Linked List: September 17, 2007

Monday, 17 September 2007

This upcoming phone looks like a rip-off of Nokia’s upcoming phone.

New York Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site ★

Glad to hear it. I didn’t mind paying the $50 a year for TimesSelect — I’d pay that just to read Paul Krugman and Frank Rich — but it was frustrating not to be able to link to certain articles at The Times because they were behind the pay wall.

iTunes 7.4.2 ★

No release notes online (that I’ve seen), but the Software Update blurb says: “iTunes 7.4.2 addresses an issue with creating ringtones using iTunes Plus song purchases and includes bug fixes to improve stability and performance.”

Where by “bug fixes” they mean “closes the loopholes that allow you to create ringtones for free from the music you already own.”

Reuters: ‘Apple’s iPhone Can Only Help Rivals in Europe’ ★

Tarmo Virki reporting for Reuters:

Major handset vendors have much more to gain than to lose from the buzz Apple Inc’s coveted iPhone will create when it arrives in European stores for the key shopping season ahead of Christmas.

In other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

Inscribed in the Living Tile: Type in the Toronto Subway ★

Joe Clark on the sad typographic history of the Toronto subway system.

Trailer: ‘No Country For Old Men’ ★

Modern-day Western from Joel and Ethan Coen. Can’t wait. The Coen brothers are on my list of filmmakers who I’d go see a movie they made about paint drying.

Pay Phones on Chestnut Street Between 10th and Broad ★

Photographs taken on my walk home from lunch yesterday.

TechCrunch: ‘Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million in Cash’ ★

Mike Arrington:

Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 for iPhone ★

“Also, we’ve done away with warning dialog boxes in Photoshop. Instead, Photoshop actually calls your iPhone and tells you the warning!” (Thanks to Dan Benjamin.)

‘Where Thieves and Pimps Run Free’ ★

So that aforelinked quote on the music business from Hunter S. Thompson? Ends up it’s a widely-cited misquote. The actual quote is about the TV industry:

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

That it’s equally true for the music industry is why the misquote resonates. (Thanks to Ramanan Sivaranjan for the link to David Emery’s investigation on the quote.)

Cinemascapes ★

Rosecrans Baldwin interviews photographer Aaron Hobson.

Devicescape Connect ★

Glenn Fleishman:

Devicescape has released a simple application for the iPhone that lets you connect to Wi-Fi hotspots without all the fuss of tapping in user names and passwords, clicking Accept buttons, or remembering WEP and WPA encryption keys. Devicescape’s Connect application requires the Nullriver AppTapp application installer, a third-party hack that enables easy installation of software on the iPhone.

Mark Cuban Switches to the Mac ★

Billionaire captain of industry Mark Cuban — who really does capitalize and punctuate his writing as you see below — got frustrated with Windows, bought a MacBook, and loves it:

First is that when I close my MacBook without turning it off, it doesn’t lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up.

The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.

Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).

Im not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook

There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define “Apple fanboy” as “anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac”.

Humanized Enso Beta Products ★

New software from Humanized; might be of interest to DF readers who use Windows.

Hunter S. Thompson on the Music Business ★

Good words to keep in mind regarding the ringtone racket, from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Update: Ends up this is a misquote.