vastly inferior tablet for lots less,” many companies concluded, and the air around the CES floor is ponged with the offgassing, both literal and figurative, of the race to the bottom of the tablet market.
That’s a shame. When someone buys an iPad, Apple wins a customer for life. When someone buys a $299 10-inch Android tablet …Apple also wins a customer for life.”
(Via mattgemmell.com)
parislemon Why I Hate Android
parislemon.comWhy do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the…
Yup.
DSLRs are a dying breed – 3rd Gen Cameras are the Future
Trey Ratcliff, stuckincustoms.comNo More DSLR Equipment for me – Trey Ratcliff
I can’t picture myself investing any more money in DSLR bodies and lenses. The new Nikon D4 that is coming out? Not interested.
3rd Gen Cameras are already here, and they will only get bet…
Yup.