Last week, TheStreet.com ran a story about a possible deal involving Apple and an Israeli startup. The story has since been heavily edited. Here’s how it originally appeared:

Apple is in talks to buy a flash storage company for mobile products called Anobit Technologies for $400 million to $500 million, Israeli newspaper Calcalist reports.

If a deal were to materialize, it would be Apple’s biggest company acquisition since bringing legendary founder Steve Jobs back to the company by buying NeXT Computers in 1996. For a company that’s relied on inventing and growing internal products to win consumer loyalty, a flash-focused deal could potentially solve an oft cited bother of Apple’s popular iPhone and iPad products – their inability to handle Adobe’s Flash program that allows Web users to view applications, pictures and video.

You see the problem? The author mixes up flash memory—the silicon chips that go into digital cameras, phones, and computing devices like the iPad—with Adobe’s Flash software, which plays back media files on a variety of platforms, including Windows and the Mac.

The story was quickly edited, with the egregious errors removed and this explanatory note added:

Story updated to reflect difference between flash memory hardware and flash software.

Ah, but the original lives on, thanks to this screen capture.

The worst part? The author of that story has an impressive journalistic background, including a master’s degree in business and economic journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. (Columbia should ask for its return.)

But here’s the best part:

Prior to moving into journalism, Antoine worked as an analyst in the fixed-income operations of Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital.

Yeah, Lehman Brothers. The largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. At dead center in the great banking collapse of 2008.

It’s bad enough that clowns like this destroyed the economy. Now they’re messing with my profession?

Begone!

If you’ve read any of the 20 or so books I’ve written since 1997, you probably met Katy. She made cameo appearances in nearly every book, as sender and recipient of e-mail messages, subject of photos and videos, corporate officer, quality control engineer, personal assistant, and even helicopter pilot (in a chapter where I needed to show an example of a résumé created using Microsoft Word).

Katy probably spent more time in my office over the last decade than I did. When I wasn’t there, she found dark, quiet cubbyholes to sleep in. When I was sitting at my desk, inevitably she wanted to be in my lap or, even better, on my keyboard. Unless there was a sunbeam coming in the window, of course. No lap can compete with a sunbeam.

We had to say goodbye to Katy this week. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising for a 15-year-old cat to suddenly develop a life-threatening condition, but we were still shocked and surprised and ultimately very saddened.

Katy was a marvelously photogenic creature, and given her love of the office it’s not surprising that I have a collection of photos of her at work. In her honor, then, I present this gallery.

I am a writer. I make my living helping people use technology to become more productive.

My first book appeared in bookstores back in 1995, when the World Wide Web was still shiny and new. I’ve been writing books steadily since then, always with traditional publishers, always following the same basic model.

I still believe in books. The web might be the best option for finding a specific answer to a specific question, but there’s nothing like a well-written, carefully edited book to help you understand a new technology or quickly master a new product.

The trouble with the traditional publishing model is that it hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years, despite the revolutionary changes in technology we’ve seen during that time. Traditional publishers still start with a print edition and eventually get around to digital formats. That model has to change.

That’s why I’ve joined a new company, Fair Trade Digital Exchange, as a founding author and partner and why I’m leaving traditional publishing behind.

It’s the first shot in what I am confident will be a revolution in tech publishing.

We’re “digital first” for a reason.

Technology changes at breathtaking speed these days. One of the advantages of a digital-first approach is that we can produce smaller titles with a smaller price tag, and get them into the market quickly, while print-first publishers are still arguing over proposals.

My first book for Fair Trade DX, Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start, is practically a case study in the difference between the two publishing models.

With a traditional publisher, I would start writing when the first beta appeared. Four to six months later, my co-authors and I would have a finished, fully edited manuscript. After two more months of post-production and printing, that 1,000-page book would finally be available for sale.

By contrast, the first edition of Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start, based on the Windows Developer Preview released in September at Microsoft’s BUILD conference, is already fully tech-checked, professionally copy-edited, and available in every popular digital format. (You can buy the EPUB version at our website, get it for your Kindle at Amazon.com, or download it to your Nook from bn.com.) The first edition is 130 pages. I’ll have an updated, expanded edition within weeks after the beta is released. And I’ll update and expand that book again when the final version is released to manufacturing.

Our digital-first process lets us work fast, update quickly, and stay relevant. If you’re an early adopter, you can follow along with those early editions and have a genuine head start on the competition by the time the final product is released. If you prefer to wait for the final edition, you’ll still have a head start of weeks or even months compared to competing products from traditional publishers.

