By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: September 16, 2008
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
- Average Nintendo Employee to Generate $1.6 Million in Profit ★
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Sounds like Nintendo employees deserve some nice bonuses this year.
- From the Department of Snappy Answers to Simple Questions ★
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Craig Grannell:
In July, Apple noted that an upcoming “product transition” would affect future profit margins, prompting speculation. For once, such speculation has started to fade, but now rumors regarding the new MacBook are beginning to surface: an aluminium case, LED backlit display, multi-touch. Does that sound like anything to you?
Is Apple going to ditch the “Pro” from MacBook Pro and streamline its laptop range, leaving just a “standard” MacBook (with different screen sizes and minor tinkering possibilities under the hood), and the Air for people who happily set fire to $50 dollar bills?
No.
Also, Apple’s “product transition” was the explanation for their lowered gross margin guidance for this financial quarter, which ends in two weeks. The product transition therefore must have been a reference to something that Apple has already done, for products they are already selling. Like, say, the new iPods introduced last week.
- Timothy McSweeney Is Devastated and Lost ★
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McSweeney’s is running memories from those who knew David Foster Wallace. Dave Eggers:
There’s something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world—and who seems exactly like someone who would have come from your part of the world. He was funny, decent to a fault, and thoroughly unpretentious. He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books. You knew it within two or three minutes with him. He was an actual human, far more colloquial and normal than you could imagine, given what he engineered on the page.
Zadie Smith:
He was my favourite. I didn’t feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod.
(Via Kottke.)
- Podcaster: What All the Fuss Is About ★
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Chris Breen reviews Podcaster. The nut:
A very useful application for streaming and downloading podcasts on the go—and one whose capabilities are definitely not found elsewhere on an iPhone or iPod touch.
- Bluff: Beautiful Graphs in JavaScript ★
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James Coglan:
Bluff is a JavaScript port of the Gruff graphing library for Ruby. It is designed to support all the features of Gruff with minimal dependencies; the only third-party scripts you need to run it are a copy of JS.Class (about 2 KB gzipped) and a copy of Google’s ExCanvas to support canvas in Internet Explorer.
- Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator ★
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My Sarah Palin baby name: Stick Freedom Palin.
(Thanks to my wife, Clop Clutch Palin.)
- 7digital Now Selling High-Quality DRM-Free Music From All Major Labels ★
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Distorted Loop:
This is highly significant, and means 7digital is the first digital music store in Europe to offer downloads from all four major labels, Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI Records. Tracks are sold free of DRM rights restriction as high-quality (320 kbps) MP3 files — better quality than offered by iTunes Plus.
- Apple’s Capricious Rules for iPhone Apps ★
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Podcaster-gate is percolating upward in the media hierarchy. Saul Hansell has a good piece on it for the NYT Bits Blog. “Capricious” is a good word for what’s wrong.
- Gears for Safari Requires Input Manager Hack ★
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Gears, Google’s API for offline web applications with local storage, is now available for Safari. Alas, it requires an input manager hack:
When you install Gears, you’ll notice that it’s composed of 2 components: an NPAPI plugin which lives in “/Library/Internet Plugins” and an InputManager. Gears needs to load first thing upon browser startup, for cases in which the first page loaded into the browser is from the Gears offline cache. NPAPI provides no mechanism for loading that early (it only provides support for loading plugins the first time a page specifically includes them) so we needed a small InputManager to do the work for us.
- David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College ★
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Thoughtful and true. But this bit, in hindsight, is painful to read:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
- VMware Fusion 2.0 ★
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Free upgrade for existing users. New features include the ability to run Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine.
- Hewlett-Packard Cuts 25,000 Jobs After E.D.S. Purchase ★
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Ashlee Vance, reporting for the NYT:
The computer and printer maker Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday that it would eliminate 24,600 jobs, or 7.5 percent of its work force, as part of its plan for digesting the computer services giant Electronic Data Systems, which it acquired for $13.9 billion in August.
For comparison, Apple only has 22,000 employees total, including retail; Google: 20,000. That’s a lot of jobs.