tom moody

On the topic of Facebook's ever-upward user creep (supposedly 400,000,000 two years ago, now supposedly 845,000,000 MAU, or monthly active users), financial blogger Barry Ritholtz counters:

What I learned from Facebook’s [S-1] filing was that they have 161 million active users who actually go to Facebook.com each month. That’s not shabby — but it’s a far cry from the MAU claims of 850 million.

Update, January 28, 2021: I stopped tracking Facebook's claimed user count, but it kept growing, and the larger numbers were always accepted and passed along uncritically by journalists and bloggers. As of today the claimed number is 2.6 billion "regular users." I wonder how many it really is. The S-1 SEC filing that Ritholz checked 9 years ago is a one-time statement made at the time of a company's initial public offering. Further research is needed to see if a tech company's regular 10-K filings must also accurately state user counts, so the 2.6 billion claim can be fact checked.

After writing a eulogy for Del.icio.us 14 months ago I gave it up for dead, even though I later heard it had been sold rather than dismantled. Just looked at it again recently and boy did the new owners mess it up.

NYT Arts Beat blog:

Kraftwerk* will give a series of eight performances, each devoted to one of its albums, as part of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of the electronic music pioneers in April, museum officials said. The performances during “Kraftwerk-Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” on consecutive evenings starting April 10, will not only feature tracks from one of Kraftwerk’s albums,** but also other original compositions intended to showcase the group’s influence on contemporary culture. Projected images, including 3-D ones, will accompany the music. The albums will be performed in chronological order, one each night, starting with “Autobahn” from 1974 and working up through “Tour de France” from 2003.***

*Ralf Hütter plus three impostors
**Will The Mix be one of the "eight lps between '74 and '03"- guess so - but why - it just rehashes the old material
***The last album is called Tour de France Soundtracks, not Tour de France; Tour de France was an EP from 1983 #kraftnerd

Update: Wizardishungry put up a very funny Downfall parody about MOMA's two-ticket limit [YouTube]. Didn't realize that you can only have two tickets for the entire 8 night series. Meaning, you could win the speed-dial lottery and still end up with only one choice: going on the night Hütter & Co. perform The Mix. (On second thought, that might be the one to attend because even though it's a weak album, it is a greatest hits package.)

Via Paddy Johnson's blog we see certain art schools are drinking the Apple Koolaid and giving their students pads "pre-equipped with a number of applications for use in their art and design classes."

Just thinking back to my prehistoric art training. We learned how to make stretchers - Fredrix snap-together stretcher bars were acceptable. Preparing canvas - acrylic one-application gesso was OK, no need to mix glue sizing or prime. Premixed paint and varnishes - check. After a year or two you could imitate reality just using your eye and wrists. The resulting image could sit in a closet until the present day, then be scanned using an Epson scanner, rendered to JPEG, posted to the web and it would have a slightly different flavor than an image produced entirely in the software realm, moving your finger around on a piece of glass and picking menu items on your pre-equipped tablet.

Nevertheless, if I were teaching this class I would be fired for encouraging the students to retro-engineer all the Apple programs and move them over to Linux boxes where they could be customized to express each student's individuality.