The most fiscally prudent administration in living memory was Clinton’s. Bush was gratuitously bad on the fiscal front: he didn’t need to enact those monster tax cuts. Obama was necessarily bad on the fiscal front: he inherited a recession and had no choice. But the flip-side of stimulus spending in a recession is tax rises when the economy starts to recover so that you can pay for all that stimulus. If Congress refuses to enact any such tax hikes, that’s a problem. And so it makes sense that the downgrade came now, when Congress’s intransigence came into full focus.
Felix Salmon’s Downgrade FAQ explains the situation quite well.
This is from a Pew survey on political attitudes. If you’ve ever wondered why the American right is so much more effective in government than the left, it’s likely something to do with this: the two largest left-leaning groups here (“Solid Liberals” and “Post-Moderns”) broadly favor compromise, while conservative groups broadly oppose it.
Wayne Rash is complaining that the new Blackberry Playbook is being unfairly compared to Apple’s iPad, a device which is in a radically different class than the Playbook. He has a point: spend even a few minutes with a Playbook and you can tell at once that he’s right: this is like comparing unrelated fruit. (Apples and lemons, perhaps.)
I here attempt to present a fair and proper review of the device.
Blackberry should be proud of what they’ve done in engineering the Playbook. The device is a slick, smooth, and sleek combination of matte and gloss surfaces. Weighing in at 0.9 pounds and only ten millimeters thin, it’s surprisingly portable, and at 7.6 by 5.1 inches, it is a broad and flat device nearly half the size of a piece of standard letter-size paper. This unusual, ultra-flat design means the Playbook can sit flush on a table, and its plastic and glass exterior won’t scratch delicate wood surfaces. The flat design, without rubbery feet or other such adornments, means the Playbook can even prevent corners curling.
There are, however, a few problems. The Playbook is so thin it can easily become lost in a pile of papers, never to be seen again. Also, the Playbook we tested occasionally would make odd noises or appear to light up, which can prove distracting. (By the second day of testing, happily, these incidents seemed to stop, and did not resume.)
Then there’s the price. Blackberry’s Playbook starts at $499—very expensive for a non-collectible—and also has $599 and $699 versions, though in our testing we could not distinguish any meaningful difference between the low-end model and the more expensive ones.
Finally, we feel we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that, unlike other Blackberry paperweights, the Playbook can not receive email.
note: I would actually be remiss if I didn’t say I have never seen a Playbook in person. This review is entirely fictional. If the Playbook doesn’t hold its own as a paperweight, please don’t complain to me.
7 Apr 2011
But do we really need to measure? The idea that “if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count” is one of the most damaging delusions of our time. It gives us a world that rewards quantity, not quality.
Make metrics the core goal of your design and you’ll just end up with design that optimises those numbers, at the expense of other important qualities… The numbers of capitalism are almost all short-term – profit, year-on-year growth, yield – rather than long-term and sustainable. No wonder the tantric joy of user-centred quality often loses out to the instant hits of promotion, discounting and resource depletion. The metrics make it so.
Look, I really like all the folks at Tumblr, but how is it possible that you cannot go a single day without getting an error at least twice? Lots of users, lots of load, I get it. But seriously, come on.
It’s depressingly cultural for open source to be dick-measuringly sexist, but MS makes money when they’re friendly to women.
It’s really not surprising. Open source developers are great at making tools for open source developers, but I don’t think they even see what they’re lacking from the people they turn off or push away. Women (probably to their credit) mostly don’t think like open source developers.
I use the <aside> tag a lot on this blog. It’s a handy new tag in HTML5 for sidebars and other accompanying content, which is fantastic, semantically. I display my <aside>s next to the text and use them as marginalia.
The problem comes in when I try to display them. I want the aside to appear to the right of the paragraph it’s talking about, so people who are reading can glance over and see I have more to say on the topic. I use the following code to do this:
Fits nicely into my golden ratio grid. Everything is happy.
Except, for this to line up properly, I have to put my aside before the paragraph it’s referencing. Otherwise, the floated aside will render starting on the bottom edge the paragraph, instead of the top—as you’d expect if you know CSS. But, to someone reading in the Tumblr feed, or in an RSS reader, it’s out of place and jarring.
Is the problem RSS readers and Tumblr, or is there a better solution in HTML5?
I think I bought this on my other computer! So I should just be able to download it again, right? Hmmm…
That says it’s $9.99! But I thought I already bought it. Maybe not? Or maybe it just always lists the price? I’ll just click.
*click*
I’m sure I bought it.
That says “your credit card will be charged for this purchase” and the big button says “Buy.” I guess… I didn’t buy it? Oh well. I do want to play…
*click*
I knew I bought it!
The iPhone’s App Store does the same thing.
I wonder how many people give up, rather than re-downloading an app they’ve already purchased, because they’ve been lead to believe they will be charged for it again.
And no sooner do I make fun of open-source typefaces than someone points me to Crimson Text, a Garamond-inspired open-source face (with an eminently elegant ampersand).
Lest you think I’ve changed my mind on open-source fonts: it still suffers from sloppiness, though: for example, none of the different weights and styles sit on the same baseline, and the kerning needs work. Still, it is far better than most.
