- iPhone rate plans announced
I just checked my current plan with T-Mobile. I’m currently paying around $50/month for 500 minutes per month with unlimited nights and weekends. We’re sitting at a week away from the end of the month, and I’ve only used 224 minutes so far. The cheapest plan for the iPhone, at $59.99, has 450 minutes. Since I don’t appear to even need that many minutes, and it only costs $10 more than what I already pay, gives me 150 more free SMS messages, unlimited data, 5000 night and weekend minutes, rollover minutes (I had none with T-Mobile), and unlimited mobile-to-mobile — it sounds like a pretty good deal to me. And compared to a lot of AT&T’s other plans, I think it’s pretty obvious that Apple did a bit more strong-arming of AT&T to make the plan affordable and (most importantly) simple. Kudos!
Too bad I still have to wait until August, though. (But I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up an opportunity to go to film school just for a phone, no matter how cool that phone is.)
- Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
People often ask me if I’m worried about teens today. The answer is yes, but it’s not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic teens, I’m very worried about the stress that they’re under, the lack of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and they hyper-scheduling and surveillance. I’m worried about their unrealistic expectations for becoming rich and famous, their lack of worth ethic after being pampered for so long, and the lack of opportunities that many of them have to even be economically stable let alone better off than their parents. I’m worried about how locking teens indoors coupled with a fast food/junk food advertising machine has resulted in a decrease in health levels across the board which will just get messy as they are increasingly unable to afford health insurance. When it comes to ostracized teens, I’m worried about the reasons why society has ostracized them and how they will react to ongoing criticism from hegemonic peers. I cringe every time I hear of another Columbine, another Virgina Tech, another site of horror when an outcast teen lashes back at the hegemonic values of society.
I worry about the lack of opportunities available to poor teens from uneducated backgrounds. I’m worried about how Wal-Mart Nation has destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor as these youth enter the workforce. I’m worried about what a prolonged war will mean for them. I’m worried about how they’ve been told that to succeed, they must be a famous musician or sports player. I’m worried about how gangs provide the only meaningful sense of community that many of these teens with ever know.
- Confessions of an iPhone tester
Thandu is one of about 200 field technicians who have been secretly testing the iPhone and looking for technical glitches for more than 10 weeks and counting. AT&T routinely tests new devices, but the iPhone has been different, Thandu says. The technicians have logged more than 10,000 hours on the phone, including more than 5,000 hours of voice calls and near 5 gigabytes of data usage. Most phones, he says, get about half that much test time.
People keep expecting the iPhone to have all sorts of 1st-gen problems “like most other Apple products” — never mind the fact that I’ve owned three 1st-gen Apple products and never had any problems with them (one of which, an iMac G4 800, I still use!) — and I keep saying that there’s a very low chance of there being any because of how important the iPhone is to Apple’s future. This story really drives home the point; the amount of testing that’s gone into this device seems to have been pretty aggressive, and I just don’t think that there’s going to be any show-stoppers with this product.
- Apple Mac grabs 7.6% home computer market share
In a sidebar accompanying the article “iPhone mania nears fever pitch,” which we’ll get to in a moment, USA Today reports that “home computer market share” for Apple Mac in May 2004 stood at 3.2% and has now rocketed to 7.6% in May 2007. Those figures, which also accompany iPod and iTunes numbers, are sourced: “Apple, USA Today research, Wolf Bytes, IAG Research. By process of elimination, knowing what each source provides, we assume that the market share number came from USA Today research. We are also assuming these figures pertain to the U.S. market as opposed to worldwide which have always been lower historically.
- How children lost the right to roam in four generations
When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.
It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.
Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.
He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.
This is sort of an odd concept to me, because growing up in Burien I walked everywhere. 10 miles in a day was not entirely unheard of. But like most things in my life, I was probably the exception to the rule.
- Call Centre Worker Kills Himself After Pressure From Telstra
This is why I don’t work in a call centre anymore.
- The Fascinating History of Oregon Trail Developer MECC
For a lot of Apple geeks, the love affair with Apple began at school, using an Apple II while playing Oregon Trail, the all-time best game where you could explore the wild west and see your whole family die of dysentery or snake bite, all before afternoon recess.
