Disqus - Latest Comments for mithaler

Re: http://iya-komatta.tumblr.com/post/7492037291

Michael Thaler — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:07:49 -0000

節電 is interesting. Have you seen/heard any statistics on how much less energy the country is using as a result of it?

Re: Unity personalization: how much can you really do?

Michael Thaler — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:49:15 -0000

Can I disable the global menu and put all the app menus back on the apps they came from? That's really the only question I have.

Re: Blag Hag: And these are the same people who hate burkas?

Michael Thaler — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:29:32 -0000

Shit like this is one of the many reasons I don't go near Reddit.

Re: Scripting News: Google Maps now show subway routes

Michael Thaler — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:15:15 -0000

Unfortunately, I don't trust it. I use the 23th and 7th station a lot, and for as long as I've been using it Google Maps has incorrectly claimed the 2 stops there (which it doesn't, only the 1 does). As a result, I don't trust Google Maps over Hopstop or just a paper map copy on my phone.

Though, note also: if you open the More... box in the upper right, you can click Transit, which shows an overlay of the entire subway system, which is useful for getting a sense of what goes where (especially on my Android phone). But again, I don't trust it on matters of which services stop where.

Re: Wherein I play with Chrome OS

Michael Thaler — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:48:28 -0000

I'd buy one if it were a few hundred bucks, and if I knew it were faster than the Cr-48 and had a better touchpad.

Re: Visualized: the real Android fragmentation

Michael Thaler — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:06:45 -0000

This is a fake issue. Users notice it at worst once, when they switch to a new Android phone. Why should they be standardized? Let phone designers come up with their own arrangements that fit the rest of their phones.

Re: Since you asked, Gruber, here are my Android “killer apps”

Michael Thaler — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:25:58 -0000

By that definition, these are indeed killer apps--for me. That's what I would buy a phone for. That and, getting email notification of your comment and responding to it right now. ;)

There are no killer apps for everyone--just individual people. I'm sure there are killer apps for some people for iOS. Just not me. I can't speak for everyone, and neither can Gruber, or anyone else.

Re: Since you asked, Gruber, here are my Android “killer apps”

Michael Thaler — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 15:08:17 -0000

Gruber:

At this point, I’m guessing, Android fans are ready to exclaim that the fact that Android supports things like home screen replacements (or other system-level tools, such as touchscreen keyboard replacements) — and that iOS does not — is precisely why they prefer Android, and/or consider iOS to be an unacceptable toy, or what have you. But, again, that’s not the argument I’m making. I’m talking about third-party developer exclusives — and the only ones Android has are ones that Apple doesn’t want.

I cited one example, which I consider a genuine selling point. Gruber doesn't consider it one. That's a difference of opinion, not a argument "in favor of iOS".

Re: On scarcity and frustration.

Michael Thaler — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:05:39 -0000

There are different kinds of frustration; for example, there's "argh, Apple sucks," and there's "argh, I want the product but I can't get one". The former seems a lot more likely to actually negatively affect sales than the latter, no?

Re: Apple Shows Us What HTML5 Can Do

Michael Thaler — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:09:30 -0000

Not only that, it uses the same rendering engine, Webkit, which is maintained by Apple. It has the same capabilities as Safari. For them to demand that we download Safari when we're running the same engine is outright insulting.

Re: Apple Shows Us What HTML5 Can Do

Michael Thaler — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:03:17 -0000

The completely galling thing about that is it even blocks Chrome, which uses the same rendering engine! There's absolutely no excuse for that, and it shatters their entire message of "advocating web standards".

Re: Twitter From the Command Line in Python Using OAuth

Michael Thaler — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:56:50 -0000

Ah, so it will--you are correct. I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for the simple writeup on how to replace my method. :)

Re: Twitter From the Command Line in Python Using OAuth

Michael Thaler — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:36:06 -0000

This can be done with curl, with no OAuth installation necessary. Simply add the following to your .bashrc or whatever shell config file you have, replacing username:password with your username and password:

function tweet { curl --basic --user username:password --data status="$1" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml }

After restarting your shell, you can then tweet by doing:

tweet "This is a new status update."

It'll say "via API", not "via mycustomappname", but it otherwise works.

