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"An airliner in vertical descent is a spectacle of modernity's complete failure." - Cote'

But the explosion of legitimate digital content services, the rise of downloadable applications – fuelled by the iPhone – and the widespread availability of wireless broadband has created a market for a tablet PC that is more of a multimedia device than merely a "keyboardless" computer. It would essentially be a cross between the iPhone, Apple's TV service and an iPod. - Cote'

I don't mean to get all moral here, but there's something wrong when credit card protection laws are freaking out retailers so much. With new credit card laws, people can't borrow as much money, and will thus spend less. And, since we don't seem to save enough money - indeed, need more money for things like health care - isn't spending less money the whole point? “It will mute the impact of the rebound that would have otherwise occurred," says the Target CFO. Yeah, rebound for who? - Cote'

The economists covers the renewed popularity of zombie films. - Cote'

See how the sausage is made. Sausage, you know you love it! - Cote'

"Ninety-two percent of those surveyed expect mergers and acquisitions to increase next year, the Global M&A Outlook found. Bloomberg’s survey of about 250 investment bankers, lawyers and investors was released today. About 21 percent of those surveyed expected energy companies to lead in M&A next year, while 17 percent chose financial firms." - Cote'

iTunes stops downloading podcasts if you don't listen to them frequently enough, and that's just stupid. - Cote'

An unnamed source lists off OSS groups in Sun that have been hit by lay-offs, or not. - Cote'

"Initial jobless claims rose by 7,000 to 480,000 in the week ended Dec. 12, from a revised 473,000 the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington." - Cote'

"'Let’s be honest, that small-town atmosphere or any-town atmosphere, they are always going to be weary of outsiders coming in and I think that, in an era of globalization, that’s something that you cannot have in you,' he said. 'You’ve got to let that barrier down." - Cote'

It's called the "Titonic." - Cote'

"The challenge for brands and their advertisers (in the digital space) can be to identify a platform to 'own' that fits into people’s day to day lives. Said differently, the challenge for a brand is to learn how its customer engages with the researching and purchasing of its product online, and develop a relationship with them within that context." No more TV & billboards, bro, but Cluetrain marketing. - Cote'

More "mobile is the remote control for the cloud," here with personal analytics (or "personal data") for your baby: "Fifteen years ago, tracking your baby’s development meant going to the pediatrician every few months and recording his growth on a simple height and weight chart. Today, baby tracking is a booming business. In addition to websites that let you track your infant’s schedule, there are iPhone apps that translate and record your baby’s cries, wearable devices that keep track of how much you talk to your child, and even electronic toys that record how your child plays with them, so you can compare his progress to developmental norms." And: "'People look at us and say, "My goodness, how do you spend so much time on this?"' Fawcett said. 'But each record takes just a few iPhone clicks, so it’s really not as time-consuming as it looks.'" - Cote'

I like the conceit here: you don't have an iPhone (smart phone) that would otherwise do this. Paper! - Cote'

"With the rise of mobile projectors we wonder how this shift will affect our video viewing and sharing habits." This is a good statement/question. I bet it'll be as annoying as ring-tones: sounds individual like that played in a public space become annoying to the group. Like, can you image how many cute cat and melt-down kid videos would (will) be shown on the bus, the street, in the shopping mall ("those damn kids and their projectors!")? - Cote'

Brian Eno diary (?) entries from 1976. Nice, short, concise. - Cote'

"While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple, Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team. As all industry eyes look to the iPhone, the iPod Touch is quietly building a loyal base among the next generation of iPhone users, positioning Apple to corner the smartphone market not only today, but also tomorrow.... When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface. This translates into loyalty and switching costs, allowing Apple to seamlessly 'graduate' young users from the iPod Touch to the iPhone. For OEMs hoping to challenge Apple, we believe an even greater sense of urgency must be adopted." - Cote'

"If climate change were to suddenly reverse itself (because of some yet undiscovered mechanism of balance in our climate system), my guess is that the denialists would be triumphant, the skeptics would be skeptical this time of the apparent good news, the warners would be relieved, and the calamatists would seek out some other doom to proclaim. If climate change keeps getting worse then I would expect denialists to grasp at stranger straws, many skeptics to become warners, the warners to start pushing geoengineering schemes like sulfur dust in the stratosphere, and the calamatists to push liberal political agendas — just as the denialists said they would." - Cote'

"It just seems like we're making a lot of mistakes on this whole calling everybody racist. Everybody's calling everybody morons and nuts. We're becoming more juvenile as a nation. The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits. People 50 years old acting like that. In Gran Torino, I play a guy who's racially offensive. But he learned. It shows that you're never too old to learn and embrace people that you don't understand to begin with. It seems like nobody else got that message, I guess." - Cote'

And you thought the TSA was bad! - Cote'

"I’d like to mention here Michael’s style of writing is really appealing. He writes – in a way – a bit as he speaks: a clear, approachable, narrative style. Rare in tech writing and a great relief. Also great not to hear a condescending voice, but a human one. Michael has never felt he had anything to prove in his podcast, or his writing – and rightly so." - Cote'

"'Smart' so far looks complicated. And most people don’t want complicated, especially from their utilities." - Cote'

I went to this last year, it was pretty good if you're into the topic. There were *a lot* of sponsored and vendor centric talks. If you're thinking of presenting: getting cloud people to go sell to enterprise IT old schoolers would be interesting, as well as virtualization. - Cote'

These guys are set to go after medium to large businesses in 2010: multi-site monitoring, now up to 1,000 nodes, SQL Server monitoring, "over 800,000 registered users," help desk improvements (rules for routing and grouping tickets), network topology customizations. Impressive as always. - Cote'

"My reaction is a bit different, and it reflects the comments we've been hearing from our customers: IBM already has too many BPM products, and a third one will only aggravate the situation. This acquisition might make sense if IBM intended to rationalize the products and create one leading-edge product that addresses all BPM use cases (e.g., human-centric, system-centric, document-centric, case-centric, etc). But it seems pretty clear that IBM has no intention to do so." - Cote'

"The words we use to talk about people quickly come to constrain the ways we relate to them, so it’s with mounting alarm that I see the spread of the word 'normob' – a contraction of 'normal mobile user.'" - Cote'

A scale with wifi. - Cote'

"Still, there is aspect of the above figures that rings alarm bells for me. They show no evidence that Adobe is able to migrate its business from one dependent on packaged software sales to one that is service-based. That is important, because I suspect that the packaged software model is in permanent decline." - Cote'

"Survey respondents said that the inability to easily modify their ERP system deployments is disrupting their businesses by delaying product launches, slowing decision making and delaying acquisitions and other activities that ultimately cost them between $10 million and $500 million in lost opportunities." - Cote'

"The battle for enterprise BPM is about engaging the business at enterprise scale, not just IT. It’s what Phil Gilbert has been preaching for years, and I don’t think IBM would have coughed up the money if they didn’t believe it, too. So the trick is melding Lombardi’s superior business-friendly tooling with IBM’s bulletproof backend and SOA. BPMN 2.0 will provide them a way to do that, so I think today’s positioning slides are just placeholders." - Cote'