SF Chronicle: Home sales plunge in September. Sales of existing homes in the Bay Area and California plummeted in September and prices sank as the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting credit crunch put a squeeze on would-be home buyers, a state real estate trade group reported Wednesday.
The only real news would have been any other news.
No Comments »
NY Times: Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web. Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections. The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
Google is not doing a bad thing, by any means. But it’s too much to ask a for-profit company to not ultimately abuse the basic monopoly it’s seeking in this case.
The Open Content Alliance is the right next step. It’s worth everyone’s support.
1 Comment »
Glenn Fleishman: Software Kit for iPhone, iPod touch Applications Set for February 2008. (I)t will be interesting to see what the iPhone hacking community does. I suspect they’ll continue to explore the innards of iPhone 1.1.1, both to bring back existing third party applications for the four months and to figure out how to unlock the iPhone again. The final reason hackers won’t just wait patiently until February? Because hacking the iPhone is a challenge.
Still more questions than answers. Apple’s control-freakery with the iPhone doesn’t inspire confidence, yet, that it’ll ultimately be truly open. Still, this is unquestionably a positive move.
No Comments »
Salon: If you care about your rights, don’t buy an iPhone.
It’s only in the cell phone business that anyone would tolerate such behavior. If a company tried this in any other industry, people would howl to the heavens. Imagine the outrage if Apple or Microsoft sold desktop PCs that allowed you to connect to the Internet only through Comcast — and then, if you tried to use Earthlink instead, the company would shut down your machine. Or what if Ford allowed you to drive your new Explorer only to Wal-Mart to buy your groceries; if you went instead to Whole Foods, a company official would come by and slash your tires.
As Apple breaks the phones of people who’ve done nothing but assert rational customer rights, it is showing an attitude that will come to hurt the company in the end. I wouldn’t use this phone now if someone gave it to me.
Stay away from the iPhone if you have any common sense. Don’t reward Apple for its sleazy ways.
2 Comments »
SF Chronicle: $65 million will buy you an unfinished mansion on S.F.’s Gold Coast.
It would be one of the most expensive houses ever sold in San Francisco – a neoclassical villa with a four-story floating staircase and glass atrium, a facade of French limestone and a roof of 19th century Florentine tile is on the market for $65 million. Despite the price tag, the home is a mere shell – it doesn’t have interior walls, floors or ceilings – and will require more than $10 million to complete.
As more and more people sink below the financial waves, the super-rich do better and better. This is by design — by national policies that have divided Americans by class more than ever, rewarding the people at the very top, largely at the expense of our children and grandchildren, who either will pay to fix the mess we’re creating or will live in a world that makes this one look positively egalitarian.
1 Comment »
Will Shipley: iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?
But with the iPod Touch, what’s Apple’s excuse for locking up the platform? Why can’t I write programs for this device? Who might it hurt? Why is Steve announcing that he’s playing cat-and-mouse with developers who intend to do so? Is Apple so far removed from its customers that even when the latter overwhelming votes for extending a device (by downloading iPhone programs in the hundreds of thousands), Apple’s response is, “No, you can’t do that. We know what you want, you don’t. You want AJAX apps, you just don’t know it yet.”
That sure reminds me of the old, crappy Apple. The one that almost went bankrupt because of its hubris.
I don’t write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I’ve always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly — trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.
Apple’s control-freakery is more than inconvenient for customers and potential partners. It’s insulting, and counterproductive.
I still use a Mac because it’s the best tool for the job — and because it’s infinitely extensible. But I won’t consider an iPhone or iPod Touch until the company lets go of its insistence that Apple, not the customers, are in charge. That may be never. Too bad for Apple, which is losing a customer.
1 Comment »
Look near the bottom of the story about the conviction of a Silicon Valley executive for flagrant violations of law in issuing stock options, the SF Chronicle. In “Legal drama as backdating trial ends in ‘guilty’,” you’ll find this:
Many in Silicon Valley viewed the prosecution as a government witch hunt, arguing that backdating didn’t harm anyone. Companies routinely handed employees and executives better odds of big profits by granting them options at trading lows. They broke the law when they failed to properly account for the practice or disclose it to investors, inflating their companies’ profits
The mantra of the valley, and of corrupt people everywhere, is that breaking the law didn’t harm anyone because, well, it was for the good of the company. Bull. It was outright lying to shareholders. That is the bottom line.
No Comments »
NY Times: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich. (M)any such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more. When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.
Envy and greed: what a great country.
No Comments »
Entries (RSS)
and 
