Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Starr vs US regarding AIG

Article in the NYT about the Starr suit against the federal government.

It would truly be wonderful if we saw some evenhanded coverage that showed exactly what the government did and did wrong when it used AIG's value to bail-out much of wall street.  Even if the actions were necessary to preserve the financial system, it doesn't mean that AIG shareholders should have uniquely borne so much of the burden of those actions.


The use of AIG as a conduit to make other parts of the financial system whole was a panicked reaction by the government to the crisis.  Taking the government at face value that there was no malice does not justify the use of government powers to act so inequitably.  Some recompense is appropriate.


The following statement from the NYT article captures what I have been writing for years



The decision to use taxpayer and A.I.G. money to repurchase soured mortgage deals that the company insured for big banks in the form of credit-default swaps amounted to a “backdoor bailout” of Wall Street, the lawsuit says.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Touch ID and Mac

I wonder why Apple has not brought Touch ID to the Mac to help in password management.  I know typing in passwords is faster on a keyboard and that safari can be set up to automatically enter passwords but still, simple identity verification seems like it would be useful.  Maybe this is an example of less is more and just saying no.

Friday, September 12, 2014

U2 and the circle of endorsements

Just a thought on how funny it has been to see U2 migrate from Apple, to Palm, to RIMM, and back to Apple over the past several years.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Apple Watch and iPhone pairing

It seemed clear that the watch will require an iPhone for full functionality.  My question: will it fail to work as a fitness band without a phone?  Given the new larger size of the phones, it seems a burden to have to carry both for running (especially as I think they said there was enough onboard memory for music).  It will be interesting to see how tied together the phone and watch are to each other.

apple watch customization

I think I saw in the keynote that the watchface is customized from the watch itself.  Which is fine but, given that the watch requires a paired iPhone, I really hope customization can be done from the phone.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

apple Watch

Now I understand why they added voice messaging to iMessages.  To text from the watch.

Monday, September 8, 2014

iPhone 6 and one-handed typing

Why would one-handed mode on a large-screen iPhone require a crazy re-sizing scheme?  Wouldn’t it just be a small variation of the iPad’s shrink-and-split keyboard where the iPhone keyboard would shrink to match the size of the regular iPhone keyboard and shift to one side or the other?  It could even use the same trigger (a slide of the screen once engaged) or just default to shrunk and shifted.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

iPhone 6: September 14

As if there were any doubt, September 14 seems all but certain as the release date for the new iPhone: the "upgrade eligibility" engine on the apple store app now specifically notes eligibility both as of today and as of September 14.

[UPDATE: OBVIOUSLY THIS WAS WRONG.  PREORDERS BEGIN SEPTEMBER 12]