Month: April 2012

Kindle Fire taking over Android tablet market

The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side.

Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double of the Fire’s Android market share since December.

The Kindle Fire is in warp drive — far outpacing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (15.4% of Android), Motorola Xoom (7%), the Asus Transformer (6.3%) and others by Dell, Lenovo and Sony.

But the tablet market leader remains Apple’s iPad, which, according to the market research firm IDC, owned about 55% of the tablet market at the end of 2011. Android tablets accounted for about 45%.  This is all great news for Amazon, meaning about 30% of tablets currently shipping are Kindle Fires, making the Fire a close second to the iPad.

Despite efforts by Apple, dismissing the Fire is increasingly difficult to do so. In February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed tablets like the Kindle Fire as inferior:

A cheap prod­uct might sell some units … But then [consumers] get it home and use it and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone ev­ery day that they use it and they wind up not us­ing it anymore.

No one knows for sure how much use the Kinde Fire is getting, but consumers certainly are buying it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

[caption id="attachment_1278" align="alignleft" width="100" caption=" "][/caption]She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.

Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Francis Holl after George Richmond c.1855. Stipple engraving

She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.

When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.

When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.

Continue reading “Harriet Beecher Stowe”

RIP: Harry Crews

[caption id="attachment_1175" align="alignleft" width="100" caption=" "][/caption]Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”

Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”

The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”

Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,

His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.

“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”

After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.

He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”