McSolo's News Links Archive

Where’s the best place in the world to retire comfortably for under $1,500 a month? Kathleen Peddicord says Belize:

Jason and Elizabeth Pearce moved from Canada to Belize three years ago. They bought a piece of property on the sea. A year later, they built a house. Today, they live in a beautiful Santa Fe adobe-style home with gardens all around.

I can’t do a three day weekend on Maui for that much.

An idea whose time has come. Journalism Warning Labels from Tom Scott:

• WARNING: To meet a deadline, this article was plagiarsed from another news source.
• WARNING: This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia.
• WARNING: Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.
• WARNING: Journalist hiding their own opinions by using phrases like “some people claim.”

And many others.

I’m not so sure that the smart phone battle between Google and Apple isn’t exactly like the Windows vs. Mac battle of the 1990s. Jason D. O’Grady in ZDNet points out a number of distinct differences:

1. App Store: Apple has four times the number of apps as Google’s Android (many of higher quality and capability). Selection rules.
2. Customer Service: Apple has it, Google doesn’t.
3. Consistency: The iPhone OS is pretty much identical on every device. Not so with Android devices.
4. Fragmentation: Apps distributed in the App Store behave pretty much the same across all iDevices. Performance will differ between models, but most apps will run on all devices.
5. Software Updates: Apple releases its iPhone OS updates simultaneously for all devices, Android, not so much.
6. Copy & Paste: Apple took forever to deliver it, but it works really well. Android has had it forever but it’s a kludge…
7. Media Player: Apple’s built-in iPod app beats Android’s Music app handily
8. Ease of Use: The iPhone “just works” for most people, Android is a little less seamless and can be more daunting to novice users.
9. Unified Inbox: Coming in iPhone 4.0. Android has separate apps for Gmail and Mail. Fail.
10. Skype: Skype for Android only works on Verizon devices, and doesn’t work on WiFi.

In the end, Google vs. Apple isn’t quite the same as Windows vs. Mac. Yet.

Europe’s financial instability seems to have infected Wall Street. From WSJ Online:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 225.06 points, or 2%, to 10926.77, its worst daily decline in both point and percentage terms since Feb. 4. The decline also represented the Dow’s fourth straight triple-digit point move, underscoring that volatility is returning after a long stretch of trading that had been defined by modest daily moves and light volume.

This will get worse before it gets better.

In another sign of the changes in Microsoft’s fortunes, the popular Internet Explorer browser, once boasting 95-percent market share, is now below 60-percent and falling quickly. NetMarketShare:

Microsoft’s browser dropped to 59.95 percent of web use in April after Google Chrome leapt half a point ahead to 6.73 percent in the same timeframe. Firefox and Safari also ate into Internet Explorer’s share with small gains that put them at 24.59 percent and 4.72 percent each.

Change is good. Good change is better.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt in Fortune:

If you buy the digital editions of Popular Science or TIME Magazine on the iPad, they cost $4.99 each — same as on the newsstand. However, one-year subscriptions to Popular Science (the paper magazine) are currently selling for $12 — or $1 an issue. And TIME subscriptions can be had for $20 — around 35¢ an issue.

Why the disparity? And, why so much money for a digital version vs. a paper version?

Because that’s what the market will bear — at least for now