hej

Have you considered that you may just have a different taste?

To me, the fitted hulu logo looks so much better. I like the crispness.

I think those symbols are just learned.

Take folders. They look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Earthwise.jpg

That makes it obvious where the symbol is coming from. The only problem is that those kinds of folders are not commonly used in Germany. I think I never saw a folder like that before I started using computers.

Folders look like this in Germany: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Lever_arc...

The word that is used in Germany to refer to folders („Ordner“ in German) actually refers to ring binders.

Yet I had never a problem dealing with folders on computers, even though the visual metaphor was unfamiliar to me.

Oh come on! Don’t be so dense.

Not so much evidence (from trials, say), rather plausibility. We do not understand how Homeopathy works, but it goes even a level deeper: There is a certain and very specific process for creating those homeopathic remedies and from what we currently know about, say, physics, that process cannot leave you with some sort of active ingredient. If homeopathy were to work, our understanding of physics (which we have lots of evidence for) would most certainly be wrong in some ways.

That doesn’t mean that homeopathy is definitely wrong, but it does mean that the signal should be very strong for us to even be considering it to be not wrong. There are also levels to this: I’m pretty sure there are remedies about which we don’t know how they work, but them working would at least not require us to overhaul the laws of physics. That’s still worse than remedies for which we already have a model of how they work in mind, but at least it’s something.

Although you can’t really quantify that, I think such plausibility arguments are vitally important for any research. In fact, since time and money is limited, all researchers (in any field) will always try to limit themselves to what is plausible. Explaining why your model and your hypotheses are plausible is a big part of any scientific work. Plausibility is already a big part of science.

When something is factually wrong it’s factually wrong. That’s it. There is nothing else to it.

Nobody said that there is no security hole and no problem.

This comment doesn’t defend Apple. It doesn’t make any value judgments about Apple at all. It merely attacks the article.

But cars did also become widely used in those other countries during that time. I don't think that blaming presidents makes sense (and that part was a joke, anyway), but cars as an explanation for the decline of hats seems intriguing. As you noted, in some places in the west, commuting by public transport remained widely used (though I would argue that even many of those people frequently had to use cars), but here I would simply add fashion to the cars and turn it in a two-step process: cars made the use of hats decline, that decline became visible (either through interpersonal relationships or the media) and through that became fashion.

It's an intriguing idea, certainly, but obviously without any empirical validation (that's just how it is, that doesn't mean it's not allowed or fun to speculate about).

It's confused bullshit. The rest doesn't matter.

A unified theory doesn’t have to explain consciousness. Far from it. Why should it? That’s absurd.

Satire, right?

That’s impressive, actually.

Whether or not you succeed in lotteries is out of your control. There is a certain probability your lottery ticket will win and there is nothing you can do to change that probability. Your success in winning the lottery is independent from you as a person.

That’s likely not the case with apps. I’m sure there are some factors that are out of your control (some would call it luck), but others are most certainly not. Put another way: Those 40 percent of apps that at least break even probably are more likely to have certain properties that make them successful and that the 60 percent lack.

The success of your apps is dependent on you as a developer. Certainly not completely, but much more than your success in winning the lottery.

Given that the barrier to entry in the App Store is incredibly low, given that making apps is so hip, I’m actually surprised by that 40–60 split. Those 40 percent (more realistically you want to aim a bit higher, breaking even isn’t exactly sexy) are a big juicy target, and unlike with lottery tickets you can actually aim for it.

(By the way, this headline is perfect for many absurd re-writes to illustrate my point: “Success in school is a lottery: 50 percent or more of students only get Cs or worse.)

It seems even many of those who really love Android are extremely underwhelmed by this phone. It’s just another boring Android phone, there are tons of those. There is nothing exceptional or special about it.

There is only one iPhone every year.

You might say it’s not fair, but that different strategy is paying off for Apple.

(Hey, and there was lots of coverage. I saw it everywhere, no matter the medium. From The Verge to a German weekly news magazine. That’s not so much less than what the iPhone gets, in fact it might even be about equal. Is that your persecution complex flaring up?)

It’s blow your mind time. Ready?

Double-tap any text you are editing in order to select a word. That also allows you to drag the endpoints. Tapping with two fingers selects the whole paragraph.

In short: Tapping places the cursor (and brings up the keyboard if it isn’t already up), double-tapping selects a word, tapping with two fingers selects a paragraph. I couldn’t find any other gestures.

If you you double-tap and hold, you can immediately change the selection, but you are anchored to the word you selected (i.e. you can add characters to the left or the right but not both). Tapping and holding with two fingers allows you to change both endpoints with your two fingers.

Web views (and most other views of text you cannot edit) don’t work like that. In those, you tap and hold to select text. It’s a bit inconsistent, though: in iBooks (for example), tapping with two fingers will select whole paragraphs.

While inter-rater reliability is a concern for identifying ethnicities, other traits should be more reliable (gender, hair color). Still, stuff like that needs to be pre-tested. You basically let the coders code a limited set of photos and check the correlation between their codes. The higher the correlation, the better, >.7 is the convention in social science (but still pretty bad, higher would be better).

You should also check intra-coder reliability, i.e. give the same person the same set of photos with two weeks or so between. You can then again calculate the correlation. This tells you wether your categories are too fuzzy (e.g. what exactly is medium length hair?).

All in all this has serious methodical flaws, from a social science perspective it’s not salvageable, and I haven’t even talked about the complete lack of statistical tests (which, to be honest, would just be like polishing a turd).

Impressive work! It’s a really nice app, not just normal and boring, not a visual mess, a joy to navigate. If only I could convince myself to pay.

