My wife took me to a prescreening of Beginners last week. What a good film.

Timothy B. Lee over at Ars Technica has a smart take on why Apple hasn’t been successful with online products and services:

Apple’s perennial difficulty with creating scalable online services is not a coincidence. Apple has a corporate culture that emphasizes centralized, designer-led product development. This process has produced user-friendly devices that are the envy of the tech world. But developing fast, reliable online services requires a more decentralized, engineering-driven corporate culture like that found at Google.

One of the many things I thought was great about Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC on Monday was how he openly admitted MobileMe was a failure. This got a big laugh from the audience and rightly so.
How often do we see CEOs of other technology companies openly admit when they’re wrong?
I see it occasionally, but I rarely see admissions of failure during a keynote for an event or product unveiling.

David, from 37Signals, talks about motivation:

When you’re not working on something you’re inspired by, your efficiency is so much lower. You find more moments in the day to let yourself be distracted by email or reading on the Web or something else. That’s usually the key smell I detect when I’m working on something I don’t really want to be working on: I check email much more frequently and I engage in chats about things that aren’t related to what I should be working on.

You could hate on the 37Signals dudes with all their inspirational talk and books, but they run a profitable company based on their beliefs.
They walk the walk.
(I was going to say they eat their own dogfood, but that’s such a negative analogy)

Robert X. Cringely sees a bleak future for us consumers and the stuff we’ve owned and stored on our own computers up until now:

And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.

Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever.

This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total.

With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party, with much of Redmond’s market cap transplanted eventually to Apple and Google.

Slate: The Highest Form of Flattery

When most people think about the effect of counterfeits on legitimate brands–and when brands themselves litigate against counterfeiters–they focus on the “business stealing” effect: Every fake Prada handbag represents a lost sale for Prada. But a dirty little secret is that Prada rip-offs can also function as free advertising for real Prada handbags–partly by signaling the brand’s popularity, but, less obviously, by creating what MIT marketing professor Renee Richardson Gosline has described as a “gateway” product. For her doctoral thesis, Gosline immersed herself in the counterfeit “purse parties” of upper-middle-class moms. She found that her subjects formed attachments to their phony Vuittons and came to crave the real thing when, inevitably, they found the stitches falling apart on their cheap knockoffs. Within a couple of years, more than half of the women–many of whom had never fancied themselves consumers of $1,300 purses–abandoned their counterfeits for authentic items.

ReadWriteWeb: You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Apple’s Disappointing Music Announcements at WWDC

At first blush, the thought of having your entire music collection available through iCloud sounded like an amazingly awesome deal. And for those of us who have amassed large record collections outside of the iTunes marketplace, it felt as though we were being pardoned for sins against the $.99 download – whether we came across our mp3s through ripping, legal filesharing, or piracy.

But it’s important to note that Apple’s new offer does not involve music streaming. True, you can have your music collection synced across devices (up to 10 of them). But you will still have to download the music you want to play on to your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch or Mac. You won’t be able to access your entire collection and randomly shuffle between all the glorious gigabytes.

Even in today’s world of super-convenience, it never ceases to amaze me how often people are disappointed in technological announcements like iCloud. Now I wouldn’t say Apple’s products are ever perfect (even Jobs poked fun at the failure that was MobileMe) and I’m the first to be cautious about putting all your content on remote servers, but it amuses me Audrey Watters at RWW thinks Apple’s music announcement is disappointing.
Ms. Watters, you have a rough life.
It’s not enough that we have have 500 gigabyte hard drives to store our entire music collections on and it’s definitely not enough to have a measly 16 to 32 gigs of space on our iPhones (Ha! I can only fit 30 albums on my phone, it’s bullshit!).
Now it’s not enough to store your entire collection on iCloud, because shit, I can’t stream my entire collection wherever I am, whenever I want. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Now. Bigger. Everywhere. I’m reminded of Umair Haque’s Opulence Bubble I posted earlier this month.
It’s make me wonder if people who are this easy to disappoint also expect relationships with no fighting, cars that never run out of gas and perfect weather everywhere.

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

—Albert Einstein

via On Display

Writing blanks: “also known as ‘school pieces’ or ‘Christmas pieces’, these were single sheets printed from copper or wood engravings, issued by print sellers (and, later, children’s booksellers), and sold to children across a broad socio-economic spectrum. ‘Regularly published at least twice a year’, they were intended as a form of sampler, the child filling in the blank space in the centre of a sheet with a set piece in her or his best penmanship. They were sold in book and print shops ‘for the use of writing schools, at the vacations of Lady-day-Midsummer-Michaelmas-Christmas, &c.’, as well as by street criers. Schools, and, in one recorded example, a workhouse overseer, distributed them.

via BibliOdyssey

Anything he could do for them would only comprise a small push in a positive direction before the tremendous momentum of their negative tendencies reasserted itself.

—George Saunders, from Tent City, U.S.A, GQ Magazine, September 2009

If you’re interested in counter-culture, outsiders or homeless, crazy people in a tent city, you’ll dig this.

via The Brooks Review

Craig Mod starts putting some critical thinking towards the tablet page:

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books–the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books–the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

This essay looks to address these very questions. This essay also marks the release of an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading. It’s currently iPad optimized. It’s called Bibliotype and the hope is for it to provide a solid base atop which we can explore. It’s very rudimentary, but rudimentary is a damn fine place to start.

Nation Post: Leaked U.S. cable lays out North American ‘integration’ strategy

The integration of North America’s economies would best be achieved through an “incremental” approach, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable.

The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union.

“An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,” the document said. “The economic payoff of the prospective North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are unpredictable, so it should not be oversold.”

via Twurts and Geekery

This clip of John Stewart critiquing Donald Trump’s choice of pizza parlor to take Sarah Palin to, as well as Donald’s bad form in eating of said pizza is pretty awesome:

Like Stewart, I’m also a mutt from New Jersey who spent the weekends of his youth visiting his grandmother in Middle Village, Queens and I have to agree with him.
You broke my heart, Donald.
Shameful.