AOL Tech

Dogger

Member since: Jun 18th, 2005

Dogger's Latest Comments

Blog Activity
Blog# of Comments
TUAW.com11 Comments
Engadget4 Comments
AOL TV1 Comment
BloggingStocks1 Comment
Switched1 Comment

Recent Comments:

New MacBooks add metal cases, power to burn but no FireWire (TUAW.com)

Oct 14th 2008 3:10PM The headline is misleading. Everyone is going to assume that you are saying none of Apple's laptops released today have FireWire, which is false. Way to exploit the name confusion in order to get more hits...

Mr. Blurrycam reveals the updated MacBook Pro, $899 laptop model shows up in Apple inventory systems (Updated) (Engadget)

Oct 14th 2008 6:58AM "What is so bad about a glossy screen for prof. designers/photographers/multimedia people? Can someone explain it to me without personal attacks, please?"

The reason 'pros' don't like glossy screens is that they are afraid that the colour information they are seeing is not accurate. i.e. The gloss makes the colours richer, which means when they adjust the colours to what they intend on a the richer system, and export their file, other people will see the colours duller than they intended. Only people who are very careful about what colour values they are going for will worry about this (thus -- the pros).

However, this is an overcomplained issue. The fact is, there are ways of measuring and calibrating your system's colour response, no matter what screen it has, and the pros should know this. There is nothing about a glossy screen that should prevent you from calibrating it like any other. But if you aren't going calibrate it, and you are going to make fine colour adjustments (an odd mix of pro and non-pro behaviours), in THAT case, your adjustments will probably come out duller than you expected (on paper or on matte screens).

Apple responds to Greenpeace: what part of "end of 2008" didn't you understand? (Engadget)

Oct 16th 2007 6:01PM So after judging Apple by comparing them to industry claims (instead of what the rest of the industry is actually doing right now), thereby forcing Apple to make claims of its own, suddenly Greenpeace doesn't care about claims and timetables and despite praising Apple's decisions they've now decided to completely ignore them.

Greenpeace should hold a seminar in how to blow your credibility and teach everyone not to take you seriously.

Apple (AAPL) sued over iPhone price cut, world collectively laughs (BloggingStocks)

Oct 2nd 2007 5:41PM Yes, that's right. The litigious society is all the Liberals' fault. *rolls eyes* Idiot.

Shatner out, Nimoy in for Star Trek prequel (AOL TV)

Jun 25th 2007 1:28PM Oh, here come the Shatner whiners. Who cares who got the cameo? It's a damn cameo! I bet Shatner and Nimoy don't even really particularly care. Can anyone think that at this late stage either of these men is really taking this show seriously anymore? Maybe Shatner will get a cameo in the next one. Maybe it'll be Uhuru -- actually I hope it's Uhura, because Shatner somehow manages to get even hammier *every single year* -- even though this is like a black hole collapsing in on itself -- you would think there is nowhere left to go, but you would be wrong.

Anyway, if you are not going to see this 2-hr movie simply because Shatner did not get a 30-second part in it, then your mental deficiencies are probably pretty apparent for all to see, so I shouldn't be making your lives that much more difficult by pointing them out.

Good luck with the insane Kirk fetish!

Most so-called iPhone alternatives are nothing of the sort (TUAW.com)

Jun 25th 2007 1:16PM >> I wouldn’t be so biased as to refer to the
>> competition as “efforts from other companies”.
>> I’m an apple fan myself and read this blog daily,
>> but I’m managing to maintain a level of perspective.

I don't get it -- what's so biased about referring to the competition as 'efforts from other companies'? Seems perfectly accurate -- other companies have indeed put many separate efforts into competing with the coming iPhone. This is the epitome of neutral language. 'Successes from other companies' or 'Failures from other companies' on the other hand, would both be non-neutral in different ways.

You're way oversensitive to this bias thing, to the point of inventing it, I'm afraid. In fact you seem to share this trait with a lot of N95 defenders in this thread. I didn't read a single negative comment about the N95 in the original article, and yet everyone is reacting as if its just been 'bashed' and 'trashed'.

