aprendo

Scrolling is buttery-smooth on most websites, less so as complexity ramps up. (Some particularly complex Facebook pages, for example, have minor stutters, i.e. dropped animation frames.) Still, it’s minor stutters even on those.

That’s with Mountain Lion. Lion was markedly different.

It has HDMI (as well as not one but two ports that can be used as VGA ports with a simple adapter, but that’s all very much besides the point) – and I’m not sure what you were expecting?

The rMBP is the perfect embodiment of Apple’s laptop philosophy. Apple’s Steve Jobs (maybe even Steve Jobs himself, I’m not sure) pretty clearly said years ago that all laptops will be like the Airs in the future. All flash memory. No optical drive. Thinner and lighter at the expense of upgradeability. This is how they saw the future, this is what they made happen with the rMBP.

I can’t help but think that if anything, Steve Jobs would have pushed the rMBP much more aggressively (but, really, I’m just speculating here).

The rMBP, widely hailed as the best Mac since forever? You seem to be the only person on the planet disappointed by it (besides people disappointed in the glued-in battery – but that’s nothing new).

Besides, there are a few years to go until we run out of Steve Jobs products.

(I think this whole discussion is utterly pointless at this point. Look at Apple’s stock in ten years and you will know the impact of Jobs. I have my doubts that it will be possible to say much meaningful now.)

Removing RSS functionality: A defensible decision, I think. Many excellent third-party RSS readers are available and this fits Apple’s overall theme of simplifying the OS: there are more system apps but each does less and only a very specific thing (Mail was split in Mail and Notes, iCal was split in Calendar and Reminders), iTunes being the big exception. RSS was never a good fit for Mail, why should Apple have to schlepp around that ballast for all eternity?

Removing user data: That is indefensible. There should be a painless way for users to export their RSS feeds on first launch (an OPML file would be minimum, better would be some even tighter solution that is not as painful and annoying as dealing with an OPML file.

(Yes, I know that technically Apple didn’t remove the data – but no one should be expected to conduct such a preposterous rescue mission for their data. This is also not meant as a criticism of her, it’s pretty clear that she is more or less ok with Apple removing the functionality, just not the data.)

What do you want to say with the last four paragraphs? That's value as in monetary value, i.e. about the costs of the calorimeter system described in the report, taking into account labor costs in different countries. It has nothing to do with the other meaning of value, i.e. how the contributions of "non-western members" are valued.

Racism is still pervasive in western countries, so it's certainly possible – my guess is likely – that it plays some role even at CERN, but what you are quoting there is no evidence for racism. That's an absurd interpretation.

No, the subtitle said pretty clearly that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. I think confusing that with the Internet has nothing to do with the UK boosting their role in popularizing the Internet (since media outlets all over the world get it wrong all the time) and everything with many people not understanding the Internet.

Has it?

For decades communication researchers had trouble finding big media effects. That said, the same seems to be true for social networks.

In Germany it’s €215.76 per year, so about $266. Similar, but I can’t help and feel that value for money is worse here. There is some real cool stuff the BBC does that just does not exist in Germany.

But it seems that the Olympics will get pretty great coverage, also on the web. (There were, e.g., streams with and without commentary available tonight.)

No, I don't. But it doesn't matter. As an organization you have to go where your users are. And they are on Twitter.

This is something no single organization can solve. It's impossible. And email is about the absolute worst example. No, it absolutely didn't solve the problem. First the users had to come. Before that it was worthless.

I think many here are delusional about how this works.

No, you won't. You will be dramatically worse off. You have to go where your users are. And they are on Twitter, not your own hosted thing.

Twitter will not make or break most organizations. If it were to disappear tomorrow most any organization will have plenty of time to look for alternatives. In the meantime Twitter wins. Always. By a mile.

It's not two sides, though. That makes no sense. The issues MRAs are campaigning for are not issues feminists are campaigning against.

Don’t you browse your music? I’m very particular about my music collection and I definitely need to browse it. Sometimes I just do not know what I want to listen to, so search is useless. And looking at something like all albums from 2009 (because I know some good music came out then) can be very useful for me.

I do not care about the structure on the disc. I use my music library app to browse.

Is it really so hard to see the real value a service like Facebook provides? I’m personally not a fan of Facebook (but found it to be tremendously useful for quite a few things in the past) but I know several people who find it very useful. At its worst it’s a silly diversion (ála Reddit or Hacker News, though certainly not worse than those), at its best it’s a rich communication infrastructure tailor-made for certain kinds of relationships.

Social networks are here to stay. They fix many of the shortcomings of older ways of communicating. Facebook has shown that it’s possible to make money with that. Their current numbers are most certainly not an invalidation of the business model or service, it’s more that they might have wanted too much.

Social networks are a sound idea. Facebook has a competent implementation of a social network. Maybe it’s not enough to rule the world – but I think it’s enough to make some money and be a healthy business (though Facebook seems to want more).

I don’t think this matters if it’s possible to plug in an Xbox controller. They are ubiquitous, cheap and competent.

All MRAs I’ve ever heard were downright weird in their worldview. There are some problems worth fighting for (nothing comparable with what women faced and still face), sure, but that doesn’t seem to be their focus. Their focus seems to be demonizing feminists and derailing. (Let’s quickly talk about custody: feminists and MRAs could actually be marching in exactly the same direction: The root cause of the problem are strict gender roles, women are for taking care of children, men are for working. But no, feminists are to blame. MRAs also love using warped statistics, but that is very much besides the point. There is no reasonableness in that movement.)

