OS X Mountain Lion paves the pragmatic, useful middle path:
My favorite Mountain Lion feature, though, is one that hardly even has a visible interface. Apple is calling it “Gatekeeperâ€. It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple.
(As requested by Wil Shipley, who understood that long-term improvement for OS X users, developers and Apple does not hinge on Apple taking over markets but on OS X users knowing what they get.)
I also quite like what’s happening in Objective-C, and in text rendering in transparent layers.
BBC:
An early “I” in Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You takes nearly six seconds to sing. In those seconds the former gospel singer-turned-pop star packs a series of different notes into the single syllable. The technique is repeated throughout the song, most pronouncedly on every “I” and “you”.
The vocal technique is called melisma, and it has inspired a host of imitators.
This is great; knowing the name of something like this makes it much easier to proclaim how fucking horrible it sounds and to please stop.
It’s almost time to go, but before that, Waffle turns nine.
Samsung, worrying about someone else:
“They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else.
“TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.
It’s a bit more measured than what you might think, but it also reeks of myopia. Pixels don’t have to be scaled. Standard Definition TV and 720p has to be scaled. (Maybe in a few years, 1080i/p has to be scaled to 4K.) Whatever someone else might come up with, they could solve this particular issue by picking a good screen and by delivering very high quality.
All they’d have to do is avoid the scaling problems and they won’t need 10,000 experts of their own to beat you. If you’re worrying about who you think you’re worrying about, do you think that’s going to be a problem for them?
. Copyright © 2003—2012 Jesper.
