Hypereality

onepotato said:

lkrupp said:

(u) Crap. I found it on Amazon but it's in German. Never mind.

Get the Kindle edition, then use Kindle translate.

Doesn't the Kindle just translate single words, and only one at a time? 

I just checked my slightly old Kindle Fire and it does not even do that, it only provides dictionary definitions. 

I guess App Store reviews will remain, one rule for Apple, another for third party software developers. 

My app has 4 stars so I'm happy enough, but I do hate the many reviews that complain about the price of my app being as much as a sandwich and a soda, as though I somehow write and maintain the code in my sleep rather than sweating blood over it. 

True, I was there.  I was astonished as each phase of outrageous Microsoft behaviour proceeded.  I wasn't a Mac user at the time, they seemed only used by artists home users at that point. 

I was working at one of the big workstation vendors in 1984. At one point I had a Xerox 1108 on my desk that I think was specced around $100k.  The Mac was very impressive but underpowered compared to our Unix workstations running X windows, but we were impressed that Apple could produce something that seemed to share the DNA of the Xerox machines for such a low price and in such a desirable designed package. 

I remember the first time I saw Windows 1.0, it seemed a bit of a  joke, one of the other guys had the job of investigating it and building the first apps for it.  He had a merry time, he showed me six or seven pages of C code he'd written that opened a window!  At the time I was writing fully windowing X-windows code with all the bells and whistles, and opening a window took only about 10 lines of C :-)    It turned out not to be a joke by the time Windows 3.1 shipped in I think 1991,  that was the important one. With 3.1 it was a usable OS on PC hardware. I can't remember what was specifically lacking in 3.0, but suffice to say, it wasn't super usable. It was with 3.1 that our office PC's switched over from  DOS to Windows. 

As the years went by there were several more egregious examples, the way Microsoft essentially ripped off Java from Sun when creating C#, I couldn't believe how all the support API's were almost identical given just a bit of respellings,  and then there was the whole Android rip off.  

Anyhow, Gates is a very smart guy but read Gladwells "Outliers" and Cringely's "Accidental Empires" and you'll see he had a very privileged leg up, and then started a career of sharp elbowed deal making.  Realistically Microsoft did create the industry as we see it today, and its nice to see what Apple became despite Microsoft, Google and how they benefitted from their sharp practices.  One of the most important developments of my career was the absorption of Nextstep and Unix into the Mac platform, I have a lot to thank Jobs and Ive for. 

I use tags a great deal and find the Yep Mac app invaluable. That permits far better ways of finding and managing tags such as adding sets of tags to multiple files in one go.

It’s frustrating that tags are missing from Notes, another place I’d like to see them is integrated with bookmarks for web. So lots more to do there in future revisions of Mac OS

I'm an Apple fanboy, but in this case I think I am on the side of the people opposing these data centers in Ireland. 

Ireland and the UK where I am are very different from the US in terms of feasibility of renewable energy generation,  or indeed of Denmark. 

US has far cheaper renewable resources based on lower cost land values and available power from sun in particular.   Denmark is a very bad comparison to Ireland because it has extremely cost efficient wind by virtue of it being able to use the Swedish hydro-electric system as a battery.  The excess wind energy is used to pump water 'uphill' into reservoirs and then uses the hydro system to re-generate,  the proximity of Denmark to the vast capacity of the Swedish hydro system is critical to this. Anyone who has watched the original 'The Bridge' knows just how close Denmark is to Sweden... 

Often the details matter, and it does here. People in this part of the world often point at Denmark and say we should copy them, but our situation and that of Ireland is very different.  "I canna change the laws of physics captain!"