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I wasn't talking about the downvotes, that's to be expected. I was talking about the humorless replies :)

If we all acted our IQs, all the time, the world would be a very boring place. It's not responsible to buy myself expensive toys, it's not respectable to be sarcastic. Yet we do it anyway.

Trolling is meant to make people angry, I meant to to get a chortle out of at least somebody... but now I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is not the site for that. Thank you for helping me realize it.

Let's see how much karma I can lose in one thread.

There's a difference between not thinking a joke is funny, and arguing against it as if it weren't a joke, a la tiles.

Erm... I forgot I was in a place where preemptively apologizing for making a joke isn't enough for people to think you're joking.

I would like to point out though, that the text you just copied are pretty much apple's only words on the topic.

To further my joke even more:

Google search for "easy" on apple.com [1] returns 3.3 million results. Google search for "secure" on apple.com [2] returns .5 million results.

On the internet easy returns 3.6 billion results, and secure 1.25 billion. So on the apple site, you would expect easy to show up 3 times as much as secure. In fact, easy shows up over 6 times as much as secure.

This definitely proves apple cares about security only half as much as the rest of the internet does!

You're using an apple product. When did they ever claim to be secure? Your life is easier, more magical, full of glass, and very fast! Security is... a little bit of whipped cream on top. So enjoy your gestures on that magic touchpad, don't worry about being safe.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

I think from a programmer standpoint, I'd prefer to deal with the text directly instead of with some abstract space between characters.

I see your point though, it is different. It does take a little getting used to, but if you slowly teach yourself the motions you'll learn it unconsciously.

As for your example, you're running into this problem because you are manually placing your cursor. If you watch someone who uses vim, they almost never use the keys hjkl, or even x. When you type w to get to the next word, or when you search for something, the cursor will be conveniently placed for whatever kind of deletion you plan on doing. x is for deleting one character, if you ever want to delete more, you move to where you want to start, then use a motion and delete. For more precise control enter visual mode and delete. But never hit x three times in a row and stop to think about whether the cursor is going to shift left or right after the first x.

Vim does have a concept of words, sentences, and paragraphs, but that's because it's not a programming editor, it's a text editor. It also has a concept of lines, braces, parens, and angle brackets. That's because programming is a common text editing exercise :)

"I hope once Lik­ables and Denso goes live they will be proof for the production-worthiness of the 4-pixel rhythm. I also hope that Apple will see this and per­haps recon­sider the visual pro­por­tions of UI in future iOS versions." doesn't match what you just said ;)

What I'm saying is that "You can look at a 4-pixel rhythm as 8-pixel, 16-pixel or 32-pixel. 4 is just the lowest basic unit" doesn't improve upon our situation. The lowest basic unit is called a pixel. Grids make everything look consistent; but when the only requirement is that you snap to 4-pixels, things aren't going to look consistent, because you have far too much flexibility.

I'm not a designer, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. But @Aen, you sound like an idiot to me.

On grids. A grid is a fantastic idea for a newspaper, or even for an iPad, where you have large elements which need to all be aligned. However, your eyes are not trained to jump around in pretty pixel increments, your eyes jump to what they want to look at. In other words, fuck "rhythm." When horizontally aligning elements, I am completely for snapping to a grid of sorts, it makes your UI "just look nicer." When aligning vertically, against things that don't exist, you win nothing. (Well, you do win something, but it's something you didn't touch upon, more on that later)

On grid size. By making a "grid" of 4x4 pixels, all you have done is decrease the resolution of the display. Only an OCD programmer would get excited by a declaration that all pixel offsets must be even. In programming, whenever you sit down and design a framework that is too flexible, you have designed a framework which isn't useful. If you complain about "rhythm," you certainly can't suggest a 4px grid, it has no noticeable rhythm.

On why your design looks nicer. I'll say it, a few of your "fixed" screens do look nicer. This is because you have introduced more padding, in the form of 2px increases, to every element. Anybody can make something look nicer by removing information. Of course your examples will look great compared to the real thing, negative space tends to do that. I want you to compare the number of visual elements on either the Likables screens you posted, with the number of visual elements on the playlist view.

If I ever have a site which posts content, or if I ever finally make a blog, the first thing I will do is turn off the comments. If you want to talk to me, you can email me, or write your own post in response.

