Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM: From the blog: DRM just flat out sucks. Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, …
Author Archives: paulschreiber
a woz interview
The Cardinal Inquirer interviewed Steve Wozniak: Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they’re doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don’t know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones …
Letterman tells O’Reilly off
We already know MSNBC doesn’t like Bill O’Reilly. Neither does CBS. Instead of the usual softballs, O’Reilly got mocked by David Letterman.
textbook pricing scams
Freakonomics readers get a lesson in price discrimination (or bad customer service): Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discriminationâ€, using an example of the demand for textbooks (relatively inelastic) vs. novels (relatively elastic), the students pointed out that in our campus textbook store, “Freakonomics†is on sale at the regular price in the …
we quit
Separated at birth?
On your left, booker extraordinaire Natasha Bishop. On your right, Pollyanna Bush.
trust who?
Heather and I spotted this on the way out of the hockey arena in Yerba Buena in San Francisco.
The Secret Life of Dr. Chandra
The CBC’s The National ran an exposé on Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra. It turns out he’s been faking his research data for 20 years: Chandra claimed to have given 96 healthy seniors from St. John’s a daily multivitamin pill for a year. He then tested their memory for improvements. But the test results didn’t make …
tim redmond loses it
the san francisco bay guardian‘s editor, tim redmond, has been drinking something funny lately, resulting in him ranting against craigslist: The problem with that is simple: When Craig comes to town (and he’s coming to just about every town in the nation soon), the existing community institutions – say, the locally owned weekly newspaper – …
when your warranty expires
Ssomeone called me last week and asked what do about his 16-month-old monitor that had just died. He had already shown it to a dealer, and the dealer told him there would be a $500 minimum charge. Since monitors aren’t something you can easily troubleshoot or repair, i started think about ways to avoid paying …