BigZaphod

I work with David. He has hundreds of people wanting portraits now. There's no way it's going to stay $50. Supply and demand. :)

Minor title nit: I was momentarily confused as to how the RIAA spent 58 miles on lawyer fees. :) The usual way to write this would be "$58m" and not "58mi".

Working on Twitterrific for iPhone/iPad.

This is very much the wrong thing to do. When I push the home button, I expect the app to go away so I can get on with the next thing. I certainly don't expect it to desperately attempt to preempt my attention one last time.

Sean is surprisingly uninterested in Dustin Curtis' sleep patterns.

Sounds cool!

(sorry... had to be done.)

I wonder if this means they could be made smaller? It seems like the compressor motor and such take up a fair bit of space in current refrigerators. Maybe smaller cooling machinery could mean smaller appliances with equal storage volume. And, perhaps ironically, maybe they'd be quieter, too.

Um. Okay. All that proves is that Verizon has better coverage in the middle of Nebraska. My speculation is that the reason there hasn't been an enormous outcry about the iPhone antenna issue from the general public is that maybe AT&T is actually doing a pretty good job of covering the majority of their customers and so they don't even notice. The fact that there's areas where other companies have better coverage hardly disproves that.

It's a real issue, but it only manifests itself in areas of low signal strength. I can get my phone to go to No Signal just by holding it at home, but at the coffee shop I frequently work from, I cannot reproduce it. My guess is that for all the bitching we tend to do about AT&T, they might actually have pretty decent coverage in general and it's only the people with homes or offices in the lower-power zones on the fringes of a cell's coverage area that see the problem.

If they were actually that sophisticated, they'd be making better products.

Ebert likes to present himself as an enlightened liberal who keeps his mind open to facts as opposed to blind belief - but what he's doing here is proudly choosing willful ignorance because he's too lazy/stubborn to collect his own facts. Sad.

I talk to myself all the time when working through programming problems. (And even some other types of problems.) I remember being told at a very young age that this was some kind of sign of insanity and should be avoided. I ignored that advice and have been reaping the rewards ever since.

There's an FAQ somewhere on Apple's site which I ran across awhile back that said something to that effect. The deal to require customers to re-buy lost files was part of how they got all the labels to allow the store to even exist in the first place back in the day. Given that music no longer has DRM, this one remaining concession is probably going to be even harder to get dropped because it's one of the only "protections" that the music store offers to the labels now.

I can't second this recommendation enough. An SSD in your laptop makes such a colossal difference that it's almost impossible to describe to someone who has never used one. :)

"Soon?" I haven't had a "desktop" box since probably 2003 or so. I switched to the Mac by way of the Titanium PowerBook and within a month or so I found I was using it exclusively. I retired my old, bulky desktop machine and never looked back.

Nice to see someone try this. I wrongly thought Apple might do this with their laptops before the iPad was officially announced. Too bad this is so ugly and oddly bulky-looking, though.

Useless data point: Apple's CEO Steve Jobs has a salary of just $1/year. They seem to be doing pretty well...

After I saw the headline I was all prepared to come here and say, "No what they need to do is make what they have stable and scalable." It turns out that's mostly what this little article says, too, despite the misleading linkbait-ish headline. Sigh.

"Over the next two weeks, we may perform relatively short planned maintenance on the site. During this time, the service will likely be taken down."

Translation:

"If the site goes down over the next two weeks, just pretend it was all part of the plan."

The iPhone 4 isn't even available for purchase yet and you're already complaining that the "next thing" doesn't exist yet? Slow down!

Umm. No.

I was there. Unless my iPhone 3G, MacBook Pro, and iPad all have mysterious pre-release drivers as well, it most certainly was not a driver problem causing the wifi mess. It was unreliable throughout the week.

People who were there last year claimed that the wifi worked quite well. That was before the MiFi became popular, though. (And the crowd size was about the same as this year so Apple clearly knew what to prepare for.)

In a crowd of over 5,000 people there were at times over 500 hundred wifi networks! There should have only been one - the official WWDC network.

You're probably right, but why post a blog about it announcing it to the world as if it is available before everything is synced up and ready? It makes Google look sloppy, IMO.

When I go to https://www.google.com/ it redirects me to http://www.google.com. That's some amazing security right there! :P

dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1354289

You're able to login? It won't let me.. :(

Update: Nevermind. It's working now. :P

How else would you prove your eligibility for the bulk discount?

and drug dealers.

How could the credit check keep quality high? It's not going to change who I can accept payment from since the payer doesn't have any connection with Square. Square isn't lending me any money that I somehow need to pay back when I accept a payment. So... why check my credit again?

Square is pretty cool. I dislike the SSN requirement, though, and haven't yet setup my account because of it. I know some of the actual people involved with Square, and I trust they did a good job protecting this stuff, but it still seems wrong that I need to register an SSN to accept payments from a card but not if the person happens to be using, say, cash or a check. Why is accepting a card so different?

Well, I'm not sure if this is what you mean, exactly, but...

I can take a photo with my camera, plug it in to the computer, import the photo into iPhoto (this is done by clicking the photo itself and clicking import - there's no generic "file" icon displayed or choices about where to save anything), then do some red eye reduction, maybe some cropping, and finally click Share/Email and send the edited photo to someone else. This is all done without ever having to care about any underlying "file."

I don't think files are the problem. It's the folder hierarchy that's the problem.

The thing iPhoneOS is most intent on eliminating are deep trees of files. It does this by training the user to think of their files/content as being managed by an individual app that's responsible for manipulating it. This creates a single top-level "folder" for the user to use as a mental key to remember how to get at something.

Contrast that much shorter path to content to the standard desktop model of having a folder in your home folder, perhaps, to store documents. The ability to make sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc. and have all the contents of those folders utterly disconnected from the applications you use to manipulate and create that content. It makes sense to those of us who grew up/invented it, but for people just looking to use a computer as a tool in their non-computer-driven life suffer under the cognitive load of the foreign metaphors.

In my experience, people "get" that individual files represent their content. They do not "get" folder hierarchies, though, and find themselves easily lost within them. I think many non-experts consider an app as a destination and not as a program to run. It makes more sense to them to think of "going" to the app and then finding their content there than it does to "run" an app and then later point it to their content.