The Brooks Review

Month: July 2010

  • Microsoft’s Record Q4 Earnings Keeps Revenue Ahead Of Apple… Barely

    MG Siegler:

    Microsoft easily beat Wall Street estimates that they would see about $15.3 billion in revenues. Microsoft largely credits strong sales within enterprise of Windows 7 and Office 2010. Net income was also strong at $4.52 billion. And earnings per share were at $0.51. Both of those beat Wall Street estimates as well.

  • Motorola’s Attention to Detail on the Droid X

    John Gruber:

    This might epitomize the difference between Android and iOS.

    [via DF]

  • Safari Security Hole: I know who your name, where you work, and live

    This is so very not good.

  • Compass Mobile Stand – iPad

    This is so awesome looking. Best stand yet – which means that I have two available for purchase if you want them let me know.

  • Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

    Apple:

    Apple sold 3.47 million Macs during the quarter, representing a new quarterly record and a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 8.4 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 61 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 9.41 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of 3.27 million.

    That is a crazy amount of iPads sold.

  • Flipboard

    This is a cool app – the servers have been down most of the day so don’t be dismayed if you can’t connect your accounts just yet.(also another great video from Adam Lisagor)

  • A City Outsources Everything. Sky Does Not Fall

    Very interesting – so much of what is wrong with government is due to officials not caring about their job. They are there for a check and not to help you. Keeping that in mind read this bit from David Streitfeld:

    “Remember the Soviet Union?” said Hector Alvarado, who heads a civic advocacy group. “They had a lot of bureaucracy, and they lost. Maywood was like that. Now people know if they don’t work, they will be laid off. Much better this way.”

    Loss of your job when you work for local governments is very rare from what I have seen – outsourcing may be controversial, but it can work.

  • Microsoft gives Adobe Reader a Protected Mode

    Sounds like a great way to mitigate damage done by exploits people find in Acrobat – next up should be Flash.

  • Toshiba shows off Smart Pad tablet prototype, promises launch before October

    Good luck with that. Seems like if they do manage to meet the October date it will be utter crap – they have yet to even pick an OS for the device. They simply do not have enough time to make a well polished device to compete head to head with the iPad if they have not perfected it by today (for a launch in October this year atleast).

  • Help Menu Search as Shortcut Button

    Very clever trick.

  • Follow a Twitter Stranger

    Jonah Lehrer:

    And this is why we should all follow strangers on Twitter. We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us. (While waiting in line for my cappuccino this weekend, I was ready to punch myself in the face, as I realized that everyone in line was wearing the exact same uniform: artfully frayed jeans, quirky printed t-shirts, flannel shirts, messy hair, etc. And we were all staring at the same gadget, and probably reading the same damn website. In other words, our pose of idiosyncratic uniqueness was a big charade. Self-loathing alert!) While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable – strangers can say such strange things – it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

    Neat.

  • Documents Confirm Connection Between Zuckerberg And Guy Who Says He Owns 84% Of Facebook

    As I figured this would fall apart once evidence started coming out. It looks like the guy knew Zuckerberg, but probably can’t prove the ownership of Facebook.

  • The Case of a Free Case – Is it Enough?

    It seems the answer to the above question brings a mixed bag from people. The way I see it there are two camps: those that think Apple needs to do more, and those that think Apple has reached a resolution. What is more telling though is exactly who is saying what.

    The Apple Should Do More Crowd

    This crowd is made up of people that are experiencing dropped calls due to the ‘weak spot’ on the iPhone. They are not satisfied with Apple’s free case solution and yet are not willing to return the phone. These people also are getting terrible coverage with AT&T and just didn’t know it before due to the screwy algorithm that Apple was using.

    This crowd wants a real solution where no matter how they hold or use the phone they experience no problems. This is not unreasonable on the surface, but it is far from possible at this point.

    Apple Has Resolved It

    This group may or may not be able to make the weak spot drop bars, and are rarely experiencing dropped calls outside of the normal ‘I-am-on-a-major-highway-in-Seattle-and-the-call-dropped-while-I-was-on-Bluetooth’ calls. Further they couldn’t be happier with their iPhone 4 and a free case is just icing on the cake.

