Linked List: February 5, 2007

Monday, 5 February 2007

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

The voice of reason.

Screenshot of Times Online Redesign ★

Regarding this morning’s favorable write-up of the Times Online redesign, a bunch of DF readers sent in some rather horrible screenshots of how the site renders for them. Here’s what I see when I view it using a recent nightly build of WebKit. I see something similar using the latest versions of Firefox and Camino. I have no idea why it is — or was — rendering so poorly for some of you.

Update: Here’s a side-by-side comparison of what some people were seeing (ugly) and what everyone now seems to be seeing (nice).

Hoffman’s Rule ★

Jason Hoffman:

A common rule of thumb I tell people is to target their performance goals in application design and coding so that their infrastructure (not including people) is ≤ 10% of an application’s revenue.

Meaning if you’re making $1.2 million dollars a year off of an online application, then you should be in area of spending $120,000/year or $10,000/month on servers, storage and bandwidth.

Programmers Don’t Like to Code ★

Jonathan Rentzsch:

Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving.

Steven Levy on His Interview With Bill Gates ★

Steven Levy, regarding my criticism that he should have pressed Bill Gates on his claims regarding Mac OS X security:

I have found that when one has limited time in an interview with someone like Bill Gates (not that there’s many like him), one’s time is better spent drawing out the genuinely interesting things that person has to say as opposed to engaging in lengthy debates on technical issues that almost certainly won’t be resolved on the spot. (That doesn’t mean I won’t repeat a question or push a point when I want to hear more on a certain issue, or I feel that persisting will be beneficial to the interview.) The interview was to focus on Vista, and I had some specific areas involving Gates’s thoughts and involvement in that OS (and the next!) that I hoped to cover.

It did occur to me that Gates’s swipe at Mac OS X security was tangential to the main thrust of the interview, which was regarding Vista’s launch. I still wish he would have at least asked Gates for the source of these “daily” exploits.

Levy continues:

Gruber professes to worry about “the typical Newsweek reader” being misled by Gates’s claims. Spare me. I think that Newsweek’s online readers are smart enough to understand that Bill Gates is a passionate partisan of Microsoft, and to assess his comments on the competition in that spirit.

Fair enough.

The Joy of Tech on Bill Gates ★

Funny.

The Best Stones Film You’ve Never Seen ★

Grant Rosenberg, writing for Time, on Cocksucker Blues, Robert Frank’s 1972 backstage look at The Rolling Stones:

Although the movie was originally commissioned by the Stones themselves, they blocked its release when they saw the scenes of drug use and graphic groupie sex. After years of legal headaches, the band and Frank agreed to a sort-of compromise: the film can be shown only a few times a year, and Frank himself decides where and when, so that he may be present to ensure the screening meets his approval. In the age of YouTube (on whose servers several choice moments reside), ubiquitous, low-priced DVDs and Video-on-Demand, a film that is only permitted to be seen a limited times per year in one city in its director’s presence is nearly inconceivable.

The Times Online Redesigns ★

Nice layout, good on-screen typography, and some interesting use of color. The Times’s own coverage of their redesign includes this interview with the graphic designers, Tomaso Capuano and Jon Warden (including the question as to whether the site uses Times New Roman; it doesn’t) and Melissa Fleck, the information architect.

Apple Inc. and The Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd. Enter Into New Agreement ★

Apple Inc. PR:

Apple Inc. and The Beatles’ company Apple Corps Ltd. are pleased to announce the parties have entered into a new agreement concerning the use of the name “Apple” and apple logos which replaces their 1991 Agreement. Under this new agreement, Apple Inc. will own all of the trademarks related to “Apple” and will license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use. In addition, the ongoing trademark lawsuit between the companies will end, with each party bearing its own legal costs, and Apple Inc. will continue using its name and logos on iTunes. The terms of settlement are confidential.

Seems like a deal to publish their music on iTunes would be the next logical step.