Linked List: November 12, 2009

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Dell Zino HD 

Mac Mini-ish PCs with original, colorful industrial design.

David Pogue on Verizon’s and AT&T’s $2 Per Pop Data Scams 

This is awful.

‘I Can Go a Little Deeper’ 

Hilarious, gruesome Penn and Teller appearance on the old Late Night With David Letterman Show, with Rob Pike as their lab assistant. How did I not know about this? (Thanks to Dr. Drang.)

Rob Pike’s Google Tech Talk on the Go Programming Language 

Probably not of much interest if you’re not at least somewhat of a comp-sci nerd, but, if you are, how many times do you get see a legend like Pike introduce a new programming language? I have a feeling that Go is going to be a big deal.

Fighting Fantasy Game Books 

Of all the various Choose Your Own Adventure-type books, the Fighting Fantasy series, created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, was by far and away my favorite. I read/played them all, obsessively. They felt more like games than any of the others (and included a simple D&D-esque dice-based combat system), but were also much better written, better typeset, and better illustrated. Rather than going by pages, they went by numbered entries, generally with more than one entry per page. Most of the books had exactly 400 entries, so the gameplay was vastly more complex than any of the regular CYOB-style books. I’d love to see info-graphic diagrams of their decision trees a la the work by Christian Swinehart I linked to yesterday.

I can’t say enough good things about the Fighting Fantasy books and how much they meant to me in my early teens. I loved them.

Update: Unsurprisingly, there is a good Wikipedia entry.

AT&T Files Legal Complaint Against Verizon Over 3G Coverage Map Ads 

Funny to read a legal filing that references Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Abominable Snow Monster.

Gartner Estimates for Worldwide Smartphone Market Share 

Apple’s year-over-year share grew from 13 to 17 percent; RIM’s from 16 to 21. HTC grew from 4.5 to 6.5, and Samsung held steady at 3. Nokia dropped from 42 to 39 percent, and the big loser was the “Other” category, which dropped precipitously from 21 to 13 percent.

Now seems like a good time to once again recall the words of Steve Ballmer two years ago:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

ifoAppleStore on the Upper West Side Store 

Don’t miss the photo gallery.

News From the Opening of the New Upper West Side Apple Store 

Matt Buchanan reports on Ron Johnson’s remarks:

  • Sales per store: $26 million, which is just below what Macy’s, Target and Best Buy make per store. But, if you look at the real estate, it’s a slightly different picture. Apple Stores do sales of $4,300 per square foot which is 5× the $872 per square foot Best Buy does.

  • Wow — over 100,000 applicants on file for jobs at the Apple Store worldwide. 10,000 people submitted applications for the new Upper West Side store. Just over 200 got a job.