Linked List: November 9, 2017

Thursday, 9 November 2017

Jean-Louis Gassée:

What we see is Apple is doing what they do best: Taking chances. They made a risky bet with the iPhone X and covered it with the iPhone 8. The new and improved perception of Apple might come from the realization that both bets are winning, and that the iPhone X is a radically new, as opposed to a merely improved, breed of smartphone — and probably is the start of a new succession of carefully incremented future models.

A fork is exactly right: the iterative, familiar iPhone 8 and 8 Plus on one side of the fork, and the novel, back-to-the-drawing board iPhone X on the other.

TripAdvisor Removed Warnings About Rapes and Injuries at Mexico Resorts ★

Raquel Rutledge and Andrew Mollica, reporting for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Seven years ago, TripAdvisor repeatedly removed a post written by Kristie Love, a 35-year-old mother of two from Dallas. Love told how she had been raped by a security guard at a highly rated all-inclusive Mexican resort owned by the global chain, Iberostar, based in Spain.

She wrote how, after an evening with friends, she had returned to her room to find the electronic key card no longer opened her door at the Iberostar Paraiso near Playa del Carmen. She headed to the lobby of the sprawling resort to get her card reactivated and stopped to ask a uniformed guard whether she was walking in the right direction.

He motioned her to follow him, then overpowered her, dragged her into some bushes and raped her. When she reached the lobby in tears, hotel staff refused to call police.

A TripAdvisor moderator spotted the post soon after it had published and deemed it in violation of the company’s “family friendly” guidelines.

The following year, another young woman, 19 and on vacation with her family, reported to hotel officials in the same resort complex that a security guard had raped her in the bathroom.

And in 2015, still another woman, Jamie Valeri, 34, a mother of six from Wisconsin, was sexually assaulted at the same resort after she and her husband simultaneously blacked out in the middle of the day, barely into their third drink.

It’s positively sickening that as a matter of TripAdvisor policy, actual rapes, sexual assaults, and druggings are OK, but reports about these crimes on their forums are not. TripAdvisor should get sued out of existence.

Most-Used OS in the World? ★

Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of the MINIX operating system, in an open letter to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich:

Thanks for putting a version of MINIX 3 inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn’t even know until I read a press report about it. Also here and here and here and here and here (in Dutch), and a bunch of other places.

It’s an interesting development, having a full-blown operating system running inside a CPU. And it’s a nice feather in the cap for MINIX, which heretofore had best been known as a teaching OS for computer science students. But it can’t be the most-used OS in the world. Android is. (Or, if you only want to count the kernel-level operating system, Linux, which runs at the heart of Android.)

MINIX is now almost certainly the most widely-used OS on Intel-based computers, but Intel-based computers are now far outnumbered by ARM-based ones.

Horace Dediu: Apple Watch Will Soon Generate More Revenue Than iPod at Peak ★

Bookmark this for the next time you see someone claim Apple Watch is a flop.

Notcho ★

Notcho, from Cromulent Labs:

Not a fan of the notch? Want to hide the horns? Now you can quickly and easily create wallpapers that hide the notch on your new iPhone X.

It’s a clever little hack: you give Notcho an image, and Notcho lets you export a version with black bars and rounded corners at the top to hide the iPhone X’s sensor array notch. I don’t actually think this is a good idea — if there’s anywhere where I think embracing the notch is just fine, it’s on the lock and home screens. Where the notch should have been hidden is when you’re using apps. This utility doesn’t (and can’t) do anything about it. This was Apple’s decision to make, and even if you disagree with how they decided to handle it, I don’t think you should fight it. I still don’t like it, but I have to say that after nearly two weeks with iPhone X, I really don’t notice it.

But damn if the name “Notcho” isn’t clever — it might be the best possible name for a utility that does this. Also clever is the monetization strategy: Notcho is free to download and use, but any wallpapers you create with it are watermarked with “Notcho” in the bottom right corner. For $2 you can remove the watermark. And if anyone is going to be bothered by that watermark, it’s the same sort of person who’s bothered by the notch.

(I really hope that floppy disk icon for the Save button is a joke.)