Reading List

[Alias]

2/6/10

Woz freeform four day jag, acid trip, whatever: ". . . sometimes, you're not sure if it's going to work because it didn't follow all of the methodology, all of the science that's in the books... but in this case it did." Interesting creative process.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uCRijF7lxzI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uCRijF7lxzI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Motion graphics examples-resources

Digital Nation

More Digital Nation: Reshaping Warfare

The Chinese don't need 60 votes

Greenwashing crackdown

Texas rancher unlikely environmentalist

Flash death spiral

Melting glaciers' impacts

Valley solar and smartgrid p0wn

Flood Burma - Power China


Clever: Turbine Light concept uses passing cars' wind

Google: We will bring books back to life

iTablet launches from UK company

Gizmodo-Inhabit Week in Green

Ten economics pieces worth reading

Re Novel and Citrix stuff: iPad displace netbook?

Ed

[Alias]

2/8/10

Salt lick award goes to Gerber toddler meal

Death by paralysis

Ed

[Alias]

$270 iPad BOM

Quote:Although that $499 entry-level iPad is pretty much affordably by everyone, Apple will still be making a rather sizable profit on each one, if a bill-of-materials (BOM) breakdown conducted by BroadPoint AmTech analyst Marshall is to be trusted.

According to the BOM, the low-end $499 iPad only costs $270 to make, with the 9.7-inch touch-sensitive display being the most expensive element at around $100, with the 16GB SSD and aluminum case each costing only about $25.

As the storage jumps, so do Apple’s profits: the 32GB and 64GB iPads only see their costs rise another $25.50 and $76.50, respectively, but their suggested prices go up $100 and $200.

Apple’s most profitable BOM item? The 3G radio: it only costs them $16, but Apple’s charging over $130 for it.

This would be a great gig to lower price on entry to Apple's p0wn, the Apple Unified User Experience. Apple could certainly do a subscription-based rental w/streaming, a Netflix type deal (and what Hulu looks to move to). Giving up a break to the consumer on more fixed/less recurring cost to grab a bunch of recurring consumer cost.

Ed

[Alias]

5 reasons you should be scared of Apple



Ed

[polymerase]

(02-17-2010 05:58 PM)Alias Wrote:  5 reasons you should be scared of Apple



Ed

I know you post something like this for the Mac fan boy to go ape shit on so I guess I will take the bait. Five piles of crap. What it boils down to is that AAPL is very good at being secretive about future projects and won't let a douche like Jason Grady getting away spouting forth about secrets he should know he should keep his mouth shut about.

What is the alternative? The way MSFT does it. Blab endlessly years ahead of release about new projects thus trying to kill all competition that might want to compete in the same ballpark.

It really is amazing how much MSFT has blown it. Seven years ago they could say they are making this or that and competitors would just go wheels up with the thought of going head to head with Microsoft. Now I would think a competitor would laugh.

AAPL did it the long lasting way. With true corporate secrecy. No leaks. Think of technology companies which had longevity making truly innovative stuff. Like Bell Labs. A hundred year run. Microsoft will fall in the one hit wonder category. They got DOS and Windows going at the right moment. Barely.

[Alias]

Sure, that stuff's reasonable.

And true that Microsoft has a very uncertain future at the scope and scale they are now.

The stuff about unstoppable advertising intrusion seems reasonable, too, since the patent seems to be about subsidized devices.

Personally, I think Apple should forget backdooring/puppy-dog-selling/whatever less-periodically-recurring-cost items, since their devices draw users into the Apple Unified User Experience universe, anyway, of a ton of regularly-recurring-cost consumer behaviors such as streaming media subscriptions (they really should do that), the app stores, media rentals and purchases, e-books, etc, as well as developing a taste for the rest of the range of the device/hardware/software/apps/media Apple UUE platform, etc. They don't need to toss out cheezy-juicy subsidized devices.

Apple should capitalize enormous amounts of non-personally-identifiable user behavior data (just an anonymous meta-dot/datapoint for processing along with a bunch of other unique singular anonymous meta-dots/datapoints) for emerging informatics industries and their growing client base, such as locations of dots/datapoints/whatever clustering, how many, times of day, where they came from, where they're going, where they pause, how long, etc, etc, for correlating this with things such as events, cashflows, stores, offices, etc. Besides the enormous commercial applications, there's also a lot of public good, such as for traffic analysis, and perhaps at a personal-opt-in level for things such as personal medical telemetry monitoring, etc. And all this happens in realtime and crunches in realtime. Really useful, beneficial and also highly commercial commodity. And the nice thing about realtime data is the shelflife is short by definition - This type of raw data could be more like a continually recurring cost, perhaps a subscription for the informatics guys, who in turn are subscription-based.

