Linked List: February 25, 2008

Monday, 25 February 2008

The Macalope on the bogus math behind the claim that unlocked iPhones will cost Apple “$1 billion” by the end of the year. (It’s the same sort of math the music industry uses to estimate how much money bootlegging costs them — based on the assumption that every single bootlegged track would otherwise have been purchased for the full retail price.)

Regarding TUAW’s Mischaracterization of My ‘Repair Permissions’ Advice ★

My stance on “Repairing Permissions” is not complicated. If you have a permissions-related problem (or suspect one) it might solve it. It is not something you should worry about if you’re not having any problems. There is no good reason to run it periodically, nor any reason to run it before or after software installations or upgrades. If it were a good idea, Apple would configure Mac OS X to do it for you. It’s like taking antibiotics — a good idea if you have an infection, but a bad idea to take every day “just for good measure”. (My thanks to “Floggy”, whoever you are, for making the same point in the comments on TUAW.)

MonoPrice.com ★

Purveyor of super-cheap A/V equipment and cables. I’d never heard of MonoPrice until yesterday, when a slew of people on Twitter suggested them after I tweeted about the fact that the cheapest HDMI cable at Best Buy (where by “best” they mean “worst”) costs $60.

Wired Magazine Profile of 37signals ★

Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: “Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,” and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else. But the article also states that they doubled revenue in 2007 without increasing the company’s head count — that doesn’t sound like the path to failure to me.

NY Times Profile of Josh Marshall and TPM Media ★

Congratulations to Josh Marshall and TPM Media for being the first weblog to win a George Polk Award — sort of a Golden Globe for journalism.

“I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging,” [Marshall] said. “We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Killer Park Job: ‘Asus Designers Have Really Great Ideas’ ★

Dan Hughes on the industrial design of the Asus Nova P22:

To me, it initially looked like a pen holder. Bizarrely enough though, it turns that it is indeed a pen holder. Are you kidding me? What computer user has ever said, gee, the one thing this machine really needs is a pen holder hanging off the side of its case?

What an amazing computer: slower, bigger, and more expensive than a Mac Mini — but where do you put a pen in a Mac Mini?

The Original Photoshop Icon ★

Sebastiaan de With: “While I was doing some research for one of my upcoming projects today, I found the very first Photoshop icon.”

Techdirt: ‘Dear ABC, You Don’t Compete With TiVo by Making a Product Worse’ ★

Hard to believe that this is an actual quote:

Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group, claims: “You don’t need TiVo if you have fast-forward-disabled video on demand. It gives you the same opportunity to catch up to your favorite shows.”

The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986–2007 ★

Interesting infographic from The New York Times showing box office receipts over time.

Rogue Amoeba: ‘Your Screen. On A Screen. On Screen!’ ★

Guy English on a nifty trick in the latest version of Airfoil:

So when you’re streaming to an Apple TV via Airfoil running on Leopard, we send along the image of your Mac and overlay your desktop on it. Put simply, it’s damn cool to see.

Interview With GTD Author David Allen ★

David Allen, in an interview with Bob Walsh at Web Worker Daily:

One of the problems that’s endemic with the younger generation people who have grown up with computers and with email they make the assumption that email is a fine medium for communicating anything and everything.