I have to say that I was one of those avid Oregon Trail fans. In fact, I still have a copy of the colour version, which I fire up every now and again for nostalgia’s sake. For me, however, the real threat of the game was the Snake River. That river in the game traumatised me so much that I still get a little nervous whenever I drive over the river in real life.
- US states renamed for countries with similar GDPs
Kind of funny, actually, in that a friend of mine actually just moved from Washington to Turkey…
- Daring Fireball hits the nail on the head with iPhone’s 3rd-party app support
Gruber:
If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.
- Electronic Arts, id Software announce commitment to Mac gaming
I hope it’s true, because if it is then the renaissance of the Mac has truly begun. But I’m not holding my breath; we’ve heard this all before.
- More than just resistance to science
Evolution is a theory that relies on population thinking (as Ernst Mayr pointed out many times) which is hard to grasp if one’s understanding of the world is hierarchical. Population thinking is an interactionist model of the world. So is the role of genes. For a conservative (yes, hierarchical mindset is conservative in a psychological sense, i.e. not in a particular political sense: if GOP at any point in history had a platform plank that is not based on a hierarchical view of the world, that plank was liberal and thus loved by the majority of voters), it is easy to think of a gene causing (determining) a trait. Or, a more sophisticated version: gene A causes expression of gene B which causes expression of gene C…and so on until the last gene in the cascade cuses (determines) the trait. It is almost impossible to grasp the interaction of genes among themselves and with the environment, with no single factor determining anything, but the trait emerging from the interaction. That is why conservatives misunderstand free market as well.
- Creationism is just one symptom of conservative pathology
Modern American Creationists are not just a small but vocal group of marginalized wackos one can just laugh at. They constitute one of the important prongs of the multi-pronged strategy of the Conservative/Regressive movement to gut the Enlightenment and bring about the Second Dark Ages.
Just like the forces of anti-modernism divvy up their responsibilities as the IDC crowd, pro-Iraq-war crowd, NRA crowd, anti-choice crowd, racist crowd, tax-cutting crowd, libertarian crowd, Horowitz crowd, homophobic crowd, etc., are delegated to speak to somewhat different audiences in hope of recruiting as broad a swath of population as possible for their cause, so we also have to divvy up our responsibilities and each one of us needs to use one’s own skills and expertise in countering the a ssault of one appropriate prong.
In other words, we have to have people trained in defeating the rhetoric of Creationists, other people trained in defeating the rhetoric of the Superpatriots, yet other people trained in defeating the rhetoric of the anti-choice crowd, etc. But although we need to have an approriate division of labor, it is of utmost importance to always keep in mind that all those groups are not independent, but just different weapons in the arsenal of a large (and quite unified, for now) movement to turn back the clock at least a few centuries (two millenia is the ultimate goal) on social policies, and at least about 125 years back (to the Robber Baron era) on economic policies.
- Why creationists need to be creationists
Is the “argument from morals” actually an argument from fear of modern civilization? Is the world becoming too confusing? Is this a nostalgic pull towards some imaginary Golden Age in the past? Or is this a fear that humans, left to their own devices, cannot build a reasonable moral code? After all, conservatism as a worldview is based on the (outdated and erroneous) view that people are inherently bad and that only strict upbringing through harsh (Dobsonian) discipline can build “character” and lead to moral behavior in adulthood. If people get their morals from strict childrearing practices of their parents, and parents get their moral guidance from God, then removing God will, logically, lead to the emergence of a whole generation of immoral brutes incapable of raising another generation of moral people. The precarious chain has been broken and there is no way to put it back together again.
…
The extreme Dobsonian Strictfathering results in an extreme need for an external locus of moral authority. As American children (unlike their counterparts in most of the world) are kicked out of the house to fend for themselves at the age of eighteen, the reliance on one’s father for moral guidance is forcefully replaced by a need for reliance for moral guidance on one’s Higher Father (isn’t this something Bush said to Woodward?). This type of childrearing leads to people too insecure to find strength of moral conviction within themselves, thus the idea that our code of ethics stems from our psychological make-up honed by our evolutionary history is not just unfathomable, but extremely threatening. The notion of internal moral locus is just not something that people raised this way can comprehend.
