friend of the built environment

As much as our society pretends to love the geek and the ‘creative class’, there really is a subtle war against genuine geeks and nerds.
I’ve contemplated making a rather caustic journal entry about Americans for the Arts, a group that thinks getting kids interested in art is more important than letting them be interested in [...]

There is lots of digital drool going around about all sorts of ‘problems’ with the iPhone. I just don’t get it.
Yaw, there are some things that the iPhone could theoretically do that it doesn’t. There’s also lots of stuff that most politicians could theoretically do and don’t. The key is recognizing when then things at [...]

It’s been seven years since I bought my first new Mac. Over that time, I’m been a pretty intense Apple fanboy. For the first few years I was repeatedly amazed at the things Apple hardware and software enabled me to do that I didn’t even realize I wanted to do.
My oh my how times change. [...]

The single biggest argument coming out of the woodwork is that Apple’s iPad will fail because it’s not a laptop or a phone:
In the case of the iPad, the obvious shortcoming is that it can’t replace a cell phone (not only does it not make calls, it’s simply too big to whip out when you need [...]

By Jeff Fox:
Why did I need to buy a 3G version (which I don’t have yet coz it’s not in stock til next month)? Because the stupid neighbor stopped letting me steal their wifi! Etc etc, whine moan, I’m a consumer and thus must be coddled and loved because without me Chinese slave labourers might [...]

Randy links:
The point that Jon Stewart recently made on his show, about how disturbing it is that Bill Gates is a humanitarian hero giving children clean water while Steve Jobs is calling the police on bloggers, bears repeating. Daniel Lyons in Newsweek wrote about how Apple’s desire for control as epitomized [...]

Interesting pair of articles from James Kwak this week RE: whether Apple will be on the right side of history by emulating the Microsoft model of market dominance in software.
The obvious alternative is Google, which has its own operating systems (Android and Chrome), but doesn’t particularly care if you use them or not [...]