Well, just watch this.
I’m tired of hearing people pay obesience to John McCain because of his, er, heroism. Whatever principles he once may have had have already been jettisoned in the interests of getting elected. Besides, a guy who could offer this religious crackpot to his country as a potential president needs to be certified, not elected.
While browsing I came on what his agent describes as Clay Shirky’s ‘Must Read’ list.
Rise of the Stupid Network, David Isenberg — Why the Internet works
End-to-End Arguments In System Design, J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed, and D.D. Clark — How to Design for the Internet
Worse is Better, Richard Gabriel — Why weak but flexible systems beat strong but inflexible ones
Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson — Group coordination costs as a key aspect of organization design.
Good Morning Silicon Valley is spot on. It’s not about phones, it’s about philosophies.
It comes down to closed vs. open. In political terms, the Apple environment is like Singapore, where some freedoms may be ceded in favor of providing a pleasant and orderly experience, and Google, with its Android platform, is like a loud and messy New England town meeting. Apple has one iPhone, a tightly controlled App Store for third-party programs, and a touchscreen design that favors consumption of iTunes entertainment. The G1 is but the first of many Android-based devices to come, all of which will be served by the wide-open Android Market, and its design, featuring a real keyboard, leans toward typing-oriented functions like mail, messaging and mobile search, not coincidentally all Google strong suits. If you’re already happy in the Apple ecosystem, or with an “it just works (most of the time)” approach to tech in general, and you’re in the smart-phone market, there’s probably not much that Android handset manufacturers can come up with that will tempt you away from the iPhone. If you’re already happy in the Google ecosystem, then the tight integration of Google applications and services and the breadth of third-party development possibilities will make an Android-based phone more appealing. At the core, the iPhone and the Android phones may not really be the direct competitors they’re made out to be, but rather comparable alternatives whose appeal depends mostly on whether your tastes and needs put you in the closed or open camp.
Walt Mossberg’s useful first impressions are here.
Meanwhile, Google has been posting demo videos like this on YouTube.
Excuse the variation on the Dorothy Parker Walter Kerr joke*. Also, non-photographers and all readers infuriated by gadgeteering, please look away. Those of us who follow these things have been pondering the extent to which Leica seemed to have lost the plot. Its moves into digital cameras have been, to say the least, patchy. And its flagship M8 model was beginning to look a bit outmoded with the launch by Canon and Nikon of ‘full-frame’ (i.e. 24x36mm sensor) digital SLRs. My expectation was that we would soon see a full-frame M9 limping into sight.
But it now turns out that Leica was switching strategy and going for the very top end of the professional market — the folks who use Hasselblads for magazine and advertising work. Yesterday news leaked out of the Leica S2 series — a DSLR with a 37 megapixel sensor. That’s equivalent to the sensor in the Hasselblad HD3-II (£18,265.00 exc VAT to you, Sir).
Needless to say, there’s no pricing available yet for the new Leica product. But the old rule applies: if you have to ask the price then you can’t afford it.
*FOOTNOTE: Hmmm… I’d always been led to believe that “Me No Leica” was Parker’s verdict on the theatrical adaption of Isherwood’s I Am A Camera. But this source, among others, attributes it to Walter Kerr. Still, it was a good line, no matter who said it.
One of the creepiest aspects of the Perfect Financial Storm is the way Dubya has been reduced to being a bit-player in his own Administration. It’s clear from the few public statements he’s made that he hasn’t a clue what’s going on and is reading from a script written for him by others.
Good stuff here…
For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.
This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering…
Yep. Looks like Kodak are phasing it out.
Only one commercial lab in the world, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan., still develops Kodachrome, a once-ubiquitous brand that has freeze-framed the world in rich but authentic hues since it was introduced in the Great Depression.
Eastman Kodak Co. now makes the slide and motion-picture film in just one 35 mm format, and production runs — in which a master sheet nearly a mile long is cut up into more than 20,000 rolls — fall at least a year apart.
