Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues.
This just reeks of greedy desperation to attempt to boost DVD sales. Unfortunately for Warner Brothers, it won’t work.
If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime. If I can’t add it to Netflix, I’ll just forget about it and probably never see it.
Maybe the studios’ problem isn’t that people can rent movies. Maybe there are just fewer people motivated to buy and keep their own copies of the studios’ decreasingly interesting movies on plastic discs of hostility.
So with all the focus on tax rates, I sat down with my 2010 returns, calculator in hand. I’m still reeling from the results.
I paid 24 percent of my adjusted gross income in federal taxes and 37 percent in combined federal, state and local income taxes.
I just did the same calculation on my 2010 returns. While they’re not quite as high as Stewart’s, my numbers really make me wish for Romney’s tax rate.
Equally rankling to many is New York City’s unincorporated business tax, which is “charged to every individual or unincorporated entity carrying on a trade, business or profession — in whole or part — in New York City,” according to the New York City Department of Finance. “I despise it,” Mr. Willens said. (As head of his own firm, Robert Willens L.L.C. in New York City, he pays the tax.) “You’ve already paid federal, state and local income tax on the same income. It’s double taxation. It’s odious. I hate it. The self-employed are supposed to be the backbone of the economy. They’re treated very harshly. I guess there’s no organized lobby for the self-employed.”
This is one of the (many) reasons I live just above New York City, not in it. New York State already imposes a largetax burden, but New York City makes it much worse.
New York City’s additionaltaxes effectively tell self-employed people to live somewhere else.
It seems to me that Siri is slowly entering this area of ‘nice to show but not actually useful’. I know a quite few people with an iPhone 4S and I asked around a bit and they all almost regretfully acknowledge that they, in fact, don’t really use it anymore, once you get beyond the newness of it all.
Siri has two big problems:
Managing people’s expectations: It’s quite good at the commands and tasks it was optimized for, but it can never understand what you mean as well as a human could.
Reliability: Siri’s service reliability seems to be getting worse over time — not just misinterpreting what was said, but responding with an error indicating that the service can’t handle commands right now. Anecdotally, I’ve had about a 50% failure rate recently.
After a few failures when trying to use a feature, a lot of people will get permanently discouraged and just stop using it. Reliability is a very serious problem for Siri that I hope is getting the attention it deserves within Apple.
But I still use Siri. My wife still uses Siri. Last night at dinner, my friend used Siri. I don’t think Boris and his friends are a representative sample.
Great news: this new software update makes it much faster. Page-turns are now as fast as the Kindle 4 and Nook Simple Touch. Navigation and menus have improved to be about the same speed as the Nook’s, and in the ballpark of the Kindle 4’s (but a bit slower).
It’s still not perfect: I still dislike the unintuitive touch interface, proneness to accidental actions and backwards page-turns, and lack of physical page-turn buttons. But this update makes the formerly frustrating Kindle Touch into a decent product.
Thanks to MindNode for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:
MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.
Rocky Agrawal on Google’s sometimes misleading stats that make Google+ sound more widely adopted than it might really be:
Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place.
The number of accounts created on a free web service is almost meaningless. Not only are some customers worth much more than others to a service, but a nontrivial portion of accounts on any free service often don’t correspond to actual humans using the service. Even if you somehow block all automated spam, spam-like human activity like bulk affiliate marketing will still distort the numbers. And a lot of accounts are duplicates created in error when people forgot about their original accounts or confused the registration form for the login form. Should all of these count?
When multiple services are bundled into one login, like Google’s, a very large portion of the bigger service’s userbase (e.g. Gmail) might not even realize that they have an “account” on the smaller one (in this case, Google+). Should they count?
Even for the real people who intentionally register to use the service, as this article points out, most abandon their accounts shortly after registering. I created an account to try Google+ and effectively abandoned it after a few minutes. I don’t consider myself a Google+ user. Should I count?
I prefer to gauge a social network’s success on more subjective factors: How many people do I know who use it? How much do I feel like I’m missing by not using it?
There are a lot of stories out there which are genuine examples of terrible government overreach and/or the evils of the current copyright system. Megaupload’s story is not one of them.
Megaupload is actually a great anti-SOPA argument: it’s an example showing that we already have the means to fight online piracy without SOPA. Maybe we can’t fight it as quickly, cheaply, and effectively as SOPA would, but our current procedures also have very few negative side effects and much less potential for abuse.
Every few years, the MPAA’s lobbying power, rhetoric, and immense campaign contributions succeed in purchasing a bill in Congress to advance their agenda in a way that’s hostile to the technology industry and consumers.
Their bills have had mixed success and usually die before being brought to a vote, but SOPA and PIPA came frighteningly close to becoming law. The internet-wide protest this week seems to have stalled their progress and probably killed them for now.
