It's a mad world.

Windows 7 is a solid product - Microsoft did something right?

Bill Gates is saving lives - uberdork turns out to be human?

Steve Ballmer sort of admits a mistake - the total tool drops the toolishness for 5 seconds?

Good lord, what's next? Will Apple drop the "magical" bullshit and admit they're only super-cool, and not supernatural?

A favorite Charles Francis Harper quote:

Much of the fun of being the usual, smugly-satisified Apple customer is enjoying the bitter grumblings of those who aren't part of the in-crowd.

So let them whine and let it be louder, sweet music to my ears. I say, iTunes DJ, put that music on heavy rotation! I'm feeling Magical!

As you were.

Dude! T.M.I!

I turned on my wife's laptop and Windows wanted to do updates. I slid over to my Mac and OS X wanted to updates. I got disgusted, fired up the Blu Ray to watch a movie and it wanted to do updates. Beaten down by the world, I went to snag a beer and the fridge needed to reboot. And then do updates.

If the old Sun dream for Java ever came true, that there'd be small chunks of code running on every device big or small, then suicide would be the only option of escape for the many.

Recall Apple's marketing. They've built up from a cornerstone concept of "PC stuff gets viruses, Apple stuff doesn't." Big part of their spiel, no?

Sure it's about money, just perhaps not the way you think. If I spent megabucks chucking rocks at Windows, I'd be a little leary about making a nice, comfy home on my shiny, new platform for that well-known Windows virus vector.

I guess I'm more willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, that they're trying to back up the claim of more safety by making their platform, uh, safer. For certain values of safety.

I was on the beta team, and with the handful of beta testers none of this stuff came up.

That may not seem to be much of an excuse, but they had developed this for a specific volume of people and bought server space for that expected flow of individuals.

Instead it has been considerably more popular. Even some of the weird bugs about saving file paths were found months ago but had been fixed, and then re-introduced? Anyway, the feedback is being reviewed.

So? Welcome to science!

A whole lot of "laws" were formulated and used, considered correct and useful until at one day they were proven incorrect. Considering how insignificant Moore's law is when it comes to the scientific community, I could think of worse contradictions.

Here's another one I can recommend for pseudo-realistic hacking: Sneakers

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

I would gladly dedicate another 5mm to a decent keyboard :(

As for the camera: The thing with the autofocus (not focusing until you push the camera button halfway down) is normal - this allows you to pick the spot you'd like to focus on ;)

However, saying the camera takes decent pictures borders on a crime against geek-humanity... :P. They're grainy and noisy, and the flash is completely useless unless you like red eyes :(

First, full disclosure. I've paid my dues to get an iPhone OS developer license, and I'm actively writing and releasing apps for these devices.

However, I don't think the focus should be on the fact that Apple says you have to write your code in a specific language. The focus should be on the mechanism by which they can enforce that; their monopolistic App Store. The fact that the only way to get applications onto the device is to pay Apple's fee seems highly suspect to me. I understand the desire to keep a level of quality control on the code that's executing on these machines, and in principle I applaud it. The way they've gone about it is horrible, though.

People have had years now to recognize that the hardware and underlying OS are sound. I think it's time to just open the flood gates, and let developers release whatever code they want. Customers will quickly learn which companies produce good software that doesn't destabilize or crash their device, and which companies write nothing but garbage that causes their shiny little slab of magic to become a shiny little slab of useless components.

Play Company of Heroes. Unlike Starcraft, which is still an old-gen RTS, despite the new graphics, COH has things such as popcap, map control, directional cover, suppression, retreating, reinforcing, etc. Sure, there's a lot of luck involved, and it's not perfectly balanced, but in many aspects it makes SCII look like a kid's toy (and dare I say it looks prettier to, even though it was released a long time ago). Furthermore, it's not a clickfest nor a spamfest, so even people out of their teens are able to play it very well.

Can we stop with the "slippery slope is a fallacy" nonsense? Slippery slope isn't a logical argument, it's a psychological/behavioral argument. The claim is not that anyone who screens for a genetic disease will by logical inference subsequently be obliged to embark on a campaign to exterminate the Jews. The claim is that human psychology will countenance a succession of small steps that amount to an outrageous offense, because none of the individual steps is so much more outrageous than the previous that it can rationalize great opposition, until you realize that no individual step is more worthy of opposition than any other and rationally commit to opposing them all.

Whether you class is as logical or psychological/behavioural, it's still fallacious. The slippery slope argument is that we shouldn't take one step in a certain direction, not because the step itself is wrong, but because the perceived extreme at the end of that direction is wrong. Yet, in virtually all cases, policies don't end up moving to an extreme, just because they take one step in a particular direction. They tend to rest at some compromise position.

"I see! I see!!" said the blind man, but everyone knew he was full of shit.

Until now when he CAN actually say it and follow it up with high fives to everyone.

Every time I get cranky about all the dumb shit that we do in this day and age, I also think about all the cool and fantastic things we can do. It's a funny balance.

amen brother

US General Maxwell Taylor in 2009: "We are now threatened with a jizzle gap that leaves us in a position of potentially grave danger."

and once again, the threat is from the Russians. anyone browsing the Web can tell from all the Slavic models named Katya, Tanya and Svyeta that the gap is widening dangerously. i'm talking Goatse here