Seems like with an anchor and a solid styrofoam buoy or similar, they could float the line a few feet above the sea floor on a flexible tether and prevent this problem more permanently.

Apple's were the first ones that anyone took seriously. Before that, you mostly had HTPCs, which were kind of niche.

Wow. Today I learned about two devices I had never heard of. But look at the user interface of the Samsung tablet from that era and the GridPad tablet. Compare with the Palm. They're nothing alike.

Now tell me the Newton UI wasn't a major influence on Palm's UI.

The appearance of Fox News was when any appearance of trying to be honest in newmaking went out the window. So yes, it really is. They made the talking head gallery into an art form.

Before that, there was a clear line between news and interviews, and biases were largely subtle, mostly in the form of choosing which stories to cover, rather than in the form of deliberately interposing large amounts of commentary into the coverage itself. This is not to say that there weren't editorials, but they were clearly delineated from the news portion of coverage. After the rise of intentionally biased news sources, that all stopped.

And no, most major news outlets were not intentionally biased before that. They had biases because the individual people reporting had biases, but that's not the same thing as the corporate entity dictating that bias by fiat. Most journalists prior to the Fox News era would have resigned rather than put up with that. It was very much seen as a violation of journalistic ethics back then.

Well, one of those is basically the same as one of mine, to be fair. IMO, it's not 24-hour aspect that's the problem. It's the entertainment aspect. CNN was founded in 1980, and Headline News was founded in 1982. The quality of news/journalism didn't really start to decline rapidly until the late 1990s, and it cratered by the mid-2000s.

Before Fox News, CNN was the only 24-hour news source. It had no competition, so it had no incentive to spin the news and sensationalize it to get viewers. If you wanted news some time other than first thing in the morning, noon, or 6-ish in the evening, you went to CNN. When Fox News and MSNBC started competing, they added more entertainment to differentiate themselves, the 24-hour news-entertainment cycle became a thing, and things went horribly wrong.

But I mean if you think news quality started going downhill significantly before the mid-1990s, I'd be curious to know when you perceived the decline.

s/many/nearly all/

It turns out that when advertising is free, the worst elements of society that provide the least benefit to society take advantage of it to bad ends.

Wish I had met him, but sadly, I didn't, so I can't say. I did meet Sam Donaldson (who overlapped with him at a different network) and Katie Couric (who missed overlapping by only a few years at the other major network), and they seemed like decent people. I'd imagine Cronkite was as well. Most of the journos back then were.

The fact that part of what is ostensibly mainstream media spews stuff that would lead to a post like this is exactly why trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Back in the 80s and before, journalists actually had to take the time to learn enough about their stories to sound intelligent. And that meant that when they interviewed a talking head in politics, if the politician lied, the journalist would often correct them.

In the post-news era, we started seeing more and more talking head "news", where news channels spent more and more of their time having guests on the show who spew whatever bulls**t they want and nobody calls them on it.

And in the post-truth era, that level of idiocy began bleeding into the news, with "journalists" putting spin on the news, with the destruction of fact checking, and with the quality of the reporting spiraling.

What do I blame for this? Two things. First, the rise of Fox News, created by Rupert Murdoch to be an intentionally conservatively biased news source. Second, decades of media consolidation producing steady declines in pay and in job availability for people who work in journalism, leading it to become a less and less desirable field, resulting in most of the best and the brightest choosing other fields. This is not to say that there aren't intelligent journalists, just not nearly as many as a percentage of the total. Also, media consolidation has resulted in fewer voices in general, which further erodes trust.

The specific impulse of a fusion drive is expected to be several hundred times that of a chemical rocket, and "maximum speed" for a rocket is proportional to the specific impulse.

Nearer term advanced engines, i.e. ones that have working prototypes or even production examples, are in the 10-100x range. That takes a trip to Saturn from 12 years to between a month and a year. Or a few days for a hypothetical fusion drive.

Please, no. The Mac under Ive was a train wreck of missing functionality. From the lack of floppy drives in the iMac (which was a nightmare in the education market, to the point where ~100% of them ended up with some kind of floppy drive or Zip drive or similar attached externally), to the premature dropping of FireWire (which Apple literally just dropped support for a few weeks ago, but which was phased out on the hardware side from 2008 through 2012), to the premature removal of USB-A ports (which a lot of Mac laptop users still curse to this day), to the premature removal of HDMI ports, SD card slots, and MagSafe (all of which Mac users complained about so much that they actually put them all back).

That's before we even get into human interface issues like the butterfly keyboards, the touch bar, the removal of Touch ID and the home button on the iPhone, etc.

The post-Ive MacBook Pro models are IMO a breath of fresh air pretty much across the board. I'm hoping the iPhone gets there eventually.

To be fair, that ARM thing resulted in Macs that run all day without a charge, which is literally the thing more Mac users have asked for than probably any other feature, and have literally been begging for since the PowerBook G4 took away the dual battery bays in 2001.

And remember that the iPhone team wasn't led by Ive. It was led by Forstall, and the hardware team was led by Tony Fadell. That's where bulk of the innovation that made the iPhone a success came from, IMO. This is not to say that Apple should have held on to Forstall, given reports of his personality conflicts with other execs, but I think he should get credit for a lot of the fundamentals of what made the iPhone a success, along with Tony Fadell, who also gets credit for the iPod.