Talk about a userbase with a glass jaw! Apparently, N95 users are made of finest porcelain and even them holding them incorrectly can cause cracks in their veneer. And here I thought Apple was bad for touchy users...

More Google Apps for iPhone? (Switched)

May 29th 2007 10:31PM Everybody's missing the point. If Apple succeeds in making the 'widget' the standard app delivery service for cell phone usage, then they can succeed in delivering the first mass-market entirely web-based computing platform. That is huge. iPhone widget development will become the whole game. Now Google apps also have some hardware to live on where they (hopefully) get adopted as a new standard for document exchange. If it works, then Microsoft is no longer anywhere in the picture of the future of personal computing devices and of the most innovative channels of software delivery. This is going to be very interesting...

Mac 101: Things NOT to do on your Mac (TUAW.com)

May 16th 2007 12:23PM "This is an Apple bug as far as I'm concerned. Since Windows 2000, Windows will automatically disable caching to removable devices like iPods and USB sticks, allowing you to yank them any time you want. The fact that Apple doesn't is just stupid and lazy on their part."

I completely disagree with this. There is a reason for removable device caching -- it can substantially increase performance, especially when copying over many similar files at once (MP3s? Hello?). I do not want my iPod's performance compromised because some idiot can't read a plainly written warning. All you have to do to avoid the damage if you mistakenly decide to pull the jack without dismounting is to plug the device right back in when the difficult-to-dismiss modal dialog tells you to. Apple, DO NOT CRIPPLE MY HARDWARE IN ORDER TO CODDLE IDIOTS, thank you very much.

New Get a Mac Ad: Stuffed (TUAW.com)

Apr 14th 2007 10:43AM Heh heh this commercial is almost as funny as the Cancel or Allow. The best thing about the Get a Mac ads is not the points they make, but that sometimes the humour is really show; like funny enough to be not a commercial at all and you would still want to watch it if it were part of a sitcom or something. Hodgman is largely responsible but one should never overlook the role of the straight man; it's something that is easy to mess up if you overplay it.

As for the printer drivers and languages; well, wanting the printer drivers is a no-brainer. That doesn't even need answering. That's like saying 'Who needs food'? As for the languages, I uninstalled all of those spare languages once, and I found that some English websites do use special characters from international fonts for decoration and whatnot, and now they appear to me to have gunked up symbols and stuff. The Mac knew exactly what it was doing with the standard install. I should have just stayed out of its way; I won't make that mistake again.

Compare this experience with what happens to you when you first sit down at a brand new PC, and then end up wishing that IT would get out of YOUR way. Completely 180 degree opposite.

Will iTunes truly support interoperability? (TUAW.com)

Apr 3rd 2007 9:27PM "Considering that the iTunes Store is far and away the market leader, there's no reason for them to try to attract non-iPod users. If they want to use a DRM-free iTunes purchase, they can drag it from any playlist to the desktop."

Actually, they can drag it from the playlist directly to the player icon. Getting a single unprotected song from iTunes into your MP3 player is (and always has been) easier with a non-iPod. It's *managing* the songs on the iPod that is easier with iTunes -- as it should be! Let the other MP3 players write their own song managers. Why should Apple do their homework for them? There is nothing stopping them. (And there never was for the majority of people's music collections -- and soon, there won't be anything stopping them for iTMS either.)

After this all plays out, the ugly truth about these other MP3 manufacturers will come out. As a group -- they are very lazy about desktop software for their players (it tends to do only the bare minimum, and that means no attempts to self-sync with iTunes), and when they aren't lazy, they're incompetent (this stuff is largely buggy and unreliable). There is WAY more they could have done in the past, but they didn't. And in the future: most of them probably won't, either.

Apple should neither be faulted for this, nor asked to fill in the gap. Leave the gap there as an embarrassment to the competition and a spur for them to the much better job we all know can be done.