Sometime when bad things happen all you can do it show your support. That’s what I’m doing here. The first cause is “One Day Blog Silence”:
This is to honour the victims from Virginia Tech and all those other innocents throughout the world. Given that the “blogosphere” is where many students poured their grief and vented their anger it seems appropriate.
Combining my two favourite subjects — Apple and taking the proverbial out of Dubya — how could I not post a link to this: What George W. Bush could learn from Steve Jobs.
Is this neat or huge security hole?
(You need a Mac with an iSight camera to make it work.)
It seemed to take pretty much everyone by surprise. Techie-oriented website Slashdot greeted the introduction of the iPod with the words: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” Even I, on the way home from Tottenham Court Road with a first generation, 5Gb model, thought, “What have I done? I’ve just paid ?350 for a walkman!” And I did wonder about the name.
But we all underestimated Apple. Five years later and now it’s difficult to see someone on the London Underground without an iPod and they’ve captured the public imagination in a way that few products have in recent times.
Last night we went to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a charity gala in aid of Amnesty International. Despite the great cast — everyone from The Mighty Boosh to Eddie Izzard — beforehand I was worried that the “charity” aspect would take too prominent a position compared with the comedy. Obviously there’s a need to make people remember what the show is all about but often these events become preachy and, ultimately, a little dull.
Sometimes a quote from the article can say more than I ever could:
Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
I think they should look up the word “irony” in a dictionary.
I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.
However this article caught my eye:
AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249
What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.
I think, over the years I have left companies for most of the reasons listed in this article. Not that I’m claiming to have always been a “star” employee.
I left my first job mainly for money. My third wins the honour of collecting most of the reasons in the list, but would gain special commendation for management BS (as the article calls it).
It was no surprise that they assumed that more people would leave for money. Most people incorrectly assumed that I left my last job for a pay raise too. The part that rang most true for me was “too challenged”:
I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.
It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.
Today marks the 50th anniverary of IBM’s introduction of the first hard disk.
Of course things have moved on since then. Not only are they physically smaller, cheaper and more reliable, but, according to Steven Levy, their capacity has increased considerably:
The total amount of information stored [was] not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Would Apple’s iPod adverts have been quite so successful if it had only been “nearly two songs in your pocket”?