Category: observations

CNN.com has RSS feeds: updated URLs, if you need ’em. The [feed] URLs will open whatever you have configured to handle feed:// type URLs. The others are http:// URLs for your copying or linking pleasure.

• http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
  [feed]
• http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_mostpopular.rss [feed]
• http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_topstories.rss [feed]
• http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_mostpopular.rss [feed]
• http://rss.cnn.com/rss/si_topstories.rss [feed]

It looks like we get excerpts on inhouse content and “Read full story for latest details.” for wire stories.

It’s been a long time coming . . . .

And in case you’re curious about how long I have been grumbling about this . . .

<update> well, from what I understand (I still know some people there), this is but a preview, an aperitif, of what my former colleagues have planned. I hope that if we’ve waited this long, they’re going to reward us.

Well done, anyway, and some days I still wish I was part of all that.

<followup> Well, those updated URLs are rumored to be solid: check ’em out.

I’m interested to see a feed of most popular stories mentioned: that’s exactly the kind of thing that can only originate inhouse, since it would be driven by actual log data. Very cool idea . . .

Louise Erdrich:

“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.”

Yesterday, at Discovery Park, down the beach from the West Point Lighthouse.

Now playing: Requiem in D Minor, K.626: 8.Communio: Lux Aeterna by Agnes Baltsa, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Berliner Philharmoniker, Helmut Froschauer, Herbert von Karajan, José Van Dam, Rudolf Scholtz, Werner Krenn & Wiener Singverein from the album “Mozart: Requiem” | Get it

Apple may offer iMac computer for $500:

Apple shares have more than tripled this year, making them the second-best performer in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index behind Autodesk Inc.

Munster last month said the shares would climb to $100 within a year after a Piper Jaffray survey found that 13 percent of iPod users who formerly bought other PC brands had bought a Macintosh or planned to within a year.

A $500 iMac would accelerate that movement, he said.

Apple shares rose 36 cents yesterday to close at $64.80 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

A $500 pizza box monitor-less iMac? Yes, please.

Interesting article on Kodak’s resurgence and how it found its market:

The company’s big decision was to focus on low-priced, easy-to-use cameras that would appeal to women, who take the majority of snapshots, rather than Sony’s forte – shiny toys for gadget-loving men.

I can’t think of any other consumer products companies that eschew flash for functionality . . . . can you?

And Nikon not even mentioned in that article . . .

Now playing: This Night Has Opened My Eyes by The Smiths from the album “Louder Than Bombs” | Get it

WSJ.com – Real Time:

As Apple keeps innovating, its challengers keep competing like engineers, thinking that advantages in storage capacity or battery life can make silk purses out of ugly, hard-to-use sows’ ears of machines. When people would rather spend more than $130 above list price on eBay for your product than buy someone else’s comparatively priced or cheaper product, you own the category.

These guys — at the WSJ, no less — think Apple may finally have shaken off the FUD: could they be coming into a long overdue renaissance?

This is a really nice camera: solid feeling, well laid-out, and bristling with features. I’m very intrigued by the amount of manual controls it has (and how you use them: how to check depth-of-field, for example?) and hope to explore them.

But.

If you understand that no one would ever buy a 16 Mb compact flash card, wonder no more about where they end up. They get shipped in new camera boxes, so you can thrill yourself with 9 pictures before offloading them to start again.

Of course, a 512 Mb card can be had for $45 or so, making it moot. I can even see upgrading the firmware to handle RAW images with that much space to work with.

Kevin Kelly has collected a list of definitive text some of the world’s major faiths for his Cool Tools list:

The Message:

Cool Bible translation

The Qur’an: A New Translation:

Best modern translation

The Way of the Sufi:

The Zen of Islam

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:

Pocket parables

A good idea for this time of year, to say nothing of where we are in history.

Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Yet More Intellectual Property Weirdness:

Graphing Calculator has been part of the Macintosh ever since. Teachers around the world use it as an animated blackboard to illustrate abstract concepts visually. It shipped on more than twenty million machines. It never officially existed.

Why did Greg and I do something so ludicrous as sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work? Apple was having financial troubles then, so we joked that we were volunteering for a nonprofit organization. In reality, our motivation was complex. Partly, the PowerPC was an awesome machine, and we wanted to show off what could be done with it; in the Spinal Tap idiom, we said, “OK, this one goes to eleven.”

I still remember seeing this in early 1994 and thinking how cool it was. A great story and a great idea: I am downloading the freeware version (it no longer ships with new hardware) just to see it again.