The text implies that some sort of MR movement would spring up as a widespread reaction to feminism (and it doesn’t have any comparable issues to fight for, it doesn’t have the numbers, it doesn’t have the intellectual depth nor the academic backbone). It did spring up as a tiny reaction to feminism. Wikipedia tells me that the movement has its roots in the 1970s, so it’s not like this would have been something completely new in 1987. It’s hard to say, but I see no reason to believe that the MR movement is that much bigger than it was in 1987. And it still defines itself as a reaction to feminism. Which makes about zero sense. All the issues they are fighting for were not caused by feminism. Far from it. Many feminists will be perfectly capable of recognizing them as valid problems. (But, again, that’s very much besides the point.)

The second point is technically accurate – but does it really count if it’s a delusional movement by a few crazies that is in no way comparable to to the women’s movement and mostly based on a completely weird worldview (all the while many of the legitimate goals of the women’s movement are far from reached)?

Here is the announcement from Bukkit's side: http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-the-next-chapter.624...

I think legal problems … I guess. Not sure. But it also seems like they want to do quite a few things differently, though I'm not sure whether that's good idea.

How much music do you have? 100 songs?

I have 5,380 titles, I cannot for the life of me imagine how to deal with that inside the confines of the file system. I want to browse my music. (It probably doesn’t help that I despise search. Search is no alternative to browsing for me.)

(Besides: This is not some evil scheme. Metadata for music is completely standard. My music library app – and every popular music library app – puts music in straightforward human-readable folders. That’s a nice fallback if all else fails – but to me it is just that. A fallback.)

I think the last time I used the filesystem to browse my music was in 2003. And it was dreadful. I use a music library app in which I can decide which way my music is ordered. Albums from oldest to youngest? No problem. Artists alphabetically? Sure thing. Artists alphabetically and their albums in chronological order? No problem.

The music library app is especially tuned for ways to view my music that make sense for music. It makes those easily accessible. The file system is wholly inadequate for that task.

The library app takes care of the underlying folder structure – but that’s an implementation detail I absolutely do not care about. I don’t even know how it looks. (I just looked it up, it’s “Artist” – “Album”, the same structure I used before I started using a library app.)

I’m not sure that the file system is really so bad (at least I’m relatively comfortable with it) but I do think that for certain specialized tasks it’s massively preferable to have dedicated apps. Music and photos are my two prime examples.

Does Apple actually keep money in off-shore tax-havens? They are legitimately making tons of cash everywhere in the world (the majority of their revenue and profit) and that money is stuck there and they can’t bring it to the US. It’s not like they moved the money out of the US to flee some tax, they just didn’t make it in the US but elsewhere.

It’s seems to me that this is the main driver here for Apple.

Why so angry? I totally agree with you. In all cases where Apple ported an already existing fullscreen mode to their new solution they fall flat on their face. It’s an awful experience if you have more than one screen. So that’s QuickTime and the DVD Player. Not a big deal.

Third party developers should just not use Apple’s stupid mode. Problem solved. (Though I don’t understand everyone’s sudden fullscreen love. It’s just goofy on a big screen expect for a select few use cases. Don’t use it. That has always been the Mac OS philosophy.)

Overall I don’t think it’s a big issue. A small minority of Mac users is affected by this problem in a tiny number of use cases. It sucks for them – but no need to whine for hours on end. That’s just annoying for the rest of us :-)

It seems like every single discussion about OS X is dominated by this stupid topic. It’s boring. Yeah, it sucks. Everyone knows it. Apple made a stupid decision. Can we talk about something more interesting now?

If you go full screen, the app in full screen mode gets to use all your monitors. It gains control over every last pixel available to you. The other monitors are not unavailable, they are greyed out because the app you are using doesn’t take advantage of them. It could if it wanted to.

That’s the decision Apple took. It makes sense† but it’s also utterly stupid. For some reason they stick to it. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Fullscreen apps suck anyway and there is no reason whatsoever to use them on a big screen, much less when you have more than one screen available to you. They might make sense on the 11" Air but certainly on no other computer or screen Apple sells.

Just use apps like you always did (before Apple introduced their stupid fullscreen mode) and they will work fine. Like before, like nothing changed. I have the sneaking suspicion that only maximize-crazy Windows converts run into this problem. On the Mac you don’t maximize. Apple only implemented fullscreen mode the really stupid way to make that abundantly clear to everyone.

—

† More than Apple just disabling other monitors, anyway.

If it works like the Twitter integration it won’t be problem. You have to explicitly enter your name and password in the preferences. It won’t bug you, it won’t even be visible until you decide to take part. You have to care about it as much as you now care about the Chinese services Apple integrated.

Though I really do not understand your allergic reaction. Facebook seems like a tremendously useful tool to me since I always know that everyone is there. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to use it – but you should at least be able to appreciate how valuable such an integration is to a great many people.

He has RSI.

Not everything is about HN. It seems to me that he is just having fun.

No, it's a quite serious (and quite good) review. Marco Arment is only teasing Siracusa.

Yes, they do. Do you have a problem with that? Why?

Besides, the page breaks are not arbitrary (like on so many other websites), they actually make sense. They are basically chapters. I do not think there is anything wrong with those kinds of page breaks. (Though your personal preference may be different and if it is you are free to pay, suffer through the page breaks or not read the review. It's up to you.)