Posts by Stephen Judd
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I find both the inspiration lacking and the subsequent mourning a bit misplaced. (Jack Elder reports seeing three actual memorial tattoos already. No doubt there are more). I accept that I'm out of step with the majority, and perhaps the problem lies with me, but it's all a bit Princess Diana to me. "Thank you" Post-It notes on the Apple Store window? Weird. When the tributes are so uncritical, I think the charge of hagiography stands.
Addendum: will people feel like this when Larry Ellison dies? Why not?
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Russell Brown,
there's a whiff of faint praise there.
More than a whiff and more than faint, I hope. Some artists need impresarios.
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Jobs was a significant figure in industrial design, turning mere electronic devices into objects of desire. It's hard to say what he actually invented though beyond an incredibly appealing brand. The crucial technology and the actual design was always the work of other people, like Wozniak, Ives, Raskin, Tesler, the PARC crew, Frog Design, BSD, Mach, yadda yadda. As far as I can tell, what Jobs brought to it was superb taste and a singular ability to yell at the right people the right way to do things he personally could not.
The very things that typify his approach to computing and built the brand are also philosophically repellent to me. At one level, as so many in this thread testify, his design vision enabled creativity, at others it has locked down and restricted it.
I find the hagiographical tone for another domineering CEO a bit much to take. Chris' comments may be in poor taste but Apple and Jobs' brand values are definitely in conflict with the realities of high-tech manufacturing among other things. When can we step back and assess the Jobs reputation as a whole if not now?
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to chris,
$90 p/w for power? Are prices really this high now?
Doesn't seem excessive for a 9 pr 10 person household (four kids, four grandkids). There's going to be a crapload of hot water just keeping everyone clean and in clean clothes, not to mention heating and cooking.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
If only success in politics rested on rigorous logic applied to undisputed facts.
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... all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.
Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.
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Getting back to the theme of Labour and the media for a moment, this seems well-done to me.
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Clearly Google projects a much more trustworthy brand than Facebook.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
this data improves the quality of my searches
How do you know? Perhaps it's giving you an ever-narrower subset of results, tailored for optimal ad response.
I think it would be interesting to try the same search from a range of cookie-free browsers with different IP numbers.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to JacksonP,
How do I find out what I’ve been searching for?
Here.
As for your Facebook data, there is no reason to think they don't collect a lot more than what you get in that download. Indeed that's the whole point of the show Russell's doing tonight.