hej

If anything at all there will be new Macs, coinciding with Mountain Lion and Intel's release of low-power Ivy Bridge CPUs (though Macs might be a bit too unimportant to warrant the big stage and Intel might not deliver on time or Mountain Lion may not be finished). The iPhone was moved to autumn.

It's possible that there are no new hardware products at all in the keynote (though maybe not likely), only a review of what Mountain Lion brings, maybe incldluding some new software (the aging iWork is desperate for an update) and a preview of iOS6. Remember: Apple used to have preview events for the next iOS early in the year. That did not happen this year, so they have to preview iOS6 at some point before they release it, likely together with a new iPhone.

You want something very different from what Apple implemented. It doesn't even make sense to connect the two.

You really don’t get it, do you? That’s pretty amazing.

This is about people accidentally pressing keys on the wrong side of the keyboard. It makes sure that those people are not interrupted in their writing, while still presenting a clear image to the user that is not confusing. It’s a line of defense, like the buttons that are actually a bit larger than they are displayed – just in order to make sure that users missing those buttons is less likely.

It’s error correction. The feature is not that there are repeated buttons on the keyboard and users can pick which they want to use. Users are not supposed to use those. They are not supposed to know (or have to know) about them.

I agree with the points you are making, but the iPad did in fact launch in ten countries on March 16th, including many important European countries (like Germany) and Japan.

Apple sold as many as they could make. Whatever it is, (low) demand for the new iPad is not the reason why Apple didn't meet expectations.

Also: follow the links to the source. The Atlantic article misquoted its source. That source claims that the consensus is 12 million.

Don't know about that. It looks to me like it's getting less cyclical.

This qarter only includes two weeks of the sale of the new iPad.

Also, just now it was said on the call that they are selling iPads as fast as they can make them, so they are still supply-constrained. They either couldn't make as many iPads as analysts predicted (though, actually, analysts were very close, to say Apple missed the estimate doesn't really make much sense) or iPad 2s tailed off faster than analysts expected.

Alright, thanks! That's better. I couldn't find the link to that page anywhere on the Google Drive site, though. I was led to the old pricing page.

Do you have a link? Their pricing is confusing as hell, no clear information anywhere.

Great to see some competition. I'm looking forward to Dropbox prices come tumbling down.

This is not news, by the way, this is an editorial disingenuously disguised as news. It contains predictions that have to sound an awful lot like facts to any unsuspecting reader.

There is nothing wrong with predictions, just don’t pretend they are not.

Uhm, as a rule, authors should do none of those things. (I will make an exception for Douglas R. Hofstadter. If you want a book where presentation is interwoven with content and you can't really separate one from the other you have to read Gödel Escher Bach. In general, though, it’s safe to say that most authors are not Douglas R. Hofstadter. Gödel Escher Bach is also one of those books that’s hard to make into an ebook – and hasn’t been for that reason – because web technologies are lagging behind the printed book so badly.) They need experts to do that.

I’m not suggesting that authors start bikeshedding. I want professionals to do their profession. Authors are rarely good designers.

I don't really get you then. You seem to claim that design is important but at the same time deny it.

I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.

You seem to have seriously misunderstood what great presentation is and you are selling books way short. Good presentation is only about rounded corners if those rounded corners are actually an improvement. If they distract they are bad presentation.

There are good and bad ways to present text in books and this is not some subtle improvement, this is noticeable. Typesetting books is seriously hard and there are tons of pitfalls, even if all you need are paragraphs and chapter headings. To make this short, here are all things books can do and the web cannot (yet or in most browsers) do: Complete control over the font. A lot of microtypography. Complete control over justification. Easily creating and maintaining a rhythm.

I'm sure there are a lot more. (Those points are also the reason why typography in ebooks still sucks for the most part, some of that is caused by the ineptness of those who create those books.)

Anyone who has ever had the book of someone with no design background in their hands will be able to testify that there is a huge difference between books done by a professional typesetter and an amateur (if that amateur isn't self-taught and doesn't otherwise care about design).

That’s not uncommon. Frutiger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger) was designed for the signage in the Charles De Gaulle Airport but was later used everywhere.

The characteristics that make for a good signage font seem to me to be beneficial in many other applications.

That’s what I have been thinking about as well. At first I thought that 0x10c will be a game for an extremely small niche, enough to not really be a failure (at least if you don’t compare it to Minecraft) but not enough to be a true success.

That is still very possible (I think it’s also possible that Notch doesn’t really have a well-thought out plan, that all this wasn’t planned and that he just did what he can do best, playing around with a game concept and having fun, all alone. I’m not arguing that’s a bad thing.) but the game has certain properties that could make it a success, even if it seems incredibly nerdy.

Only a handful people had to re-build the Enterprise in Minecraft and make a video of it. Only a handful people had to build ALUs and CPUs in Minecraft and make a video of them. Only a handful people had to design practical redstone and rail contraptions and make video tutorials. Only a handful people had to build tools, make texture packs and code mods. Only a handful people had to make adventure maps.

0x10c could be similar: Only a handful of people have to write software (and judging from the initial response, that handful will be quite the handful). And someone writes really cool software and shows it off in an YouTube video others who have no intention of ever really understanding the DCPU-16 nevertheless have a reason to check out the game and run that software.

