Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

“I'm off to get a liver and might even die but oh wait, I'm back now and guess what, I saw God and here's the tablet computer that he wants you to use”

This guy is too much. Seriously. Read this...

iTablet: My hero's journey

From Vanity Fair. It starts off funny and gets pretty brutal by about page 3 or so.

Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version | vanityfair.com

“This line-of-credit, the stop-gap measure that was supposed to solve the problem that hadn't really existed in the first place had done nothing but worsen it. When we started the week, we had no liquidity issues. But because people had said that we did have problems with our capital, it became true, even though it wasn't true when people started saying it. . . . So we were forced to find capital to offset the losses we'd sustained because somebody decided we didn't have capital when we really did. So when we finally got more capital to replace the capital we'd lost, people took that as a bad sign and pointed to the fact that we'd had no capital and had to get a loan to cover it, even when we did have the capital they said we didn't have. “

  • From a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell on the psychology of overconfidence, in this case how the rumor of illiquidity took down Bear Stearns in the matter of a week. Gladwell goes on to make parallels between the hammering of the finance industry and the disastrous British landing at Gallipoli in WWI, where the Brits thought they had it so in the bag that they landed with half the force that they needed to do the job.

it was a done deal

come to find out it wasn't

i am the jackass

“Microsoft's core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts.”

  • the Daring Fireball in a piece called Microsoft's long, slow decline. He sums up my feelings almost perfectly. I apologize ahead of time for being a snobby Mac asshole, but feel my decades of loyalty to MS-DOS and Windows justify and inform my opinions sufficiently.

edit: a discussion thread going on YCombinator

“The lesson for any artist here has to be to sign a contract with any session musicians you use to ensure that you have set out any arrangement on copyright and royalties in the product. The vast majority of modern artists will be well aware of the risks, but we could see a great number of similar cases. An ounce of protection could be worth nearly 40 years of cure.”

from a British law blog, Ralli Solicitors. You know that tune “Whiter Shade of Pale”, that I always thought was a Steve Winwood tune? That's by a band called Procul Harum. The keyboardist on that tune claimed “that he wrote and was responsible for the main melody of “Pale”, and as such is entitled to a share of its copyright.” He won the judgment, 40 years after the tune came out. Good for him, right? It's a little more complicated than that.

This one comes from a marketing blog called Outspoken Media. It's a little over the top for me most of the time, and the girl Lisa that runs it most of the time has pronounced diarrhea of the keyboard (yes, I'm calling the kettle black). This post got me thinking, however...

The spark was with the “United Breaks Guitars” tune that's been stuck in my head all day. I'll ruin the surprise and tell you – she's not that impressed. She has some interesting reasons why =>

When Social Media Becomes A Weapon

In case you don't follow the tech press as closely as I do, Apple will be releasing a small, supposedly cheaper tablet computer intended to compete in the “netbook” market. Those are small, cheap computers that can't really do anything but access the internet. I see them in airports a lot lately. They look annoying to use, but that's just me. So Apple's version will (according to rumor) look like a really large iPhone – a 9 inch or so touchscreen and no keyboard.

“Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple's iTunes software, executives said.” – via Financial Times

This sounds like what the iPhone's promise of a music player has been all along – crazy amounts of interaction with the content you've bought – but artists (save perhaps Trent Reznor) have been slow to get on board with realizing the potential. Let's hope this will stir things up a bit.

Apple, Labels Aim To Save The Album With “Cocktail” Project (AAPL)