    The Real Problem

    It has become apparent to me that the real problem is not the iPhone 4 it is actually AT&T (and every other cellphone provider). You see every other major smartphone on the market suffers the same fate of the iPhone 4 if held in certain ways (you can argue if you want that the iPhone 4 is more prone due to the manner that you hold it, but it is irrelevant). If the only way to solve this problem (at least that I have heard about from antenna engineers) is to go back to external antennas that you have to pull out on the phone, or the nubs at the top – then I think we can all agree it is a solution that none of us want.

    So the only solution then would be to improve the cell network coverage of all the major carriers. This means that if I touch the ‘weak spot’ on the iPhone 4 I only lose one bar instead of two, which means there is no dropped call (assuming the better network gives us all full bars).

    We should all be pissed at the cell carriers: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile. It is they who have failed us, not the smartphone manufacturers. It may take AT&T 3-years to get a new cell tower in downtown San Francisco as Steve Jobs stated, but how long does it take to roll out free Femtocells to customers with poor reception? Shouldn’t AT&T just be giving these away – why would you charge for one, they are far less costly to install than a regular cell tower and guess what: they can be installed in days.

    Even better AT&T keeps charging you for the bandwidth used on these devices even though you are the one paying for the internet connection. Femtocells is not the end solution to the entire problem – better network coverage is – but they are certainly a great stopgap. They are a stopgap that AT&T just may need to use to stop an exodus to other carriers if/when the iPhone goes to them.

  • Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown

    Fred Vogelstein has written an incredibly interesting article on the Apple and AT&T relationship, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing (you should make time) take a look at these choices quotes:

    They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

    and

    Even more irksome to AT&T, though, has been Apple’s relative silence in the face of thousands of frustrated customers. “AT&T went in thinking the deal was a true partnership: ‘We’re in this together, and we defend each other throughout.’ That wasn’t the way Apple did things at all,” says someone who worked on the project for AT&T. “We’d say, ‘Let’s resolve these issues together,’ and they’d say, ‘No, you resolve them. They’re not our problem. They’re your problem.’”

    and

    Even if AT&T had wanted to respond with iPhone ads, Apple would have refused. “Put yourself in Apple’s shoes,” says an Apple executive involved in those conversations. “The reason the Verizon ads were so effective wasn’t because of the iPhone. It was because of AT&T’s network. We would have been letting them use the iPhone to put lipstick on a pig.”

    and lastly

    Jobs and his team would continue to discuss switching to Verizon, but these were always short conversations. “Every time the issue of switching came up, it always seemed to cause as many problems as it solved,” according to a source who attended some of these meetings.

  • Paid Comments, Do They Make Sense?

    I posted a link about a newspaper site that will begin charging readers to leave comments. The fee is nominal ($0.99 one time) and the idea is noble. The basic theory operating behind this idea is that requiring people to use their real (full) names (and verify that by making them pay with a credit card) the quality of all the comments go up. Instead of comments looking like YouTube’s they look like those that people used to mail to editors.

    The Concept

    The paper will charge customers $0.99 to register – registration allows them to leave comments on the stories. Registration and the fees are one time only and must be paid using a credit card in the registrants name. Once registered users will not be able to change the name that is displayed when they leave a comment – it is the billing name that will be shown.

    Due to this verified identity schema the paper believes that people will be more apt to leave comments of an intelligent and insightful (read: helpful) nature. Instead of just berating the journalist or the politician being talked about with slang and put-downs – actual evidence will be presented. This is all based on the idea that people are vain and when they can be called on something they said (in real life now) they will want to portray a sensible and smart self.

    Thus in the end you have a cleaner commenting system, requiring less moderation and further engaging the readers of the story. In essence you have brought back the relevance of comments.

    My Guess at the Reality

    I think that very few people would argue that the above seems like the end goal of comments – make them relevant and engaging. However reality is much different from the concept. Conceptually we assume that people are smart and care about what people think of them. Further assume that no one will pay $0.99 to tell the writer that they suck.

    In reality all people are not smart, and a lot of people simply do not care what others think of them. So what is stopping them from paying less than a dollar for the privilege of flaming on? Further we assume that people want to sound intelligent that thus will try to be intelligent. Have we forgotten that most people do indeed believe they are smart and (worse yet) right?