So, with all these great revenues available, it really does seem cheezy and unnecessary to puppy-dog out some subsidized hardware with annoying ads - This idea must have been when Steve was high on meds.

I also wish Apple would fix the living room. Multi-band airport and device transceivers, with one band for interacting with an Apple television or Apple AV receiver, streaming to it from any device, simultaneously downloading the internet on another band, with other bands for game consoles, etc. Apple could clean up.

AppleTV, the Mini, Front Row remote, wireless mouse, and God forbid a wireless keyboard, etc just doesn't get it - What a freakin mess, no wonder this junk hasn't taken flight - The user is already groomed for a remote, something he/she can move around, wave around, point-and-click gratification, not all this other garbage, and something like the iPad could be like a remote, but a lot more. The ultimate electronic sedation/gratification/whatever device.

The user needs to be able to play non-Apple media such as streaming Netflix or broadcasting an Amazon video rental to their Apple Home Theater or Apple Television, but, enthralled card-carrying citizen of the Apple Unified User Experience that he/she is, will defer to Apple media often enough, as they transfer funds to their proxy internet account to cover their upcoming Apple streaming music and video payments (or pay into a storewide account 'nut'), maybe buy a few music tracks, while also friending up with an old high school daze lifestream stalker, Google-video-voice-chatting the virtues or lack of regarding John Mayer's David Duke penis versus Beyonce's vagina, checking email forwarding Obama's alien DNA Sector 86 Experiment genetic roots, posting a Buzz/tweet/blogpost about Mayer's penis versus Beyonce's vagina, scanning Wikipedia for information about penis or vagina piercings, etc, all from the comfort of an animal-piss-smelling Barcalounger ( BTW, we don't have a Barcalounger, but the carpet guys do have to come in next week or so ). Oh yeah, now with Apple's heavy-handed censorship, I don't suppose there would be any downloading of ebooks about John Mayer's penis and Beyonce's vagina .

The iPad could be that magical device. Well, Apple could furnish that entire magical Unified User Experience universe living room. And the only place where this user nirvana stuff would happen is the growing AUUE universe.

The neatest coolest stuff could happen in the Apple Unified User Experience universe. It would be a shame for this great Big Thing to stoop so low to tacky sales-schlepping cheezy stuff that's so totally unnecessary as well as tasteless. That's hardly elegant.

Ed

Well, this is OT, but kinda relates: Over at Mactech there was a funny thread about some pennywise-poundfoolish dude with an ancient PPC that chokes on Youtube, that wants to plow $$ into buffing it, sorta like draining your wallet to restore an MGTC expecting it to cruise the autobahn. And he's got SCSI peripherals, scanners and probably the last Jaz drive in the world that actually works . Sheesh, besides the fact that a faster, more-featured, higher-rez all-in-one goes for $100 these days, 1TB external HDD $100, $300 Intel solo Mini-mouse-kb to $400 Core Duo Mini-mouse-kb all day long on SF/Bay craigslist. $0 for the desktop since the guy's got Universal Binaries, so the guy can't do the math on $500-600 for something that stay on the page and do something useful, or $400-on-up for something worthless. And the guy will eventually die a death of a thousand cuts as he gradually gets shut out of more and more of web interactivity as it quits dealing with PPC user agents. Hulu is Intel-only Silverlight. Adobe will eventually quit making PPC plugins, so his beloved Youtube breaks. As it will go with offline-capable web apps. So much for a free and accessible web, but only if you can keep up with staying on the more increasingly useful page.

I like thrift and simplicity, but one of its objectives should be personal gain and greater efficiency, so if you're not gettin any, something's broke. It's a smart universe. No free lunch. GIGO. It takes energy to make energy. Dynamic equilibrium.

Now, that's where this guy ties in with consumer behavior. When personal gain and greater efficiency outweighs the thrift of loss and wretchedness, smart people make the right decision, and other people take the hard path to the thrift of lesser personal gain and efficiency, and some wretchedness thrown in the mix. Other people with lesser capital management aptitude throw money at increased personal gain and efficiency. Still other people don't even process any of this stuff, if they like it they get it.

