Quote / Extrapolation
If “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, then we can assume science is the process through which magic becomes technology / technique.
Similarly, if “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”, we can assume that immigration is often a form of time travel. Stating it this way is probably horribly offensive and condescending, but there’s a ring of truth, there.
[I’m fairly certain these are Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson quotes, respectively. But the idea has stuck in my head longer than the attribution.]
Today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point – it marks the point where Android starts to surge past Apple the way Windows surged past Apple in personal computers back in the 1990s. Moreover, I also believe that Jobs knows this, and doesn’t care. I think he’d rather have a small share of the market where he can exert complete control and create beautiful products that look exactly the way he wants them to look. Thus we have the new iPhone 4, which will cost a little more but will have pretty icons, pretty ads, and a cool video chat feature that only works if the person you’re talking to has the same Apple phone that you do. If you want to buy into Apple’s world, and you can deal with AT&T as your carrier, you’ll probably be very happy.
This has been my stance on Apple vs Android for a while. Google is the champion of owning a market, and collapsing it into a smaller one owned entirely by google. Apple, on the the hand, has spent the last decade building integrated experiences that Apple controls all aspects of, and gets paid at every transaction point of.
If I had to bet on who was going to make the most money in the long run, the smart bet is Google. But remember what Jobs said to John Sculley: “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Apple is focused on a different end game than selling the most phones. It would much rather sell the most important phone.
It’s got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it’s not like they’re doing something fucking crazy. Everybody’s had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren’t possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn’t make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it’s too late. You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Stephen Jay Gould (via butdoesitfloat) (via jeremyturner) (via merlin)
Hijacking this tendency is my current obsession, FYI.
My favorite part of The Dark Knight is when the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital, and he says: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just DO things… I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”
And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.
Thoughts on tour « Hoehn’s Musings (via withabang)
More Dark Knight related life advice.
In Denmark, it’s legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It’s also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about. They promised him a response, then didn’t respond. So now he’s reporting himself to the police. He wants a trial, so that the legality of the DRM-breaking law can be tested in court.
Dane who ripped his DVDs demands to be arrested under DRM law - Boing Boing
Digital martyr.
(via david-noel) (via mikehudack)
This is known as civil disobedience. The part where he offers himself up as a demonstration of the unfairness of the punishment is the key difference - don’t refer to your illegal downloading as a form of protest unless you are actually demonstrating the flaws in the existing system.
Where facts are few, experts are many.
Donald Gannon (via enquotations) (via thegirlriot)
*Looks accusingly at half of twitter.*
So, we asked New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at last night’s benefit for The News Literacy Project, what advice did he have for young people who want to go into journalism these days, you know, given the job market? “Why don’t we not go there?” he laughed. Then he went there anyway. “Um, what I would tell them is the industry is in the midst of a massive transition,” he said. “But the core of the fundamental job is critical. We have to re-create ourselves, but the heart of what we’re going to re-create is still journalism. The way people get information is changing, but the need for information will remain constant.”
He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”
My little brother almost bought an album from iTunes the other day because it was too much trouble to find a pirated version. Why on earth hasn’t the music industry shifted their marketing to how it is more convienent to buy authentic than the “we will sue you for every dime if you don’t”approach
(via danielpatricio)
Bankrupting potential customers would be universally panned as moronic if it was a pricing strategy.
Why is it an appropriate response to piracy?
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
