Linked List: January 3, 2012

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

RIM Cuts BlackBerry PlayBook Price by as Much as $400 

Zach Epstein, BGR:

Research In Motion’s debut tablet has been something of a disappointment for the Waterloo, Ontario-based vendor.

Well, I suppose Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was “something of a disappointment” too.

Apple’s Upcoming January Event 

Clayton Morris:

This event will focus on iTunes University and Apple in education. […] Steve Jobs was intimately involved with this project before his passing. He gave a hat tip to the textbook side of this project in the Isaacson biography.

Larry Downes on Best Buy 

Larry Downes, in a piece for Forbes that’s shamelessly split across five “pages”:

But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.

It really is that simple. I find shopping at Best Buy to be insulting and annoying.

Proposed Law Prohibits TSA Employees From Dressing Like Cops 

Cory Doctorow:

The STRIP Act, proposed in the US House of Reps, would require TSA employees to stop dressing like police officers, because they aren’t cops, and when they give orders to travellers, travellers assume that these are the orders of real law enforcement officers, rather than minor bureaucrats.

Let’s change their title from “officer” back to “screener”, too. (Via Ben Brooks.)

Nobody Understands Debt 

Paul Krugman:

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

Glenn Fleishman on Roboto 

Good article — and, in a self-referential twist, it’s typeset using Roboto itself — but to me, Roboto is just the new Arial.

‘Liz Taylor Knows It, the President Knows It, the Bum Knows It, and You Know It.’ 

The whole idea of Vertu — a company (well, a Nokia subsidiary) that sells $6,000 cell phones that are nowhere near state-of-the-art in any regard other than in the use of leather, going into a market against a company like Apple that sells what’s widely held to be the best cell phone in the world starting at just $199 — reminds me of Andy Warhol’s great quote about Coke:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Speaking of Vertu 

Rob Beschizza, writing for BoingBoing on Vertu’s $200 USB cable. Not a bad price when you’ve already spent $6,000 on your Symbian phone.

Will Wright on TV Complexity 

Game designer Will Wright, in an interview with Reuters:

It’s kind of remarkable. I’ve set up a couple of PCs and a few TVs over the last couple of years. Buying a new television and setting it up is far more complicated now than buying a computer and setting it up.

Sounds like an opportunity.

‘Clopen’ Sounds Like Something You Treat With Antibiotics 

Speaking of Danny Sullivan, he wrote a good piece on Android’s “just buy a new device” software updates, calling it more “clopen” than open:

A big reason behind this mess is that Google doesn’t actually sell the Android operating system to consumers. If it did, it would probably care more about ensuring customers (because that’s what they would be) were covered from start to finish.

The Android 4 page from Google touts all the advantages that the new operating system offers. The page is written for consumers. But nothing on it explains how consumers can actually get the operating system.

It isn’t just that Google doesn’t sell the Android operating system to consumers. It is that the consumer is Google’s product. Android is a delivery system to serve the consumer to Google’s target market — the advertisers. So Google’s customer for Android is not the consumer (with the arguable exception of the Nexus phones), but rather the carriers.

Google’s ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Sponsored Post Campaign for Chrome 

Danny Sullivan:

Imagine you’re someone trying to understand the benefits to using Google Chrome versus other browsers. Out of 21 million possible matches, two of Google’s sponsored garbage posts make it into the top ten results. 

“Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global.”

This seems to be in direct contradiction of Google’s own web spam policies.