    Have you ever tried to argue with someone that is completely miss informed about a situation and yet they believe whole heartedly that they are correct and you are nuts? It is painful and frustrating to do – these are the people leaving most of the problem comments. They will not go away with paid commenting solutions. This of course is not to imply that what they add to a conversation is hurtful, just that what they add to a conversation is not necessarily productive or the desired outcome.

    Which brings us to perhaps the most contentious point of paid commenting systems – how do you moderate a paid comment? If someone is paying you to be able to comment on your article, can you then still remove the comment if you don’t find it tasteful? Certainly there are terms of service agreements, but that means you then need legal to step in and explain why a comment was removed. Given the sheer amount of poor comments this could prove to be quite a challenge, both fiscally and manpower wise.

    The Real Problem

    Comments are more noise than they are valuable. Let me offer and analogy: we all love Freeways even though they are incredibly noisy, they provide great value in moving us long distances in a short(er) periods of time. Comments though are like a Freeway that doesn’t take you anywhere you want to go – pointless and noisy.

    The solution being proposed then is to change all the Freeways into Toll-ways where people now must pay to use them. The problem is that you will now have less noise, but you still won’t be going anywhere you want to go. You have only solved 50% of the problem. Comments won’t be great until you can foster an environment where people leave useful/constructive/informative/interesting comments.

    The only way to get great comments is to take away the soapbox. That is the reason more and more blogs are moving away from comments that appear directly on the article to a commenting system where readers email the writer. I am all ears when people email me comments, or hit me up on Twitter it is really no different that having to send a letter to the editor. I take away the soapbox to remove the noise and make sure that we are going somewhere – this is the only model that currently works.

  • Apple Peddling Revised iPhone 4s Through Genius Bar Replacements?

    I would ignore this on most blogs, but Stephen M. Hackett used to be an Apple Genius (still is, just not employed as one) and given that he has pretty good sources on this matter.

  • Times’ Paid Model: The Unofficial Numbers Come In

    Robert Andrews:

    The registration wall, despite being free for a month, resulted in site visits declining by 58 percent. By the time actual payments had been required for a week, visits were down by 67 percent, compared with the old days.

    This won’t worry many at the paper, since the whole strategy is about courting fewer, more loyal users. And it’s a darn sight better than the 90 percent drop-off that many, including The Times’ editor, have braced for.

    I saw numbers popping up about this over the weekend however they were on the Financial Times which I could not see due to a paywall. This is a huge drop, time will tell if the model is lucrative or not.

  • Consumers Reports’s ‘Recommended’ Smartphones, July 2010

    John Gruber:

    Curiously, Consumer Reports’s list of “Recommended” smartphones includes all of the smartphones suffering from “holding it wrong” attenuation I’ve linked to tonight (Palm Pre, HTC Incredible, Nexus One, BlackBerry 9650) as well as three of the phones Apple posted videos about (iPhone 3GS, Droid Eris, BlackBerry 9700). I’d link directly to Consumer Reports’s web page for this list, but can’t, because it’s behind a paywall that their coverage of the iPhone 4 antenna is not. I’m sure they’ve been performing the exact same attenuation testing with all of these phones that they have with the iPhone 4, and that they have published precise technical standards regarding how much attenuation is acceptable to still qualify for a “Recommended” rating.

    Consumer Reports is bullshit and if you are looking at them for recommendations then you are never going to have the best current phone, only the best phone from last year. I saw Gruber’s links flying in yesterday about all the other smartphones that have attenuation when held and that even some say not to hold the phones in a certain way – this is a great wrap up of this whole iPhone 4 antenna B.S.. I was asked five times this weekend about the antenna on my iPhone – I told each person I never had a problem. These people didn’t even know what the problem was, just that there is a recall – people are so mis-informed on the matter that it hurts my brain trying to comprehend the blind sheep following each other mentality.

  • The Real Damage – How much does that really cost?

    If you are caring credit card debt, this is a must look at before you make another purchase.

    (via The Consumerist)

  • iPhone 4 Press Conference – The Post-Game Wrapup

    Andy Ihnatko:

    Steve Jobs didn’t fall to his knees, rend his garment, clasp his hands together, and beg for forgiveness from users and stockholders.

    This has upset many people.

    These people are idiots.


    (via Daring Fireball)