Linked List: October 7, 2007

Sunday, 7 October 2007

Real people on the streets of New York talking about how they use their iPhones.

What Bugged Drew Thaler About MacJournals’s Post on ZFS ★

Drew Thaler on the potential for ZFS to eventually become the default file system for Mac OS X:

The bizarre rants about ZFS wasting processor time and disk space. I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that we were still using 30MHz machines with 1.44MB floppies. ZFS is great specifically because it takes two things that modern computers tend to have a surplus of — CPU time and hard disk space — and borrows a bit of it in the name of data integrity and ease of use. This tradeoff made very little sense in, say, 1992. But here in 2007 it’s brilliant.

The Vista Nerd Rage Feedback Loop ★

Vista getting a bad rap in the nerd press? (I have no opinion on Vista because I haven’t used it, but I have noticed that I have yet to see any reports of security problems.)

Silicon Alley Insider: Supply and Demand Applies to Concert Tickets, But Not to iPhones ★

Peter Kafka, at Silicon Alley Insider, claims the “obvious solution” to Hannah Montana ticket scalping — wherein $67 tickets are being re-sold for upwards of $250 — is to raise the initial selling prices of the tickets, so that the money die-hard fans are willing to pay goes to the artist and concert promoter, rather than to the scalper, and then to reduce the prices after the initial high-priced demand passes.

Good advice, I say. And, of course, it’s exactly what Apple did with the iPhone. Except Silicon Alley Insider didn’t see it that way with the iPhone, writing “To us, this move suggests the phone is not selling as well as Apple had hoped,” and “[The real issue] is Apple’s obvious misjudgment of the market for a flagship product.”