Posts by Mending
230 posts • joined Monday 12th March 2012 21:19 GMT
Let me guess
He wants the US to drop climate research, drop malaria research and research how humans and spend more money on research into just how God created the world in seven days.
Oh, and he probably wants to stop research into gerrymandering, given the perfectly logical shape of the district he represents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas.21st.Congressional.District.gif
(It's created to dilute the political power of San Antonio, a very liberal city, as much as possible.)
It's a 1980s feature
Everyone else has explained this here, but one of the things I like about Apple is their determination to make everything as logical as possible, and as legacy-free, for people starting to use computers and Macs today. The new 'duplicate' command feels weird, but it really does make more sense than 'Save As' which doesn't have the graphical cue that you're splitting the file into two differently-named copies which can diverge from each other.
Launchpad is actually a pretty sensible idea for novice users
Macs didn't really have a start menu to open apps you haven't already got pinned to your dock before-only opening the applications folder or typing out the name in spotlight. (When I first used a friend's Mac-this would have been early OS X era-I got completely confused thinking the Apple icon was the start menu.) Launchpad fixes that nicely. I mostly open apps from Spotlight now since I like to have a very empty dock, but if I was a novice mac user starting today I'd appreciate it.
I'm a power user and I like skeuomorphism
Well, not the Calendar, admittedly. Nobody likes that. But I liked the richness of the design in iOS when I first saw it, the feeling that I was reading an enchanted scrapbook that shifted as I moved my fingers over it and not just another kind of computer. It felt fun, like playtime. (Bundling Winnie The Pooh with the first iPads to show of the book-reader with a genius decision, it had me smitten from the start.) I really hope they don't lost that in the redesign.
The features rumoured for OS X sound great, but I wish they'd let me cut files, move somewhere else, and paste. Simple feature I miss from windows.
Not user friendly
When it works, it's great. I would say that-because of driver issues, and Microsoft's greater resources-it hasn't been given a fair shake.
Fragmentation is the greater issue-though I like it in many ways, I wish Ubuntu had gone with GNOME3 and not Unity.
Because Canonical have never made a profit, ever
Canonical are burning money and need to do something about it. I don't urgently blame them for this-anyone who cares can turn it off.
Re: Updates will be available
It'd happen silently-every time you plug the adapter into an iThing the iThing pushes the latest firmware onto it.
This was really stupid
Having created a smaller port, they find they can't send 1080p video over it. So:
a) outputting from an iPad to a TV means horrible video quality
b) You can't use an old dock-to-hdmi and a new lightning-to-old dock adapter together, even though some Apple stores have claimed you can.
c) expensive adapters
I actually like Lightning on my iPad 4, and this isn't relevant to me since I don't connect it to a TV, but I bet this means Lightning has a very short lifespan-there's no way it'll be able to do 4K when that arrives.
The long run
Here's Google's other pitch, I think: people who grew up with chromebooks. Not now, but in the future.
So here's how it works: you're fourteen now. You need a first laptop. Your parents bought you a chromebook, because it was cheap, low-maintenance and backed up everything you did to a Google data centre. You grow up using Google apps for everything.
Three years go by. Google Documents gets better and better, offering more and more of Office's features for free-certainly all the ones you can imagine using. Google's Photoshop competitor doesn't offer everything, but it's good enough. You build up piles of files-saved webpages, homework, photos-all on Google's servers. Suddenly you're having to pay Google to store it all.
You're seventeen now and have a summer job. You can afford a first 'serious' laptop that will see you through university. You could buy Windows, but while you use it in school you don't know it well. You could buy a Mac, but you've never used one of them either. You've always used a chromebook. You'd like to have every photo you ever take backed up to a Google server, but that's pricey.
You get a Chromebook Pixel 2016. You know the system, and with 8TB storage for the laptop's likely lifetime (by now), it's a bargain-that's a decade's worth of photos and stored content. Heck, if you ever want a proper OS, you can still install Ubuntu on it. You probably won't, though.
Special use, but...
Here's how I see Google's pitch with this: if you're a sysadmin considering switching a company to chromebooks, this is the laptop the CEO gets. It's a demonstration of commitment to ChromeOS's future, more than a laptop Google actually expect to make a profit on or make massive sales with.
