Hontano

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I didn't say they're perfect or anywhere near perfection. I could go on at length about the myriad things that annoy me: Finder, HFS, software update crammed in the App Store, iOS lockdown.

All I did say is that they absolutely do _care_ about what's below the surface. Parts that a fraction of a fraction of folks will ever see are given loving attention far beyond the norm. Do most or any other manufacturers color coordinate battery warning labels, PCBs, etc., down to the cm^2 headphone jack?

It might not be perfect, because what ever is? But the interior of the Macbook Pro, Mac Pro, and other hardware suggests otherwise:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Di...

Similarly, the filesystem on OS X. As far at the Mac parts go, while the BSD folders have visibility toggled off.

X

The book is a fascinating read: http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy...

It chronicles competing standards, proprietary efforts, attempts at sea-rail-road integration, with some lively characters thrown in. It captures the entrepreneurial vibe of the heady postwar decades. I loved it.

It's not ideal, but there's a happy enough compromise in USB-powered 2TB 2.5" external drives.

True. And the "marine reserve" shenanigans are disgraceful.

Indeed there is no indigenous population and hasn't been since 1966 [1]. It's nothing but a strategically well-placed airbase with a few thousand personal and contractors.

.io is clearly a gccTLD. The TLD administration and commissioner in charge of 'the government' reside in the UK.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory#...

You're right, I just re-read the judgment with the proposed wording. Apple should have gone with that verbatim and otherwise shut up so as to not drag it out.

They made what could have been a publicly boring notice buried in the page footer a spectacle.

The judgement specified where, when, and how to publish the notice down to which website and publications, the typeface, and point size.

It was sloppy to do all that and then not either properly parameterise what should be published or include a requirement that the copy be agreed or reviewed before publication.

Apple complied with the letter of the judgment and arguably the spirit of the judgment which was "not designed to punish" but rather "to dispel commercial uncertainty". It clearly states that Samsung's products were found not to infringe in England and Wales. Unambiguously. Can anyone parse that first paragraph in any other way?

Going on to provide nuance by quoting the original judge and including rulings from other jurisdictions doesn't negate that.

Apple have been foolish in getting the court's dander up, but they're not wrong.

The obvious answer is to use progressive fines, making them proportional rather than a fixed amount. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Beats me. Apple complied with a sloppy judgment. I'm no great fan of Apple in this, but the appeal judges fucked up by not clearly specifying what Apple needed to do and could not do.

"The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it."

It might be a simple apt-get command, but consider setting up Chef Server. You're suddenly adding the following to your system: Ruby, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Java, merb-assets, merb-core, merb-helpers, merb-param-protection, merb-slices, thin, solr-jetty. And then maybe libxml-ruby, merb-haml, haml, coderay. (From http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installing+Chef+Server)

That's a whole heap of stuff and moving parts I wasn't looking for. Compare that to the above mentioned Ansible or cdist on the lightweight end of the spectrum.

Sorry, I don't recall in particular. It was about a year ago.

It was only a basic setup of a user account, a directory tree, and ufw. It took over a minute for either a first or subsequent run on a clean install of Natty. Considering how much more config I had to add and too little time to dedicate to investigating and speeding it up, I had to put Puppet aside.

Good to know 3.0 is a lot faster. I'll give it another look in future.

I never got on well with either. Puppet was mind-bogglingly slow (even locally without a master), both Chef and Puppet felt overwrought, and I prefer keeping dependencies to a minimum.

Just a pointer for anyone else that doesn't have much love for either: I found myself happy and productive with Salt. Fast, simple, and lets me do what I needed with less Byzantine setup: http://docs.saltstack.org/en/latest/

There's also Salty Vagrant and Salt Cloud for local and remote provisioning.

I don't know if that would be more awesome or terrifying, especially once you've removed the pilot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaman_K-MAX#Unmanned_remote_con...

I forgot Browett came from Dixons. Everyone then said he would probably be disastrous for Apple. Looks like we were correct. I can't imagine him not being shown the door imminently after such a huge PR gaffe.

Asymco just posted figures on staffing levels: http://www.asymco.com/2012/08/17/are-apple-stores-overstaffe...

Ah hah, I forgot about Fantastical. Looks like it will do the trick for quick entry of reminders which was one of the few features I was missing after Things. (Plus there's a 50%-off sale).

Using an Fn double-tap to dictate makes it Siri-esque, only more reliable :)

I loved the original release of Things on the desktop, but wish I had never bothered with the iOS app. It took far too many taps to do anything and syncing was clunky to the point of uselessness.

It was the wait for over-the-air syncing, with months of overwrought blog posts, that led me to abandon Things. I recreated my use in the Reminders app and have been much happier since. With this 2.0 I see they have finally, years later, released "cloud syncing".

I don't see $50 worth of functionality, but still, wish them well with the new release.

I read both "What wasn't I consulted?" and "Behind a Press Release" as being very directed at this situation, neither of which were classy ways for Gruber to handle it, just snide allusions.

Dan's short message was pure class.

It looks like Apple Illustration got there first in August 1996. I presume Apple Computer didn't have the foresight to go around registering with every ccTLD back then.

It must be worth a pretty penny now though.

Way to leave in style, good for him. I hope it gives the firm the wake up call it needs.

I left a couple of years ago after a three year stint. It was partly out of the boredom of babysitting a legacy platform that had little future, but mostly because the department's role devolved into getting away with doing the minimum for clients to justify our fees.

No matter how well GS pays, despite the relatively poor bonuses, it's not going to be possible to attract and retain the kind of staff they need. I wonder how many other nerds sit at their desks and catch a minute's respite by daydreaming of building something great? If they're lucky enough to have the freedom and enough of a financial cushion to take the leap I highly recommend it. I've not been happier since.

A few paragraphs in to the article I was wondering what font the article was written in. I figured it might be Roboto and sure enough, a quick trip to Web Inspector shows it is.

I'm not a fan of Roboto personally as each character feels too narrow, squashed, and makes for tiring reading. I frequently check what fonts are in use when it's something unusual. The most beautiful by far that keeps cropping up is Proxima Nova.

Depends on what scope you're considering. You're right if you're talking about the US alone. But calling the NYT moderately right-of-center isn't far off the mark if you consider the wider Western media.

Sure it's a piece in a far right wing magazine with its own agenda to push, but you'll have to substantiate your claim of "complete bullshit". The Chinese government is well known for its supression entire ethnicities.

But surely you'd agree having your organs cut out while you're still alive very much does matter, no? Or is it okay if it's done to particular kinds of people?

If any of the article is true it's horrific.

These are a very well written set of articles. Heartwarming.

At Apple, Jobs inspired without inspiring much love. “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Andy Hertzfeld, who helped develop the Macintosh, told Moritz. “The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The people at Apple had a name for that behavior, too: “the shithead-hero roller coaster.”

That phrase always makes me chuckle. Time to re-read a few folklore.org entries.

Single page links for the three parts:

Part 1: http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-beginning-1...

Part 2: http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-wilderness-...

Part 3: http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-return-1997...

Likewise I don't know anyone else attending, but I happen to be in Paris that day so I signed up. Should be fun!