Author: John

  • Hachette Job

    John Scalzi had some smart things to say about the contractual dispute brewing between Amazon and Hachette regarding how to price eBooks. I read through all the comments on the piece and I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually see anyone bring up what I think is the real justification for why Amazon is pushing for this…

  • Apologists

    It really bugs me when folks (like this guy, for example) end up sounding like apologists for truly appalling corporate behavior. I’m hoping that these folks have simply been blinded by corporate spinmeisters and simply haven’t thought through the situation completely. In this particular case, Netflix is being forced by Comcast (and apparently some other broadband providers)…

  • East Side Apple Store Moving

    This is pretty interesting. It looks like Apple is moving their original Cleveland store from Legacy Village to Eton. I wonder how Legacy Village is doing. It’s had a number of major store closures in the ten years or so it’s been open; losing the Apple Store has got to sting. The store is a…

  • This kind of post always mystifies me

    Tim Bray, a well-known smart person, wrote a post today about how he’s been reading John Scalzi‘s Old Man’s War series on his Kindle (he’s apparently on book three, The Last Colony). Because of the addictive qualities of these books, he implies that he can feel Amazon siphoning money out of his wallet as he compulsively starts the…

  • Humps

    Today Apple announced the new iPhone 5 and claimed that it was the thinnest smartphone in the world. Predictably, folks who should know better claimed this statement wasn’t “fact checked” and was WRONG: that there were existing Android devices out there that are thinner and this was more of Apple’s unceasing marketing lies. And I guess if…

  • Looking good!

    The new St. Ignatius HS Mall is getting closer to completion: http://bit.ly/oMBaon

  • Textbook rental?

    I was somewhat annoyed but certainly not shocked when my high-school-entering daughter’s textbooks and other required reading material ended up costing us several hundred dollars. And this was purchasing many of the books used. It’s well known that publishers, losing customers in other aspects of their business, are using their textbook publishing divisions to make…

  • So, how did we afford all this stuff?

    One of the things I wonder about a lot is this whole idea that while we used to be able to do/build/have certain things in the past, we are now apparently no longer able to. This is despite the overall wealth of the US now being far greater than it was when we used to…

  • Caps

    Gruber: “If you use more than 2 GB per month you’re going to pay more, but this strikes me as fair, because most people don’t use that much data.” Wired: “Video streaming and online gaming use much more bandwidth than web browsing or e-mailing. For instance, Netflix ranges from .3 GB per hour to 1…