• filed under
• Random

The New York Times reports that cheap laptops like the EeePC have destroyed the market for high-end computers and laptops.

“The day of the Rolls-Royce laptop and the high-end computer may not be totally over,” said Charles King, an independent technology industry analyst in Hayward, Calif. “But certainly the audience for that type of product is getting smaller and smaller.”

Really? Have they looked at Apple’s bottom line this quarter?

What makes it even more obnoxious is that they have:

Even the mighty Apple, whose iPod and iPhone revenue had helped insulate it from the first phase of the recession, reported last week that revenue from its desktop line fell 31 percent from the same period ago.

But that’s been going on so long that it’s hardly news. Apple’s customers have been shifting to laptops for half a decade at least. Plus, Apple launched a new laptop line in October, but not new desktops. And, oh right, the article (or at least the headline) is about laptops. How did Apple’s laptops fare? Let’s see:

Sold 2.5 million Macs, 9% growth over prior December quarter results. Very solid growth, particularly in contrast to the rest of the market. … Customer response to new MacBooks and MacBook Pros strong, year-over-year growth of 34 percent laptop growth. Desktop unit sales declined by 25% year-over-year.

Clearly, no one will buy a high-end laptop anymore.

• filed under
• Random

You may have heard that there was a massive water main break outside Washington last week that flooded out a road and required some dramatic rescues.

What I didn’t notice until now (because I didn’t bother reading the actual stories) was that it was River Road that was flooded.

• filed under
• Random

Smashing Magazine today had a compendium of stop motion videos on the web. If you ever wondered what it looks like to have too much time on your hands, I present the answer to your question here:



Yes, that’s all done with Legos.

I also really liked this one (which gets a lot of bonus points from using a favorite Sigur Ros track I’ve always wanted to use in a video).

• filed under
• Random

Peter Sellers was a great, great man.

• filed under
• Random

Awww. Look, it’s a giant sea mammal wailing on the sax. Isn’t that great?


Story

(Let it be noted that my headline is better than their headline.)

There’s bonus walrus (extra walrus? MORE WALRUS!) after the jump.

Is that a happy walrus? I don’t know. What’s a happy walrus look like?

Walrus is a funny word.

• filed under
• Random

I have often found that a distinguishing characteristic of really excellent writing is analogy and metaphor.

This is Gene Weingarten, an occasionally funny and often interesting humor columnist for the Post, in his weekly chat (he can write, by the way):

The woman’s voice was perfectly unaccented, sounded like a real sexy, breathy-sophisticated American gal, but it was as though she had spent her childhood in a monastery among monks who had taken vows of silence; there was plenty of reading material but no one to show her exactly how to say things, and dictionary pronunciation guides went only so far.

He is describing the voice of a GPS unit. It is a perfect description.

• filed under
• Random

Just an odd and sort of cool video (after the jump)…