But what will happen when the MPAA buys the next SOPA? We can’t protest every similar bill with the same force. Eventually, our audiences will tire of calling their senators for whatever we’re asking them to protest this time.
Eventually, we will lose.
Such ridiculous, destructive bills should never even pass committee review, but we’re not addressing the real problem: the MPAA’s buying power in Congress. This is a campaign finance problem.
We can attack this by aggressively supporting campaign finance reform to reduce the role of big money in U.S. policy. This is the goal of groups such as United Republic and Rootstrikers.
It’s also worth reconsidering our support of the MPAA. The MPAA is a hate-sink, a front to protect its members from negative PR. But unlike the similarly purposed Lodsys (and many others), it’s easy to see who the MPAA represents: Disney, Sony Pictures, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. (Essentially, all of the major movie studios.)
The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.
Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.
Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.
They use our support to buy these laws.
So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.
This metaphor only makes sense if we assume that pies behave in ways that pies doesn’t actually behave. The argument only makes sense if we pretend the economy behaves in similarly imaginary ways.
Kelly Clay paraphrasing an anonymous Google engineer:
While he says there is no direct pressure to conform to “crazy hours,” he hints at the reason he lives a Google-centric life: His pay is directly related to the amount of time he spends with Google. For those who can’t keep up with the demand, they simply have no choice but to leave, as previous (and notably older) Google employees have done when they must make the choice between raising a family or getting a raise. (I personally know at least one former Seattle-area Googler who quit under similar circumstances after being forced to either choose seeing his newborn less, or receive a demotion if he didn’t travel more.)
This workaholism culture has infected much of the tech industry, especially startups. It’s sad that it has even hit Google to at least some degree.
Even before my wife was pregnant, I never let a job prevent me from having a healthy relationship and home life. You just need to stand up for yourself: if you need to work long hours constantly (not just in occasional “crunch times”) to remain competitive and reasonably paid, your employer has serious cultural problems that will probably never be fixed.
There are plenty of employers out there who respect their employees enough to permit them to have a work-life balance.
Screen size is a clear differentiation from the iPhone that stands out in stores, attracts people’s attention when comparison-shopping, and trains reviewers to assume that bigger is better, and Apple has shown no interest in competing by matching the larger sizes.
A bigger footprint yields a much larger internal volume, allowing manufacturers to get around Android’s historically poor battery life by just adding much bigger batteries.
Some of the increased internal volume can be eschewed to achieve an overall thinner phone than otherwise possible, especially when the handful of thick components like the camera can be moved to a thick lump on one end that reviewers will ignore when discussing the phone’s thinness.
This makes a lot of sense, and it’s in line with how Apple has kept around old iPhone models since the third-generation product’s launch.
Cheap 7” Android tablets are now selling in meaningful numbers (mostly the Kindle Fire and Nook Color), but I haven’t seen a single credible review claiming that anyone should buy one over an iPad for any significant reason except their much lower prices.
The Kindle Fire and Nook Color are $199 and the iPad starts at $499. How far down can Apple push the price of the iPad 2’s basic design, maybe with only 8 GB of flash? $199 probably isn’t possible and $399 probably isn’t a significant enough reduction to change anything, but if they can get it down to $299, that would take a lot of wind out of the 7” tablets’ half-assed sails.
Thanks to Scrivener for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:
Writing a book or research paper is about more than hammering away at the keys until it’s done. Research, shuffling index cards to find that elusive structure - most software is only fired up after much of the hard work is completed.
Enter Scrivener, a content-generation tool that lets you compose and structure long and difficult documents based on material from multiple sources. Adopted by novelists, screenwriters, journalists, lawyers and academics alike, the program allows users to split the editor and view documents, PDF files, multimedia and other research materials next to each other. A virtual corkboard and outliner help with structuring or providing an overview of the draft. Collate, read and edit related text without affecting its place in the whole using Scrivener’s Collections feature. Close out the world in Full Screen mode. And when you’re finished, export to e-readers or the most popular word processing programs for submission.
This Ars Technica article by Jacqui Cheng is interesting from the pros’ perspective, but the idea that the Mac Pro is being neglected is short-sighted:
The fact that the Mac Pro seems to be on Apple’s back burner is making professional users nervous and forcing them to begin looking at other—non-Mac—hardware solutions to ensure their future employability. …
With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old—and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old—these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple’s commitment to the pro market.
Since the Mac Pro’s introduction in 2006, it has always followed the Xeon CPU roadmap. New Mac Pros are released when Intel releases new Xeon CPUs for them to use. That’s it. I’ve given away my secret on how to very accurately predict when the Mac Pro will be updated (and when it won’t be).
