The new “Retina MacBook Pro” is an attractive machine, but it does come with a big caveat. A lot of users wisely order the base configuration of a notebook from the manufacturer, and subsequently upgrade its memory and storage capacity using aftermarket parts. This is done to avoid the massive price markup the OEM places on such parts (specifically, RAM and HDD/SSD storage in this case). Before buying a Retina MacBook Pro, take note of the following - it’s an appliance, through and through.
While we’re basking in the afterglow of Apple’s WWDC keynote and their demonstration of truly transcendent integration between its devices via its various cloud services, it’s important to take a step back and reflect on why the cloud is a bad idea. From the article:
I can’t speak to the merits of the lawsuit; the court will decide that. The issue of whether or not Apple should have pulled Speak for Yourself from the App Store before the case was decided is trickier.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says the contract with American Mug and Stein is only the beginning. “There are hundreds of East Liverpools around the country today,” he says. “These towns have been left for dead. And even though it’s more expensive to manufacture this mug in the U.S. than it would be in China or Korea or Mexico, this is what we need to do.”
A-fucking-men. Read more: http://www.npr.org/2012/06/12/154793475/starbucks-order-gives-ohio-mug-maker-a-jolt?device=iphone
If the computer were to end up and remain in the hands of a small elite, e.g. of a dictator, [the computer’s] power will make the common man powerless and utterly submissive. And this tyranny will be introduced under the guise of the advancement of human well-being.
– Prof. Dr. ir. H. van Riesen, 1956
Red Hat yesterday defended its decision to collaborate with Microsoft in forcing Linux users to pay a $99 fee to install custom kernels as the “best thing for its users”. In truth this is a delusional position to take - the best thing for users is to pressure the software/hardware industry to avoid obvious situations where customers will become victims of vendor lock-in and inability to make full use of the devices in which they invest a non-trivial amount of money.
It’s tempting to say that Caesar could only have won if he had argued like Cato. It’s certain, though, that Cato’s words became the prototypical case for security opposed to liberty. What Caesar missed, and what Cato grasped, was just how central emotional appeals and logical non sequiturs are to security politics: national security as culture war.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-soni/national-security-culture-war_b_1553200.html
In his tenure as Apple CEO, Tim Cook has taken a company built by Steve Jobs, and transformed it into something a bit more corporate, according to a new report. Although Cook himself wouldn’t sit down with Fortune, the publication today published a a feature citing several sources with knowledge of how the Apple chief executive has changed the company. Chief among those changes, Fortune says, is a switch from engineering-driven decision-making to one that more conservatively considers production efficiency, and thus, cost-savings.
In another blatant demonstration of why curated electronic bookstores are no friend to literacy and freedom of expression and thought, Barnes & Noble pulled issue #154 of Linux Format magazine as they believed it contained an article instructing people how to engage in illegal activities. The problem is that it didn’t. A complaint was made and the magazine’s edition was pulled offline out of sheer heresay. Until simple concepts like sharing and community can be embraced by the business world without a negative impact to its bottom line, you should never buy or accept as a gift any digital book that is equipped with DRM or other mechanisms to restrain you from appreciating its contents.
No. A snippet of chat log posted by Darxus (link below) shows how current minimalist X Window Managers can be ported to become Wayland display servers without the bottom-up effort of having to handle input and other events from scratch. Another common statement is that “compositing is bloat”, but this is just the sort of concept Wayland seeks to avoid. Wayland replaces the X server completely, making the path between applications and graphics buffers more efficient.
Whenever the head of a major corporation cries about Internet freedom you can rest assured their words are laced with cynicism. We saw this same behavior in Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he pontificated on the open web in an effort to elimitate flash, while pushing everyone to use their QuickTime browser plugin. Google is only out to serve itself here, make no mistake. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/15/sergey-brin-internet-freedom-threatened_n_1427325.html