And ChromeOS is catching up, you can even get IDEs for it, for heavens' sake. (Why anyone would develop on one I have no idea, but I suppose it makes more sense than doing same on an iPad, which I'm assured happens.)
One comment by many Apple bloggers: it's a neat way of proving Apple aren't so special. Google, in one jump, have basically built themselves their own Retina MacBook Pro, though they probably make a loss on them. Apple's chances of offering online services as good as Google's? Zero. So if Google can make using Google online services on a chromebook more luxurious than doing same on any other computer, they've at the very least probably blown cheaper Windows laptops out of the water.
I have to admire his honesty
He seems to have been a crap CEO running a joke of a business, but that resignation letter is the most honest admission of personal failings I've seen in a long time. I wonder what working for him was like.
Overstating it a bit?
"Modern distros such as Ubuntu are way easier and faster to install than Windows and Windows applications on 99% of current PCs. There is a centralized software installation/updating system and not an installer/updater per program."
True and false. Most users never install Windows from scratch, so they wouldn't know. I agree that installing Windows as a clean install (like I may be just about to do on a laptop with a replaced hard drive) is no picnic, but even most users who bother will be using an OEM CD with drivers.
"You will never touch the command line if you just want to do text processing, spreadsheets, image manipulation and similar things."
If you want LibreOffice 3.6 and the current LTS Ubuntu release you need to add ppas in the command line. It's trivially easy, to be fair.
"Whereever real IT professionals work, they use Linux for the heavy-duty work."
That's for servers. Zuckerberg wrote Facebook on a Mac.
'it is not the tablet Linux we all would like to have'
Your best bet, frankly, is Unity. Other than that I can't imagine full-on Linux ever getting anywhere on tablets. How could it?
A better bet is wait ten years for Android to update, expand and become more complex as users' demands magnify.
Frankly, this is the problem
'Here's another example: how the Linux FOSS community doesn't really love tablets or phones with Android': have to disagree here. Mozilla and Ubuntu are desperately looking for things to do with themselves now the buzz is focused around mobile, but most Linux nerds are looking at CyanogenMod or similar, not anything else.
Unity
At first, I thought I'd hate it. Then I started to get it. In particular, it makes finding commands faster, and on a small screen (I use a Thinkpad X61) putting menus on the wide menu bar at the top and not on the windows makes sense.
Personally, though, I kind of like having a different way of working-it takes extra time to start with, but it's a lot better than thinking 'I'm looking at a bad reimplementation of Windows 95', which is what I always thought whenever I used GNOME 2.
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
Apple gullibility tax
That's for a Retina laptop. If you buy refurb (like me for personal use) MacBooks start at £720, which is a lot more like it, and the 13-inchers from £850.
Posted in Apple refreshes MacBook Pro range
That is actually one heck of an upgrade price
Basically now retina on a 13" mac costs £250 extra, which is actually pretty good, especially since nobody else makes a retina-quality laptop display.
It only has Intel graphics so effectively what they've produced is a pimped-up personal laptop not a portable AV workstation, but a lot of people who do photography (amateur or pro) will be pretty happy about this.
On a sea of...one hundred billion dollars
You may be right, but sinking by 'worth more than Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook put together' standards...
Re: Microsoft Stores execs must be worried then ;-)
>I'm not sure they'd be able to contract back to the design and technology-obsessed* niches they held last time things went bad.
Three words: Retina display laptops. DTP users practically wet themselves when Apple announced them. Windows has nothing similar and no impetus towards them either.
Old Skool
It has a track point. Time to party like it's 1999.
Strange guy
He was a smart guy. I look at what he accomplished before he reached 19 and weep at my failure to match up.
Message to anyone facing problems like this: call the Samaritans. Really.
Advertising budget
HTC's money woes have hurt them here, I suspect. At least in the UK, Samsung have absolutely thrown money at marketing the GSIII, Note and Note 2-I see more of them than iPhone 5s in London. I've barely seen anyone with HTC One phones, even though to me they look miles better than Samsung's latests, even than the latest iPhone in some ways.
Then again, HTC's slogan is 'quietly brilliant'...
It's Creative Commons licenced
so I doubt it.
Now, the rights to make a remake, on the other hand...
Wow
I know people doing PhDs and it's not what you'd call a 9-5 punch-card job: good on you guys for finding time and making this!