There’s not much about the Mac Pro for Apple to update between Xeon launches. The chipsets (and the ports they support) are also dependent on Intel’s server-class roadmap, so it wouldn’t have been easy, for instance, to have released a Thunderbolt Mac Pro update (with the same CPUs) while waiting for the next Xeon.
Apple can’t switch away from Xeons for the Mac Pro, and Intel hasn’t yet released the dual-socket successor to the current lineup’s CPUs. It was scheduled for release a couple of months ago, but Intel delayed it, and estimates put its release at early March. So — ready for this crazy rumor? — I bet we’ll see new Mac Pros in March, at which point pros can go back to complaining only (and legitimately) about Final Cut Pro X and Apple’s attitude toward the pro software market.
Actually, [the iPhone owner] said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.
And a lot of people started condemning the iPhone mute-switch behavior, which doesn’t mute all sounds all the time.
The iPhone makes very few exceptions to the Mute switch.1 For the most part, exceptions to the Mute switch are:
The Music and Video apps, when you tell them to play something. This makes sense, because you explicitly, right then, not a week ago, asked the phone to do something that a reasonable person would assume would make noise.
The Alarm and Timer in the Clock app. Timer is a one-time countdown that you can only set for up to 24 hours, useful for cooking, laundry, and parking meters.2 If you forget about your Timer, its alert sound is generally welcome.
Alarm works just like an alarm clock, most often used to wake people up. I’m with Gruber on this one: to me, an alarm that obeyed the mute switch would be infuriatingly broken.
Some third-party apps, which must choose whether it’s appropriate for their sounds to bypass the Mute switch.3
For example, in a theater users switch their devices to silent to avoid bothering other people in the theater. In this situation, users still want to be able to use apps on their devices, but they don’t want to be surprised by sounds they don’t expect or explicitly request, such as ringtones or new message sounds.
The Ring/Silent (or Silent) switch does not silence sounds that result from user actions that are solely and explicitly intended to produce sound.
In other words, the Mute switch silences sounds that the user didn’t ask for, but not those that the user explicitly requested. Users are fully in control, in that sense. My iPhone has never made a sound while muted that I didn’t ask it to make.
Ihnatko frames this as Apple’s arrogant design:
My philosophy is “It’s much better to be upset with yourself for having done something stupid than to be upset with a device that made the wrong decision on its own initiative.” …
Apple’s most notable successes and failures usually spring from the same basic company mindset: “We know what the customer wants better than the customer does. …”
Apple certainly shows that attitude a lot (and is often right), but that’s not a fair characterization here.
The user told the iPhone to make noise by either scheduling an alarm or initiating an obviously noise-playing feature in an app.
The user also told the iPhone to be silent with the switch on the side.
The user has issued conflicting commands, and the iPhone can’t obey both.
It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in Ihnatko’s preferred way, millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.
When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed would make sense to the most people in the most situations.
That’s good design.
Ihnatko’s “Case ‘B’” wouldn’t really happen: when muted, alerts from iCal and Reminders only vibrate. ↩
Siri is great for setting timers. After putting the quarter in the parking meter, as I’m walking away, I can put the phone up to my face and tell Siri, “Set a timer for 37 minutes.” ↩
If only built-in apps were allowed to bypass Mute, we would complain that developers couldn’t make useful alarm apps and Apple was being evil. (Update: Oops.) ↩
I’m not sure what Disqus was really trying to say in this giant image. I think they were attempting to defend comments (their business, as an embeddable comment system) in response to the recent anti-comment discussions around these parts.
Their conclusion was that most good comments come from people who don’t give their real name, and I guess the implication is that sites without comments (like mine) that prompt people to respond publicly from their own online identities elsewhere are suffering as a result.
But Disqus gives commenters the choice to post anonymously, under pseudonyms, or using their real names. You can type whatever you want into those boxes. Given that choice, of course most people wouldn’t put their real names in. It’s not worth it. Most people lack the fortitude to attach their real names to debatable public opinions.
All Disqus’ data shows is that most people smart enough to write coherent comments are also smart enough to dodge the risks of attaching their names to them.
To show how anonymity affects comment quality and volume, you need to test the same community both ways: forcing everyone to use real names, and forcing everyone not to.
For my part, I have no opinion on what their chances are, only to say that the successful design platforms that we’re most familiar with tend to be ‘born that way,’ whether it’s Apple or Adobe or even Windows Phone, which had to essentially reboot the notion of Windows to properly integrate the kind of design culture that Microsoft aspired to.
This is the allure of “content”: it allows comforting, structured data which simplifies the complexity of a large business and makes decisions less intimidating. Executives aren’t making qualitative picks regarding art or an artist, they’re merely signing off on whichever “content” produces more valuable metrics.