Kodak won’t say when the last one occurred nor hint at Kodachrome’s prospects. Kodachrome stocks now on sale have a 2009 expiration date. If the machines aren’t fired up again, the company might sell out the remaining supplies, and that would be the end.
“It’s a low-volume product; all volumes (of color film) are down,” said Kodak spokesman Chris Veronda.
Sigh. There goes part of my youth. And of Paul Simon’s.
Terrific post by Dave Winer.
Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. It’s the lack of specificity that makes it so chilling.
Consider the whole scenario. Powell can’t tell us what the danger is because that would violate some security that he can’t violate. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I’ll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.
We all paid a huge price that day, and the bill may be coming due today, because they’re presenting us with the same scenario, this time about the economy. And we’re not going for it. You can see it in the way things flipped around overnight. A lot of people woke up this morning, like I did, and realized — wait I’ve seen this movie before.
Now we have another impressive Almost Presidential secretary, Henry Paulson, who says there’s impending doom, but he can’t say exactly what it is, it’s not security this time, but fear of starting another level of bank runs. Senators and Representatives come out of a Thursday night meeting with the secretary (would they have believed the President) won’t say exactly what he said, but they are stunned. The next day buried in a sea of press about this event is an almost innocuous paragraph in a NYT piece that talks about a flight to safety from the US Treasury money market. OMG. A point made by the secretary to the Congresspeople, a lot of your constituents have their savings in money markets. The Senators think to themselves, Fuck the constituents, that’s where my retirement savings are! (And by the way, mine.)
And who elected Hank Paulson btw? Dave’s point is that
we can’t do it on the terms that Paulson asks for. There has to be some pain and there has to be oversight and checks and balances. There’s no such thing as a law passed by Congress that can’t be judged by the courts. Not in the USA, not under our form of government. And no way is Bush going to get that by us.
So here’s what I propose. The Republican slogan today is Country First. So let’s see the Republicans do a little of that famous Country First stuff.
Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson.
It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.
Hmmm…. I think we know the answer to that one.
James Miller pointed me to an interesting post by Robert Reich, the Harvard academic who was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor for a while:
The public doesn’t like a blank check. They think this whole bailout idea is nuts. They see fat cats on Wall Street who have raked in zillions for years, now extorting in effect $2,000 to $5,000 from every American family to make up for their own nonfeasance, malfeasance, greed, and just plain stupidity. Wall Street’s request for a blank check comes at the same time most of the public is worried about their jobs and declining wages, and having enough money to pay for gas and food and health insurance, meet their car payments and mortgage payments, and save for their retirement and childrens’ college education. And so the public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?
So if you are a member of Congress, you just might be in a position to demand from Wall Street certain conditions in return for the blank check…
He goes on to set out five conditions. The one I like best is that banking bonuses be based on a five-year rolling average of performance.
Great post by Jeff Jarvis…
We’re spending $700 billion to bail out the idiots who got us into this mess and we end up with nothing to show for it but the bag we’re left holding and maybe a disaster averted (we hope).
We could be spending a lot less to get a lot more. A national wi-max buildout would cost between $5 billion and $14.5 billion. That would enable every American to get high-speed access to the internet and to its education, commerce, connectivity, innovation, jobs, and value. With a lot left over.
Or take the $700 billion and divide it by America’s 114.5 million TV households. Minus the 40-percent-plus margin that cable companies make on internet access (that’s the number I heard from them), we could provide broadband access to every one of those homes for about $300 a year. That means we could give every American free broadband access for 20 years.
We could buy 3.5 billion One Laptop Per Child machines. Want world peace and understanding? Give one to every Muslim on earth and every citizen of China (or since China can afford them, make that everyone in India or everyone in Africa and South America combined) and you’d still have more than 500 million machines left over.
Or we could give 4.4 million Americans free college educations at private institutions. We could give 23 million Americans free college educations at public institutions like mine. That alone would improve our competitive position and transform dying industries.
Or we could more than triple total annual R&D spending in the U.S. I can’t find total R&D on alternative energy but with this money we could multiply what Google.org is spending by a factor of 35,000…