Month: January 2008

Some alpha geeks is about as useful a term as “some Democrats” or “some government officials” in political reporting. It allows the writer to project his (or those of one or two friends) onto a faceless unnumbered group of disaffected people, none of whom are quoted and whose complaints are delivered without any context.

Radar’s Nat Torkington has a smart take on this. (He’s away on vacation, so I’ll quote him.) “Success breeds risk of failure,” he writes. “Some alpha geeks are turning away from Macs. Not all, but some. The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.” [From Why Apple might not be able to get away with it anymore]

Taking these gripes in order:

1. Flaky hardware has not been much of an issue for me: I have have drive failures but Apple doesn’t make drives. Everything else has worked pretty well, even this obsolescent iBook.
2. Genius Bar access has never been an issue for me: you can sign up online to make an appointment and get one same day, I expect, or if you are a Pro user, you can leverage that priority system
3. By the base apps, I assume the iLife and iWork suites are what’s meant. I didn’t realize there was any perfect software: I’d like to know about it if there is. But for the price of those suites, I think they offer pretty good value and if the alpha geeks are all that, where are the development efforts that will meet their needs? My read of this is that they don’t match the functionality of the Office suite. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to have the same “alpha geeks” claim that the bloat and excess of features of the Office suite was one of the reasons for switching.

This really seems like a weak argument. Maybe alpha geeks are not the core of Apple’s market (I think this is pretty obvious) and the loss of a few won’t matter all that much. It would be interesting to see where they go. Linux? Yeah, there’s a mass-market product 😉 Back to Windows? Good luck with that.

• What Do Cell Phone Reception Bars Mean?
  not much, evidently.
  (tags: wirelessphones markets communication)
• New York Changing
  This is excellent. I could look at more of this. It’s a New York I don’t know/have never seen. I especially like that this one shows that the same owners have been there since the fir
  (tags: history photography newyork)

retrovore n. The best moment at this market was when I found out I’m a retrovore. That’s a new word, invented today. One of the farmers we were chatting with said his kid said to him “Dad, if you didn’t raise animals the way you do, I’d probably be a vegan.” He said, “I probably would too.” That’s when they came up with the term “retrovore.” One who eats food that was raised the way it should have been raised… like they used to do it before they learned how to ruin it. —”Vegetables of Mass CONVENTION—Austin Edition!” by OrangeClouds115 in Austin, Texas Daily Kos Jan. 6, 2008. Categories: English, Food & Drink, New or Nonce—More information about retrovore and related words at Double-Tongued Dictionary.

[From retrovore]

Somewhat related to organitarian.

I think only three of these are new and surprising–“it’s not just the lenders” seems to me to be mischaracterized, and not to carry the implications Tyler wishes us to drawn from it. [From Tyler Cowen Learns Four New Things]

As I still don’t know what libertarians really believe, this is one more datapoint. Cowen claims that blame for the subprime lending crisis can can be apportioned to “predatory borrowers” or people who made false or ambitious statements on their loan applications. But who makes money based on the loan going through? There is a disincentive for greedy lenders to look too closely at those papers and some of them got caught in that.

Next up, how patients are to blame for malpractice . . . .

People shot and killed are victims of sectarian violence.

People killed by bombs are victims of “al Qaeda.”

“Sophisticated” bombs are all built by Iran.

“Al Qaeda” are Sunni.

Iranians are Shiite.

And only stupid bloggers notice this stuff.

[From Iraq Logic]

• How to Test RAM Under Mac OS X
  (tags: hardware osx)
• Media Matters – “Media Matters” by Jamison Foser
  This is embarrassing, or it would be if Chris Matthews was capable of shame. He sure seems to have issues with women, either hates them (like Hillary) or leers at them (like various other guests and co-hosts)
  (tags: media politics journalism)

For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern. [From Social networking through the ages]

Don Surber:

Huckabee’s Bible belting does not bother me as much as his populist bent. A chicken-in-every pot is unnecessary in a nation whose poor overwhelmingly suffer from obesity.

[From Annals of Compassionate Conservatism.]

Maybe if they ate more chicken and less over-processed crap . . . . ? Why bother. Like teaching a pig to sing, it’s a waste of time and annoys the pig.

Joe Stalin had these folks pegged: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.“

If you find yourself really delighted that a war of choice has resulted in the deaths of a population the size of Jersey City, or maybe Oakland, instead of one the size of Baltimore, you probably need to rethink your priorities.

[From Crooked Timber » » Post-Invasion Deaths in Iraq]