Linked List: February 19, 2009

Thursday, 19 February 2009

‘Small and Scared Behind That Mask’ 

A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut:

But the charge that his Manhattan looks nothing like the real thing strikes me as completely irrelevant: Just a rough translation of the source material’s title, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), should erase any expectation of gritty verisimilitude. Once Cruise is jettisoned into the night, Kubrick’s New York becomes a kind of backlot ghost town, populated only by figures that play a role in his waking dream.

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorships 

Speaking of RSS feed sponsors, the current schedule is sold out through the end of April, but wide open after that. If you have a product or service you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball’s audience, check out the sponsorship page for more information and current rates.

Delicious Library 

My thanks to Delicious Monster for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Delicious Library 2, their award-winning tool for cataloging your books, movies, software, toys, tools, electronics, and video games. It even lets you use your Mac’s built-in iSight camera to scan bar codes for adding new items to your library. There aren’t many apps that can be described as swanky, but Delicious Library is one.

Delicious Library sells for $40, and you can purchase it, and find out more information, at their web site.

HTC Accounts for 80 Percent of Windows Mobile Handset Sales 

Tricia Duryee:

At Microsoft’s press conference yesterday at Mobile World Congress, if you tied two threads together, you learned a very interesting fact about HTC, one of the company’s closest handset makers—the Taiwanese company is responsible for 80 percent of Windows Mobile phone sales. The number is astonishingly high when you consider the next fact: Microsoft has 50 handset partners.

Joe Wilcox on the iPhone’s Competitive Advantage 

Smart piece by Joe Wilcox:

Apple’s platform will grow stronger and maintain huge advantages over competitors as long as there continues to be one iPhone OS version for all handsets from all carriers. Apple did something quite extraordinary with the original iPhone launched in June 2007: It broke carriers’ control over mobile operating system updates. Rather than there being multiple mobile OS versions, further fragmented by carrier distribution, Apple controls and distributes the updates.

Fixing OAuth 

Loren Brichter:

I have a tendency to think of things that have already been thought of, so I apologize if this has already been discussed and rejected. I also have a tendency not to think things entirely through, though I’m hoping this post is a starting point, not a complete solution. In any event, I think there may be a way to fix OAuth and you’d only have to change 4 words of the spec.

Hulu’s Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight 

Marc Hedlund on the Hulu/Boxee fiasco:

Emphasis added: portable computing devices. Not to your TV — from your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that’s how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To your TV is something completely different, and from the “content providers’” point of view, completely wrong.

Hulu Pulls Content From Boxee 

If you read between the lines on Hulu’s weblog entry on the decision, it’s clear that it wasn’t Hulu’s decision, but rather that of their “content partners”. Read: the studios and TV networks. As Hulu CEO Jason Kilar writes:

While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move.

Hulu gets it. The studio executives do not. They want a level of control that is no longer feasible — allowing us to, say, watch their movies and shows on Hulu on our computer screens, but not on our TV screens.

A Classic App Store Rip-Off 

Positively shameless rip-off by Diego Dominguez Ferrera.