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apress

5,356 karma · joined January 13, 2010

General purveyor of http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/
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apress··on A Midcentury Bender: Revisiting Mad Men
The show also followed several decades of demonization of the changes that happened in the 60s. I sometimes think of Mad Men as making the point that the 60s happened for (good) reasons.
apress··on Test scores are not irrelevant
Title IX applies to schools that accept federal funding such as Harvard, MIT etc. see for example https://studentlife.mit.edu/titleix
apress··on In Supreme Court brief, Yale and peers defend use of race in admissions
In CA at least, there is a large gap: Despite those changes and others, the proportion of freshmen from underrepresented racial groups, including Blacks, Latinos and women, attending the UC campuses, averaged 20% before Prop 209, then dropped to 15% in 1998, then slowly increased over the next 20 years, reaching a peak of 37% in 2016, according to the system. However, the percentage of underrepresented students graduating from high school had doubled to over 56% by 2016. Source: https://edsource.org/2020/students-at-californias-top-tier-u...
apress··on New Standards for National Electric Vehicle Charging Network
Glad to see the proposed minimum charging capability of 150kW or higher. Too many "fast DC" chargers are only 50kW, well below the maximum that most current EVs can take. And there are some innovative charging platforms out there that incorporate batteries to get the charge rate up even when the local electric infrastructure is weak.
apress··on Tesla owners less likely to crash their EV than their other cars
The stat compares the crash rate per miles driven of drivers who have a Tesla and another car, finding a lower crash rate when the same person is driving the Tesla versus their other car (on average).
apress··on Ask HN: What’s Wrong with Wired?
For one, the longtime top editor and editorial visionary Chris Anderson left in 2012 and there has been a bit of a revolving door for top leadership since then. There was also a visual design overhaul which in my opinion lost a lot of the energy and vitality of the old Wired look https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/wireds-new-edit...
apress··on The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions
Chip design guru Jim Keller told me this was one of his favorite books (and highly influenced his business approach) when I interviewed him last year. https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...
apress··on Electric vehicles may not be the climate answer after all
What the headline says: Electric vehicles may not be the climate answer after all. What the story actually says: Hydrogen, for example, could outperform batteries for efficiency when it comes to heavy goods vehicles and long-haul buses. Synthetic fuels may well continue to provide the drama, noise and excitement that make sports cars so special.
apress··on IBM CEO will be on the hunt for acquisitions and new businesses after spin off
I doubt VMware is for sale. What are his other possible targets?
apress··on Salesforce, Honeywell, Amgen into the Dow; Exxon, Raytheon, and Pfizer Out
Salesforce replaces Exxon Mobil. Data really is the new oil.
apress··on The week old Hollywood finally died
Coca Cola sold Columbia Pictures to Sony and Rupert Murdoch bought 20th Century Fox in the 1980s, General Electric got Universal Studios 20 years ago, sold it to Comcast, Stephen Spielberg sold Dreamworks to Sumner Redstone, who had taken Paramount off Gulf+Western, but sure NETFLIX brought a "ruthless new culture" to Hollywood.
apress··on Reporters are leaving newsrooms for newsletters
One of the newsletters everyone points to when discussing this trend, Ben Thompson's Stratechery, now includes an audio podcast version of each day's written post read by Ben.
apress··on Reporters are leaving newsrooms for newsletters
If you are interested in finance or markets at all, Bloomberg's Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter is great http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...
apress··on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI free until May 28th
Civ IV!
apress··on Hayao Miyazaki Movies on iTunes
Finally, these classic gems are online!
apress··on Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?
Before the next wave of Internet-from-space companies fly by, I'm going to delve in to the last great bubble. John Bloom's "Eccentric Orbits," mainly about the life and death and rebirth of Iridium–but also covering all of that company's even less successful peers–came out in 2016, but somehow I missed it until now. Lots of awards.
apress··on Ask HN: Which backpack do you use for work and work travel?
Love the all-black Aer Fit Pack, which they've since updated to the Fit 2 https://www.aersf.com/fit-pack-2-black. Lots of room, super durable and did I mention all black?
apress··on Patrick Stewart Will Star in New Star Trek Series as Picard on CBS All Access
They finally figured out a way to get us all to pay $6 a month for that damn service.
apress··on The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning
Publishers can opt out of the book indexing, too (kind of like robots.txt) https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html
apress··on Ring Doorbell Vulnerability Exposes Wifi Password
Don't forget to scroll down to the end of the article. Spoiler alert: they fixed it. "A firmware update was released earlier this week that fixes this issue, just two weeks after we disclosed it to them privately. Good job Ring!"
apress··on Chromebook buyers were promised two years of free Verizon data, only got one
Google now giving out $150 rebate. http://blogs.computerworld.com/mobilewireless/24060/google-c...
apress··on Amazon.com Help: Amazon Prime and Amazon Student Prime Membership Fee Changes
Over time, due to both per-item shipping fees rising and higher volumes, Amazon's losses on shipping have been rising at an unsustainable rate. The gap last year between its shipping costs and shipping charges was about $3.5 billion, up from just $600 million 5 years ago. http://www.statista.com/statistics/236503/amazons-annual-shi...
apress··on Gamasutra: Jon Shafer's Blog - Revisiting the Design of Civ 5
Amazingly candid admissions by the designer of the fifth entry in the Sid Meier franchise, by far the worst and least playable. At least now we know how this train wreck happened. Among other things, Shafer did the AI programming himself despite a lack of previous experience, leading him to make the computer Civs far too random. He also didn't think through his many efforts to simplify gameplay such as by removing a player's ability to allocate resources among research, spending and culture, which was a key component of tactical strategy. Switching from a stacking units model to a one-square-per-unit model also made no sense without radically changing the game's maps, which he failed to anticipate. And on it goes.
apress··on High stakes if Apple e-books antitrust case goes to trial
Actually, the monetary stakes discussed ($200 million a year for a couple of years) are peanuts to Apple, not even a blip. The real battle is over their freedom to engage in these sorts of business dealings to enter new markets and beat down incumbents.
apress··on Do you think the desktop is dead?
Extending the life of the desktop: all the Internet-based ( aka cloud) services we use more and more like Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, Spotify, etc which make it trivial to switch from phone to laptop to desktop and back. Even Apple is in the game now, with iTunes Match and the ability to download purchased apps, music and videos to all your computers. Used to be a huge pain to keep things straight on more than one device. Today, I never worry about it. Thinking of switching from just a laptop to also having a faster, larger screen desktop at home base.

