This will offer me a much greater degree of freedom and flexibility in what I choose to do with the blog, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I know I will.
This WordPress link will not longer receive updates – all new entries will be at http://www.the-technologist.com, so please make the necessary adjustments to any bookmarks you have made. You will also be able to update all RSS feeds on the new site.
Thanks for reading and see you at the new location. More changes to come in the new spot…gonna be sick.
Again, that number is FOUR BILLION DOLLARS. That’s the net dollar value in Apple stock sell-offs triggered by one erroneous post on gadget weblog Engadget at 11:49 AM EST today. The chart on the left (pirated from CNET’s report on the matter) graphs the status of Apple stock throughout the trading day – clearly there is a correlation with the post.
I’m no finance expert, but this equates to around $3/share or 2.2% of the stock’s total value from what I’m reading – aka major, MAJOR amounts of cash lost. Check out the comment section on the post-itself for some claims on individual losses.
The larger point illustrated here is that blogs are more far-reaching and influential than most people can possibly imagine. I admire and respect sites like Engadget and Gizmodo because they have really pushed tech-blogging to the forefront of relevance. Their hook is that they post news within minutes of it breaking anywhere. The technology-obsessed have been flocking to these sites (guilty) for a few years now because they have legitimate sources that provide them with timely insider information critical to maintaining the readership that craves the latest news in the quickest timeframe.
This time, however, it appears to have backfired on Engadget. Apparently they were forwarded the below memo (presumably from a trustworthy informer inside Apple) that looked to be from Apple’s internal email update source:
If you’re like me, you drive a Ferrari, are a mainstay on People’s 100 most beautiful people list, and you sift through countless sites, blogs, etc. looking for the most-likely-to-be-true of all the wild Mac-related rumors that disseminate daily across the web. I participated in the collective yawn of Apple fanboys and rabid rumor sites across the internet when Apple announced a decidedly pedstrian update to their Macbook line of laptops today.
The new consumer laptops, all of which are an inch thick and have a 13.3-inch display with 1280×800-pixel wide-screen resolution, are available in three models: white with the option of 2GHz or 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors, or black with the faster processor.
All three models are equipped with 1GB of RAM that can be expanded to 2GB of RAM. They also have built-in iSight video cameras, AirPort Extreme wireless cards capable of 802.11n wireless networking, two USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port.
The lower-end white MacBook, with a starting price of $1,099, comes with an 80GB hard drive; its 2.16GHz counterpart, which has a 120GB hard drive and a faster, double-layer support 8x SuperDrive DVD drive, costs $1,299. The black MacBook, identical to the faster white MacBook except for the color and a beefed-up 160GB hard drive, is priced at $1,499.
Which begs the question: have we come to expect too much of Apple? Do we now drive ourselves into such a blog-fueled frenzy that Apple is constantly a victim of hype?
Most definitely, but it’s also exactly what they want to happen. The obsessive speculation equates to free publicity as people research Apple product cycles and development trends…and then analyze them ad nauseum. Whereas the PC industry is predictable and quick to update with the latest technologies (Santa Rosa is the perfect example) so as not to lose ground on each other, Apple plays a different game…
Check the sidebar for the latest electronic artist feature. Mike Relm – sick ass turntablist and DVJ pioneer – gets the nod this week.
Just a quick note that previous featured artist updates will be retired as posts and appropriately tagged & archived.
Also – a new YouTube video awaits. Trying to put a new one up every day. These aren’t acrhived as of yet, but I will probably throw up a page with archived links in the near future.
“A good friend of ours said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazi’s after World War II, then every single one of ’em, every last rich white one of ’em from Truman on would have been hung to death, and shot. And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations. Way beyond elections. Way Beyond every four years of pulling levers. Way beyond that, because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel, that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries, and profit from their reconstruction, in order to survive, and that’s not a system that changes every four years, it’s a system that we have to break down generation after generation after generation after generation after generation. Wake up.” – Rage Against the Machine frontman Zach de la Rocha @ Coachella 2007
[“A good friend of ours” = Noam Chomsky (one of the most outspoken critics of the current administration’s foreign policy). See the full text of the interview that Zach de la Rocha refers to here.]
I know that we’re a few weeks removed from Coachella, so I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s really too relevant to simply let die down just because the concert is over.
Below are the print and video versions of a Hannity & Colmes episode on Fox News, in reaction to Rage‘s performance at Coachella. The focus is primarily on the speech from above, which was delivered during the song “Wake Up.” Well, just one fragment of one sentence of the speech, really.
