This is an awesome T-Shirt. Hm, with all this press Carl must have plants at the Times. But maybe he should spend a little more time focusing on that web thing.
What’s up with the seeding metaphor for software? You plant your buggy code around the country and it grows into beautiful bug reports?
Oh, phew. Jaguar is only $69 for students. That’s not quite as bad.
During the Q and A Steve’s being coy about OS X on Intel. “Let’s complete the transition to OS X,” he says. “Then we’ll have options.” “The relationship with Microsoft is a bit like a marriage… sometimes you have little spats like in the Wall Street Journal this week.” “They’re making a lot of money off of Office.” “In hindsight this time is going to look like on hell of an opportunity to make a market share grab. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.” On the high price of Microsoft Office: “This is America and they can price their software however they want. […] This is also America and making apps for OS X is really easy to write software for so some third-parties might come along and make some compatible applications.” “I think the PDA is going to go away. And be replaced by a new generation of cell phones.” Cell phones can view info and maybe modify phone numbers. But they’ll edit it and run custom applications on their computer. They decided not to make a PDA because they saw three years ago they’d be subsumed into cell phones and they don’t want to make cell phones. What about the iPod? “I don’t want my TV to make toast.”
I guess McCusker was an anomaly. Apple says 99% of the people who go to the store would recommend it to a friend. They also have a new program where if you buy a “Mac pack” from them they’ll help you set up your AirPort base station. To cut down on rent they’re taking out the theaters and moving the genius bar up to make it 40% smaller. They’re hoping these stores will break even on a retail basis.
I’m listening to the analyst meeting.
One of the Minority Report futurists discusses his role in the film and has the same complaints that I’ve heard elsewhere, namely that there was little creative use of technology and people were mostly consumer drones. He also has some theories why: “Napster lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that’s under the control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is distopian to Hollywood.”
The Bates Method: A cure for myopia. This article (and the things linked) fits perfectly with the intuitions I’ve developed about my sight. When I got glasses I refused to wear them because of how awful my eyesight was when I took them off. I’ve also been followin the instructions of another site which suggests purchasing reading glasses with “plus” lenses and using those to train your eyes. They worked for a long time but then I made the mistake of not wearing them for a while and my eyes have relapsed because of all the “nearwork” I do (mostly reading the computer screen. I’m trying to wear them once more and retrain my eyes because my eyesight has gotten so horrible it’s frightening. Luckily it seems to be working. In the past two days my screen has gone from being directly in front of my face to the back of my desk with brightness all the way down.
Amazon Light, an Amazon interface patterned after Google’s.