So, I got the Wordbooker plugin installed and configured on my blog. This is a first test of the plugin to see how much it manages to amplify trivial words.
California voters increasingly tolerant
California voters increasingly tolerant
There is a lot of speculation about how the Republican Party will do in the upcoming elections in California. If there is any truth in the above cited poll of Californians, then the extreme positions that the GOP has taken in California have almost certainly guaranteed its demise and decline into an irrelevant minority party. Prehistoric sensibilities rarely succeed in ostensibly modern societies.
Graffiti: RIP
Calligraffiti Exhibit at Pacific Asia Museum
People are saying altogether too much about graffiti. About six months ago, graffiti burst onto the mainstream art scene with a bevy of exhibitions touting the rise of erstwhile taggers to the level of masters. One lovely exhibit was the Calligraffiti exhibit at Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. It consisted of works by graffiti artists from diverse backgrounds who integrated elements of Asian calligraphy into their works. On the whole, the exhibit was very nice, and the art was thought-provoking, but one could not escape the feeling that a great lion of expression had finally been de-fanged, de-clawed and thoroughly domesticated.
Graffiti was an expression of rebellion, much like punk rock. Its appeal was precisely in the way it which exposed, defied and counteracted the accepted order. It was a means for creative souls to circumvent commercial censorship boldly, loudly, crassly, beautifully and arrogantly. That was the point. And, it had to be done in grand style: graffiti’s impact came from the way it transformed and mutated the giant edifices of the corporate, commercial culture. Consequently, lacking any expression of defiance and confined to the small walls of a museum, the medium has no soul, it lacks impact, and it neither impresses nor inspires. The strict enforcement of criminal laws have quashed this wonderful voice. Only oddball geniuses like Banksy manage to provoke despite his ability to garner outrageous sums for his work.
So, as beautiful as these works of art may be, these are not loud avant-garde voices. Jean-Michel Besquiat’s genius and its context in the New York underground art scene in Downtown 81 puts all of this in perspective. Graffiti was the vanguard of underground art, itself the last bastion of creativity in a culture dominated by commercial enforcement of subordination, acceptance, mediocrity and complacency.
And, alas, with the acceptance of graffiti into the mainstream museums, this great vanguard of creativity may finally have been silenced, accepted into submission, swallowed by the capital juggernaut.
Graffiti, rest in peace. You had a great run.
iPad Carnage
Apple’s new product announcements never make much sense at the time they are made. It takes a while for people to understand the ramifications of the technology being introduced and the shakedowns that will ensue. The iPad announcement may well have been the paradigmatic enigmatic announcement. The stock has tanked, and everyone is talking about the announcement being “underwhelming”, but Apple’s competitors are shaking in fear because they can see the carnage coming. Here is a short list of products or industries that will soon be laid to waste by the iPad. In no particular order, these are the products, corporations or industries that could be eradicated by iPad’s success.
- The Kindle DX Without a doubt, the first product to die will be Amazon’s Kindle DX, the larger kindle model with a color screen designed for viewing textbooks. For the same price as the Kindle DX, the iPad offers a complete computer capable of viewing textbooks with a far richer content, word processing, games, music, photos and countless heretofore unheard of new applications. The iPad will run Amazon’s Kindle and Stanza apps, on top of all this. So, Amazon was wise to hedge its bets with its iPhone apps. In essence, Amazon was well aware of the inevitable.
- Portable Game Players If the iPhone and iPod touch failed to obviate the need for small game consoles like Nintendo DS and Playstation Player, then iPad positively will. The iPad promises graphics and action that rival those presently available only on powerful desktop computers. So, why compromise excitement for the sake of mobility? Sure, there will be many holdouts who like the little pocket devices, but the kids will want an iPad, and parents and game enthusiasts will abandon the little devices in droves.
- Amazon Kindle Subscription Service As the New York Times’ presence at the Apple announcement on Wednesday showed, the iPad offers publishers infinitely more flexibility than the Kindle does. Publishers are free to offer something as simple as a web subscription, and everyone with an iPad (which has a full browser) will be able to take advantage of it. People with Kindles will not. Furthermore, publishers will have the ability to offer their own subscription services or product lines through an app over which they can exercise complete control over appearance, behavior and content. Amazon’s Kindle service is not as accommodating of publishers. The Kindle limits publishers to formats that Amazon defines. Publishers will have no incentive to stay with Amazon. They will abandon it in droves, and the Kindle subscription services is thus assured of a quick and untimely death, unless Amazon can reconfigure the service. Oddly enough, the Sony reader may survive because it is not tied down to any one distribution channel the way the Kindle is.
- Windows Tablet The most shocking revelation in the iPad announcement was the fact that Apple rewrote its iWork productivity suite to be fully functional on the iPad. iWork on the iPad was a demonstration of how Apple’s grand designs for the iPad were vastly more ambitious than any pundit, prognosticator or Wall Street analyst expected. Apple is announcing that it is beating Microsoft and Google to the mobile computing platform with a fully functional mobile computer that runs a proven and battle tested mobile platform (iPhone OS) and that is ready to do everything out of the box before any of these guys even leave the gate. Oh, yes, indeed. The carnage could be far bigger and far uglier than anyone expected.
