Linked List: July 26, 2011

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

Paul Krugman:

We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president.

Apple’s P/E Ratio ★

Matt Richman:

If a company’s P/E ratio is supposed to be indicative of its growth prospects, then why is Netflix’s P/E ratio more than 4.5 times higher than Apple’s when Apple is growing its bottom line more than twice as fast as Netflix is?

I think it’s psychological. Wall Street, collectively, can’t wrap its head around just how big Apple has gotten and how fast it continues to grow. Ten years ago Apple traded at $10 a share; five years ago $65. That’s the Apple Wall Street remembers, and thus today’s Apple at $400 seems like it’s had a really nice run to reflect its last five years of success. The stock is weighed down by old impressions of Apple as a smaller company with niche appeal.

Eric Schmidt, BlackBerry User? ★

Maybe it’s just a spare for when his Android phone’s battery dies?

The Kobo App Removes Its Store ★

Jim Dovey, developer of the Kobo iOS app, on the changes they were forced to make to keep it in the App Store:

The store was removed because Apple rejected any updates which included it, period. They also rejected any updates which stated that Apple required its removal, or indeed any mention of ‘compliance with App Store guidelines’. It was further rejected for the cardinal sin of allowing users to create a Kobo account within the app. Then it was rejected for providing a link to let users create an account outside the app. Then it was rejected for simply mentioning that it was possible to sign up, with no direction on where or how one could do that. Then it was rejected for making any mention of the Kobo website. Then for any mention of ‘our website’ at all, in any language. We additionally cannot make any assertions that Kobo provides content for sale, however obliquely.

Capricious.

I should note, however, that the Borders app for the US was subject to almost NONE of these restrictions. This is all the more amusing since the Borders US app is built from the exact same source code, with a different colour scheme and titles.

But it seems like Amazon is under the same restrictions with the Kindle app — not only does the latest version of the Kindle app not have a link to the Kindle Store, but there is no mention of the Kindle Store within the app, period. Maybe Borders got a pass because they’re going bankrupt? As it stands, this is very strange — you can create a Kobo account within the Borders iPhone app, but not within the Kobo iPhone app.

Dan Frommer on the Removal of the Kindle Store Link in the iOS Kindle App ★

Dan Frommer, arguing that Apple’s new “if it’s in the App Store, we get 30 percent of everything purchased through it” policy has forced Amazon and other e-book sellers to make their apps worse:

One argument I’ve heard is that Apple is, in theory, acting in the customer’s best long-term interest here: iTunes is an easier payment method than Amazon’s Kindle store, so Apple should try to pressure companies to use iTunes for everything over the long run. You know, starve the losers and feed the winners.

But that argument doesn’t hold up in reality. Amazon doesn’t set its prices for e-books — book publishers do. There’s no realistic room in its business to give Apple a 30% cut. Maybe 5%, but not 30%. Same goes for many other services. So using iTunes is a non-starter.

Pretty much spot-on. That the e-book market is set up in a way that doesn’t allow for Apple’s 70/30 split is not Apple’s problem, however.

I think it’s reasonable for Apple not to allow App Store apps to sell content on their own, within the apps themselves. But I think a better compromise would be to allow linking to a store, so long as the links open in Safari rather than within the app itself. In the app: you play by Apple’s rules. On the web: anything goes.

(Worth noting: Frommer left Silicon Alley Insider a few weeks ago to strike out on his own with SplatF. I’m really enjoying it.)

Lukas Mathis on the iPhone’s Home Button ★

The rare case where I strongly disagree with Lukas Mathis. I think Apple has done very well with the iPhone home button. Perhaps the difference for me is that I spend almost all my time on the first two or three screens of apps. Those three screens I keep meticulously organized, and I don’t use folders on them. The rest of my screens are barely organized at all — full of apps I use but rarely and which I typically launch through the search feature.

Nathan Myhrvold, King of the Patent Trolls ★

Paul Kedrosky:

Myhrvold, however, is now regularly writing columns in praise of the glories of the U.S. patent system, about how technology companies once ignored patents, and how it’s now coming back to bite them. Myhrvold, a principal in a patent holding company, somehow gets treated deferentially, in a way that, say, a hedge fund manager talking about his largest position wouldn’t be. [...]

What we have here, in short, is this: Myhrvold is happy to see patent portfolios like Nortel’s being bid up because it increases his own company’s value with its thousands of patents. This is an arms-dealer applauding the outbreak of hostilities, meanwhile pointing to people making war-like faces on the sidelines. (Whoa, watch out for those guys!) This is far, far from a disinterested observer of a fundamentally broken U.S. software patent system. Let’s end the deference.

Nailed it.

The Campaign for Real Monopoly ★

Critical Miss Gaming Society on Monopoly:

Because it’s crap. It takes ages to play, suffering long action-free periods in which the players endlessly circle the board in search of the streets they need to complete a set, and lacks the interaction between players that we look for in a game. In short, it’s boring and lacks skill.

Except that it isn’t crap. Actually. You just have to play it the way it was designed to be played.

You just have to read the fucking rules.

I had no idea most people played without the auction rule. That’s the best part of the game. (Via Marco Arment, who has some good comments on the game.)

TidBITS’s Favorite Hidden Features in Mac OS X Lion ★

Nice list of Lion details.

Spatial Impossibilities in ‘The Shining’ ★

Mind-blowing. (Part two here.)

Why CrumplePop Is Betting Everything on Final Cut Pro X ★

CrumplePop, a professional video effects development shop:

Our conclusion is that FCP X will be the best option for the largest number of professional editors going forward. We have started to port all of our products to FCP X, and hope to have this complete by late summer 2011. We won’t be supporting another NLE.

James Surowiecki: ‘Why We Don’t Need a Debt Ceiling’ ★

James Surowiecki:

In the past few years, the U.S. economy has been beset by the subprime meltdown, skyrocketing oil prices, the Eurozone debt crisis, and even the Tohoku earthquake. Now it’s staring at a new problem—a failure to raise the debt ceiling, which would almost certainly throw the economy back into recession. Unlike those other problems, however, this one would be wholly of our own making. If the economy suffers as a result, it’ll be what a soccer fan might call the biggest own goal in history.

News Redux ★

Andy Rutledge:

In digital media — websites in particular — news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise… which they call content.

Matt Gemmell: ‘Apps vs. the Web’ ★

Love this bit on “Frames of Interaction” and input scope:

We can cope with a surprisingly high degree of interaction frames, but we’re not optimised for it. Try running an operating system within a virtual machine, and tell me you’ve never made an error of input scope, sending a command to the host instead of the guest system or vice versa. Web apps within browsers are essentially the same situation.

Really smart piece.

Update: Fireballed; cached here.