Is this for Dieter?
A quick audio clip I recorded last night, of an amusing event from my childhood. Apologies if the audio isn’t perfect.
Kaby Lake Haters…
There has been much written over the past year about Intel and the arrival of the end of Moore’s law – at least as we knew it. Earlier today, a friend sent me a link to an Ars Technica piece discussing Kaby Lake, and what a letdown it was in terms of desktop CPU performance momentum. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The desktop CPU is dead. Don’t tell your friends who are big desktop gamers… they’ll…
Windows 10 on ARM. What does it mean?
Yesterday, when I heard the news from Microsoft’s WinHEC announcements stating, “Windows 10 is coming to ARM through a partnership with Qualcomm”, my brain went through a set of loops, trying to get what this really was, and what it really meant. Sure, most of us have seen the leaks over the past few weeks about x86 on ARM, but I hadn’t seen enough to find much signal in the noise as to what this was. But now that I’ve thought about it,…
Tired Mac prose
Over the last several weeks, a Skylake full of ink has been spilled over this fall’s Apple crop. Actually, the press seems fascinated with three distinct topics: Insufficient magic in the 2016 MacBook Pros Apple “sticking it to pros” by offering limited RAM in the MBP Apple “sticking it to pros” by not updating the Mac Pro desktop since 2013. Issue number 1: Beginning the next day after the announcement, I had non-technical friends asking me, “what’s the deal with poor, old,…
Goodbye, Twitter
Almost exactly three years ago, I decided to kill my Facebook account. Not log off. Delete it. It’s been gone since then, and honestly, I never miss it. When I signed on to Twitter for the first time in May of 2008, I had no idea what I would do with it. The running joke at the time was that Twitter was primarily used to let others know you were going to/were in/were back from, the bathroom. Colleagues at a startup…
It doesn’t have to be a crapfest
A bit ago, this blog post crossed my Twitter feed. I read it, and while the schadenfreude made me smirk for a minute, it eventually made me feel bad. The blog post purports to describe how a shitty shutdown dialog became a shitty shutdown dialog. But instead, it documents something I like to call “too many puppies” syndrome. If you are working on high visibility areas of a product – like the Windows Shell – like Explorer in particular, everybody…
Compute Stick PCs – Flash in the pan?
A few years ago, following the success of many other HDMI-connected computing devices, a new type of PC arrived – the “compute stick”. Also referred to sometimes as an HDMI PC or a stick PC, the device immediately made me scratch my head a bit. If Windows 10 still featured a Media Center edition, I guess I could sort of see the point. But Windows, outside of Surface Hub (which seemingly runs a proprietary edition of Windows), no longer features…
An iPad Pro is not a Mac
Last year, Christopher Mims wrote about how Apple should kill off the Mac. Just this week, Apple alumnus Michael Gartenberg wrote that the iPad Pro is the new Mac. It’s human nature to try and match things up… to simplify, organize, and categorize data points. To say a thing is like another thing, or a thing can replace another thing. But I think doing so today only confuses normal users. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how you…
The Autostadt, brand spaces, and marketing
Following my recent trip to Germany, I’ve spent the last month thinking about the idea of brand spaces. By brand space, I mean the use of a space – be it a single store, a building, or a multi-building space, that a business uses to establish or grow a marketing relationship with their consumers. Although I hate to fly, I love to travel. (As I like to tell people, “I like to be places”.) I took a few days this year…
Taken for a ride
Last week, as I entered the elevator of the building, another tenant turned to me and gleefully exclaimed, pointing across the garage at a new Jeep, “See that Jeep? I think I’m going to buy it.” I could tell immediately that this guy (a younger man, in his 20’s) was in trouble. He was smitten. He was a stranger, but sharing all of this, unprovoked. I had just come home from work, after a long editorial review meeting, followed by a trip to…