At Fair Trade DX, authors are 50/50 partners.

I’ve been fortunate to work with many fine publishing professionals through the years. We’ve shared a long list of successful titles together, but those successes have always been on the publisher’s terms. They keep 85-90% of the revenue; the author gets 10-15%.

That split made sense in a print-first world. After all, it costs a lot of money to print books by the thousands and ship them around the country, and there’s always a risk that the booksellers will return those copies if they don’t sell.

Digital publishing changes that cost structure completely. There’s no manufacturing cost for e-books, distribution uses web servers instead of trucks and warehouses, and there’s no risk of returns.

But publishers still insist on keeping their traditional revenue split with authors when they sell a book in digital format. That doesn’t seem fair. Which is why we’ve changed the split to a straight 50/50 for revenue on an author’s work.

At Fair Trade DX, we share the responsibilities and the rewards. Authors are the subject-matter experts. We provide professional development, editing, proofreading, cover design, and translation into every popular digital format. Not to mention the tricky details of placing titles where readers can find them.

This arrangement allows Fair Trade DX to publish titles that might never get considered by a traditional publisher because they’re too small. And it allows authors the chance to make a living without having to spend time mastering self-publishing tools. Instead, they can do what they do best—write.

And best of all: there’s no DRM.

At Fair Trade DX, we hate copy protection as much as you do. For titles aimed at IT pros and computer professionals, it’s especially annoying and counterproductive. If you buy a new title, you probably want to read it on your Kindle, your iPad, your smartphone, at least two PCs and a Mac, and eventually on devices that don’t even exist today.

We say, go right ahead. Our titles have no restrictions on the number or type of devices you can use them on. In other words, we trust our customers to do the right thing.

Why now?

We’ve been asking traditional publishers to make these sorts of changes for years, and every time we asked, they said the time wasn’t right. They always seem to have a reason to keep doing things the way they’ve always done things.

So finally we got tired of waiting and decided to get it done ourselves. That’s why we founded Fair Trade DX.

If you’re looking for our first wave of computer books, you can find them at our online bookstore. If you’re a technology expert and you’d like to talk to us about how Fair Trade DX works and how you can submit a book proposal, we’re ready to listen.

Come and join our revolution.

Over at CNET, Molly Wood is getting a lot of attention for a post titled "How Facebook is ruining sharing."

She complains, justifiably, about how "the slow spread of Facebook’s Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing."

I know you’ve seen this at the top of your news feed: a list of stories your friends have been reading. Or, simply, a single post with a great headline leading to a story that you’d really like to read. So you click it, because your friend shared it, and you really want to read it.

But you can’t read it, because you don’t have that app installed. And there’s no easy way to work around that roadblock except to install the app, in which case the default settings make sure that everything you click gets "shared" to your Facebook feed. And the cycle continues.

Here’s the problem. That’s not sharing.

I read lots of stuff online. Much of it is crap. (Sturgeon’s Law and all that.) I don’t want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs showing every link I clicked on. If I read a post that has a great headline and turns out to be utter garbage, you’re going to see that in my feed. You might be tempted to click it because it has an interesting headline and you think I am somehow recommending it. When that happens, the purveyor of that particular piece of crap has been unjustly rewarded.

Now, I do like some of these news-related apps. In Facebook, I have three of them installed: The Guardian, WSJ Social, and the Washington Post Social Reader. But if you go to my Facebook feed, you will not see any of my activity from these three apps. That’s because I specifically disabled the automatic sharing feature.

Here’s how you can do the same.

If you click on a link and you haven’t already installed the app that feeds it, you’ll see a dialog box like this one:

If you look carefully, you’ll see that this app is set to make your activity visible to Friends. Click the arrow to its right and you’ll get some additional choices:

And now it gets interesting. Click Custom and you get the option to decide exactly who gets to see what you share. You can go totally granular here if you want, using Lists or even the names of individual friends to make your activity visible to some people and hiding it from others. Or you can choose the option I have chosen here: Only Me.

Click Save Changes and then add the app to Facebook. Now, I have a record of everything I read using this app, which I find convenient if I want to return to an interesting article. But I’m not sharing that information with my friends. If I want to share a link with them, I can do it in a conscious, purposeful way, and I get the option to add my own comments.

In my next post, what to do with apps you’ve already added…

My latest project clocks in at 24,700 words. Here’s an aerial view:

Phase One is done. Next week should be fun…

We had a delightful photo session yesterday at our house. The business necessity was to come up with a head shot I can use in press releases, social media sites, and other places. But we couldn’t resist the opportunity to bring the dogs into the picture. Here’s the result:

Photographer Corinna See deserves credit for her patience and skill in getting Mackie (left) and Lucy (right) to actually sit still and look at the camera long enough to get this great shot.

