1954: RCA Vs. CBS For Color TV Creation

From a January 4, 1954 issue of Life magazine, the beginnings of color TV.

RCA and CBS were at war over how to do color TV. The FCC played referee and they each came up with a method of being compatible with monochrome TVs (most of the TVs sold and owned then).

Eventually, the RCA method won. As you’ll see, CBS had a crazy Rube Goldberg-like method with several points of failure.

Onda V818 Gets Android 4.2.2 This Week

Android 4.2.2 for the Onda V818 could roll out today.

There’s a downloadable RAR file for 4.2.2 for their V972 tablet.

I haven’t yet seen a link for the V818. When I do, I will update this post.

I’m very interested to see this update and if it changes the customized-by-Onda Settings UI. I’d also like to see new AnTuTu scores.

After the break, I’m repeating the video from AllWinner that shows their 4.2.2 update running on the Onda V818.

Same-day update: This 4.2.2 rollout is over the next week and is a public beta. It’s probably best to wait for the final firmware to show up at the Onda download page or to get the OTA notification.

Update Friday May 17, 2013: See: Get Android 4.2.2 For The Onda V818 Mini

The Forecast For 1976 From 1954

From a January 4, 1954 issue of Life magazine, comes this interesting bit:

1954 was before my time, but I was an adult in 1976. And it was an absolutely shit year. We’d been through the assassinations, the oil shock, stagflation, pervasive urban crime, race riots, widespread unemployment, the collapse of quality control, Vietnam, war protests, Hippies, the counter-culture, bombings, airjackings, and drugs were everywhere. No one seemed to give a shit or know what to do to fix anything. It would be several years before things began to get better (as well as bring even worse revenge effects we still live with today).

So sit back and have a read of this forecast that had no idea what was to come and blithely extrapolates from its much-calmer present to the far future of twenty-two years hence.

1954: Electronics Wizards

From a January 4, 1954 issue of Life magazine, a bunch of electronics wizards (and one physicist) who would dramatically change the world and lead to the one we now have (click to enlarge).

Playing Hide And Seek With Yes

The One Word That Shouldn’t Exist in an Entrepreneur’s Vocabulary

You don’t ask. You don’t get.

And here’s the thing about “no.”

I know first hand just how chicken people are about hearing it. I’ve sat through so many meetings where sales reps didn’t ask for the order. I’ve been pitched by hundreds of entrepreneurs who never actually asked me whether I would invest. Very few people do.

I was searching for a story I encountered a while back about a woman who got a job with a prominent person. People marveled over her luck, wondering why others didn’t get the job. The bottom line was, she was the only person to ever ask for the job.

I expected to find a blog post I had done, but I came across someone asking that was even more outrageous: You Decide: Greed Or Stupidity? —

an 18-year-old single mother living on state benefits was handed £5,000 for cosmetic surgery by one of the biggest high street banks

How many others in her position would have had the guts to even ask?

Previously here:

The Universe Is Made Of No
He Knew What The Universe Is Made Of
The Universe Is Stingy And Lazy

Boss Jobs And His Apple Mafia

U.S. Now Paints Apple as ‘Ringmaster’ in Its Lawsuit on E-Book Price-Fixing

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Anti-trust?

That smoking gun email from Eddy Cue is extortion.

If we had an awake, aware, and active prosecutor, Apple would be prosecuted under the RICO Act.

Don’t bother with your techno-LOLbertarian fanboi whining in Comments about how “it’s Apple’s store.” You don’t know shit about the real world.