My grandmother has some Sears catalogs from the 1800s. The 1800s! I mean, they made it a hundred years doing fairly well, but they couldn't seize the opportunity of the Web that they -- more than any other company in the USA -- were positioned to grab. It makes me kind of sad, not that I have any great affinity for Sears, but that it was a national institution throughout the 20th century (at least until the 70s where they started to decline) and they just couldn't adjust to the march of technology. But I guess you could say that about a lot of well-established American companies; resting on their laurels until resting turned to rusting.

Atari lost the computer war because they had no mindshare. I was the only kid in school I knew with an Atari computer. Everyone else had Apples and C64s. To most people in the early 80s (which is when I had my 800), Atari was a brand associated with an aging game console, not computers. Between that and the lack of quality software as compared with the Apple ][, it was a doomed system.

The Atari 800 was my first computer, and it was simply awful. As far as I remember, the manual was a joke and I had to learn BASIC through magazines and good ole trial and error. The available software was a slim selection, and the cassette drive I had to load programs -- while novel in that it could play audio from the tape in conjunction with program execution -- would get out of alignment or simply stop working constantly. The Atari 800's system of cartridges used to expand RAM was quite elegant for its time, and you could probably use the chassis to stop bullets, but that's about all the kind things I could say about it. I have a feeling that opening up the software back then wouldn't have done much to reverse their fortunes or increase their share of the market. My best friend had an Apple ][c at the time, and man was I envious! It was really night and day, comparing those two.

Lyrics are protected under copyright in the same was as poetry and prose are. Reprinting (in its entirety) a poem from Yeats or a novel from Haruki Murakami is an equal copyright violation. It has nothing to do with the music portion of a song's copyright.

The artists may provide lyrics, but they are the ones who put the songs under copyright via ASCAP or BMI, not the labels (assuming the artists actually wrote the song). Just because they printed them on a CD booklet or vinyl insert for the benefit of fans doesn't mean that the fans now own the lyrics. This is no different than if someone put up HTML versions of the Harry Potter books on a site and placed ads on every page.

I would also draw a difference here between fair use for non-commercial purposes, and the 99% of the lyrics sites out there who are trying to make a business out of reprinting someone else's copyrighted work. IANAL, so I don't know if fair use would really cover a non-commercial site of lyrics, but I'd have a lot more sympathy for that use.

If they want to make this thing legit, they should set up a lyrics site where a portion of the ad revenue for each artists' lyric pages goes back to them.

They must've changed the unemployment caps in the last few years then. Sorry to hear about your difficulties, and hope you get back on the horse soon.

During the first dot com bomb I lived on CA unemployment for about 6 months. If memory serves, my payment checks were about 75% of my previous income, which I don't really remember, but I think it was $60-70k at the time. Barely subsistence living? I mean granted I was living in a rent controlled apartment (back before the apartment owner lobbyists fucked everyone over and got the state legislature to get rid of rent control), but still, that's a completely reasonable middle-class salary. You must have been living pretty high on the hog before you became unemployed, so maybe there is a payout limit I never hit back then, but don't act like the payout is minimum wage.

The optical format is mostly irrelevant; the Cell processor in the PS3 is a *completely* different architecture than the PS4, as well as being very byzantine and complex. It'd take them a lot of time and R&D to create an emulator, and even then it probably wouldn't be 100% compatible with old games. They might be able to put a Cell processor in there, but that would bump up the cost of the console considerably. This is a very different situation than say the Wii being able to play Gamecube games, because the Wii was basically just a souped-up Gamecube from a hardware POV.

Yes, in a perfect world everyone would love to keep their PS3 games, but Sony made the right choice by going with a more standardized architecture, even if it meant sacrificing backwards compatibility. The PS3 will still be there to play your old stuff.

They also archive public-domain films (and possibly other things). Additionally, the Way-back Machine sadly only started archiving sites a couple years after the web was already being used. So one would hope a few of these pioneering sites are still out there on backup tapes, somewhere.

For collaborative projects, in-the-room meetings are still vital. Videoconferences can be adequate for status check-ins, but messaging meetings leads to most people not paying attention. You may be "bored" or feel like your bit of a project is the only important part, but without everyone paying attention to what others are doing -- as well as giving your valuable input on project question marks -- the project will go off the rails to a lesser or greater degree down the road when you say, "Oh I didn't know you were doing that." "Yeah jellomizer, we discussed that in the meeting two months ago."

But I suppose this is part of the what this study shows -- that younger people believe they are the center of the universe, and anything not directly related to them is a waste of their time.

allofmp3 used to sell flac. times were good back then. now, to get flac, you mostly have to rip yourself (or have someone do it, but again, you don't have control over the quality and there's a lot that can go wrong when someone careless does the rip/encode/tag).

There's a lot of talented indie artists on bandcamp.com, which allows artists to sell songs and albums, and enables multiple digital format downloads for purchasers, including FLAC. [I have no affiliation with them, other than having some music on there. I just like the service.]

They do. They use iPhones (and iPads). iOS has an accessibility feature called VoiceOver which changes the input paradigm from a touch initiating a 'click' action to one where a touch reads out the description of the UI element with text-to-speech. Two taps on the item will send a tap to the UI, and a three-finger swipe will initiate scrolling. So you can basically drag your finger across the screen and find things with your ears instead of your eyes, then navigate and interact as a sighted person would once you get your bearings.

I don't really think Kutcher is clueless or stupid. I saw him speak on an internet panel event with the creator of tumblr and a couple other guys. He seems fairly intelligent, and has a decent nose for what will work and won't work on the internet. But being heavily involved in hardware product design? I think that's above his pay grade, unless this is the same sort of in-name-only product "design" as Lady Gaga being hired to be the creative director for Polaroid or any of the other celeb "designer" roles for technology companies. What makes this weirder is Lenovo's use of the term "engineer".

Who's to say someone who knows nothing about the industry doesn't have some useful input on Customer Experience?

Sorry, I don't even understand what you're inferring from your title and this statement. You're saying Steve Jobs knew nothing about the computer industry? The industry he helped *start* by building mass-market products out of what was formerly a hobbyist-only, DIY field? The guy who helped design circuitboards for Atari arcade games in the 70s? Yeah, you're right, Jobs was totally on the same clueless level as the guy who portrayed him in a shoddy movie.

What's strange to me is that Apple even allows configuration profiles to be distributed and installed by non-enterprise, third-party apps. This seems like a giant security hole. If I was Apple I'd be pulling this app from the store posthaste and closing that attack vector.