Linked List: September 19, 2007

Wednesday, 19 September 2007

The Conscience of a Liberal 

The world’s best political commentator, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is now also writing a weblog for The Times. Hooray for the unpaywalled Times.

Stephen Fry: ‘Device and Desires’ 

Actor and writer Stephen Fry is a gadget hound, and proves it in this extensive survey of the current state-of-the-art in the smartphone market. E.g., regarding the Sony-Ericsson P1i:

The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto. UIQ promised something, the actual GUI is reasonable, in fact quite delightful, but it needed refinement, it needed acceleration and it needed flair. Instead we’ve got a very, very slow device that eats power, is difficult to use in varying environments and frequently hangs and crashes. In a word unusable. And I can just hear them hiding behind the excuse of “price” and “sectors of the market” and other bullshit. What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better. That was once true of Sony too.

T-Mobile to Sell iPhone in Germany 

Goes on sales November 9 for €399; plans to be announced later.

Interesting stuff at the end of the story on iTunes song pricing in Europe. The European Commission is investigating charges that Apple is breaking the law by selling the same songs at different prices for different countries. Steve Jobs flatly lays the blame at the music labels’ feet: “We think the prices should be the same.”. “Anybody in Europe should be able to buy off of any store. I’ve been saying this from the start. But the music companies don’t permit us to resell their music that way. So it’s really an issue with the music companies.”

Smartphone Market Shares Across the World 

It’s fascinating how different the markets are in different regions of the world. Microsoft and RIM are huge in the U.S., but mere also-rans everywhere else. Linux is huge in Asia, but barely registers in Europe or North America. And Symbian dominates the entire world except for North America, where it’s behind even Apple, which only entered the market three months ago.

David Maynor’s Home Office 

David Maynor:

Here is a pick [sic] of the home office I have been working from, this setup is mostly duplicated everywhere else I would work from, I thought you might just want to see what the fuss is about.

Let me guess which part of the setup is not duplicated everywhere else he might work from. Um: all the guns laying around on the table and floor?

‘Always Wait for Something Better’ 

The Macalope on David Berlind:

New Yorkers like to say that the outdoors is something you have to go through to get to the cab. Well, EDGE is something you have to go through to get to WiFi. My god, people act like EDGE is some blight on the human condition like polio or something, as if there were no trade-offs to be made that 3G was simply better.

It’s not.

Comments on John Nack’s weblog are rather negative.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0 

Looks like a splendid update to Mike Bombich’s donationware rival to SuperDuper. New features include block-level disk-to-disk clones, better synchronization features, network backups, and scheduling features.

WireTap Studio Preview Movies 

Ambrosia’s Andrew Welch links to a slew of QuickTime movies showing off their upcoming WireTap Studio.

Undercover 

$49 theft-notification software for Mac OS X notebooks; if your machine is stolen, it starts transmitting things like current screenshots, network settings, and, if there’s a built-in iSight, photos from the camera. (Via Jason Santa Maria.)

TrueGrain 

$300 “pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black-and-white film with digital photography”; simulates the grain of a bunch of specific black-and-white film stocks.