Tired of the bold, yet unsubstantiated claims of financial analysts, the L.A. Times turns to a bastion of data analysis for its latest story… CouponCodes4u.com.

On Thursday, the folks behind CouponCodes4u.com made a bold prediction: They say the Kindle Fire HD will outsell the iPad mini by 2 to 1.

To back up that claim, the coupon clearing house website cited data collected from its website that shows nearly twice as many searches for the words “Kindle Fire HD” compared with “iPad mini” in the last three weeks.

Pathetic.

Here’s an analogy I posted on Twitter:

Equivalent of @latimes iPad mini/Kindle story is asking Ferrari club how many will buy a Corolla, then concluding Ferrari will outsell them.

Very sad that it had to come to this.

Okay, that’s impressive.

Dish has been in talks with several companies, including Google. While everything is in the early stages, it would be very interesting if Google did move ahead with this plan given its relationship with existing carriers.

Here is a Google Cache link of the WSJ article.

MusicFIRST, an organization that represents musicians and their rights, in collaboration with SoundExchange on Wednesday announced that 125 artists, 40 of which are Grammy award winners, have opposed the bill. Artists include Common, Dead Kennedys, Missy Elliot, Vince Gill, Don Henley, Billy Joel, Maroon 5, Martha Reeves, David Sanborn, Michael W. Smith and Roger Waters, among others.

I always believed musicians should be paid for their music. Perhaps it’s because I know so many of them that rely on it for their livelihood, but whatever the reason, if you want to use their material, they need to get paid.

Jacob Ward for Popular Science:

Voice interfaces like Siri seem outdated by comparison. With Google Now, you don’t pull the phone out when an idea occurs to you. You pull it out when an idea occurs to it.

Shawn Blanc on his new Hidden Radio:

The device is little more than a giant volume knob with a speaker inside, and yet, ironically, it’s the most difficult-to-use volume knob in my home.

Great review of a kickstarter project he backed last year. Reading the review, I felt bad for Shawn because he didn’t seem to have any unreasonable expectations for the device, but yet it still failed.

vjay transforms your iPhone or iPod touch into a cutting-edge mashup machine, directly integrated with the media libraries on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Another great looking app from Algoriddim. They have an iPad version too.

Charlie Demerjian:

In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky’d. Or was it Guggenheimer’d? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won’t change the outcome.

You may think that this is kind of harsh or maybe even an improbable outcome, but as you read through the story, you see that he is exactly right.

I laughed repeatedly when reading this comic. The part about the guy and his pants reminded me so much of Peter Cohen. Kind of frightening really.

While there’s still no substitute for a great mix or good microphone technique, the Precision K-Stereo Plug-In is a simple yet powerful new ambience recovery tool that can actually enhance the depth and imaging of a recording during mastering without adding artificial reverberation or changing the ratio of center elements to side elements.

This is Universal Audio’s latest plug-in and as you can see from the description, it can really help with the subtle characteristics of your song. The tips come straight from the company and is well worth the read.

Philip Messing and Josh Margolin for the NY Post:

A pair of brazen crooks punched another hole in the lax JFK security when they stole a trove of new Apple iPad minis — worth $1.5 million — from the same cargo building that was the site of the 1978 Lufthansa heist featured in “GoodFellas,” The Post has learned. The crooks struck shortly before midnight on Monday and used one of the airport’s own forklifts to load two pallets of the tablet computers into a truck, according to law-enforcement sources.

This never would have happened under Steve Jobs’ watch.

Todd Bradley, the head of HP’s PC business:

“I’d hardly call Surface competition,” Bradley said in an interview with IDG Enterprise. He listed several reasons, “One, very limited distribution. It tends to be slow and a little kludgey as you use it …. It’s expensive. Holistically, the press has made a bigger deal out of Surface than what the world has chosen to believe.”

This coming from one of Microsoft’s partners.

Chris Ciaccia for The Street:

After reports earlier in the week that the South Korean technology giant was raising application processor (AP) prices on Apple by as much as 20%, a Samsung Electronics official denied the reports to The Hankyoreh, a Seoul-based newspaper. The unnamed official noted that prices are set at the beginning of the year and aren’t changed easily.

Ballmer last night during an interview with Reid Hoffman:

Ballmer called the Android ecosystem “wild,” “uncontrolled” and susceptible to malware.

This coming from the man that’s in charge of the most virus- and malware-infected operating system in the world. Perhaps someone should have told Ballmer that the day before his comments, a teenager developed a prototype malware for Windows 8 that will be demonstrated later this month at the Malware Conference.

Drew Olanoff at TechCrunch did a great job of grabbing some other treasures from Ballmer too, like when Ballmer was asked about Windows and he said “Wow, it just works!”

The man is crazy.

I stared at this picture of an eye for quite a while before I finally saw what it was. Freaky.

Most Windows users in the U.S. know about Windows 8 but few have immediate plans to upgrade to Microsoft’s newest operating system. What’s more, about one-third of Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users who are ready to buy a new personal computer say they intend to switch to an Apple product.

Fascinating numbers for me, but they must be frightening for Microsoft. Imagine that one-third of the customers planning to purchase a new computer — 16% of the 350,000 people in this survey — decide that your product is so bad, they are switching to the competition. Microsoft has run out of goodwill from its users.

Update: I updated the wording to make the number of people considering a new purchase clear.

Stef Gonzaga put together a great roundup of Markdown apps on AppStorm. I’m really late to the Markdown party, but I really like using it. I started with Markdown last year and it’s incredibly versatile.

There seems to be nothing that can’t be done with CSS these days.

It won’t be new to anyone who owns a copy of Kurt Cobain’s Journals, but for the rest of us, the late Nirvana frontman’s hand-scrawled list of his all-time favorite albums is a sight to behold.

It’s always interesting to see what other musicians listen to on a regular basis.

News of the intrusion surfaced late Tuesday, when a hacker claiming to be from Egypt claimed the hack and proved it by releasing 644 records from the site, including emails, saying that the release was done to prove that Adobe is slow in fixing security issues with sites and products it releases.

I bet they got Adobe’s attention now.

Jim and Dan discuss Sinofsky’s departure and it’s affect on Microsoft, US iPhone sales by outlet and the success and importance of the Apple Store, the desperate future of RIM, allergic reactions to the Blackberry, the iPad mini and Apple’s decline, the Zoom Multistomp, and the new USB Strat. Sponsored by Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), Squarespace (use code DANSENTME11 for 10% off), Lynda, and Mutual Mobile.

Steinberg announced Cubase 7 today and it looks pretty good. I especially like what they’ve done with the Mix Console and Control Room.

Jeff Hunter:

The abuse of push notifications is spreading across the App Store. As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send push notifications.

I couldn’t agree more. Some of the uses of push notifications have gotten way out of hand. Some apps even pop up notifications when you open the app advertising some of their other products. I hate it.

[Via Ben Brooks]

Christina Warren locked her iPhone away and is only using the Nokia Lumia 920 for the next 10 days. Good luck.