Yes, you too, can smell like the Crawley family! Marks & Spencer is going to start selling soaps, candles, and beauty supplies when the next series airs in the fall. Not knowing the average price for these things in the UK, I can’t say whether spending £6 (or about $9) is a good deal.
If you’re in to this sort of thing, it would certaily help you complete the look with all the period clothes the producers have licensed out.
Dustin Curtis writes about Amazon’s seven year Kindle strategy after he noticed a price drop that, many suspect – him included – is extremely unlikely to generate any profit (emphasis mine):
If you think about seven years in the future, the Kindle Fire kind of makes sense. Amazon sees a future where digital content sales are a platform-locked commodity, and in order to make a profit, you need to control a platform–any platform. Amazon has no platform, and the Fire is a moonshot attempt to create one. If it wants to have a chance, it has to sell as many of the damn things as it can right now, even if it makes a loss, to kick-start an ecosystem that can survive many years before it potentially becomes a profitable marketplace for content.
I like that term "platform locked commodity" for a reason. Content is everywhere. It’s not just books and movies. It’s games, news, cat pictures, and all the amazing things the Internet delivers. If the content is everywhere and low cost as the term commodity implies, there has to be a premium on something to make a profit. Apple puts a premium in hardware.
But Amazon appears to be turning its device into a commodity by offering it at such a low price with no indication of offering a device people will value. Far for me to question the strategy because, on the surface, it makes sense. But if your competition is going to offer a commoditized service just like you, your long term strategy has to add a different value to customers. Commoditizing your only other differentiator (hardware) doesn’t seem like the way to go.
Marco Arment writes that Apple practically had to radically alter its UI in iOS 7 to help separate itself from copycats – namely Android.
Copying iOS 7 is going to be a big problem for cheap hardware. iOS 7’s appearance and dynamics require a powerful GPU and advanced, finely tuned, fully hardware-accelerated graphics and animation APIs. This will hurt web imitators most, but it’s also going to be problematic for Android: while high-end Android phones have mostly caught up in GPU performance, and recent Android versions have improved UI acceleration, most Android devices sold are neither high-end nor up-to-date. The gap is much wider in tablets, and even “high-end” tablets usually have insufficient GPU power to drive their high-DPI screens.
He notes there are challenges to the bold move. App developers who do cross-platform development are going to suffer the most. But if Apple’s message at WWDC is as Marco believes, it will shift resources to updating apps that take advantage of the new look.
I know I’m looking forward to updated apps. It wasn’t iOS’s UI that bothered me so much as the apps. Good apps like Dots and Letterpress look great. Other apps can, too. They just have to put in the effort. Perhaps that will be easier, now.
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood where the cul-de-sac had no housing around it – just a wooded area that separated other developments. I crawled under bushes and thick brush to get there. I never worried about Lyme Disease. But now, I worry about ticks and the pathogens they spread every time I walk on the grass.
Crazy? Perhaps but read this about Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme:
“Borrelia is a remarkable creature,” he told me. “It has all my respect.” He went on to explain that the bacterium, after slipping through the tick’s mouthparts, can change its form, cloaking itself in the surface proteins of the tick’s saliva. Then, much like H.I.V., the bacterium hijacks the immune system. “It doesn’t stay in the bloodstream for long,” he said. “Instead, borrelia manages to insinuate itself into parts of the body that have fewer circulating antibodies, where it is harder for antibiotics to reach.”
Scientists equate Lyme and ticks to malaria and mosquitos – forming a symbiotic relationship:
…at least four pathogens, in addition to the Lyme bacterium, can be transmitted by the black-legged tick: Anaplasma phagocytophilium, which causes anaplasmosis; Babesia microti, which causes babesiosis; Borrelia miyamotoi, a recently discovered genetic relative of the Lyme spirochete; and Powassan virus. Some of these infections are more dangerous than Lyme, and more than one can infect a person at the same time. Simultaneous infection, scientists suggest, may well enhance the strength of the assault on the immune system, while making the disease itself harder to treat or recognize.
I’ll take my urban jungle, thank you very much.
via The Feature
Sabine Pearlman took photos of bullets split in half (warning: Flash based site). They’re artistic and creepy at the same time.
via Kottke