Linked List: February 20, 2012

Monday, 20 February 2012

Lex Friedman Makes the Case for Siri on the Mac ★

Lex Friedman:

And, of course, there’s transcription. Apple has never been hesitant to offer built-in competition to existing third-party apps, and while I’m sure the folks at Nuance wouldn’t appreciate an OS-level transcription service, I’m equally confident that Apple’s customers really would.

Siri on the Mac would be a huge accessibility win, if for the speech-to-text dictation alone.

The Oatmeal Tried to Watch ‘Game of Thrones’ and This Is What Happened ★

Infuriatingly spot-on.

Not Just Safari ★

Dean Hachamovitch, vice president of Internet Explorer:

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?

Guess what the answer is. Just guess.

Google Didn’t ‘Track’ iPhones, but It Did Bypass Safari’s Privacy Settings ★

Danny Sullivan has a good summary of last week’s WSJ story about Google circumventing Safari’s default setting to disallow third-party browser cookies. (I’m pretty sure he’s wrong that Mobile Safari defaults to disallowing all cookies, though.) Bottom line: the Journal story sensationalized what Google was doing, but Google still doesn’t come out of this looking good.

Update: I just double-checked on an iPhone restored to factory settings, and Safari’s “Accept cookies” preference defaults to “From visited”.

Dan Frakes on What’s New in Mail in Mountain Lion ★

Lots of improvements, and one interesting omission: RSS feed reading has been removed.

That’s a Blank, All Right ★

Jack Schofield, writing for ZDNet UK, “Apple Briefs Bloggers, Blanks New York Times”:

Apple has a track record of playing favourites with publications, so that a handful of journalists get treated like royalty while the plebs consider themselves lucky if they can extract a “no comment”. Of course, these very select American publications retain their editorial independence, but there’s always a hidden threat: they know that if they don’t provide the right sort of coverage, they can be excommunicated. And it looks as though that’s just happened to The New York Times.

Except that’s not what happened at all. Schofield’s “correction”, appended to the column:

Good for Pogue. It doesn’t change the fact that Apple is playing favourites, and Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt — who says he has been covering Apple since 1982 — has published Apple public relations’ new media pecking order.

It may not “change the fact that Apple is playing favorites”, but it does change the entire premise of Schofield’s column — that Apple “excommunicated” The New York Times because of its reporting on Apple’s use of Chinese manufacturing. No doubt the Times would have loved to have scored the exclusive Tim Cook interview, and, let’s face it, the “iEconomy” series certainly didn’t help their case. But the fact is, the Wall Street Journal probably would have gotten the same exclusive interview regardless if the “iEconomy” series had run. And David Pogue’s A-list status as a product reviewer is unchanged.

Regarding yours truly’s status on that same A-list, Schofield writes:

Someone with Apple Royalty status, such as The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, might well be blasé about this level of attention, but it’s pretty unusual stuff for bloggerdom.

No, it’s not. Previously, it’s true that Apple PR’s “prerelease access to new stuff” A-list included only the major national newspapers and news weeklies: the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, Time, and Newsweek. Over the last few years, however, that list has expanded to include writers from several online-only publications: MG Siegler, Josh Topolsky/The Verge, Jim Dalrymple/The Loop, Engadget, Slashgear, and others.

This level of attention from Apple is no longer unusual for “bloggerdom” — at least for those denizens of “bloggerdom” who get things right and don’t publish fabricated scurrilous accusations that have already been publicly refuted.

(As regards Elmer-DeWitt’s aforelinked “pecking order” — any writer who published a review of Mountain Lion with pre-announcement access to the software surely received the same sort of one-on-one briefing I did. The briefing goes hand-in-hand with the access to the pre-release product.)

Why Do We Still Care About the Dow? ★

Sharp piece by Adam Davidson for the NYT Magazine:

And those are the least of the Dow’s problems. More troubling is that it ignores the overall size of companies and pays attention to only their share prices. This causes all sorts of oddities. ExxonMobil, for example, divides its value into nearly five billion lower-cost shares, while Caterpillar has around 650 million more expensive ones. Therefore ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies in history, pulls less weight on the Dow than a company less than a fifth its size.

I knew the Dow was imprecise and rather arbitrary compared to something like the S&P 500, but the more I learn about the Dow the more nonsensical I realize it is.