Keep Cal–

It seems Walter Isaacson is jumping on the innovation bandwagon with his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
Isaacson did a really shitty job with his biography of Steve Jobs. In the book you can see he doesn’t understand the industry or the technology and like John Siracusa explains in his scathing review of the Jobs bio, “he didn’t understand it and didn’t bother to learn!”
If you’re interested in understanding how badly Isaacson dropped the ball with the Jobs bio, I recommend listening to Sircusa on the Hypercritical podcast, episodes 42 & 43.
As for this new book on innovation? I’m going to pass.
(if you want to read an author who does know how to write about the history of innovation, I highly recommend Steven Berlin Johnson)

Oh shit.
DE contributor Bryan is at it again:

It’s the October Horrorshow! It’s no secret that I hate autumn. It’s a shit time to be alive here in the northern latitudes, where the air takes on a chill, the days become noticeably shorter, and every plant from here to Seattle looks like it’s dying. Thank goodness, then, for Halloween. The festival of death is a yearly finger in the eye to the fall season, when we, and by that, I mean me, watch lots and lots of horror flicks. I choose to embrace nature’s inexorable slide into hibernation by watching fake snuff films, paradoxical as that is, and I love every minute of it. Like last year, there’s a full slate of reviews this year. No gaps. And the first is a double bill.
Fall is the house.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.
—William Faulkner, The Paris Review, 1956
via Twitter

Taken from The Verge

via Colossal

Eric B & Rakim – Juice (Know the Ledge)

At the Apple Store and at the AT&T Store (to get a new sim) I heard five people ask if they could cancel their iPhone 6 Plus orders and change it to a 6 instead. “All day man,” the AT&T clerk mumbled.
—Drew Breunig

I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.
—David Fincher talking to TotalFilm.com
via The Verge

said in an episode of 99% Invisible

FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.
—Craig Timberg and Greg Miller, The Washington Post
via Daring Fireball

Twitter

Andreessen is completely right: Startups are overvalued, stuffed like Christmas ducks with cash they don’t really need, and since they’re staffed by inexperienced kids with no oversight, they’re spending that cash. This is a big problem, a big and obvious problem, and Marc Andreessen is right: We should worry.

But what he’s not saying is that all of these worrisome things are happening because he has made them happen. Marc Andreessen is warning us, essentially, about Marc Andreessen. It’s not a good sign when a man, no matter how large it would appear his brain is, tries to distance himself from his current agenda.
—Sam Biddle, Valleywag

These idiots deliberately bending their iPhone 6’s reminds me of this old Tom Green skit:

There are no guarantees.