Filed under "stuff doesn't work" and "consequences of lost focus" - I ended up dealing with an interesting bug in the new "Catalina" update for Mac OS. No, not the one giving antivirus and other "data protection" types nightmares about the kernel being locked down, no extensions, etc. It turns out for a lot of people, you walk into a Starbucks, hotel, etc., that when you connect to the wifi, it connects, but that login/authentication sheet that is supposed top open up to allow you on the network never does. There are a lot of proposed fixes. Most of…
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Two dead and 20 injured after an in-construction collapse of a hotel in New Orleans. You can read up if you like, but the upshot is that this is the second time in several years a major construction project literally came apart before it was even completed. I understand "shit happens", but due to the circle of people I work with, I also have a passing lay familiarity with the kind of review that is supposed to happen. The kind with rules based on painful experience. Obviously it didn't. Now. I for one don't entirely blame the shift on minorities…
Peter Grant makes the following point regarding “Amazon is taking away muh jobs.” Companies who are currently struggling to attract customers, such as retail stores, often have themselves to blame for their predicament. They stock limited merchandise, employ the minimum number of store staff (many of whom have no idea what they’re selling or how it works), offer minimal customer service (and that only because they can’t get away with killing it completely), and focus on returns to their shareholders and bloated salaries for their executives, rather than attracting the consumer with his or her dollars. Funny, stores…
To follow up on the notes in my previous post where Apple really dropped the fucking ball – and other people, even fanboys, are arguing that Apple is provably losing it on multiple fronts – John Gruber points to an article called “Capitulation.” Yes, I bought a new Mac Pro. For certain values of “new”. Hear me out, though, after the jump. Why? So, my last post was about my angst about replacing my 2008 Mac Pro tower, the best Mac I’ve ever owned. So what happened? Well, upon further reflection: The idea of a 2012 Mac Pro, even the CPU-upgraded…
John Gruber’s site is one I have a love-hate relationship with. The man “gets” why Apple has worked – whether you like Apple kit or not – and what made apple successful as a business up to this time. He also created the very useful markdown tagging/formatting system for plain text. If he could lay off the non-computer political posts where he proves that the very principles he applies to explaining Apple’s success he cannot generalize to the rest of the world… But I digress. He has, with some justice, been accused of being a total, unquestioning, Apple fanboy.…
Yeah, I’m a Mac user – and no, not out of lack of familiarity with Windows. Due to various bugs and other issues the last few years – more will be posted in the next couple days – I’ve been searching for viable replacements to using a Mac as my next computer, looking at both Windows and a number of Linux distros, and a close look at what pieces of software I’d have to find effective replacements for. Given that, it was interesting to find an article on another developer’s quest for the same. He leans toward the Ubuntu…
PDF and preview issues in Sierra are affecting what used to be long-standing features of the app and the API. The kicker is this: Apple wants to use a common foundation for both iOS and macOS. However, it was released way too early, and for the first time (at least in my experience) Apple deprecated several features without caring about compatibility. And to make things worse, lots of former features are now broken or not implemented at all, meaning that we had to add lots of workarounds or implement stuff on our own. And there’s still work left to…
I recently wrote about how Apple, despite the technical momentum and inertia it still has, is already being affected by loss of both product and technical focus as it spends more and more time virtue signalling by working to have “diverse” presenters, a “diverse” programming staff, and expanding their product line. And sure enough, the iPhone release and iOS 10 update proved my point. First – we had a few update issues in the early hours of the iOS10 availability that caused a small percentage of phones to brick. I say small in the overall scheme of things, but large enough…