Not to mention that the volume "shortfall" wasn't caused by poor sales or high prices. It was cause by the previous financial year's quarter being one week longer than this year's quarter. The weekly average actually increased.

And there will be no corrections, clarifications, or retractions because the tech press is completely beyond accountability.

I need to dig into the Twitter app, at 121.1 MB on my iPhone 6 Plus, to see how it ended up that much larger than Twitterrific at 11.4 MB. I'm guessing it's because The Iconfactory, as Mac development veterans, wrote Twitterrific in straight Objective-C code, while Twitter is using something like React. (I think Tweetbot is even smaller than Twitterrific, but that's probably because Tweetbot doesn't come with any iMessage stickers.)

All USB protocols and connectors are royalty-free to members of the USB Implementers Forum, and Microsoft is on their board of directors. And even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure they could find the US$4,000/year membership dues in the cushions of Satya Nadella's couch.

The exact same thing was said when Apple introduced Gatekeeper in mac OS Mountain Lion four years ago. The default when Mountain Lion* shipped was to allow apps from the App Store or signed apps from other sources, and it's still the default today. The blanket option to allow all apps and go unprotected is now hidden, but it can be re-enabled from the command line. And you can still override Gatekeeper for individual apps from at least three different interfaces (attempt to launch the app, then open the App Store prefpane; right-click the app in Finder; use spctl from the command line). As far as I'm concerned, that's all as it should be. It's still possible for a user to selectively bypass Gatekeeper, but it's harder to do so accidentally or globally.

(*: The back-port to Lion allowed all apps by default as a concession to users of old hardware that were left behind when Mountain Lion dropped support for 32-bit EFI.)

That's no guarantee that Microsoft will be as wise as Apple has been. Instead of code signing, Microsoft is encouraging developers to wrap Win32 apps in UWP containers so they can be published from the Windows Store, so probably not as wise. Closed-source OS developers aren't idiots, though. Apple and Microsoft both know that the "default walled garden on desktop" button is wired to the self-destruct system.

AFNetworking is MIT-licensed, FYI. You can look it up on Github.

Much of our building is converted warehouse space, so the HVAC is rather patchwork. On any given day, regardless of the season, one part of the building will be too hot, one will be too cold, and one will be just right. You won't know what the conditions will be in your part of the building, however, until you get to the office.

This is exactly what happened to Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall. In the days following Osama bin Laden's death, Mendenhall tweeted some misbegotten thoughts that could be interpreted as sympathetic to bin Laden (personally, not as leader of al Qaeda). He tried to explain himself, but just dug the hole deeper, until Champion dropped him as an endorser. The Steelers tend to keep their discipline for stuff like this out of the papers, but it's worth mentioning that Mendenhall hasn't tweeted since last season's training camp started.

Anarchist reactionary running dog revisionist
Hindu Muslim Catholic
Creation evolutionist
Rational romantic mystic
Cynical idealist
Minimal expressionist
Post-modern neo-symbolist
Armchair rocket scientist
Graffiti existentialist
Deconstruction primitive performance photo-realist
Be-bop or a one drop or a hip-hop lite pop metallist
Gold adult contemporary urban country capitalist

Don't Let's Start was not perceived as a standout track to us or really anyone in our audience until many months after the album was out. A Pittsburgh radio station started playing it like it was a hit song, and that really turned it into something else.

We keep hearing echoes of WXXP in Pittsburgh, even after all these years. That was the most daring rock playlist in the city in the late '80s, but without all the WTF-ishness of WRCT. We'll never see its like again, though, especially with Clear Channel and CBS dominating the market.

Until 480 Mbps high-speed USB was widespread, Apple had specific use cases for USB and Firewire. USB replaced ADB and RS-232 for devices like keyboards, mice, and modems. Firewire replaced SCSI for devices that needed higher speeds, mostly hard drives, but later digital video.

The original iPod was a Firewire device because USB 2.0 was still a paper spec when the iPod was in development. If you were prototyping a new device built around a 5 GB hard drive, and given the choice of a 400 Mbps Firewire connection or a CPU-dependent 12 Mbps USB 1.1 connection to fill that drive, which would you choose? Creative Nomad players from that same era had both USB 1.1 (sloooowww sync, but PC compatible) and Firewire (fast sync) ports, but they were also much larger than the iPod. They also had more space, and were not lame.

To avoid the appearance of "marketing trolling", future references to product names will be replaced by more meaningful titles, like "Asparagus Peeler" or "Irving".

Sent from my Tin of Christmas Cookies

The product that we displayed was an actual Fermi board. The demo ran on Fermi silicon.

But the mounting screws weren't actual Fermi mounting screws. How can we ever trust you again!?

By linking directly to the PDF, the submitter bypassed a summary from ScriptLogic's web page that directly contradicts the summary provided by angry tapir and kdawson:

The primary goal of this survey was to assess the impact of the weak economy on IT infrastructure projects and we found that, despite its impact on short-term plans, 41% of organizations plan a wholesale migration to Windows 7 by the end of 2010. This is actually a strong adoption rate when compared to the historical adoption rate of Windows XP in its first year which was cited as 12-14%.

Furthermore, in ScriptLogic's primary market segment it is usual for businesses to upgrade operating systems piecemeal as they purchase new desktop hardware, so the fact that nearly half of organizations surveyed are planning major rollouts during 2009-2010 indicates a high acceptance of Windows 7 among small and medium businesses.

Hat tip: Ed Bott

Um, no, the tabloid you linked to said that. Microsoft only said that they have new keyboards, mice, and webcams that leverage some of Win7's snazzy new features.

And why the hell would Creative get out of the PC audio market because Microsoft makes game consoles? That would be like Chrysler throwing in the towel on automobiles because they couldn't compete with Braun razors.

Oh, BTW, Microsoft did an own-brand sound card back in the early 1990s, and it was an also-ran. They left the market and never came back.

I gotta warn you, though, that the Kwisatz Haderach achievement is a grind and a half!