Yes, it is illegal to financially damage a company, and many crackers do exactly that. This article and most of the comments here argue about the tools. As hackers we find it hard to understand why a hammer could be outlawed because it is good at breaking through the windows of houses.

Why does no one talk about the network that was broken into? Why does the general public believe that crackers are so good at their job it is impossible to secure a computer system? There are two possibilities that I can see here.

1. Most cracks happen because of a less-than-perfect system administrator. Either some subtle problem with a configuration file opened up a hole for the cracker or nobody bothered securing the network to begin with.

2. Most cracks happen because crackers have found a reliable method of discovering 0day exploits or our current computing model is fundamentally insecure.

In either case, I find it unjustifiable to declare cracking an act of terrorism without spending ANY effort reflecting back on our own security. If millions of us routinely use the same password (or a easy-to-guess pattern) for all of our accounts who is the terrorist? The people who take advantage of an easy opportunity, or the people who created that opportunity in the first place?

It is well known that users are stupid, and that two-factor authentication is much harder to break than static passwords. Bruce Schneider has been saying so for at least a decade. Why have we not moved on? As a system administrator, it should be an act of terrorism to NOT make two-factor authentication the DEFAULT way of using your service.

I'd really like to know what happened to Ubuntu being supported by Dell a while ago. http://www.dell.com/ubuntu only lists one machine that you can buy with Ubuntu pre-installed.

If this had kept up, and more suppliers had joined the bandwagon, it would have been exactly the major support you are talking about. Why did things move backwards?

I hadn't heard of that thank you for pointing it out. This does make things look more optimistic. I would still define it as vendor lock-in though. The iTunes binary might be available for Windows, but Apple still claims control over your experience and your data.

While they are in control of your data, you will be faced with a question every time you upgrade your hardware. Do you want to interact with your own documents and music using a clunky interface, or do you want to use an interface that makes you feel more in control and happier?

The above question is a little contrived, but I believe that it is fairly close to the truth, Apple has always been a company based on making you feel good.

> Apple is actually moving in the direction of less lock-in as far as the consumer goes.

Do you expect that any non-Apple device will be able to use iCloud? Vendor Lock-in is what's important here, and it's definitely been made stronger by this move. Once all your data is in the cloud, do you want to go through all the effort of moving it to a different cloud (if you even can!) or do you want to cough up a few extra $100 to buy from Apple and make things easy.

[dead] 15 years ago

This sounds reasonable. I had previously thought that only John Gruber belonged to that group. Is there anybody else you would categorize with him? I'm interested to see how other people write about Apple products.

[dead] 15 years ago

> And here’s the real death blow: iMessages will be completely free.

Compared to the cost of my data plan (and the data plan that you'll have to buy to use any iOS5 device), SMS is essentially free. Google Voice provides unlimited messaging for free, all you have to do is download an app. Making iMessage free is not a death blow, and presenting it as such does nothing but imply messaging is a commodity. Not even fax machines are a commodity yet, you have plenty of choices as to which service to use and which machine to buy.

> But it’s not just that iMessages kills SMS because it’s free. It kills it because it’s better.

When I read a straightforward sentence that presents an opinion as fact I expect evidence. In this case the evidence we are given is a link to the Apple website [1] and an assurance that iMessage is "streamlined and simplified."

I've only been following HN for a few months now so this is a serious question, has TechCrunch always been so horrible at journalism?

[1] http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#imessage

This is one of the biggest challenges with teaching programming, everything changes incredibly quickly. If you want to write a book that people will recommend for decades, or even for years, you need to gloss over any specific technology and only talk about the concepts that will not change for quite a while.

With that said, InfoQ.com has a lot of videos that sound like what you're looking for.

You are absolutely correct there, once somebody has their commercial license it becomes easier and cheaper to build hours. I guess it comes down to how effective the practice is, as acrobatic maneuvers are frowned upon in most commercial settings. :P

Certainly getting your license doesn't mean you have mastered controlling the airplane, but I'd imagine that after a thousand hours of doing basic maneuvers and tightening your tolerances there's not much more you can do without buckling down and getting time in an acrobatic.

Something I recently realized is that if this theory is true I have a big problem on my hands. See I love flying, and it is one of my life's goals to fly in professional competitions. However flight time in airplanes routinely cost $100 or even $300 an hour. My goal might end up costing me a few million dollars.