Really? This is common knowledge. Steve Jobs said it during one of his keynotes. I won't search this for you, you can do this on your own.

Unlikely. We already have one example where Apple is enforcing the “no malware” rule and that’s the App Store.

On the App Store, Apple reserves itself the right to not only remove apps from the store (which Apple has done often and we know a lot about) but also to actually remotely pull apps from users’ devices.

Apple claims they will only actually remotely pull apps if said apps are malware. That’s the exact same rule they seem to want to apply in the future to third party apps on the Mac outside the App Store.

I do not think Apple ever pulled an app from iOS devices. They certainly never used that right for apps that were rejected or removed from the App Store (e.g. tethering apps). They seem to really only want to pull true malware and don’t seem to apply some contorted definition of malware here. (E.g. I’m sure carriers would claim that tethering apps cause them much damage, hence they are malware, Apple doesn’t follow that definition of malware, though.)

Apple's EMEA headquarters are in Cork, Ireland. 2,800 people (and growing) are working there. In the last quarter, 23 percent of Apple’s profits were made in EMEA (compared to 33 percent in the Americas, 28 percent in Asia-Pacific, 16 percent in Japan and seven percent in retail). The article on The New York Times quotes numbers from 2004, then EMEA made 28 percent of Apple’s profits.

I don’t think it’s a problem when Apple decides not to move money made overseas back to the US. That's their decision and there is nothing shady about it either way. I can't think of any moral objections.

Purposefully moving money somewhere in order to avoid taxes, however, could be if not a legal at least a moral problem.

Oh, look, it's a tabloid article. Not packaged that way and with more words, also more eloquent, but still a tabloid article.

Why can't this sort of advocacy (which is important) not take the high ground for once? Fighting FUD with FUD is disgusting.

No, it’s not necessarily immoral to break the law. There is it again, the error to try and map morality to laws perfectly.

Whether or not not paying taxes is immoral (by abusing obvious loopholes) is different from the law.

That was a nice explanation of why what’s moral doesn’t map to what's legal. I’m not sure what your point is, though.

That’s not how it works. A single app should never try to singlehandedly change the OS. That's just stupid and doesn’t work. Please, self-important developers, don't force me to deal with your personal stupid version of how the OS should work. It's hard enough to deal with the shit that comes out of Apple from time to time.

It’s kinda irrelevant in this case because Mozilla doesn’t actually care about any of this. They are just slow like a snail and incompetent when it come to writing apps for OS X. They don’t want to improve it.

Not that I care.

Using loopholes when you know they are loopholes seems pretty immoral to me. You don’t have to agree with me on that, but that would for example be a prime reason for shaming them. Morals are not equal to the law. Immoral things stay immoral even if they are legal. And there is nothing wrong with calling out immoral behavior.

> Playing within the rules created by society is not morally wrong.

There are people who honestly believe that? It’s not that simple, it really isn’t.

I, for example, think there are many immoral but legal things and I want it to stay that way. The law is not supposed to perfectly mirror our morality, that would be a clusterfuck, tyranny, and otherwise a really bad idea. (For example: I think not tipping in the restaurant is immoral. I, however, never ever want that to become a law. Just one example.)

In short: Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because it’s not right, doesn’t mean it should be illegal.

Could be culture. We are used to films looking a certain way and TV looking different, everything else could very well be rationaizations. Not that it changes much about the situation, though.

Ehm, selective enforcement by the state most certainly can be a problem, I cannot, however, see how selective enforcement by people or companies (who, in civil law, are always free to sue or not to sue for whatever reasons) is bad or can even be considered selective enforcement in any way.

It’s a pretty central part of civil law, actually (making sure – at least in theory – that only if two parties absolutely cannot agree on their own, the legal system has to kick in), and I think it would be downright evil to require people to always sue everyone.

Even state attorneys can pick and chose (to some extent), but to avoid arbitrariness they have to have good reasons for what they do, who they decide to prosecute and not to prosecute. They can’t decide not to prosecute for arbitrary reasons. (I know that’s the case in Germany, I think that's the case in the US, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

It is in Germany (but you are right, it’s incorrect if used in English).

I'm not sure how that makes it better. The consequences are the same.

You do not use surveys to learn about gravity. That would be stupid. You use surveys whenever there is no better way to get the data you want. We have better ways to learn about gravity than surveys, so we use those. This is true for all scientific methods we have: All are not perfect (some are better than others, though) and all are not appropriate to answer every question.

(I know very little about psychology so I’m going to put on my social scientist hat.) The Large Hadron Collider can tell us nothing about which political issue people think is the most important one (one of the variables needed for Agenda Setting research, for example), so even though it’s a great tool to learn about gravity, it’s not a great tool to learn about Agenda Setting.

fMRIs are currently also about as useful as the LHC when it comes to answering questions like that. fMRIs are not very precise, we don’t understand the underlying system (brain!) thoroughly enough, they are expensive so we can’t look at very many people and have a representative sample.

They are just not good tools when it comes to answering certain questions and surveys become then our only realistic option, warts and all. (Some warts every good social scientist knows about: social desirability bias, reactivity, ceiling and floor effects, …)

So, Agenda Setting. The hypothesis is that issues about which the media reports a lot are also seen as important by the recipients. If you want to answer that question you have to do a quantitative content analysis and a survey. There is no other way to get to that data.

Surveys are not dubious tools. In the context of this research question, for example, an fMRI would be a much more dubious research tool.

They picked the time in a way that it was night across the Pacific (where nearly no one lives). That way it was a bit late in Japan and a bit early on the West Coast.

The world doesn't start and end with the West Coast, especially not for Apple (and those on the West Coast are the best connected anyway, the most likely to learn quickly about the WWDC).