January | 2010 | Alex's Soapbox

Too Much Twittering

January 30, 2010 at 8:34 pm | Posted in Humor (G- and R- rated), Macintosh | Leave a comment

Panic Grips Amazon.com

January 22, 2010 at 12:09 pm | Posted in Macintosh, Rants, Technology | Leave a comment
Tags: Amazon, Apple, iPad, kindle, tablet

Amazon.com is in full-on panic mode as the anticipated announcement of the Apple JesusTablet draws near. First, they reduced the royalty split from 70/30 in Amazon’s favor to 70/30 in the publishers favor. Then they announce a beta version of a Kindle Development Environment to get third party applications. Finally, they announce a money-back guarantee for selected Kindle customers, as long as they buy their Kindle by January 26th.

These developments wouldn’t be bad if they were spread out over months and or announced earlier in the Kindle’s life in response to customer complaints, but the timing and spacing of these events indicates that Amazon is greatly worried about their ability to compete with an unannounced Apple product, and rightfully so – their pricing and the fiasco over copies of Orwell’s “1984” deleted from their customers Kindles has earned them the distrust of many users, including myself.

Sorry Amazon, I’ll be waiting until January 27th to decide if I want an ebook reader.

America – Technologically Illiterate

January 17, 2010 at 10:40 am | Posted in Politics | Leave a comment
Tags: education, illiteracy, paranoia, Technology

A San Diego magnet school went into lockdown when one of their bright students brought in a science project with “wires” and empty plastic bottles. The idiots running our school system are responsible for this excessive post-9/11 paranoia and hysteria that is taking America down the path of technological illiteracy, where kids are treated like terrorists and discouraged from pursuing science and engineering careers. Something is wrong with this country when the 90% of the research staff at the company where I work are foreign-born immigrants.