The session was fun and the results were even better than we hoped for.

If you’re in the Santa Fe area, I recommend Corinna’s work enthusiastically.

Bonus close-ups of Mackie and Lucy:

I’ve been immersed in Windows 8 lately, getting ready for some interesting new projects.

One of the new features I’ve been looking forward to testing is the enhanced support for USB 3.0 devices. USB 2.0 is fine, but with terabyte-sized hard drive it can be downright painful to do large copies.

I’ve added USB 3.0 ports to a couple of desktop PCs here using inexpensive add-in cards, and I also picked up some external drive enclosures that support the format. Here’s what a copy operation looked like when I plugged a drive full of data into the USB 2.0 port and copied it to a local drive:

Not bad, actually.

Now the exact same data set, but this time with the drive plugged into a USB 3.0 port:

Yeah, that’s about 2.5 times as fast.

Obviously, your mileage may vary. The type of data you’re copying makes a difference, as do the USB chipset and drivers.

Still, at those speeds, I’m sold.

I miss you guys.

Talk to me.

Consider this an open thread. But please be nice to one another.

Also, for those who need a refresher: How to Disagree.

Update: If you’ve never commented here before (or even if you have), your remarks might get stuck in my spam filter briefly. Sorry about that. I try to clear them as quickly as possible.

If you’re testing Windows 8 via the Windows Developer Preview, you might find this interesting.

This project is way more fun than I expected, and I hope I’ll be able to share it Real Soon Now.

Today, I got yet another piece of hate mail from yet another idiot. This is an occupational hazard for a tech journalist, and normally I just hit the delete key. But this one was just too good not to share.

It was filled with the usual gibberish about Microsoft, and it included this paragraph as the key piece of evidence for my inability to be impartial about Microsoft:

It was extremely funny to read what you were saying about Windows Home Server 2011. They ditched the [Drive Extender]technology but as the public’s biggest advocate, you decided to grab your tail and run to the keyboard to praise it instead.

It took me a few minutes to stop laughing. I mean, of all the examples to choose, this had to be one of the most unintentionally funny.

I remember that episode well. It took me only a a few seconds to find the post, titled "How Microsoft can clean up the mess in its home and small business server business."

And here’s how that post started (I’ve boldfaced the good stuff):

If you want your customers to trust you, don’t lie to them.

That sounds like common sense, the kind of stuff you should learn in the first semester of business school, but apparently someone up in Redmond skipped that lecture. And boy, are they paying for it now.

Last week, Microsoft announced its decision to discontinue development of one of the core features of Windows Home Server, a technology called Drive Extender. I won’t rehash the details here. You can get an overview in this post from my colleague Mary Jo Foley and get more technical details in this thorough explanation from Peter Bright at Ars Technica.

Instead, I want to talk about how Microsoft delivered the bad news, and how in a matter of hours they destroyed their relationship with a large and loyal customer base.

Later in the post, I referred to Microsoft’s blog post announcing its decision as "a masterpiece of corporate muddlespeak."

In the middle of my post, I noted that "I spent 30 minutes on the phone with [a Microsoft product manager] last week, in a tense interview that I’m sure was as uncomfortable for him as it was for me." I remember that interview well. I asked a lot of tough questions and interrupted the Microsoft spokesperson repeatedly when he was refusing to answer difficult questions and was simply trying to spin the answers. It wasn’t a fun interview, but I got the answers my readers were looking for.

And here’s how that post ends, with my advice to Microsoft:

Finally, start telling the truth. The whole truth. Everyone knows there are issues with the new Drive Extender technology. Acknowledge them openly instead of trying to hide them under a bunch of doubletalk. Microsoft owes no less than that to the customers who’ve stuck with them for all these years.

So, let’s review: I accused Microsoft, publicly, of issuing doubletalk. I started the damn post by calling the company out for lying to its users.

And yet this idiot remembers how I "ran to the keyboard to praise" Microsoft on this issue.

He closes with this piece of advice (after, of course, calling me a "Microsoft tool" with "no professional journalistic integrity"):

I hope you do your due diligence next time to write and base your decisions with a modicum of integrity instead of letting Microsoft spoon-feed you information that may or not be true.

Sir, I pronounce you World’s Stupidest Troll. It will take a special effort to dislodge you from that lofty perch.