The Insomniac Coder

Yes, it misses the mark, but it is still going to make Apple boatloads of cash, and this is without even trying hard at it. I currently own two of the first generation AppleTVs, and both have been sitting idle for months. Why? We kept losing the remotes, that's $29 each and Apple did not allow an easy way to program any remote to use the AppleTV until we were fedup about it. Aaccording to my other blog, we had the two AppleTVs since February 2008, and the "new" feature to program remotes did not arrive until the 2.3 upgrade in October 2008. We probably bought four of those remotes in that period of time. Re-coding content sucks. Even with a hardware encoder dongle, which only worked in the Mac, it still meant that using the AppleTV involved a time tax for the conversion. The "hacks" available to add functionality to the AppleTV were not very consistent, so I always ended up resetting them to the official firmware. This is not Apple's fault, and sure as h...

Image by pvera via Flickr If you follow the technology news you will notice that Apple has a certain schedule for releasing certain things. You can always count on Apple to release brand new hardware during the Mac World expo in San Francisco, which happens early in the year, and OS-related announcements during the World Wide Developers Conference during the Summer. Apart from these two, there is usually at least one "media" event that deals with things like iTunes , iPods , etc.  You can also count on people crying like little bitches because no matter how much Apple announces, they simply can't make everyone happy at the same time. This is what we call the "Apple Crying Game." Today we have some announcements, and the crying is already getting out of control: On the new iPod Touch : OMG why doesn't it look like the iPhone 4? This is BULLSHIT! Why the hell do I need to pay for this double camera nonsense? $400 for the 64 GB version? Apple thinks we...

Image via Wikipedia Wanna know how you know you're old? My high school drafting classes were all done with mechanic pencil, on proper paper and drafting tables. Worse, we were the last class in my university to train in paper drafting for our engineering drawing courses, we were the pilot class for ACAD, the next class was 50/50, and the "kids" that arrived two years later did all their coursework in ACAD. My favorite part was watching people do some sloppy shiat thinking nobody could tell just by looking at the screen. You can easily grade paper drawings by looking at the smoothness of the pencil lines , but on screen all you see is a straight line. The trick is to have the student send the drawing to a pen plotter , if the student did something stupid, it will show up when the pen plotter draws it. For example, curve transitions that are not snapped properly, chamfers, compound curves, or even lines that don't connect properly. Related articles by Zemanta A...