There is obviously more to a game than that, but I do think that 0x10c has at least the potential to be quite popular even for those who don’t know how to write assembler.

Maybe not, at least not if they made only negligent errors. Hitting a city is hard (with the size of asteroid we are talking about here). If they didn’t do it on purpose but because of a combination of some negligent errors and extremely bad luck I’m not sure whether they deserve to be financially wiped out.

Allow me to roll my eyes at so much hypocrisy.

Oh come on. Apple’s iPhone and iPad barely hits the mark there. They are overshooting nothing.

It’s a petty good approximate term that to my mind works perfectly well. Sure, things change depending on view distance but I guess nerds have to survive a term that’s not always exact. The horror!

That was an uninformed rant on your part. What are you suggesting as an alternative? High-PPI certainly does not work.

DPI i just incorrect. Use PPI if you really insist on that name.

That said, there is nothing gimmicky about the retina name. It's a device where distance to the display, resolution and screen size are such that someone with normal vision cannot distinguish between pixels.

High-PPI does not in any way pack the same information. It’s ambiguous and unclear.

The only thing that’s bad about retina is that Apple uses it like a trademark. I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays (because they are), but that’s not possible. Luckily everyone else is busy taking away that name from Apple (for example by naming their software like that).

Describing passive opposition as war just makes no sense at all.

It’s not a war. Not even using extremely liberal (and stupid) definitions of war.

But how many people used PDAs? Those were always niche devices.

Smartphones is where it's at.

That's the technology. Apple actually made people want those touch devices. They were the first ones to package it correctly.

I'm sure there were many people who thought and wrote about rrepublics and democracies before the French revolution. But the revolution was what did it.

Maybe the technology of those other phones was revolutionary. But revolutionary technology no one wants hardly matters. Apple found the revolutionary package.

Why are those free speech cheerleaders always to opposed to people freely talking to each other, telling each other why they think something is or isn’t a bad idea?

It’s much easier to get hired as a male nurse and those who are responsible will always be looking for more male nurses.

What an ignorant fool.

This article doesn’t say much (except that sexism is super awesome which I don’t think deserves a response) but the one he linked to (about hypocrisy) is incredibly bad (http://kswizz.com/post/8275502957/hypocrisy).

Facebook has very liberal fields for all kinds of stuff. It’s no problem to say that you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (9,573 fans) or Russel’s Teapot (86 fans). Like Jedis? Facebook’s got your back (2,829)! If you can’t find your religion you can enter your own, even with a description.

Why then is the gender so locked down? There are two choices. It’s not even possible to just say nothing. I mean, what the hell? That’s a serious indicator that Facebook hasn’t done much thinking about gender. That’s just awful for a huge social network with nearly a billion users.

(Also, is he seriously defending saying “retarded” to people? What the hell?)

One thing, though, Dragon won’t deliver is volume. There was lots of space in the Space Shuttle. (But I just wanted to add that for completeness sake, not to claim that the Shuttle was super awesome.)

By the way, currently it’s only possible to return up to 50kg of cargo from the ISS. After the Space Shuttle was retired, Soyuz became the only spacecraft that can actually return anything to Earth from the ISS and there is pretty much only space for three people and nothing else in that thing.

Dragon is supposed to bring back 600kg in its first test flight to the ISS, but it can bring back up to 3.000kg. That’s still not much compared to what the Space Shuttle could do (14.000kg), but it’s a lot more than what is currently possible.

So even if it takes another three years until the first manned flight, Dragon can be very useful as a cargo ship for the ISS (despite the fact that the ISS already has three cargo ships: the Russian Progress, the Japanese HTV and the European ATV – those three ships can deliver tons of cargo but they all can return nothing).

That is indeed the logical consequence. I’m not disagreeing.

There are a plethora of factors that make, say, results of a social science statistical analysis less likely than they might seem. Biases, wrong assumptions during statistical analysis, …

I’m also not claiming that it’s impossible to find better methods that shield scientists much better against, for example, biases. I do indeed think that this (developing new and better methods) is where non-natural sciences have their most important work in front of them. This is where it’s at for them, this is where real revolutions of several fields are possible. If only someone knew how exactly.

Until then we have to deal with what we have. I think it works relatively well, considering, but I’m certainly not happy about the current state.

When it comes to this particular theory, it seems to me that the odds are pretty good that it is true. The explanation for why the copy is the way it is – it was painted by someone with a knowledge of how the original was painted – doesn’t seem that outrageous and pretty logical to me. It’s certainly always possible that there is a better one.

(By the way, I disagree vehemently that those kinds of theories have little impact on our lives. This one maybe not, but forensic science – which is very similar in its method and process to what this researcher did – impacts a great many people. There researchers will often take a first look at something and immediately start forming hypotheses, which they then seek to confirm or falsify by further collecting evidence. Even worse: Researchers might be told hypotheses by non-researchers – say the police. It’s important that we find better ways to do it. It's important that we know exactly how sure or unsure we can be about the results.)

Again, to re-iterate: Just because there is justified doubt doesn’t mean this research is worthless (which your tone seemed to imply, maybe I’m wrong about that).

That seems very clear from the article. She looked at it because the Louvre asked her whether that painting had ever been looked at in depth before. It seems that she didn't start out with any hypothesis about the history of this painting (other than what is probably the default assumption and what the painting was cataloged as, that it’s a 500 year old anonymous copy).