John McKirdy: Microsoft achieved a marketing coup today by sneaking the most recognisable symbol of their Windows operating system into the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics...
The strongest argument against Silent Keynote is probably this: It's very, very unlikely to make Apple reconsider its decision to end support of Macworld Expo. It might even make it dig in its heels.
Don't intentionally disrespect Schiller because the company made a business decision that you don't agree with.
Ranking apps by volume incentivises cheap gimmicky apps, and makes it difficult for developers to charge a fair price for quality apps.
If you want the best ten hours (twenty for te completist) of entertainment you've had since World of Goo, Aquaria is definitely worth the $30.
Ambrosia Software has put together a collection of some of its most popular games, including a few that have been updated to run on newer Macs. The 15th Anniversary Holiday Bundle costs $19.
Let's face it: the people crying foul the loudest about Apple's Macworld Expo plans are also the kind of people that will buy whatever Apple comes out, with nary a moment's hesitation.
Google spends a lot of time trying to develop algorithms to discount page rank spammers. Clearly, App Store is going to have to invest in that same kind of approach.
The pessimistic view, then, is that, because we occupy such a small and brief place in the cosmos, we and the things we do are insignificant and inconsequential. But is that right? Are we insignificant and inconsequential? And if we are, should we respond with despair and nihilism? These questions are paradigmatically philosophical, but they have received little attention from contemporary philosophers. To the extent that they address the question of whether we are cosmically insignificant at all, they have typically dismissed it as confused.
Joe Jr.’s closed in the summer of 2009, with a farewell note hastily tacked up in the window explaining that the restaurant had lost its lease and, after more than 30 years in business, they were saying good-bye. Like Henri Soulé’s famous French restaurant, it was replaced, in time, by a more fashionable version of itself: a café serving Brazilian coffee, where a new generation of headphone-wearing habitués crowd the uncomfortable wood chairs, peering silently into their laptops, sipping four-dollar coffee from biodegradable paper cups. For a while, the Platts tried to find another place in our little neighborhood to go for our family breakfasts, but the dwindling number of old-time diners and coffee shops were too crowded or too anonymous or too far away. When my daughters want a bowl of chicken soup, these days, they get it at the Pret a Manger down the street, and although I pass the now-svelte Mizrahi on the street sometimes, I’ve never seen John Waters or the Tattoo Lady again.
An airplane is the perfect, and perhaps the only, place to actually read the globe-trotting lifestyle magazine founded in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian editor and erstwhile war correspondent. Its logo, an “M” with a twisted loop inscribed in a circle, lurks at airport terminal bookstores all over the world, the magazine’s glossy black cover—which the late David Carr likened to “a slab of printed dark Belgian chocolate”—conveying a placeless, easily translated sort of luxury. Inside, one encounters articles on Canadian soft power, Latin American soap operas, and Finnish domestic architecture: the casual reading of an armchair diplomat.
Given the sultry temperatures that envelop Singapore pretty much all year round you might not expect the city’s crime fiction to be dissimilar to other Southeast Asian noir, the strength-sapping humidity leaving everyone wrung out and tense. While that is mostly what you get in crime writing from Bangkok and Phnom Penh, for example, Singapore, the city state William Gibson famously dubbed “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” also, perhaps surprisingly, specializes in quirky, mildly amusing, sometimes bizarre cozies—masses of sunshine, food, friendly fat aunts and crimes that make a Miss Marple story look like an episode of The Wire. So here’s a spoiler—if you like your crime fiction hardboiled and noir-ish read the next two paragraphs and then skip to another article.
But if you read the first page of To Kill A Mockingbird with close attention to the way Scout switches verb tenses, Jem’s death comes as no surprise at all. To the contrary, Jem is already dead by the time the novel begins. In the first paragraph of Mockingbird, Scout uses the past tense to recall that Jem broke his arm when he was thirteen and his body never truly recovered. She explains, “His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh.” Here, Scout explains how Jem’s accident permanently affected his body. In the next paragraph, she switches to the present tense and then back again when she says, “I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that.” Scout is alive to tell the tale — she “maintains” in the present tense. Meanwhile, Jem exists only in the past tense — by the time Scout tells the story, he is no longer four years Scout’s senior, and his left arm is no longer shorter than his right. Jem has been dead for as long as Scout has been telling the story of his broken arm.