Linked List: September 16, 2007

Sunday, 16 September 2007

Radically simple web-based web page editor, by Aaron Swartz and Simon Carstensen. Starting a new page, the first time you visit the site, could not be any simpler: you just type text (Markdown-formatted, natch) in a textarea and click a button. No sign up, no account creation. Just write. After creating a page, you can password protect it, but you don’t have to if you don’t need to.

More info on Jottit from Aaron Swartz.

Nasty Legal Fight Over Ringtones Between Bob Marley’s Family, Verizon, and Universal Music ★

I love the lead by reporter Andrew Adam Newman:

The licensing dispute between the estate of the reggae singer Bob Marley and the Universal Music Group took an ugly turn yesterday, with nobody getting together or feeling the least bit all right.

Market Share ★

2003 piece from the DF archives, just as apt today, on the Mac’s market share:

Overall PC market share covers large market segments where Apple isn’t competing — including markets where Apple doesn’t want to compete. Fifteen or 20 years ago, personal computers were generally only purchased and used by people who were “into” computers. Today, however, many computers are purchased for use as generic business machines, modern-day typewriters and adding machines.

Randall Stross in The New York Times on the Mac’s Overall PC Market Share ★

So The New York Times ran a piece today by Randall Stross, which can more or less be summarized as follows: Microsoft’s Windows Vista is a turd, and Apple has blown it by not increasing the Mac’s market share even more than they have in the past year. Stross makes all the usual mistakes in Mac market share analysis, first and foremost by confusing who Apple is competing against. Apple does not sell an operating system that competes against Windows. Apple sells computers. Apple does not sell as many computers as Dell or HP, but Apple makes way more money per computer sold than Dell or HP (or any other major PC maker).

Precise Screen Sizes for iPod Touch and iPhone ★

Just in case you wanted one more piece of evidence that the iPhone and iPod Touch use different screens, Apple’s documentation for iPod and iPhone case designers has precise dimensions. The iPhone screen measures 76.38 × 51.42 mm; the iPod Touch screen measures 74.9 × 49.9 mm. (Thanks to François Menu.)

iPhone Features You’ll Miss Out on by Buying an iPod Touch ★

Bill Palmer runs down everything the iPhone has that the iPod Touch doesn’t.

iPod Classic Audio Measurements ★

Detailed audio quality analyis of the iPod Classic by Marc Heijligers:

Trying to reveal what I hear with the new iPod, I’ve measured the device and I’ve compared it to the iPod Video 5G. The measurements show is that the iPod Classic (also called 6G) indeed has an uplift in treble, and its timing response is incorrect. I assume Apple is able to patch the flaws by means of a firmware update.

Apple Engineers Refer to Chinese Factory as ‘Mordor’ ★

Entry for “send to Mordor” at the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as “being sent to Mordor.”

I’m sure it’s a lovely place. (Via Kottke.)

1996 Charlie Rose Interview With Steve Jobs and John Lasseter ★

Terrific interview, after the release of Toy Story, but before Jobs’s return to Apple. (Via Kottke.)

The Definition of Insanity ★

Jeremy Allison, on the suspicous voting patterns in the ISO standardization process for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats:

So we saw over the past few weeks some strange and rather irregular national positions coming to light. My own favorites were Cuba voting “yes” to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan’s “yes” vote, even though OOXML as defined isn’t able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

(Via Simon Willison.)

The ‘longdesc’ Lottery ★

Mark Pilgrim, writing for the WHATWG weblog, on the longdesc attribute:

That means that less than 1% of images that provide a longdesc attribute are actually useful. No more than one in a hundred get it right, of one in a thousand that even try.