Now, the next move is to sell the rights to make a remake to Hollywood for ££$$...
Re: Paris
Why would she be at CERN?
Actual physicists are not attractive?
They are at undergraduate level, though most of the girls realise at this level that they could get far more in banking or IT than research...
Posted in Review: Apple Mac Mini 2012
But on the flipside
As an iOS developer, you might be better with a retina display to see what artwork is going to look like. Snag is that the 13" model has atrocious graphics, I suspect if you've been using a MacBook you eyes might drop out at the 15's price, and neither of them has anything upgradable or replaceable at all...I think you might be best using an iPad 3/4 as a monitor. Here's a link on that:
http://mashable.com/2012/11/01/tablet-second-monitor/
Posted in Review: Apple Mac Mini 2012
Not so weird
This is how much processors have crept up: it's made with laptop parts, but it's got a replaceable hard drive and upgradeable RAM but more performance even than older octo-core Mac Pros. It's more than three times as fast as the last generation of Power Macs.
That means that many places who used to use the latter but whose needs haven't increased much recently would be able to drop it in place instead when one dies, assuming they don't suddenly need/want insane graphics performance.
Posted in Review: Apple Mac Mini 2012
Re: Question to Mac Developers
You'll probably want a Mac Mini. No glossy screen, and if the iMac's hard drive or the screen fails it needs a trip into service before you can go back to work since neither is easily replaceable.
Posted in Review: Apple Mac Mini 2012
The only HTPC to have emacs, pico and vim built into the OS?
I haven't used XBMC, so if anyone knows any different I'd be interested/amused...
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
Income after sale for Macs
Ow, that's a scary prospect. I agree with almost everything you've said, but I'm not so sure about this statement on income after sale, actually. Apple state (yes, naive ol' me) that they basically aim to break even on the App Stores. It's certainly a modest income source compared to their super-sized hardware sales. And Apple make nearly nothing from OS upgrades now by their own choice, to keep people up to date on APIs to help developers. I think their revenue strategy here is simple: make Macs non-upgradeable black boxes and force people to regularly buy the latest model. (On the other hand, locking every Mac to App Store software would certainly make that income stream a lot bigger.) The problem is that loads of development and scientific tools can't use the App Store, so this would more or less end Macs as anything other than appliances if they care about that.
If you're right, the App Store would give them a path to upgrade. They could announce the change to happen two years in the future and require all apps filed from then on to be written and compiled for both processors. That would give them a starting ARM App Store that even included work from developers who had died out in the intervening period when ARM Macs launched.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
Unless they buy AMD
Which they can easily afford, as long as regulators approve it. But I agree: that would be an open declaration of war against Intel, and approval would be opposed by every computer company there is.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
I'm sure this is true, in some shape or form. But that's not the point.
Computer companies are paranoid about everything, and I'm sure Apple have considered the possibility than x86 starts to become a dead end, that Intel can't manage to reduce power consumption, and so on. Literally any such discussion in the cafe chez Apple at lunch would be sufficient to make this article 'true'. That doesn't mean this will happen, or that it would be a wise move. I'm not too sure of the benchmarks-does anyone know roughly how good emulation is in this direction? I've played with ARM emulators running on x86 and they're terrible.
Apple's offer if they did this would probably be power consumption, realistically. I can't think of anything else they could offer that would be worth it from the user end. I'm sure they could commission a custom x86 CPU with some Apple IP if they wanted one with a very consolidated design-even if Intel said no AMD would find it hard to turn down the money right now. From their end, I suppose switching to custom ARM chips might offer savings-but it leaves them dependent on their own innovation fighting against the whole PC industry, just like in the PPC days, with a risk of it all running out of steam. Staying with Intel guarantees their processor roadmap forever. And why run the risk? It's not like Apple's Mac sales need a real boost right now. Adding uncertainty when they're on the verge of stealing loads of disgruntled Windows users would be...audacious. This would also end the ability to dual-boot Windows on Macs, since Windows RT is not on sale (and I doubt Ballmer would make an exception).
TLDR: I doubt they'd do this unless ARM offered something absolutely amazing. I think this a headline planted to make Intel jump into line, not a serious threat.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
It has entertained this idea
Repeatedly. Windows 2008 for Itanium, Windows RT for ARM, and so on.
