dieterrams

It also doesn't have to be your employer: it can be anyone you're financially tied to in some way.

I definitely don't think 100% of Apple fans are immune to the above-decribed behavior: there are always some who aren't, especially if they're teenagers. You'll see more of that stuff now, because the space is polarized, and Apple fans have been put on the defensive. And yet I hardly ever see Apple fans producing hate-fueled criticism of other products and their fans. We receive way more of that stuff than we dish out.

The problem is that there are now tons of anti-Apple trolls hanging out on the Internet, a lot of whom are Android users who apparently feel the need to attack iPhone users with every spare moment. (Naturally, we defend ourselves.) What guts me is seeing this juvenile behavior on Hacker freaking News. This is by far one of the best online communities I've ever seen, but the anti-Apple trolling has definitely taken it down a notch.

I don't love it when jerks deride Apple fans as "the faithful". We're a pretty damn discriminating and thoughtful bunch of folks.

And to the extent that it's about "the social graph", it's about making money off the social graph. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but as Google becomes increasingly involved with owning, controlling, and/or providing content, as opposed to just "organizing" it (indexing the web, organizing email, etc.), their mission statement becomes more PR fluff than truth.

With Search and Gmail, their ability to obtain user data at least hinged upon Google's superior ability to index web and email information and make it "universally accessible and useful." Obtaining social graph data through an existing social games developer isn't like that at all.

Stop right there. You haven't added anything substantive to support your "but". And saying that you'd trust John Carmack to solve technical problems is pointless. If John Carmack was on your team, you'd get funding even if your startup was about making cupcakes. The probability that you have someone at the very top of their field is extremely low.

Finding someone who can solve the technical programs of your game may not be a huge deal, but gameplay and creative both give you massive amounts of rope to hang yourself with. Moreover, they can completely upend all the work you've done if things don't pan out. This isn't quite like the web startup world, where if you've got a decent amount of sense, you can predict what will be useful, release a minimal version and iterate post-launch.

"Hey virtual Steve, should we add this feature?"

"Get rid of it."

"Should we keep this feature?"

"Get rid of it."

"What do you think about--"

"That's shit."

But it might be wise for him to have final approval over product designs, the way Jobs presumably does now.

Also, Apple has no qualms trumpeting better specs, but they frequently don't. The GPU, for instance, has been completely absent from iDevice discussion since the iPad. (It's part of the A4, but Apple doesn't tell you that.) They also failed to mention the RAM bump for the iPhone 4.

They also need to adopt something like Safari's URL-field-as-progress-indicator, or at least an animating graphic to indicate loading. Simply switching the refresh button to an 'X' is way too subtle, and at first I didn't think it was actually loading anything.

Edit: Oh, that's weird. I fired it up again and saw the stopwatch graphic and other loading indicators. Now I'm wondering if these didn't work the first time around, or if I just wasn't paying attention to them given that I'm habituated to Safari's indicators.

But it does mean sounddust's explanation is incorrect, since this isn't a matter of whether 'iPhone 4'-searchable post-WWDC images are indexed. The question is why the images are buried beneath several pages of results.

But it's been almost a full month since the WWDC keynote, and nearly two weeks since customers have been posting a barrage of iPhone 4 pictures to the web. So I'm doubtful that Google Images' delayed refresh rate is a sufficient explanation.

Edit: In response to your reply below, you might be right. I've only tried a few searches, but images of major events from the past month seem hard to come by. A search for 'Galaxy S' does give some results from within the past month (the first result was from June 23), as does a search for 'Kindle graphite' (July 2), but presumably refreshes aren't comprehensive. Still, a month-long refresh rate is really surprising. If you need to find images from a recent event, Google Image search may be practically useless.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB125G/C

You know why petercooper disregarded the "great, funny, vibrant, intelligent" part? Because those are qualities fleitz values in his new partner that are inherent to her. But the qualities of being "much thinner and younger" than some other woman are not. Those are the sort of comparisons you make when you view women as trophies, which, I hope we can all agree, is pretty douchebaggey.

Now I don't actually think fleitz is a women-as-trophies sort of guy. He got screwed over by his ex, so he's just happy to point out some things about this woman he met that make her different from his ex and make him happier. No problem with that. But at least you can see what it is petercooper is responding to, which isn't simply being "willing to admit that youth and looks are important to us in a partner."

(Also, I hope it's evident that this isn't the sort of thing you should admit, loudly, to your hot young girlfriend or whatever in front of a bunch of fat and old people. The idea that you should be honest about yourself isn't incompatible with the idea that there's a time and a place for everything.)

So anyway, yeah, I don't think the guy deserved to get trashed for his response. It was an understandable one to make.

This is just one guy's take on what meditation has allowed him to perceive about the world, and naturally he has chosen to emphasize those things. You can disagree with him as oversimplifying and misrepresenting the world, and that's fine. I just don't get why you're so worked up about it, and assigning base/crass motivations to him to boot. Assuming your interpretation isn't merely uncharitable, maybe he's just wrong. Hanlon's razor and all that.

I've never worked at Google, but I know someone who interned for the UX team, who complained that UX wasn't as involved with design as they could be. I'm guessing that the usability of non-core Google projects depends a lot on whether the engineers who start them seek input from their UX people. If you're doing a 20% project and want other people to work on it with you, you've got to find and convince those people yourself. So at least initially, the involvement of UX people outside of core Google projects depends on whether their involvement is sought.

Buzz in particular appeared to have been launched with little forethought, so there's a good chance it didn't get much of a UX pass, either.

I get the Mac/Win analogy, but Microsoft never really grokked UX, while Google generally does. Given that UI is their focus for 3.0, I'd assume their UX people will have more input this time around.

Build quality, probably not, especially since Google doesn't really do hardware. But it's been widely reported that they're making a big UI push. I expect them to do well on usability: they've got the talent to catch up to Apple on that. Aesthetics are another matter, however.

And where on earth does he attack families singing Sweet Caroline along with the crowd at the local baseball game? Do you actually think he's attacking the whole of baseball fandom?

You guys are definitely reacting to something, but I'm not sure it's this article.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/clark/clark_index.html

The claim that pi is wrong is a claim about pi's inconsistency and inefficiency as a matter of mathematical language design. These guys aren't dumb enough to confuse this as a claim about formal correctness. Instead, they're playfully co-opting the rhetoric of formal correctness.

Personally, it's incredibly rare for me to be using a laptop outside on a sunny day, so even if glossy were better in sunlight, I'd never base my decision on that fact. But I can tell you that I did get to compare a matte and glossy MBP of the exact same model in an Apple store, side by side, and saw no significant difference in brigntness.

I would actually argue that glossy displays are not ideal in any lit environment, for the simple reason that blacks just turn the display into a mirror. This is also a problem if you've turned down the brightness in order to save power.

Matte really needs to be the default for any display, with glossy as an option.