Month: September 2007

Naveja.net is back on the air. Someone has a long absence to explain. I suspect the rigors of earning a living are to blame though.

iPod touch:

Apple took the best parts of the iPhone and the iPod, and made an ultra-slick little device that’s a mere 8mm thin. I couldn’t be more excited about it, not just because of the killer features and gorgeous interface, but for the true mobile web.

I’ve never owned a portable device that was capable of browsing the web, and I think Apple’s implementation is just spot-on.

I have said repeatedly that speech will be the Great Leveller as far as interfaces go, recalling that typing is an artificial method of communication, unnatural and slow. But I plainly didn’t learn much from having kids of my own: touch and gesture are the first methods of communication we use to interact with the world. We learn how to grab and hold things, what things are safe (blocks) and unsafe (the cat’s tail) to grab, and how to point and wave, long before we can communicate with speech (grunts, wails, laughter notwithstanding).

More evidence why Steve Jobs is phenomenally rich and satisfied and I’m, well, not so much.

Who’s We, Kemosabe?:

This isn’t the most shocking data in the world, but in this period of stock market hysteria, it’s worth remembering that the majority of the country doesn’t own any stock. Indeed, the bottom 90 percent of us only own 20 percent of the market. The top 10 percent, by contrast, control 80 percent, with the top one percent of Americans controlling an astounding 36.9%. What’s that you say? You want to see this represented graphically?

See those tiny slivers of checkered pink, blue, grey, and red? That’s where most of the country is.

I had no idea the ownership society was so stratified. And EPI notes further:

Dow’s all-time high inconsequential for most Americans:

For the most part, lower-, middle-, and even upper-middle-income working-age households depend on their paychecks, not stock portfolios, to meet their everyday needs. Typical working families that own stock do so in retirement plans that are costly to turn into cash. Therefore, increasing stock value does little to help them make ends meet at a time when wages for most workers have been stagnant for several years now.

Stock ownership looks good (that’s what most people think of when they think of capitalism). But at the end of the day, stock certificates, assuming you own a stake directly, as opposed to through a retirement plan, aren’t going to put food on your family, as someone once said.

Sounds like a counterpart to the very serious Joe Lieberman. :

And to paraphrase the horror movie genre, is Craig really gone even now or has he merely entered the shadowy ranks of the unresigned, destined to walk the earth for eternity tormenting his party?

• Going After Gore, by Evgenia Peretz: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
  a frustrating review — naming names — of the pathetic, malevolent press coverage that gave us the worst president ever. How these people still have jobs eludes me.
  (tags: journamalism media politics)

I dropped my RAZR V3c in the lake the other week and was able to get hold a of a replacement, via FreeCycle. I now have a Samsung A670. Getting it activated was one phone call to Verizon and another to do over the air programming: simple as can be, and did much to rehab Verizon’s reputation with me.

As for the phone, I’m unimpressed. Oh, sure, it works as a phone, but the interface is way clunkier than any of the Motorola phones I have had (the past 3, if memory serves). The camera is useless, since you can’t get the pictures off without paying Verizon for the privilege. And the camera can’t be used without using one of a selection of really cartoony shutter sounds. So it’s a great handset for 12 year olds. The ringtones are not much better.

The ability to synchronize my contacts, ie the phones numbers I actually use and no longer remember, would be nice. Samsung and Verizon differ on that, apparently.

Still, can’t complain too much considering it was free, even though that’s the same price I paid for the RAZR, the V265, and whatever I had before that.

I’m going to keep on eye on eBay for a decent used RAZR. Looks like they come in well under the $100 that Verizon wants me to pay for a replacement, and all I need is the phone, not the charger or manual. Any reasonable BlueTooth phone would suit, though.

If I am reading this right, Apple is on the verge of selling one million iPhones. Today they announced new pricing that cuts the price by $200. Looks like Apple made close to $200,000,000 just by exploiting the demand for their latest product. And they’ll still make money at the new price.

Sometimes it’s good not to be first in line.

These look nice, don’t they?

According to this, I’m an iPodClassic kinda guy. So what is it have now? An iPod Prehistoric? I mean, 10 GB, monochrome screen, non-clickwheel? One step removed from coal burning . . . .

And the 80GB model is the same price as my 10GB model was, 4+ years ago.

• Whoopi Goldberg Defends Vick [not really]
  talk about your misleading headlines: she explains it as part of his background and how he didn’t realize the seriousness of the offense but doesn’t defend his actions.
  (tags: journamalism media)

Rick Rubin – Recording Industry – Rock Music – New York Times:

From Napster to the iPod, the music business has been wrong about how much it can dictate to its audience. “Steve Jobs understood Napster better than the record business did,” David Geffen told me. “IPods made it easy for people to share [listen to — ed] music, and Apple took a big percentage of the business that once belonged to the record companies. The subscription model is the only way to save the music business. If music is easily available at a price of five or six dollars a month, then nobody will steal it.”

For this model to be effective, all the record companies will have to agree. “It’s like getting the heads of the five families together,” said Mark DiDia, referencing “The Godfather.” “It will be very difficult, but what else are we going to do?”

Rubin sees no other solution. “Either all the record companies will get together or the industry will fall apart and someone like Microsoft will come in and buy one of the companies at wholesale and do what needs to be done,” he said. “The future technology companies will either wait for the record companies to smarten up, or they’ll let them sink until they can buy them for 10 cents on the dollar and own the whole thing.”

And when you consider MSFT’s excellent customer-focused history, I don’t know if things will be a lot better.

A great article: I’d like to be Rick Rubin when I grow up.