Category Archives: rant

Bizarrely, the Guinness book of world records lists the “first microcomputer” as 1980’s Xenix. This doesn’t seem right to me: Xenix is an operating system, not a microcomputer. Xenix was announced in 1980 but not shipped until 1981. The first … Continue reading

Posted on by Graham | 1 Comment

On multitasking

TidBITS unwittingly hits the nail on the head while talking about iPad OS multitasking (emphasis added): It’s easy to imagine wanting to use an iPad to read text in Mobile Safari, copy some text to a Pages document, and send … Continue reading

Posted in iPad, iPhone, rant, usability | 4 Comments

Quote of the year (so far)

From David Thornley via StackOverflow: “Best practices” is the most impressive way to spell “mediocrity” I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t agree more. Oh, wait, I could. thud There it goes.

Posted in Business, metadev, mythicalmanmonth, rant | 1 Comment

Tautology of the year (so far)

From iDefense, via DarkReading: A recent wave of fatwas issued by radical Islamic religious leaders in that region authorizing these groups to use cyberattacks to defend Islam has opened the door for these groups to wage cyberattacks, according to iDefense. … Continue reading

Posted in rant, security | Leave a comment

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In doing a little audience research for my spot at MacDev 2009, I’ve discovered that the word “security” to many developers has a particular meaning. It seems to be consistent with “hacker-proof”, and as it could take most of my … Continue reading

Posted in conference, metadev, rant, security, usability | Leave a comment

It was asked for: the “features” post

Someone anonymous once said:I’m intrigued by your feature comment. Please publish said blog post!Where said comment was:The fact that I have stopped using the word ‘feature’ in many contexts is an entire blog post and a few therapy sessions in … Continue reading

Posted in AAPL, Business, msft, rant, sunw | Leave a comment

Rhetoric, smoothly outlined

Something I did a number of years ago (I could tell you how many, couldn’t I? If I could remember; I think it must have been 7) was to study critical analysis. That’s the application of linguistics and sociology to, … Continue reading

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Managers: Don’t bend it that far, you’ll break it!

Go on then, what’s wrong with the words we already have? I think they’re perfectly cromulent, it’s very hard to get into a situation where the existing English vocabulary is insufficient to articulate one’s thoughts. I expect that linguists and … Continue reading

Posted in Business, mythicalmanmonth, rant | 3 Comments

The Dock should be destroyed, or at least changed a lot

I found an article about features Windows should have but doesn’t, which I originally got to from OSNews’ commentary on the feature list. To quote the original article: The centerpiece of every Mac desktop is a little utility called the … Continue reading

Posted in aqua, metadev, rant, usability | 2 Comments

My discs have been Americanised!

< p>For some reason, even though l10n and i18n have been fashionable terms in computing for the last few years, no-one seems able to localise properly into the lingua franca of computing, English. It may surprise some readers to learn … Continue reading

Posted in rant | 3 Comments