And, the folks at Wired.com seem to agree, though they use slightly less explicit language.
Of course, the basic premise that people will want to do their computing with hand gestures on a thin, mobile tablet that has amazing computing capabilities may turn out to be false, but Apple’s experiences with mobile devices so far would imply otherwise.
It will be interesting to see who still stands after the iPad earthquake and all of its aftershocks because the landscape will change completely.
AOL Time Warner: The Stupidity of Greedy CEOs
BBC News | Why AOL Time Warner failed to change the world
More than ten years after a horribly ill-conceived and thoroughly fraudulent union between an old world entertainment company, Time-Warner, and new-age chimera, AOL, predictably failed, people are wasting ink trying to analyze why the venture failed in a feeble attempt to gloss over the naivete with which they welcomed this incredibly stupid business deal.
It was very clear to me and many others that this merger made absolutely no sense. Why would a content distributor like AOL limit the content that it can distribute and why would a content producer like Time-Warner limit the number of outlets through which it would distribute its content? There was no synergy to be had because these were fundamentally different companies fulfilling different roles that resulted in a conflict of interest.
So, why did the deal go through? So that the CEOs can give themselves a fat bonus. Steve Case of AOL ran away with hundreds of millions of dollars even though he was summarily fired, and Gerald Levin of Time-Warner rewarded himself similarly and retired.
Now everyone is blaming the different internet climate, the emergence of Google and YouTube and supposed mismanagement at AOL-Time-Warner. The truth remains that what killed AOL-Time-Warner was this conflict of interest that arises when distribution and production are combined. AOL could not compete with YouTube because the possibility of distributing content that competes with Time-Warner content was not desirable for Time-Warner.
Similarly, it was difficult for Time-Warner to enter into distribution deals with emerging online channels because of the obligations it had toward AOL by virtue of the merger. Consequently, the company was hampered–manifestly and predictably so given the fundamental conflict of interest–and new internet distribution channels ran away with their prize.
Let’s end this stupid naivete of the press. Let’s call the AOL-Time-Warner failure exactly what it was: a scam that enriched the CEOs and left the shareholders holding the bag.
You’ll never hear this truth from CNN. As a Time-Warner component, CNN will never publicize the scandalous behavior and the malfeasance of its corporate parent’s executives. In this day and age, it behooves everyone to rely on reason and sound judgment rather than any corporate news outlet. Obviously, they are out to fool everyone, especially their own shareholders.
We Aren’t Ready for Some Football, but They’re Gonna Give It to Us Anyway
Environmental exemptions OKd for football stadium in City of Industry | latimes.com
It is tough to love Los Angeles. It is an exceptionally large city ruined by the diminutive thinking of its residents and especially that of its politicians. Among the great signs of civilization in the city was the distinct absence of a football team. The thoroughly corrupt political machine of Los Angeles somehow had managed miraculously to demand that the football league pay its own way for the privilege of reaping profits from the largest media market in the nation. It was a standoff that benefitted the city tremendously. Free from the tyranny of football, people dreamt up fabulous other activities to do. Angelenos are so happy without football, in fact, that nobody remotely cares about an NFL presence.
It boggles the mind, therefore, that a state politician would go so far as to pass a special law exempting an unwanted stadium project from environmental studies that other ones have to conduct.
This is the same politicians who couldn’t quite go to the mat to preserve education and social services, but it seems as if he can pull the strings for real estate developers who want to build a stadium that nobody wants for a team that nobody will care to watch.
That Schwarzenegger would sign this giveaway comes as no surprise.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The complacency of Angelenos in the face of the ruthless assault on the city and their quality of life, however, feels a lot worse.
Perceptions
CIF America | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
About this time last year, the Guardian (UK), ran a very unscientific poll of the perceptions of its readers of the net results of the McCain-Obama debates.
As unscientific as this poll may be, it is impossible to dispute the prevalent choice in the UK. Though it would have been nice if the American perception mirrored this British perception, we can be thankful that such a lopsided perception was not necessary for Obama’s victory.
It’s the sort of victory that makes one believe.
Almost.
The Sword
Gun-toting Pa. soccer mom, husband fo… – Google News
Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
When will we be rid of the idiots who think that the sword is the only avenue there is?
Can we expect them to annihilate themselves in such fits of passion, or can we have hope that they will learn to be civilized and civil?
Improving Windoze
VMware Fusion 3.0 makes Windows look like Mac
How does one go about improving on Microsoft Windows? One uses a virtualization engine to make it look more like a Mac. This development bespeaks frustration of biblical proportions that drove programmers to undo what Microsoft programmers spent billions of dollars to implement.
This tops even the wine project, wherein programmers forewent compensation for the pleasure of having Windows programs work inside Unix-like operating systems.
Still, Microsoft will never understand user interfaces and user experience issues.
The First Browser
It was recently the anniversary of the birth of the browser, the piece of software that changed the internet forever by spawning the world wide web, and the piece
of software whose further development is presently changing computing forever.
Of particular interest to Apple enthusiasts would be the fact that the first browser was written on a NeXT Computer workstation. The NeXT operating system became Apple’s OS X. Therefore, the world wide web was invented on a Mac.