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Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

Eddy Cue's business cards should read "Chief Achilles' Heel Officer." This online-services stuff is so hard for Apple to get right.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

Doing what they do best with iOS 7. Lots of detail-focused UI improvement wrapped in minimalist-sexy cosmetics. Will sell iPhones like hotcakes.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

Oh great, another doomed attempt to compete with Google Docs.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

Mac Pro is the new SGI? Seems targeted entirely at animation and video editing.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

How do you rack-mount a cylinder?

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

What are they doing spending this much WWDC time on Safari? This browser-wars stuff seems really antiquated, like a weird sidebar to Apple's core business... what threat is Chrome to them? Call me back when Mobile Safari has plug-ins and AdBlock and maybe I'll care.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 8 days ago

Nice to see AirPlay integrated with multiple monitor support -- I'm thinking more AppleTV-related developments coming soon?

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: DealSpork - 7 weeks ago

Everyone seems to love the Victorinox Fibrox knives these days. I personally also like the Henckels International ones which are cheapish but heavy and forged. Sometimes a particular set goes on clearance and/or gets Wooted, and you can also find scratch-and-dent ones sometimes through Amazon Warehouse Deals.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 2 months ago

Agreed on visual/UI changes to iOS being a likely next step. One other thing that seems likely to me (as porruka touched on above) is a lot of "ecosystem" growth for wireless/Bluetooth accessories for iOS (and maybe also Mac OS), equivalent to the zillions of 30-pin docking-connector things that the last decade of iPod and iPhone brought. Wearables and watches, but also stuff you leave in pla

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Vaya con IOS - 2 months ago

Dilger goes off the deep end about Android: or, what happens when you mistake fanboy sniping for tech-industry analysis.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Local Unmentionables: Notes on YOUR corner of the world - 3 months ago

No, it actually makes sense to consider increasing your max bid. People don't bid rationally on eBay, they usually bid in small increments rather than entering something like the actual maximum they'd be willing to pay. This is what makes sniping a good strategy.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Sporkers Helping Sporkers - 3 months ago

Hey, anybody have current web hosting favorites/recommendations? Where do the cool kids host their web dev and publishing side projects these days? I'm probably about to be launching into a bout of unemployment, and I'd like to start tinkering with a few site ideas. (Some would be straight blog-publishing-type stuff, others might involve learning Rails or Django.) I know a lot of folks use D

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: iBox (the hardware) - 3 months ago

Quoteporruka * (Calling Dick Tracy) It actually is a new iPhone form factor? Yeah, I think it's really the iPhone Mini. Maybe there's also a Bluetooth/WiFi-only version that works as a peripheral for a full-size iPhone, but that's not what most people will buy it for. Instead of a pocket-filling phone, maybe you take only the wrist version when you're travelling light and pack an iPad when you

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 3 months ago

Even assuming it's accurate, it's supply-chain data and Apple's supply chain is very opaque. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we/NPD don't know at all whether what looks like a drop in display orders from Apple, in this data, is due to a switch to a new component or a new supplier.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Sporkers Helping Sporkers - 3 months ago

I find RSS a lot more useful for the stuff I don't read every day or every week. There are a lot of sites that I might like to flip through once in a while but am apt to forget about otherwise, and when I remember to, those are the ones I plug into Google Reader and eventually browse in Flipboard or whatever during idle moments. Not my daily/weekly news or analysis but the blogs of people I lik

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: maxi pad - 4 months ago

Whole Foods has the LCD price tags too. They drive me crazy. The viewing angle is super-narrow so it's impossible to quickly read prices from a distance and comparison-shop (I assume they love this), and tags near the floor have to be viewed with your head practically resting on the floor (really, not exaggerating). And they're frequently entirely out of order (a single tag's battery runs out

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Local Unmentionables: Notes on YOUR corner of the world - 4 months ago

I'm always up for Letterpress (username Vaucanson), though I may play a little slow sometimes on account of teaching. Also, I mostly play with people from Metafilter -- if you want more opponents you could dig up the threads about the game there, where people swapped usernames, and add folks. They're a pretty welcoming bunch.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 4 months ago

I don't agree that "Retina on laptops is mostly just an excuse to keep prices from falling." First of all, because I think Apple would love to -- and will -- drive the price down on the Retina laptops, and is prevented only by the component pricing on the screens. These are the best LCD screens ever made, and that only Apple can bring them to market is an example of the underpraised side of the

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 4 months ago

Closest I can come is this Reuters story: On Wednesday, Apple said it shipped a record 47.8 million iPhones in the December quarter, up 29 percent from a year earlier. But that lagged the 50 million that analysts on average had projected.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 4 months ago

Man, the market really doesn't know how to value Apple at all. If this is disappointment, I'd hate to see what a real let-down would look like.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 5 months ago

I just bought a little more myself. The recent vaguely sourced "lowered component order" rumors seem like bullshit to me, though of course I have absolutely no factual basis for thinking so.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Vaya con IOS - 7 months ago

Gruber linked this piece recently, and it's really really good: http://counternotions.com/2012/11/05/sirjony/ Best list I've seen of the real, serious, functional usability problems in the current Mac/iOS ecosystem.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: What sells computers most? - 7 months ago

Yeah, I've been loving Letterpress the last couple days -- though Game Center seems badly broken right now, so it's hard to play without a lot of interruptions and failed sign-ins. I'm in GC as "Vaucanson" if anyone's up for a match when the outages are resolved.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: AAPL.O - 7 months ago

I just bought extra AAPL too (well, the laughably tiny pocket-change amount I can afford to set aside since I'm possibly soon-to-be-unemployed "visiting" faculty now). I'm quite convinced it's going up a lot from here in the next year or two.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Sporkers Helping Sporkers - 7 months ago

Beware of impending hard drive death as one reason for perceived slowdown. It's happened to me several times that a friend/relative asks for troubleshooting of this kind and I discover that their boot drive is spending forever seeking/failing to read and is about to die.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: iBox (the hardware) - 7 months ago

Thin is great for portable stuff, but a desktop so thin that it drops the optical drive is taking it too far.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Apple's relationship with the press, customers, and dealers - 9 months ago

Yeah, it's really bad. I installed iOS 6 on my iPad to try out the new Maps and as a result I'm sticking with 5 on the phone, the device I use to navigate, for the foreseeable future or until a Google Maps app is available. It's a truly colossal downgrade.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Multi Media Discussion - 1 year ago

ddt, I agree completely. The film is a huge disappointment, largely attributable to the unbelievably hacky writing -- it's certainly visually beautiful, but it's also totally incoherent on every level from plot to character motivations to worldbuilding.

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: WWDC - 1 year ago

The rest of the keynote kind of bores me, but I am thrilled at the screenshots of Do Not Disturb mode. It took them till iOS 6 to realize that people sometimes sleep in the same room as their phones, but they finally fixed it!

by Roger - Spork Central

Re: Browserphilia! - 1 year ago

Ditched Safari 5.1 a while back for similar reasons and I've been very happy with Chrome so far. And speaking of, what's the current state of ad-blocking for the iPad? Still require a jailbreak to install the AdBlock extension?

by Roger - Spork Central