Re: How Facebook’s New Privacy Controls Work

Michael Thaler — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:32:54 -0000

All this does is simplify the settings we see. It does nothing to solve the issue of Facebook leaking information to third parties or changing their defaults over time out from under people. Assuming this is all there is to it, this solves none of the problems I have, and goes absolutely nowhere in restoring what trust I had for them.

Re: Adobe and Apple: Please Spare Us the Platitudes About “Open”

Michael Thaler — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:16:16 -0000

While not involved in the Adobe vs. Apple drama, you might well add Facebook to that list, given how they profess to be offering an "Open Graph" that really just pulls more data from the greater web under Facebook's control.

Re: My PowerPoint rule of thumb

Michael Thaler — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:24:29 -0000

Gahhh, I'm a moron, that's what I get for typing out comments and submitting them without refreshing the page first... sorry, Foster. :-P

Re: My PowerPoint rule of thumb

Michael Thaler — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:23:58 -0000

Are you familiar with Prezi? My boss likes it, and I like it for its innovative style and the way it treats presentations as skimming over a large image or set of images instead of as a plain slide show that people just dump text onto.

Re: Workspaces: and How We Use Them.

Michael Thaler — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:29:12 -0000

1. I use either four or five, depending on whether I'm using a widescreen monitor.
2. I use a single horizontal row.
3. I don't really use the applet, but it's there for glancing at what I have open. I use the keyboard to switch, and sometimes Compiz's Expo feature to see them all.
4. I'm pretty consistent about my setup--browser, IM and terminal on the first, email on the second, Amarok on the third and programming IDE on the fourth (I'm a web developer by trade).
5. Compiz really helps--makes them smoother and more pleasant to look at. I don't use the cube, but the wall is nice.
6. I'm pretty happy with them, they make my life quite a bit easier (I feel hand-tied on Windows without them). Can't think of anything I could use. :)

Re: thoughts from the red planet - Blog - Introducing Cascalog: a Clojure-based query language for Hadoop

Michael Thaler — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:11:44 -0000

Beautiful, elegant syntax--well done. You should know it was all I could do to avoid bursting out laughing at the :> operator. :)

Re: U.S. Court Rules Against FCC and Net Neutrality

Michael Thaler — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:37:05 -0000

The court did not rule for or against Net Neutrality. It ruled that the FCC had overstepped its authority on the issue. There are a lot of ways this could go, and a few have been summarized on this post by a legal scholar.

Nothing is likely to change in the short term as a result of this decision.

Re: Would you buy a locked down laptop?

Michael Thaler — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:30:27 -0000

Surely you can elaborate on that? I don't have to mod you, do I? :-P

Re: Would you buy a locked down laptop?

Michael Thaler — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 11:56:56 -0000

Maybe, but gaming consoles aren't marketed as general purpose machines--they're marketed as machines for gaming. Perhaps you could argue that that's changing now that consoles can do much more than they could in previous generations (and let's face it, Sony isn't helping things by removing the ability to install other OSes), but I don't think there's a precedent for platform openness in the console market like there is in the tablet market.

I like your point, though, about a lot of other devices that address those concerns. It does seem unlikely that Android would ever close down, given that one of its main selling points is its openness (with all the drawbacks that entails), and we're already seeing Android tablets being released.

Re: Should kids be building their brand already?

Michael Thaler — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:42:15 -0000

You should know that this post is making me seriously consider buying a domain based on my name.

Re: Pay for what’s worth paying for

Michael Thaler — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:33:17 -0000

Portable Internet isn't ubiquitous yet, but it will be--I recently joined the smartphone-owning crowd and it's changing my life. Having Pandora and last.fm during my commute makes much life much, much better. I'm sure that within five or ten years, that level of computing power in a phone will be the baseline.

Incidentally, thanks for reading! Feel free to stop by whenever. :)

Re: Google Student Blog misses the mark

Michael Thaler — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:59:47 -0000

So now I wonder: with what sort of person would these things resonate? Arrogant though it may sound, I personally have difficulty understanding the mindset of an "average computer user"--it confuses me a little bit that people need "real life anecdotes" as opposed to bullet point feature lists.

But then, I remember that most computer users will automatically use the first option they're given because they just don't care. Perhaps Google is trying to entice the Microsoft Word-using market by trying to make their product look more "genuinely human"?