- The campaign against peak limiting finally kicks into gear
Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, said: “A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don’t trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up.”
I’ve been very much against the practise of peak limiting for years. I’d first noticed it with Marilyn Manson’s albums, where the average loudness of each album from Antichrist Superstar to Holy Wood rose dramatically. I even managed to get a pre-mastered copy of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, which I prefer over the final release (which I also have) because of the increased dynamic range of the album. When you get to hear the differences side-by-side, it’s really eye-opening.
- Leopard and the new desktop revolution
After getting a peek at Delicious Library 2, which hasn’t yet been shown publicly, Mac programmer Scott Stevenson wrote that the program is “going to be a major eye-opener for Mac developers. This last point is important. Whatever you thought was state-of-the-art in Tiger is going to be blown to bits with all of the new API (application programming interface) available in Leopard.”
What I think is most interesting about this paradigm shift in Mac application interfaces is that I think it democratises the GUI, putting the look and feel of the OS into the hand of app developers while still maintaining a more-or-less consistent user experience, which has always been the hallmark of the Mac OS.
- Bible Attacked as ‘Obscene’ in Hong Kong
TELA, which oversees the publishing industry in Hong Kong, refused to divulge any specific details of the complaints. However, according to the Mail & Guardian, local media reported that the complaints referred to acts of violence, rape and cannibalism in the Old and New Testaments.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
*breathes*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
- Retard Farm Behind Hideous 2012 Logo Now Directly Attack Brains Via Animation
Animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympic Games has been removed from the organisers’ website after it triggers epileptic fits.
So not only do they create one of the most hideously ugly logos I’ve ever seen in my life, but to promote it, they created an animation that causes epileptic seizures!
On the subject of the logo itself, I’m honestly amazed that any of the designers of this abortion in graphic design have managed to stay employed in the first place. I mean, really: how did they even graduate art school with design taste that bad? (Not that I ever went to art school, but still…)
The shape is ugly. The colours are ugly. The typeface for London is incredibly anti-complimentary and inappropriate to the otherwise repulsive logo. What were they thinking? How could anyone with any sense of design allow that logo to have happened?
And the animated version? It looks like the 2 and 1 are either fucking or getting fucked by the 0 and 2. (It’s difficult to tell, seeing as how they’re numbers which lack genitalia.) Then again, I don’t think anybody would ever want to fuck anything that ugly, so doing it with yourself is probably the only viable option.
(Hat tip: Warren Ellis)
- Speaking of small galaxies…
A dying galaxy near the Milky Way appears to be sowing the seeds of its own rebirth and may hold the secret to the apparent reincarnation of several other similar galaxies. The phoenix-like process may also help resolve a long-standing mystery about missing dark matter clumps near the Milky Way.
- Smallest galaxy hints at hidden population
This is pretty cool: they’ve found the tiniest galaxy ever observed and it’s only 120,000ly away, and there could be more!
- Did Pirates really say “arrr?”
No, but they did chase busty wenches through Caribbean ports.
- Amusing interview with Bill Gates
My favourite part:
GARFIELD: I want to ask you one more thing: Those Mac ads — how do you feel about the John Hodgman character?
GATES: I can’t comment on someone else’s ad.
GARFIELD: OK … but he’s you.
GATES: Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on someone else’s ad.
GARFIELD: OK, well, Bill Gates, thank you so much for joining us.
(Silence)
GARFIELD: Can I just have a clean goodbye?
(Silence)
GARFIELD: OK, can you just say goodbye? Thank you or goodbye or something like that?
GATES: Goodbye.
- The real price of doing business with the record industry
It’s not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It’s piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be “the labels’ friend,” and not the artists’.
Whatever your opinion is of Courtney Love, never make the mistake in thinking she’s not smart.
- Q & A with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails
I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off.
An absolutely fantastic interview with Trent Reznor where he discusses whether it’s the fans or the record labels who are the real pirates.