Linked List: July 27, 2007

Friday, 27 July 2007

iPhones Generally Can’t Take Calls While Using EDGE 

I’ve run into this: If you get a call while a web page is loading (or EDGE is in use for anything else), the call goes straight to voicemail. This is a limitation of the most common form of EDGE network.

Terrific Motion Graphic and Menu Design: DiRT for Xbox 360 

I love the way these menus look and move. (Via Khoi Vinh.)

CP Labs Investigates ‘Cloverfield’ Trailer 

The more I learn about this movie, the scarier it gets.

Dave Winer: What Twitter Is 

Best description I’ve seen of Twitter yet:

It’s a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following. I can follow you, and you can follow me. Or I can follow you and you don’t follow me. Or you can follow me, and I don’t follow you. Or neither of us follow each other. Pretty simple. Just arrows at either or both ends of the line, or no line at all. There are no labels on the arcs.  

Apple Gross Margins, 1992-2007 

Thanks to some research by DF reader Jim Frisby, I have a simple table showing Apple’s gross margins from 1992 until the present. That’s 15 years of data. The average: 27%. Check out those fat margins from ’92 and ’93, though.

AT&T ‘Marketing Settings’ 

Nima Yousefi on how to opt out of AT&T’s on-by-default “please send junk mail and spam to me via mail, email, and SMS” marketing settings. There’s also a setting for switching to paperless billing.

Regarding Engadget’s Photos of a Supposed New Apple Keyboard 

Erik Barzeski has a good run-down of what’s new if this rumored keyboard isn’t a fake. If it’s real, Apple is moving toward MacBook-style hardware functions for F-keys; the Help button being replaced by “Fn” would allow you to toggle the F-keys between hardware functions and regular F-key functions. I think it’s a fake, but it’s elaborate and well-done enough that I wouldn’t bet much against it. (I also don’t think white keys go well against a silver background.)

Fake Steve on Dvorak 

Fake Steve:

Because if this frigtard Dvorak now likes our machines, I think we must have done something wrong. Honestly. This idiot has been so consistently wrong for his entire career that we use him as a contrarian indicator. Now he likes us, and I’m afraid this might mean we’ve jumped the shark or something.

Joy of Tech on Dvorak 

For what it’s worth, I used to enjoy Dvorak’s back-page column in MacUser in the early ’90s.

10 PRINT “DATA TRANSFER” / 20 GOTO 10 / RUN 

David Pogue on AT&T’S tree-killing format for iPhone bills:

But then — get this — I get SIX PAGES of listings of data tidbits that the iPhone has downloaded in the form of email and Web pages–KILOBYTE BY KILOBYTE! Every graphic on every Web page, every message sent or received–it’s all carefully listed by date and time. Not as anything helpful like NYTIMES.COM HOME PAGE or EMAIL — no, no. Instead, every single one of the hundreds of listings says the same thing: “Data Transfer” of type “Data” at rate code “MBRF,” along with how many kilobytes it was (usually 1K or 3K).

I just got mine, and it’s the same thing, except the “Data Transfer” listing weighs in at 45 pages.

The New Math 

The more you think about this equation from CARS, the funnier it gets.

iPhone Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts 

Charles Arthur in The Guardian, back on July 12:

So are we all getting gouged here? The problem with these analyses is that they assume that these products fall out of a clear blue sky, their design realised by morphic resonance (where everyone suddenly understands something simultaneously), and that Apple — and other companies, for Toshiba’s creation of the miniature hard drive for the original iPod accounts for a lot of the product’s rocketing success — just sits around deciding where to buy advertising spots.

CARS Coverage of Apple Q3 Earnings Call 

“Analysts complained about a droning noise on the line, but Oppenheimer explained that it was just the sound of Stan Sigman still delivering his Macworld speech.”