Ive... made a case. It was a beautiful case, where they talked about how they carefully matched each front and back in various ways to ensure that the alignment was perfect, yada, yada, yada, but it was still a case with a glass screen and a port and a headphone jack (that was recessed so badly that no headphones anyone owned could even plug in).

Has Apple lost its innovators? Maybe. Will Apple find new innovators? Probably. Is Apple doing good engineering in the meantime? Definitely.

They tried to do a self-driving car, but I guess they couldn't pull off the AI. I know they've been doing stuff with drones for Maps imaging purposes since at least 2016, and I'd imagine that tech could eventually turn into a real-world product if they ever decide to productize it. I'm sure there are other skunkworks projects at Apple that could eventually turn into something cool, or at least I hope so, because that's how innovation usually happened at Apple, and presumably still does.

No disagreement. But it's awfully easy to say, "Why haven't you come up with anything new" without actually suggesting something that they should have invented. There's really not a lot new in the consumer electronics space. It's not like somebody else beat them to the punch on much of anything other than AR glasses (and, arguably, EVs, if you consider those to be consumer electronics).

You forgot Apple TV. The concept was brilliant, and it was arguably the first viable off-the-shelf set-top box, beating Roku by a few months.

The problem was that Apple A. did not license their tech, and B. insisted on being treated as a luxury brand in a field where being a luxury brand is a significant competitive disadvantage. A better UI isn't good enough if you can outfit every TV in your house from Roku ($29.99) for less than you pay for one set-top box from Apple ($130). And it is doubly hopeless if someone is buying a $120 TV with Roku software built in.

Predictably, despite having what is IMO a better product, Apple got their a** handed to them in the market.

I'd also give them credit for Newton, which led to Palm, which led to smartphones. I mean, they really were at least a decade ahead of their time back then. And that story went an awful lot like Apple TV, except for the part where it got Steved. :-)

One more thing to get snagged, increases the odds of the wire breaking and making the hardware an expensive, irreparable brick... no, thanks.

That's not inherently true. From a physics perspective, because earbuds are sealed against your ear canal, you can reproduce bass response with a much smaller motion of the driver, because you aren't having to compress so much air. And because the driver is small, you can still move it fast enough to get good treble response. So in theory, earbuds should be able to produce a flat response curve a lot more easily than over-the-ear headphones.

If you look at the AirPod Pro response curve, it's somewhat colored (AirPod Pro 3 especially so, with IMO way too much bass boost), but +/- 6 dB or so from below 20 Hz up to the anti-aliasing filter limit for the codec. Contrast this with over-the-ear headphones, where they usually put a bass boost centered around 120 Hz to make up for the response falling off at lower frequencies.

So if you're thinking that your over-the-ear headphones sound better because of the driver size, you have it backwards. They sound better to you because they're massively colored, but you happen to like that sound.

If they're not crap, chances are, they're going somewhere else that made a better offer. And if they are, no great loss.

Ah. I understand the confusion. You're talking about a Mac. The Mac platform isn't truly locked down; you can give any app full disk access trivially in System Settings, etc. This is mainly for historical reasons, because taking away privileges is a lot harder than never having them in the first place, and a lot of apps wouldn't work at all if you couldn't.

When talking about Apple's locked-down platform, I was referring to iOS (iPhone, iPad) and, by extension, iOS derivatives like VisionOS and WatchOS.

The problem is that the iOS sandbox makes a full backup via rsync impossible, because except as permitted by specific entitlements, apps don't have access to other apps' private sandboxed data (as opposed to data that the app intentionally stores in a shared location), and unless something has changed very recently, there is no "full disk access" sandbox entitlement or equivalent on iOS(*).

* There are at least ostensibly ways to create magic sandbox escapes that would give an app that ability, but I'm 99.99999% certain that Apple would never permit an app with that sort of entitlement in their iOS App Store.

While this doesn't make the technology entirely useless, it does mean that no one other than Apple can truly perform a full device backup comparable to an iCloud device backup.

More to the point, this is why governments — the United States government in particular — need to demand that Apple open up their platform to allow third-party backup tools so that users can choose whether to use iCloud backups, Google Drive backups, Dropbox backups, CrashPlan backups, a not-yet-existing tool that backs up to a NAS on your home network whenever you're at home and to an encrypted disk image on iCloud when you aren't, etc. That puts the backup companies in competition with one another to deliver the most secure backup scheme, and ensures that any company that bows to that sort of pressure from a foreign government will quickly find themselves customerless, replaced by a company that didn't do so, or even replaced by open source software that is auditable.

Trickledown economics! again! but they didn't even bother to make an argument this time, they just did it because Orange Jesus said so. It was unpopular and they didn't still make much effort to save it, they just rammed it through and kept up the distractions and propaganda over other issues. It's not the "economy stupid" until it really hits people in the pocketbook and even then they are so gullible you can use any other excuse or distraction to misdirect their anger.

It's an amazing sight to see how gullible people are without a competent media... and they can't even choose media that works because they never punish those caught lying to them often; they may even punish the honest ones for telling them the truth... because they don't know truth. Reason is dead. Trust is dead. As naive as Al Gore's books seemed, I think maybe he was onto something ahead of the curve and trying to raise awareness of it; it ran deeper... I should have read them instead of dismissing them from the summary. Then I'd know what he probably was trying to do or if he communicated it well enough.