A brilliant Apple move

by mnsc

Apple Outsmarts Everyone — Again!
[Via MacSurfer's Oped]

What Is Steve Jobs Announcing Monday? Here’s The Scoop About iCloud & Time Capsules [Exclusive]

According to the source, Apple has developed a system to make users’ Time Machine backups available through its new iCloud service.

This is the “Home Folder” access concept that we’ve detailed before (how it will be accessed using NFC iPhones and the role of the Mac App Store). All your files and data — pictures, videos, Word and Excel documents, and so on — will be available anytime, anywhere, on both Mac OS X and iOS devices.

The surprising thing is, iCloud won’t be fed through Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina, as you might expect.

Instead, the system will be based on Time Capsule, Apple’s wireless router and hard drive backup that’s currently sold in 1TB and 2TB versions. As rumored, Time Capsule will be updated, becoming less of a local backup and more of a personal cloud server, like the newer souped-up NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives from companies like Iomega (we reviewed one here). The new Time Capsule is rumored to run on iOS and come with embedded A4 or A5 CPUs.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

That is just … brilliant!

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The problem I have with the cloud is part of what is mentioned here: its very openness and accessibility makes it an easy target for both hackers and government intrusion. The former can do it illegally and the latter can do it legally –simply by serving a warrant to say Apple or Amazon or Google. In either case, I would not know of the intrusion before hand.

But, if the actually data is kept on a Time Capsule that I have in my possession, then this sort of intrusion is a little different. Yes, hackers could perhaps still get to it but the government could not without my knowledge.

This would be a really smart idea for Apple – give us the cloud for easy access but allow us to keep private control of the data.

Cutting spending will not create the jobs we need

by Alex E. Proimos

2011 Private Employment is 2% Below 2001 Levels
[Via The Big Picture]

From the Liscio Report, via Alan Abelson, May Employment data shows that a limp recovery is growing limper.

“As our friends and astute data scanners at the Liscio Report, Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, observe, disappointments were scattered throughout the report, And while they don’t think May is “an overture to a double dip,” it does plainly reflect accelerating erosion on the job front . . .

More than a little shocking to Philippa and Doug (and to us as well) is that private employment today is 2% below where it stood 10 years ago and, as they’ve noted before, job loss over a 10-year period is unprecedented since the advent of something resembling reliable tallies began in 1890. So far, they point out somewhat grimly, “we’ve regained just 1.8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession and its aftermath, or about one in five.”

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We have been cutting taxes and government spending for well over a decade yet we have fewer people employed today than in 2011. All that has happened is that the richest americans became richer while the rest of us became poorer.

This is unprecedented in American history. One would think that the policies followed over most of this decade would be shown to simply be ineffective for creating jobs.

Why in the world would we think that continuing along this path would solve our current problems? The tax rates and spending of the 90s gave us our best economy and actually produced Federal budgets that could have lowered our debt. We had surpluses.

The tax cuts in the next decade have produced the worse employment record in American history. When will we see a shift back to what worked in the 90s?

Probably never again. From the Barron’s article:

Moreover, there seems no immediate cure in sight for the truly sick housing market, and attempts by Washington to administer one, as its efforts to date have painfully demonstrated, are an odds-on bet to make it even sicker. Nor, obviously, is the poisonous political atmosphere in Washington conducive to sensible fiscal and monetary policy.

On the contrary, the mood in the capital seems to favor following Europe’s lead in pushing austerity at all costs to revive an already-floundering economy. And just as it won’t work in the Old World, it won’t work here, either.

Nice, succinct overview of our current housing problem and perhaps how to fix it

Creating productive jobs the way out of Great Recession
[Via The Seattle Times]

The most arresting piece of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index report last week was that house prices have fallen further than during the Great Depression, when they took 19 years to recover their losses.

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Owning a home, and the vast industry that engendered, was once the American Dream. It supported the last and largest manufacturing industry in the US, something that could not be outsourced to other lands.

Now that industry is broken and may never come back. We need to shift our entire way of thinking to overcome this. Current estimates by many are that it could take up to a generation to accomplish this relying purely on market forces.

The Great Depression was overcome by relying on more than just market forces. There is a role for government to speed up the transition, for helping our society to hold together during the transition so we do not tear ourselves apart – as so many leaders seem bent on doing.

That is what we should be talking about.

But we are not having that conversation. Instead it is about how the wealthy – many of whom are responsible for the mess we are in – to become wealthier. Some dream of an Apocalypse and are working to make it happen.

Worse than the Depression!

by james.thompson

US house price fall ‘beats Great Depression slide’ – Business News, Business – The Independent
[Via The Independent]

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

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Housing prices nationwide have now dropped more than they did during the Great Depression. And it took 16 years for prices to get back to the highs then. A large segment of America will be dead before we see these housing prices return to their highs.

Guess which is the only major market to see housing prices appreciate? Washington, DC! And it also has the lowest unemployment in the country. No wonder its inhabitants spend their time on ephemera. Life is good for them.

But the huge oversupply of foreclosed homes indicates that prices will keep going down and down.

And then there is this attitude, captured from the comments:

Why is it so hard to understand that signing a mortgage today, with no prospects for a secure jobs future that will allow one to remain in one location over time, is like signing an indenture in the 1700′s. A 20 year mortgage is an anchor, not a sail. You can’t move. You have limited job flexibility. You are in eternal debt. The old paradigm of home ownership (like so much of the rest of American societal structure) is broken.

There is simply no incentive to buy a house today and many dis-incentives. Until things stabilize or begin to look up – something economists think could take 5-10 years under the best of circumstances – home sales will be awful.

The flexibility of Apple

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

O’Brien: Apple’s path to the app store wasn’t a straight road – San Jose Mercury News
[Via MercuryNews.com]

The unveiling of the iPhone almost four years ago stands as a pivotal moment in computing history. The elegant design not only ushered in the mobile computing revolution, it also ignited an entire billion-dollar business based on mobile apps.

And, it is widely believed, this was all part of a master plan designed by Steve Jobs and Apple (AAPL).

But in a recent conversation with former Apple insider Bob Borchers, a very different picture emerged, one that hasn’t been reported until now. What he told me is that the mobile app ecosystem developed far differently from what Apple originally envisioned.

And it happened because Apple did two things: It listened to users. And it adapted.

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An important aspect of 21st Century is adaptation – they do not get it right the first time. Apple did not have a grand plan in mind. It was just trying to create the best, most stable smartphone it could.

But, because of the iPhone’s cutting edge nature, it allowed the possibility of outside change. Originally, Apple did not envision the app store.

It listened though and adapted. And in doing so, created an ecosystem much more powerful than just the iPhone itself.

The success of the App Store, though, was dependent on Apple having so many of the pieces already in place – iOS was based on OS X, meaning that  a large number of developers could jump on the new system rapidly; iTunes already had the infrastructure to support all the needs of an App store; the hardware of the iPhone could support so much more than web apps.

The success of the App store helped lead to the success of the iPad – Apple made sure that it could run not only iPhone apps but its own.

Apple would not be in the position today if it had clamped down on the development of apps for the iPhone.