Those products were minority interests, or (rumour has it) underpowered crap, but that's not the point: Microsoft aren't loyal to Intel per se, they go where the market's going.
And Apple fans did take it, in 2005-6, and liked it, because it got them out of a processor dead end. I don't hope that Apple do this, because I think it would be far preferable and simpler (for users, that is) to try to develop lower-voltage x86 processors, but that's not the point. Apple was offering something extra to make up for the inconvenience: much faster processors. What if Apple now offered users iPad-style battery life on their laptops? I'm not saying they will, but that is the kind of thing that would start to get people interested in switching.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
Re: research
This comment is far too sensible for this thread.
Other topic: power use. I bet Apple would love to get even closer to making the computer disappear than they have so far.
Posted in Apple to ditch Intel – report
Windows RT is not available as a consumer purchase
So no, not unless Microsoft actively wants to get into the backup OS for mac users market.
Posted in Apple iPad Mini 8in tablet review
Wait
Good review. Ergonomically it's near-perfect, and the build quality, update chain and app/accessory ecosystem make it honestly the best choice at this size right now (unless you want to will Android apps into existence by buying the N7, and all power to you if so, but they aren't here for me yet) but I'm sure the next version will have Retina displays.
And that means I'm not getting it yet, because I know the next version will be such a massive leap ahead.
Maybe...
The UI with no rounded corners?
Re: Empires Rise...
Given that Google make the only other mobile operating system that has mass market appeal I'm not sure I follow you...
People seem mostly to be buying Galaxy S IIIs and smaller HTCs
If walking through trains on the Metropolitan line is any judge. The GSIIIs really do have been a huge hit.
I'd love to know why people are starting to choose Android-I suspect big screens was part of it, and maybe the widget desktop letting you see what the weather's going to be? Who knows.
Good riddance for Browett
He was a hack management consultant moron. Whatever made them think importing 'talent' from Dixons was a good move?
Forstall I have mixed feelings about: the 'elegant minimalism is always the way forward' kind of people have spent years cringing over iOS trends he apparently plugged (leather stitching on the calendar, sashes on your newly-purchased apps, Game Center's casino theme) but they really do add to the fun of using Apple products. I think Apple sold a lot of iPads to families who loved the idea of it as a magical enchanted book filled with clever details round every corner.
Posted in Apple adds Fusion Drive IO to iMac
I don't know much about hybrids, but...
Surely the problem with that is it leaves some huge OS files you never use (in particular OS X's huge language file bundles) are left on the SSD whereas photos (which really could benefit from being on an SSD) are out in the cold?
Though I'd welcome some transparent controls rather than it all being at the mercy of some algorithm somewhere, I think the automation of this system sounds a lot better.
Um, nah
It's not got retina display. And it's not really that cheap-it's not competing with the Nexus 7 properly, even though the competition has a better screen. Other than the ecosystem, it's Apple snoozing.
I could have bought this, really. But no thanks, not interested.
They didn't have the money in 2004/5
and acquisitions like that weren't Steve's style.
In retrospect, it wasn't a bad decision to make the crossover, though I see how it annoyed many users.
They believe Office will win it for them
but I think it could destroy Office instead. It's not a secret that they've held Office for iPad back to give this a USP. I see the logic, but it's a very big gamble, and a rapid iteration of iWork could leave them completely in the cold in a very large market.
Fortunately Apple have never been very keen to commit to enterprise software as they seem to see matching a feature checklist as rather boring, hard work.
All Apple has to do?
"Apple can easily afford to do this..."
I think you mean 'are going to do this next week'.
Are they insane?
You've pointed out everything I was going to say but...the stupid, it burns!
Literally the only reason to get this over an iPad or Nexus 7 is a cut-down version of Office. Oh and $100 minimum for a touchpad cover is a joke as well.
One clear answer
Phone/computer convergence. Apply Moore's law and in two to three years time a £300 phone will have enough power to do all the above and a ten hour battery life to boot.
My theory is that in 2015 Windows 9 and WP9 will merge codebases and introduce dual-size software. You'll plug your confidential business phone into an inductive charging dock wherever you are and start work with a mouse and 22" monitor-no need to download any important documents. Or into a lapdock for power use on the move.
