“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
I’m pretty sure that Plato would have attended meetings of his local government bodies, or at least watched them as they streamed them over the Internet.
He was also way into Slashdot, but that’s a story for another day.
I heard this story on the Marketplace podcast and was impressed. Obviously, trade unions (and their members) have been on the losing side of a lot of the changes brought by globalization. But this is the first time I’ve heard of them proactively stepping up to respond.
But his union and others are trying to stop the slide into irrelevancy. They’re asking, if corporations aren’t constrained by national borders, why should unions be? IG Metall has signed agreements with Britain’s second-largest trade union, Amicus, and two American unions — the United Steelworkers and the Machinists.
The agreements call for more information sharing and collaboration. But the ultimate goal is much bigger. They want a transnational super union within a decade, which could have more than 7 million members. It could, for example, call for multinational strikes and keep companies from playing workers in different countries against one another.
Whatever you think of trade unions, it’s interesting watching how the world changes as “globalization” goes from being a catchphrase to simply a standard way of life.
I don’t know what this means, if it means anything, but I’m going off half-cocked anyway:
World of Warcraft users are all familiar with Thottbot, a Web site that automagically compiles information about the game, providing a (theoretically) searchable database of useful info. (The huge traffic post-expansion has really swamped the system something fierce.)
I noticed the other day that Google searches were turning up hits for Thottbott.com and Thotbot.com. I don’t know for sure that these are evil hacker sites, although given that I couldn’t find anything about alternate domain names on the official site and given the number of sites out there loaded down with keyloggers and Trojans, it’s worth always being careful when going to a site off the Internet to make sure it’s the real site you want. (The Whois search doesn’t reveal all that much about the real Thottbot, making it impossible to verify the fakes.)
To hear Apple die-hards tell it, the new iPhone will be the greatest thing against sliced bread — which, they note, does not automatically reconfigure itself depending on which way it’s held, nor does it connect to the Internet, switching over to wi-fi where available.
I’m not so sure, myself, since it mostly seems to be a crippled Treo merged with a small iPod. The Apple fans who claim that an iPhone can do everything a Treo can seem to have never used a Treo. Mine is a lot more than a phone, camera, calendar and chat client, and most folks I know that use one have likewise loaded it up with additional programs, both commercial and shareware, greatly expanding its capabilities.
And it looks like I’m not alone in this view:
Knowledge@Wharton: The iPhone has a lot of cool features. Are there too many, and is the price — starting at $500 — too high?
Fader: Well it’s not going to be too high for the first few hundred thousand people who just have to have it. You can charge them anything and they’ll pay anything. But for the mass market, if they really want to create something that is anywhere close to what the iPod did, it is very expensive.
And, I think on the feature side, it doesn’t really have that many features. In fact, it’s missing some really, really important features. What it has [going] for it is just a really cool design factor and that’s not enough. It’s going to help them to differentiate themselves from the other phones out there, but it’s not going to be enough to really be a winning entry.
Knowledge@Wharton: What other features [would you imagine] should it include?
Fader: Well, one of the things that it must include is a key pad. I think that it’s very important for people to be able to type or at least text message, and to be able to do that just on the screen instead of having actual keys is going to be very disappointing. There are a lot of people who won’t even give it a try because of the absence of that. And then there’s just some of the lack of the integration with Outlook and other standard bits of software that are becoming quite common with so many phones today.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do you think consumers are tired of juggling multiple devices though? Does the iPhone at least address that problem?
Fader: I don’t think it does. I think about how many people right now are carrying around an iPod and a Blackberry or a Treo, and this kind of falls in between the two. In some sense it’s not as simple; it’s not as small as an iPod. So, it’s a bigger iPod but not necessarily a better one. And, while it does function as a phone, it does lack some features, as we just mentioned. So I think that the large numbers of people who are in that modality are not going to have their needs satisfied here.
The absolutely accurately named Cult of Mac blog at Wired disagrees:
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but in the United States, the vast majority of people still don’t understand what good design is really about. Good design is not about aesthetics. It’s about solving people’s needs. It’s about clarifying the complex. It’s about looking good AND working better. People care a little bit about features. They care way more about knowing how to use them.
Does he know what he’s even arguing in terms of design here? The breakthrough on the iPhone is not how it looks. It’s how it works. Don’t look at the appearance of the interface, look at how brilliantly the iPhone switches modes and hooks its features into one another. It’s about integration AND intuition. You don’t have to make trade-offs.
Certainly not if you don’t really want a smartphone, no matter what Jobs may have sneered about the phones in that category in his presentation.
Anyway, the Wharton professor and the Mac cult leader are continuing to go back and forth over this at Wired:
Where’s the growth in the smart phone market? Not by trying to get people to trade in their BlackBerry tomorrow, let me tell you. It’s in convincing the millions of people with fairly commodity cell phones and an iPod that what they really want to do is trade in both for an iPhone. It’s an unclaimed market space, and its overhead is nearly unstoppable. Apple’s tool for getting there is around a revolutionary interface and not just an iPod but THE BEST iPOD IN THE WORLD built in so people actually understand how to use all the features already found in smart phones everywhere.
It’s what Apple is counting on. And if they’re wrong — they certainly might be, especially about the small virtual keyboard, which no one has tried out, particularly — they can get it right next time. They can learn over time and roll out a really amazing product line to make the iPhone resemble the iPod line. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Apple’s death grip on the MP3 market. They face a tremendous adoption problem — they’re wisely going super high-end to cater to early adopters. They can learn from those early adopters to make the product better, smaller, cheaper and more customized. That’s when everyone else will want one — including the people staunchly defending their Treos and BlackBerrys right now.
I’d love to be able to get rid of my iPod or my Treo and have a single all-in-one device, but the first generation iPhone doesn’t look like it’s going to fit the bill. In the interim, I’m just going to wait on the next generation of the video iPod, which I assume will show up this fall, and have the same widescreen and touchscreen aspects of the iPhone, but will have its other guts replaced with a substantial 30 GB or larger iPod hard drive.
So, because my joints swell up because of the granulomas formed by my wacky immune system due to sarcoidosis, I take anti-inflammatories so that I can survive the effective equivalent of serious arthritis.
But because consistent use of heavy-duty anti-inflammatories like asprin or anything else really tears up your stomach, giving serious heartburn and, ultimately, more serious stomach problems.
So to deal with that, I have to take a heavy duty anti-heartburn medication daily. (It’s an all-in-one multi-pill package of both 1000 milligrams of the medicine in Aleve and Prevacid.)
Now, because of that, a recent study says that my body isn’t absorbing calcium properly (ironically, I once got a kidney stone — which I don’t recommend — from having too much calcium). So, if I’m really lucky, I can break a hip before I’m 40.
I know an old lady who swallowed a cat. Think of that, to swallow a cat!
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider
that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she’ll die.
Time to add calcium supplements to the daily regimen.
