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The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers' wages | PandoDaily

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple's board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt "got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple."

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?"

I never liked Quark, but I respected the position it held in the industry.

But now, it is no more:

As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.

Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and… uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn't listen.

I once told Carey that Natalie had to "learn to fail." She reacted strongly at the time, basically telling me that I was stupid, and what did I know about failing at anything?

I've learned a lot about failing, and it's important to learn to fail. You can't learn how to avoid future failures if you don't fail the first few times. You won't take risks if you fear failure. You won't know how to recover from failure if you don't have experience at it.

Yet another creepy video showing the "power" of augmented reality via glasses.

The guy not only cheats at 8-ball, but uses his glasses to access personal information to scam on a bartender.

Nice. Real nice. 😛

Peter Smart lives up to his name with this little article: Rethink the Airline Boarding Pass. Brilliant. I'm flying somewhere right now (to Orlando, for the PGA Show). I've already had my boarding passes fall apart because I've had to shove them in my pocket.

The Verge has a bunch of tweets and commentary on Nest's acquisition by Google: Why is everyone disappointed by Google buying Nest?.

Review & Outlook: Apple's Star Chamber - WSJ.com:

Which gets to the heart of this bizarre case: The numbers show that, far from hurting the market, the publishers' and Apple's agency model actually helped it. They allowed Barnes & Noble to gain a foothold in the e-book market, provided relief to the independent brick-and-mortar stores, and gave consumers lower rather than higher prices.

:doh:

Oh PS with Nest’s built-in sensors now Google knows when you’re home, what rooms you’re in, and when you’re out. Just FYI.

— Ryan Block (@ryan) January 13, 2014

Great.

More here.

Formula For Perfect Parallel Parking Is Bigger Than The Spot.

Well, now that that's figured out, we can move on to the smaller things in the world…

(I honestly don't remember the last time I had to parallel park. But I live in Erie, PA, so that has a lot to do with it.)

This is how I feel like virtually every AppleScript problem I undertake turns out. The best solution: set a hard limit of 15 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever. Whatever stage you reach by then, stop.

I can tease him and he's cool with it. Pet peeve or something of mine. 🙂

Tim Bray:

You can't make money. Seriously, Apple is always talking about the billions and billions they pay out of the app store, so why is it that I don't know anyone who's making serious money on mobile apps?

I know plenty of people making money. I guess Tim just doesn't know any of them. Apple's not lying about the money they're paying out.

The GenieGo application for Mac OS X is reasonably good, but adjusting its volume adjusts your system volume… which makes working while you're trying to watch a show quietly in the background rather annoying, since ALL of your system sounds are now quieter. 😛

When I last blogged about this, back in 2006 (!!), we were only on round 12.

TextExpander was only at version 1.3 (!!).

Today I got an email announcing TextExpander 4.2.1, so I checked it out. I'm trying it, and thus far, I'm liking it. It expands every time so far, and the only missing feature that I used a few times in TypeIt4Me is the ability to simulate other keyboard presses (like the backspace key) when expanding.

Why am I trying TextExpander - and actually going so far as to buy the upgrade ($15) and commit to using it for awhile? Because TypeIt4Me doesn't seem to be getting attention. The last update is approaching a year old, and none of the instructions were even updated for Mavericks and the new Accessibility controls or System Prefs.

TextExpander, on the other hand, continues to get attention.