Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.
update 5/17/07:
techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.
Phone companies. Now they call Cingular AT&T. Whatever that means.
I realized that I picked the wrong minutes plan. Too high. Trying to change it.
Of course the web form get’s stuck when you try to submit your information.
The Cingular site is the worst orange thing I ever saw.
It will not help if they make it blue again, and call it at@t.
It should work, and it does not:
The autopay feature somehow stopped working. That’s the only
thing that it has to do: pay my bills. The card is right, still works, is still valid and covered.
Guitar hero is a very popular PS2 game. It seems that Activision wants to put in on the Wii.
Gaming consoles and game publishers always existed in this mutual interlock: Lots of consoles sold means lots of publish develop games. That’s the positive feedback loop. Then there is the negative one:
No games no sales for an ailing platform. There is no middle ground in this.
3.9 Million houses for sale. Average price at 221,000 US$. That makes for 0.861 Trillion dollars worth of real estate waiting to be moved.
Sizable, even if you compare it the US federal budget
Today the 10 was packed. Stalled. All the way. The ’10’ is a highway in Los Angeles. Luckily I was traveling in the other direction. When I pass these traffic jams I wonder how much the cars are worth that sit there on the other side of the Highway. Since I am waiting on computers right now anyway, I did the math on that. I came up with 153 Million US$ dollars that I passed in ten minutes of driving. Assuming 15,000 US$ average car value. Since we are talking Los Angeles, so that might even be low.
The next thought is how much money has gone into expanding and maintaining that strip of road. How many new roads have been built? But the number of cars certainly has gone up.
The problem is, that people don’t make the connection anymore between traffic jam and road/car ratio. They just sit they and endure it. People actually endure allot of things.
“The interface of a cheeseburger” is one of these Blog entries that validate those 30 Million other blogs with random noise in one simple swoop. If you ever contemplated to create anything that get’s used by a human, be it nuclear power plant, condom or breakfirst table for your dearest one, you could find some great insight in this text from Oliver Reichenstein. At least I think it’s by him. While content and form of the text are pretty nice it seems almost a relief that ‘Information Architects Japan’ messed up the branding for themselves. Sticking Lego’s on business cards won’t help either. Die Kinder des Schuhmachers tragen immer kaputte Schuhe.
Surprisingly little attention goes into the fact that most computer installation run 24/7 and use power that needs to be bought. Electricity bills are often perceived like taxes or any other act of god: An expense needed in order to do business. As long the competition get’s hit as well, what’s there to think about?
Well.
The ‘digital negative’ of the movie we just finished was 140 Terrabytes. That got me thinking: what if we would have tried to keep it all online. The installation of those disks would have used 8,750 Watts. Double that for cooling and you would have spent 16,863 US dollar to keep all those spindles spinning for a year. (at 11 cents a KW/h).
That does matter in my book. Since I can never remember anything I thought I would try to come up with a approximation of cost per 1000 Watts. It looks as if realities don’t get bent too much when assuming 80 US$ per 1KW per month, or 1000 US$ per year. Double that if you have to cool the room the machines live in. Which is always the case. The variables here are the efficiency on the cooling and the actual price not being 11cents. Actuall and nominal Wattage might also differ. But close numbers are better than no numbers, or numbers that are so complex to calculate that they never be taken into account.
of course I had to watch another TED video while I was at Google Video. Since it’s such a long way there.
Barry Schwartz talks about choice
I agree with him that the choice is by no means linear to happyness. But I dissagree on his remedy. It’s not a decrease of choice that would be the ideal solution. It’s the management of it. People are not in a situation to make decent and educated descissions. Like mine how to spell certain words for instance. But when people are looking into the options and only choose what makes sense, then all the rubbish will disappear. If you buy crap, or equally worse, let your friends buy crap then you inititate the production of more of it. If you only choose things that are good, then you will steer things in the right direction. The choices will follow.
There are so many junk things around us, since people can survive their wrong choices. So they keep making bad ones.
And finally:
Dan Gilbert about happiness and choice
Autoblog reviews the Bentley Continental Flying Spur
Nice read if you like cars. The 2 door cousin “Continental GT” is kind a ‘dime a dozen’ car in some parts of LA. The Warner Brothers parking lot for instance. The price tag hovering between 1 and 2 hundret thousand US$ scheds a completely new light on situation in some parts of the economy.
Glad I read the review, so that I can hold of the purchase until they get a navigation system that can compete with a Camry.
Arriving at the parking lot of a theme park in Germany in-midst 8,000 sparkling middle class vehicles my daughter asks “Kings drive what kind of cars?”.
Cars are a product of industrial mass society that is incompatible with feudalism that supports Kings. One clearly came after the other.
Looking at the current situation we are somewhat like Kings with cars. Fossil fuels make energy dirt cheap so that we can clutter our material surroundings in the wildest ways. In the same time we already have access to information technology that is clearly evolving the mass culture of the 20th century into something new that has neither name nor definition yet.