Yeah, I'm losing it here . Anyway, Apple's UUE puts itself into the middle of that equation. A lot of personal gain and greater efficiency.

Now, personal gain is subjective, but for many it's leisure consumption, and history clearly shows that despite the changing fortunes of time, one thing has remained fairly constant, man's appetite for leisure consumption. During The Great Depression, radio sales spiked. A lot of wretchedly beaten down and broke people had a lot of leisure time on their hands, and the radio fulfilled a lot of important duties at the personal and societal level. It brought a lot of comfort and respite and entertainment, as well as information, and looking at it through a certain perspective, it was The Network of the time. It was a unifying medium. It was a sort of glue with medicinal properties.

OK, so now I might be finally getting someplace. Sometimes yammering on, blind, then sometimes you arrive somewhere .

OK, so you've got this computing thing, originally what I'd call a production production thing, very useful for producers, creators, inventors of things and ideas. Then it goes out to the Mass as the micro. Well, it's a production production device that empowers a lot of producers, creators and inventors, as well as finds adoption with leisure production people, people that like to wonk around with productive stuff on their leisure time, people that didn't buy enough irons or washing machines, for example, during The Great Depression.

But a funny thing happened, leisure consumption guys intuitively figured out they could have a lot of fun with this production production device, then a lot of cool stuff started happening and the micro started morphing, bent to the will of the huge leisure consumption majority. Well, more accurately, the micro didn't morph, the leisure consumption guys morphed their employment of it from tool to toy. So with commoditization we had this nice run of the micro bent like Blue notes, to the will of leisure consumption guys. They played it like a toy instead of the tool it is. Win win - Everybody wins, dorks, nerds, and the rest of humanity.

So now we've got this thing where 80% of the device saturation out there is still primarily production production devices, with probably like 95% of people who are leisure consumption. And where a lot of that leisure consumption happens, the house, the living room, it's a total mess. You've got to be a smart production production guy with time to kill to sort it out. Or get the Geek Squad/whomever to sort it out for you. And it probably not a good idea for a production production guy to fix stuff because they'll end up with a non-leisure-consumption-friendly setup, so it's hard getting a win for the leisure consumption guy. That Hunter Thompson Youtube is a good example of that

Well, with a lot of their stuff leisure-consumption-sided, it looks like Apple gets it, but there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in the house, the living room. Trick majorly-multi-band router, next level plug and play, Apple television, Apple home theater, wireless server, buffed iPad that rules them all, devices that can interact with every other Apple device simultaneously, intelligent software interface. Throw out the streaming media players, the Rokus, the Boxee Boxes, the Mini or nettops/settops/whatever, the wireless mouse and keyboard, the Front Row remote, etc - All that junk's obsolete. Well, no, not the Mini - That has a place for the production production and leisure production guys that the world desperately needs and will always be a big slot for, along with the other fat client stuff, the towers, iMacs, etc - That stuff will never go away (although stuff requiring heavy computational lifting, like aerospace-automotive CADCAM will go full circle from mainframe terminal to mini-mainframe to exorbitant Sparcs-RSes-Indys to commodity HW workstations back to the terminal / thin-client on internal or hosted parallel computational grid of commodity muti-processor supercomputers).

The toll for the Apple Unified User Experience universe has to get paid one way or the other. The Apple way, you get big personal gain and effortless efficiency. The other way, you pay Geek Squad to still end up with a chunky, clunky, broken, Disjointed User Experience universe, less personal gain, effort-fraught inefficiency, a mess that only a production production or leisure production dork with a lot of time to kill wonking around could appreciate.

[polymerase]

(02-18-2010 03:41 AM)Alias Wrote:  I also wish Apple would fix the living room.

You got that right. I have stilted view of the television as entertainment source since I don't think I really use it as much as the average person. I DVR the Daily Show and Colbert and something like the Olympics becomes a draw but that is about it except for the Red Sox. Even that I am going to pull the plug on this summer. I'll listen to them on something called a "radio" but life is too short to be wasting time in front of a television and certainly in New England the summer is far too short to waste a movement of it.

Apple should do something like Hulu and I shouldn't be hamstrung by a Comcast DVR to collect the shows I want to watch. But if they get it right I might end up watching too much crap on TV. We spend three day weekends now at a house without a phone or a TV set and it's like I go on vacation every week. I might snip the Comcast on the weekday house too and go on vacation every day.

I talk to my kids and post something once or twice a week. It's fun.