Happy Valley: Best and worst of 2012 | Student Review

3.

Best Debate About a Mall Any of Us will Likely Ever See

In Salt Lake City, the lavish City Creek Center opened on March 22 again causing an explosion of opinion in the Bloggernacle, due to the fact that it is owned in part by the LDS Church and cost roughly $5 bajillion worth of the widow’s mite to build. Detractors called it the Anti-Christ of Shopping Malls (Retractable Roof/Fake Creek Division) and supporters insisted it was the pure manifestation of God’s Will on Earth. The unaware proletariat streamed in happily to look at things they couldn’t afford, and all the cool stores ditched Gateway to hang out with the popular new kid.

“the Bloggernacle!?”

Windows laptop sales sink — but that’s just part of the problem

Windows 8 PC sales aren’t trending well, according to a new report. And consumers’ addiction to low cost may be a factor.

A blurb on Friday from the NPD Group said Windows 8 holiday sales continue to not impress.

“The launch of Windows 8…did little to boost holiday sales or improve the yearlong Windows notebook sales decline,” NPD said.

More specifically, Windows laptop “holiday unit sales” were down 11 percent year-to-year, the market researcher said.

Want more deets? The average selling price of a Windows laptop rose a hair — $2 to $420, according to NPD.

Meanwhile, the average selling price of a MacBook rose almost $100 to $1,419 on a sales drop of 6 percent.

Google Android Baked Into Rice Cookers in Move Past Phone

Google Inc. (GOOG)???s Android software, the most widely used smartphone operating system, is making the leap to rice cookers and refrigerators as manufacturers vie to dominate the market for gadgets controlled via the Internet.

Android-based products ranging from Royal Philips Electronics NV???s PicoPix pocket projector and LG Electronics Inc. (066570)??? Smart Thinq refrigerators to Parrot SA (PARRO)???s Asteroid car stereo systems and Samsung Electronics Co. (005930)???s Galaxy Camera will be on display this week at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Extending its free operating system to new devices could let Google collect more data to build its lucrative search business and one-up software rivals Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. Android also is an easy to-use-platform that helps appliance makers like Samsung and Philips add product features and benefit from demand for Internet-connected devices — a market IDC predicts will reach more than $2 trillion in 2015.

Nielsen: TV Still King In Media Consumption; Only 16 Percent Of TV Homes Have Tablets

neilsen media 2012

It???s not too late for yet one more 2012 year-in-review report, and today???s latest addition comes from Nielsen, which examined how Americans have been consuming content over the course of the past year. The report found that of the 289 million U.S. TV owners, 119 million own four or more television sets, making TV still the device to beat when it comes to watching and recording programs, among other things.

The TV owning audience can also be further split up by how they access their programing and what sort of things they use their TV for, besides live viewing.

“TV” in this context appears to refer to the large stand-alone monitor that comes with a receiver built in. Highlight, “broadcast/over-the-air only is down from 16% in 2003 to 9%”

Key’s stance on broadband decision gob-smacking

It [the Commission ruling] substantially reduces the income of that company [Chorus] and its capacity around broadband.

Chorus investors (who are rewarded for risk, ffs) aren’t the only investors in telecommunications, even if you did think “investors” some special interest group that deserved more attention than others.

I wonder to what degree this proposed intervention and attendant kerfuffle is intended to distract us from the rort, that for every copper line, every month, Chorus (nee Telecom) was being paid $12.53 more than it was worth.  That the original “retail minus” model was so inflated by monopoly rentier behaviour, that when a “cost plus” regime was instituted it discovered how excessive the rent was.

That a company (Chorus) that is receiving the lion’s share of the State’s investment in fibre deployment, should then be protected by the State from a rational reduction in price is sketchy.  Especially when you consider the reduction will transfer profit to more competitive (AKA risky) companies who use the monopoly copper input to provide consumer choice in the market.

Maori Culture Adapting To Presence In Online Media…

But the Maori Language Commission (MLC) was concerned that the creation of culture cannot be done in an ad hoc fashion and needs to be carefully managed.

“I would like them to have some sort of sense of the translations coming from a Maori cultural perspective,” said Te Haumihiata Mason, language services manager at the MLC.

“The MLC should be the caretakers and keepers of the Maori lexicon.”

Managed culture, doesn’t sound vital to me.

To understand Christmas, go to the pub

The ???economics of the family??? is a prime example of an economic imperialism that seeks to account for all behaviour through a distorted concept of rationality, an extreme example of economists??? notorious physics envy. Some models developed in physics demonstrate a combination of simplicity and wide explanatory power so remarkable that it makes no sense to think about the world in any other way.

But such powerful explanations are rarely available in other natural sciences, and almost never in social sciences. Even the visit to the bar is governed by a complex and tacit collection of social conventions. How do you know that you have bought the beer but only rented the glass?

An economist and an anthropologist go into a bar… There’s a lot more to it.

‘Dropbox’ Is Taking Over The World

BEFORE Apple launched iCloud in 2011, Steve Jobs allegedly offered to buy Dropbox, a file-sharing service founded in 2007, for $800m. When Dropbox declined, Apple’s late boss disparaged it as a feature, not a company. Soon after, Dropbox raised $250m, putting its value at over $4 billion.

In December Dropbox concluded a promotional campaign that, in just a few weeks, added 2m new users, bringing the total to over 100m, roughly double the number when Jobs made his comment. Consumers, it seems, can’t get enough of the feature.

As a recent convert (to using it, extra storage came with the SGIII and new data cap made it less terrifying) I concur.

Tenth Grade Tech Trends

A few months ago, my fifteen-year-old sister told me that Snapchat was going to be the next Instagram. Many months before that she told me that Instagram was being used by her peers as much as Facebook. Both times I snickered.

Learning from past mistakes, I took some time over the holiday break to ask my sister many, many questions about how she and her friends are using technology. Below I???ve shared some of the more interesting observations about Instragram, Facebook, Instant Messaging, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, and FaceTime. I hope you???ll find them as informative, surprising, and humbling as I did.