Some day, there will be enough computing power and storage in a tiny device and we'll just have different size screens. But that's a ways off.

apress··on Why I'm writing on the iPad
I get where the author is coming from but I have to say that the autocorrect/autochanging of words on iOS drives me crazy and cursor placement is a pain. I don't have the author's distraction problem, either, but there are word processors like WriteMonkey or Darkroom.
apress··on Simon & Schuster, Hachette E-Book Accord Wins Approval
Agency ebook pricing is not long for this world and $9.99 best sellers will be back soon.
apress··on Retina MacBook Pro review as a Mac Pro owner
Maybe you didn't read the same link? Arment did not mention that text in some apps looks worse on the rMBP than on a non-retina screen, which is true regardless of the chosen resolution on the rMBP and is a pretty big issue right now if you use one of those apps frequently -- stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw it at the Apple store. He was using the lower resolutions to avoid the lagginess problem. Eventually this will be sorted out -- although Microsoft's early signals and Mac track record indicate it might be a long wait. But it's relevant information that many potential buyers would want to know.
apress··on Retina MacBook Pro review as a Mac Pro owner
And of course he leaves out the far more damning day to day problem with the rMBP right now -- many popular non-Apple programs including Word and Photoshop look worse than they do on a non-retina display. Anandtech has the story http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-w...
apress··on A worthy Ultrabook appears: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon reviewed
Is the RAM user upgradable? Otherwise it's an unconscionable $250 to go from 4GB to 8GB and no option to go higher.
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