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Posts Tagged Rantery

Prudence vs Paranoia

Just ran across an infuriating column1 from David Pogue, whose stuff I usually love. It’s a review of Dragon Dictation for the iPhone, an amazing app that transcribes speech into text with genuinely impressive fidelity.

Unfortunately, Pogue devotes half of the column to a rant about the “paranoid” people who are complaining about the app’s privacy [...]


Evil Is a Turn-Off

From Paul Graham’s fantastic piece on the iPhone App Store:

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans [...]


Fitts and Startts’ Law

Pierre Igot discovered that the click-through behavior in Snow Leopard’s Finder has progressed from unintuitive to batshit insane:

How is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that click-through now only works in icon view mode and not in list view mode and column view mode? And how is the user supposed to [...]


The Problem with Kindle

Norway’s Consumer Council isn’t happy with the Amazon Kindle, a sleek, beautiful book reader whose inherent awesomeness is sullied by a toxic stew of heavy-handed digital rights management, big-brotherish privacy violations, and inscrutable, nonsensical restrictions. Some of the lowlights:

Amazon reserves the right to track a bunch of stuff about what you’re doing with the Kindle, [...]


A Rant about Resumés

I do the occasional interview. Lately, I’ve noticed that a lot of the resumés we get seem to follow a very specific, and very troubling, template. Back in my day, when hair bands roamed the earth, the general preference was for one-page resumés that succinctly hit the highlights: pithy summations of the important elements of [...]


Windows 7 to XP Users: Go to Hell

From Mosberg’s very positive review of Windows 7:

Unfortunately, XP owners, the biggest body of Windows users, won’t be able to do that. They’ll have to wipe out their hard disks after backing up their files elsewhere, then install Windows 7, then restore their personal files, then re-install all their programs from the original [...]


Fast & Furious, Slow & Turgid

This evening, my continuing obsession with Vin Diesel led me to watch Fast & Furious, the fourth installment in the Fast/Furious franchise, a series that takes our culture’s odd tendency to conflate loud gas-guzzling cars and barely clothed females as far it can possibly go. And then it takes it further. And then, somehow, it [...]


Morality Does Not Scale

The Bush-era torture memos that Obama released last month make for some horrific, gut-churning reading, but not necessarily in the way you’d expect. The Enhanced Interrogation wing of the Republican party would have us believe that it’s not torture until someone gets drawn and quartered, and certainty there’s none of that kind of stuff in [...]


Leave Lord Jobs Alone

Via Gruber, this nugget of wisdom from Joe Nocera:

I can even understand why [Lord Jobs] doesn’t want to disclose details about his medical problems to the world — it’s very distasteful, and Mr. Jobs also believes strongly that it’s nobody’s business except his and his family’s. But he’s wrong. There [...]


Atrocity Schmatrocity

The atrocities going on Palestine right have been, if nothing else, an opportunity for pretty much every American politician to trot out their support-Israel-no-matter what bona fides. From pro-Israel rallies to outrageously false analogies1 to congressional resolutions, it’s been a steady drumbeat of one-sided, morally bankrupt demagoguery since the slaughter began.

I saw the best distillation [...]


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