When their hand was forced by hard evidence, Apple admitted what many people had suspected: they deliberately slow down older phones, in as little as a year. Their apology letter is a masterpiece of copywriting. But let’s have a closer look, shall we? A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy…
Category: annoyance
Shall we speak for a moment about Amazon’s epic metadata problem? On amazon.com, search for “Bench Grinder‖a query with clear intent if there ever was one. Search by price low to high. Here are some items that appear in the results before a single piece of hardware you’d reasonably call a bench grinder… Water &…
Naming is hard to do well, almost as hard as designing good software in the first place. Take for instance the term ‘node’ which depending on the context can mean A fundamental unit of the DOM (Document Object Model) used in creating rich HTML5 applications. A basic unit of the Semantic Web–a thing you can say stuff…
The valley is buzzing about Marissa’s edict putting the kibosh on Yahoos working from home. I don’t have any first-hand information, but apparently this applies somewhat even to one-day-a-week telecommuters. Some are saying Marissa’s making a mistake, but I don’t think so. She’s too smart for that. There’s no better way to get extra hours…
I’m en route to Balisage 2012, though beset by multiple delays. The first leg of my flight was more than two hours delayed, which made the 90 minute transfer window…problematic. My rebooked flight, the next day (today, that is) is also delayed. Then through customs. Maybe all I’ll get out of Tuesday is Demo Jam….
Andromeda took the facebook Challenge, and found 52 separate requests in 24 hours that would have gone to the facebook mothership. Watch her blog for more updates. How about you? If you look through these logs, pay particular attention to the referer field. This tells you on which site you were browsing when the data…
Worried about how much data facebook is collecting on you, even on 3rd party sites, even if you’re signed out? Try this for 24 hours: Find a file named ‘hosts’ on your computer. On Mac/Linux systems, it’s under /etc/. On Windows, it used to be under System32 somewhere, but who knows now. Stash a backup…
Dear Yahoo, What’s the deal? Shortly after FireSheep was announced on Oct 24, 2010, you should have had an emergency security all-hands meeting. You should have had an edict passed down from the “Paranoids” group to get secure or else. Maybe these things happened–I have no way of knowing. But it is clear that it’s…
Facebook (v): to deliberately create an impenetrable computer user interface for purposes of manipulating users. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
I’ve been thinking lately about what a sleek UI for creating XProc would look like. There’s plenty of big-picture inspiration to go around, from Yahoo Pipes to Mac OSX Automator, but neither of these are as XML-focused as something working with XProc would be. XML, or to be really specific, XML Namespaces, comes with its…
Here’s my first experience with Amazon’s new Kindle client for Mac: After digging up my password and logging in, I was presented with a bunch of books. I picked the last one I’d been reading. It downloaded slowly, without a progress bar, then dumped me on some page in the middle. Apparently my farthest-read location,…
The xml-dev mailing list has been discussing XLink 1.1, which after a long quiet period popped up as a “Proposed Recommendation”, which means that a largely procedural vote is is all that stands between the document becoming a full W3C Recommendation. (The previous two revisions of the document date to 2008 and 2006, respectively) In…
As heard from my friend and Mark Logic contractor Ryan Grimm. -m
I was lured in by a slick promotion, and decided to give a new writing tool a try. WhiteSmoke seems like it’s primarily aimed at folks for whom English is not a first language, but quotes like “Innovative technology for native and non–native English speakers” make it seem like it could help. When I wrote…
I asked this on the XSLTForms list, but it’s worth casting a wider net. Say I have an XML instance like this: <root> <format>xml</format> </root> Possible values for the format element are “xml”, “text”, “binary”, or a default setting, indicated by a complete absence of the <format> element. I’d like this to attach to a…
Hands down, the stupidest Science Friday segment evar. I want my 11 minutes back. -m
At the risk of sounding fanboy, are Windows 7 reviewers logic challenged? Not to pick on any one in particular, but here’s the most recent one I bumped into–I’ve seen similar qualities in other reviews. Under the reasons to get it: 1. Your computer can probably run it. Unlike Vista, which proved a giant slop-feeding…
Here’s the scenario: The night before a long flight, I upload my personal files into a freshly charged Kindle 2. To preserve the battery, I switch off wireless and in the bag it goes. The next day, on the plane, I open the Kindle…and it’s showing an entirely depleted battery, exclamation point and all. Can…
On this comic‘s panel 9 describes XHTML 1.1 conformance as: the added unrealistic demand that documents must be served with an XML mime-type I can understand this viewpoint. XHTML 1.1 is a massively misunderstood spec, particularly around the modularization angle. But because of IE, it’s pretty rare to see the XHTML media-type in use on…
Roger Ebert review (“a horrible experience of unbearable length”) Fake Shia LaBeouf blog (“no no no no!”) Smashing box office records (200 mil in 5 days, “The per theater average, by the way, was astonishing: $26,453.”) -m
From Brewster Kahle. Good read, so to speak. -m
My plan is to start unsubstantiated rumors about the SUV Flu, and by association cause people to distance themselves from said implicated devices. You can help. Despite denials from the CDC (you know they’re in the pockets of the auto industry), SUV flu is serious and spreading fast. You might already have it and not…
This article states: The analysts determined YouTube’s bandwidth costs by assuming that 375 million unique visitors would visit the site in 2009, with 20 percent of those users consuming 400 kilobits per second of video at any given time. That works out to 30 million megabits being served up per second. That’s a heck of…
Never trust a document with “Manifesto” in the title, nor that document’s writer. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This article seems encouraging. I’ve never been able to come to grips with the anti-CF bias of the scientific community. Sure a few researchers made fools of themselves two decades ago, but what has that got to do with falsifiable hypotheses? A small amount of research goes on with minimal funding, under the newer name…
An interesting proposal from Liam Quin, relating to the need for huge rafts of namespace declarations on mixed namespace documents. In practice, though, almost all elements [in the given example] are going to be unambiguous if you take their ancestors into account, and attributes too. Amen. I’ve been saying things like this for five years…
[Update: now featuring Actually Correct Math. Somebody stop me before I late-night-blog again…] Recent news coverage mentions a badly-needed breakthrough at MIT in battery technology. Using a slight variation of existing lithium materials, much faster charge and discharge rates are possible. The money quote is that [Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang] went…
With apologies to a real news site. (02-27) 16:14 PST SEATTLE, (AP) Amazon.com Inc. changed course Friday and said it would allow copyright holders to decide whether they will permit their works to be read aloud by the latest laryngeal apparatus, a feature that has been under development for several thousand years. The move comes…
Dear Amazon, Speaking as an author myself, you not only made a bad choice, you set a precedent in the wrong direction. The Author’s Guild doesn’t speak for me, nor do I want them to. TTS is only going to get better. The last thing we need is another backward industry fighting progress. -m