It says a lot that the headline specifies Flash by name when the feature is actually targeted at all third-party plug-ins. In part, it’s because of Flash’s ubiquity, but one can’t help but feel that another big — perhaps the biggest — part of it is because of the platform’s poor performance and many security issues (not to mention Matthew Dempsky’s infamous crash bug). The torrent of passive–aggressive idiocy pouring forth from certain Adobe employees only makes matters worse.
This Flash thing is going to run for a long time, until one day, everyone realises that the problem has been solved, and Flash gradually becomes obsolete.
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Via Hello Bauldoff :
What an awesome little (well, at 15 ¼″, not quite so little) lamp. If I could justify spending £80 on a lighting appliance, I would buy this in a heartbeat. I just wonder how the cat would react to it…
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Lukas Mathis :
I may be missing something, but I honestly don’t understand this. How is scrolling desirable to the person who is trying to read a book? If I’m reading a book, I want to fill the screen with text. Then, I want to read that text. Then, I want to fill the whole screen with new text, and read that.
What I don’t want do to is read text, then spend a second manually scrolling until new text fills the screen, while keeping track of where exactly I have to continue reading.
Amen to that. (I’m still not sold on e-books though.)
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From the Oatmeal :
Definitely a helpful, easy-to-understand guide.
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Well, it makes a change from having other people expressing your sexuality on your behalf, I suppose…
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Via Gizmodo :
WARNING: Application of this decal is indicative of a massive taste deficiency, and possible over-consumption of Apple-brand Kool-Aid.
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Dana Stevens, writing for Slate :
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (Disney) represents the confluence of a number of depressing cinematic trends: the need to ransack classic children’s literature for ideas, the unimaginative layering of 3-D technology onto a visual universe that would look just fine without it, and the belief that slathering familiar storylines with a superficial gloss of Gothic “darkness” constitutes a substantial reinterpretation. Lewis Carroll’s eminently sensible British schoolchild has been taken on a shopping spree at Hot Topic (an experience that viewers are invited to share by donning the line of tie-in merchandise available for purchase at that teen-Goth chain), and the resulting makeover doesn’t do her any favors.
Is anyone really surprised? Really?
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Interesting conclusion, and it gives some credence to why the computers in Star Trek always had a female voice.
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Me, in a post on the MacNN fora :
I’m not sure what was so holy about PPC, except that latterly it was wholly inadequate and falling further and further behind Intel’s processor offerings. Perhaps the G5s were different (I can’t comment, never having used one for more than a few minutes at a time), but the G4s being used in laptops were disgracefully underpowered. Using even one of the earliest CD Macs underlines just how outdated and anæmic the PPCs were in comparison.
Censuring Apple for its decision to transition off the stagnating PPC architecture onto one with a proper roadmap and the support of a company committed to offering modern portable processors is disingenuous at best, and blindly stupid at worst. Just because Macs now use ‘the processor of the Beast’ doesn’t change the fact that the computer you’re using is still a Mac. What makes a Mac a Mac is a combination of industrial- and software-design, but mainly its software — OS X is the Mac, not OS X-running-on-PPC. If architecture was so holy and so important, then there hasn’t been a ‘real’ Mac since they stopped using the original Motorola 68××× processors back in the early/mid-nineties. (You could also make the same argument that there hasn’t been a real Mac since they transitioned from ‘Classic’ to OS X back in the early–’00s, but that falls into the same disingenuous logic as arguing about architecture.)
Do I love my PPC Macs? Definitely. Are they still usable? Absolutely. Would I voluntarily go back to using one as my primary machine? Absolutely not. The performance under any reasonably modern OS (read: Tiger onward) is just not good enough to use them by choice as my only machine. To grasp on one of the currents topics du jour, Flash is unforgivably slow on them. I use ClickToFlash on all my machines, but when I want to watch the iPlayer, I want to be able to view it fullscreen without it jumping or freezing every couple of seconds. Of course, Flash performance is poor on OS X with an Intel, but at least it has the horsepower to compensate for it. The PPCs don’t.
Ultimately, a Mac could be using a Difference Engine as its processor and it wouldn’t matter a damn. What matters is performance, and increasingly, performance-per-Watt. Anyone who argues otherwise has imbibed way too much of the Kool Aid.
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