Posts by Richard Grevers
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My first experience with computers was the two shiny new Apple ][s at school. But when I needed my own computer doing postgrad, budget forced me to the dark side, so that by the time I was doing a bit of copyediting in a graphics agency, they were "alien" machines. The guys there managed to crash them quite regularly (followed by 10 minute reboot - possibly they were just pushing them too hard.
I bought an ageing powerPC Mac from a designer in order to do "mac testing" of websites, but it had been OS-upgraded beyond its capability and was too slow to do anything useful with.
I remember at Webstock '06 at least half the presenters spent 5 or more minutes riffing on the failings of the Ipod.
So obviously I'm not a fanboy (although I dislike Apple less than I dislike Microsoft) - but I believe Steve's legacy was a great one. He set the ball rolling, then made many innovations which others emulated cheaper, faster, more feature-rich. Does that make Apple the hardware equivalent of Opera Software?
He also understood marketing (in the fullest sense of the word) better than any of the competition. The upside of that is that it de-geeked technology and put it in the hands of people who would have shied away from it otherwise - the downside that they managed to put style over substance in many of their products.
R.I.P Steve Jobs -
Hard News: Chill out: it's a party, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
There is a single upside to Smiley John: Thoughts of "that nice Mr Key" might divert the wizened from voting for "That nice Mr Peters".
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There is something about the Irish – reports from publicans after the Ireland/USA game in New Plymouth said that while they drink heavily, they do not get aggro or stupid when drunk*. Instead they get happier and mellow. It would make an interesting study as to whether response to alcohol was cultural or genetic/ethnic, but unfortunately it might get shot down as eugenics research.
* Taranaki Daily News on 12th or 13th Sept – I can’t find locate the article via Stuff’s useless search function. The report said Crowded House sports bar had a record night - the previous record being the NZ-Ireland test last year.
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Talking of inaccuracies, Stuff yesterday had a rather interesting take on the exchange rate when they reported that climate-related disasters (floods, tornadoes, drought and heatwaves) had cost the U.S.A $US35 Billion ($NZ 1.7 Billion) so far this year. Did some journo accidentally convert Yen?
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This possibly counts as supreme irony - When I first read about McDonald being fined in the print edition of the Taranaki Daily News, the article suggested that he was responsible for a high percentage of the BSA's workload. (25% if I recall correctly, instead of the actual 4 to 5%). This is a case of material inaccuracy, since it would prejudice some readers against Mr McDonald.
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There was another bit of earthquake news a couple of weeks ago: a story combined the news that there had been a silent earthquake in the Manawatu region with news of the theory that the ends of mega-quake rupture zones have been defined by silent quakes. Which could mean there's a possibility of a M 8-9 off the coast from Gisborne to Manawatu, or it could just be that silent quakes are more common than we think and don't connect to anything else. The phenomenon was only discovered 15 years ago with the advent of high-resolution GPS monitoring, so there is very little data yet.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I was a rather naïve 6th former at the time, and although I was fundamentally anti-tour, I reacted against being told to be anti-tour by our headmaster (this included being told that absence from school was permitted during any scheduled protest and that there would be no dishonour in being arrested in school uniform).
Two things stand out to me as changing the way I saw my country: The first was the BBC using the phrase "state controlled television" when referring to the NZBC - such terminology was usually used in reference to communist dictatorships in those days. The second was one night seeing a report on how the protests were being reported in Britain. After being squeezed through the satellite twice, the images which hadn't quite seemed real when viewed locally suddenly looked just like footage from Northern Ireland, Israel or Nicaragua - the image degradation conferred some veracity on them.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Sacha,
It's not doing a very good job so far. According to the Ministry of Economic Development's modelling, in a high exchange rate scenario we should be paying $1.75 a litre this year. The model is badly broken
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It will be interesting to see what happens if the predicted late 2011 oil price spike and associated recession hits pre-election. Since our starting point is not far below current record prices, we could see $2.40 - $2.50 at the pump - and that could whack GDP by about 10%.
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Hard News: Vanilla Buffalo Yoghurt, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Actually I was given a sample tin and it tasted more like fish than chicken!