I just wanted to draw attention to the updates that were made today in the “Permanent Fixtures” section on the sidebar:
About – standard fare – a little blurb on my overall vision for the blog
Bio & Contact Info – also pretty standard – just enough to info to justify my haphazard, erratic though-patterns
YouTube Random Clip – this is self-explanatory; there’s so much random shit on YouTube and I’d like to share every last mind-numbing one that I find worth those oh-so-precious 90 seconds of your life
At this point, no one really needs to sit down and detail how bogus Scientology is. The now-infamous South Park episode did a pretty admirable job of that amidst skewering some of its highest-profile celebrity participants. But something I read today really turned my stomach. It’s one thing to choose to be an idiot and partake in this “religion,” but it’s an entirely different matter when that choice starts negatively impacting others who do not have the ability to make that choice on their own.
What Would Tyler Durden Do? – a site not necessarily known for its journalistic poignancy – actually has a pretty succinct summary of the latest development(s) in a story involving the Travoltas (that’s John and Kelly) and their autistic son, Jett.
In a nutshell: Scientology refuses to acknowledge that autism is a real affliction, thus the Travoltas have used their extensive medical and scientific analytical ignorance prowess to determine that Jett in fact has a case of Kawasaki disease…
I live in Los Angeles, so nice things don’t really phase me. Porsches are a dime a dozen, Bentley’s and Rolls are everywhere, and half the world’s Ferrari’s live here.
Ok, the Ferrari’s still get me. They’re niiiiiiiiiice.
But every once in a while, something comes along that reminds you what being truly rich really means. It could mean you own your own island. Or perhaps it means you have the largest house in the Hamptons.
There’s a Nas line from the song “Not Going Back” off his latest album that goes “Real millionaires spend $60 million on paintings.”
So that must mean that real billionaires roll like this (click on thumbnails for full-size):
Total Cost: $220,000,000 ($100MM for the plane, $120MM for remodeling). Yes, that is a solid GOLD sink. I would honestly like to meet the guy that buys something for $100,000,000 and decides that it needs another $120,000,000 to be up to par.
FYI – I don’t see ONE plasma anywhere. Hell, that 103″ plasma from Panasonic is a meager $51,000.
At the end of the day, all of us thousandaires (at least until the rent check is cashed) can rest-assured that $220,000,000 still can’t buy you good taste.
The Cupertino engineering brain trust is making waves once again. The below is a patent recently filed by Apple.
The patent details one of the possible solutions for integrating tactile interface into ultraportables (e.g. the iPod Nano), which traditionally have LCD screens that are too small to be useful as touch screens. It also addresses the issue of smudging those gorgeous Apple displays, which is a big concern for many potential iPhone buyers.
Aside from all of the technical and design accolades one could heap on Apple for their recent success, they really seem to understand exactly what type of leaps in technology will generate buzz. Of course, half of generating buzz is in how it is presented, and Apple is extremely adept at dressing up evolutionary as revolutionary when positioning their design developments.
Though this particular concept could go either way depending on how much it differs from the iPhone’s multi-touch interface, they are obviously not content to rest on the laurels of the mega-hype surrounding the June release of their little-device-that-could, and how it is going to revolutionize the cell-phone industry…
After Apple posted a profit of $770 million in Q2 of 2007, even some of the sterner eyebrows on the PC side of the fence were raised. Q2’s are typically slow in the consumer electronics industry because they fall in the spending cool-off between the holiday and back to school shopping frenzies. Not traditionally the quarter where companies expect record growth.
Apple shipped 1,517,000 Macintosh® computers and 10,549,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 36 percent growth in Macs and 24 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.
“The Mac is clearly gaining market share, with sales growing 36 percent—more than three times the industry growth rate,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re very excited about the upcoming launch of iPhone in late June, and are also hard at work on some other amazing new products in our pipeline.”
“We are very pleased to report the most profitable March quarter in Apple’s history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2007, we expect revenue of about $5.1 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $.66.”
And with that, I think everyone’s eyebrows are finally raised at this point. And by everyone, I mean Michael Dell and all of his wannabes. And all of the people who have judged Apple solely on their market share numbers since Jobs left.
And Microsoft?
Sort of. Bill Gates had to have seen it coming for a while; he’s too smart to not pick up on that trajectory a bit earlier than his industry counterparts. But regardless of what happens in the OS and hardware wars, Gates still has his stake claimed in business software. The epic Microsoft vice-grip on that industry isn’t going anywhere. Probably ever.
(sidenote: does anyone find it bizarre that Bill Gates is probably the nicest guy on the planet yet his brainchild defines the term “corporate behemoth?”)
While the PC industry was busy figuring out more efficient ways to cannibalize itself, Steve Jobs was busy laughing from way outside the box…
The Technologist 