I asked him for my full archive download in October 2022, and having heard nothing back I wound up paying him another $39 to keep my archive from being deleted while I tried to get his attention.
I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".
I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.
Yup also happened to me in 2018. I never received a download link for my archive. My support email was never answered and my archive expired and was deleted.
At one time he asked all existing subscribers for donations to enable him to pay a Romanian programmer to maintain the site. People paid and then he used the money for something else other than employing somebody to maintain the site. Not cool. Ref: https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/161007608301301350...
Yeah he's just making enough money that he doesn't care anymore. He is aware of how many people are confused about the lack of support and has commented about it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31186755.
It used to seem to me that there was a strong libertarian tendency among computer people, at least relative to the rest of society.
I always attributed this to the fact that anyone who has ever tried to tell a computer what to do has a different kind of understanding of how hard it is to precisely define intentions, even when the compiler doesn't have a personal financial or other incentive to deliberately misconstrue your code so as to create a bug.
It doesn't matter how beneficial is the intention of your law, it'll really only work if it's generally aligned with the local cultural values -- in which case people will Do What You Mean.
Politicians either don't understand this, or pretend not to; you regularly see them passing laws to outlaw things that are already illegal.
In the past few years, McDonald's (and some, but not all, other fast food restaurants) really seems to have gone all-in on the price-discrimination approach of setting list prices high and offering all kinds of discounts if you know where to look.
Relevant to the Big Mac Index, at the moment the app offers a two-for-one deal, through February 27, on Big Macs; so the effective price isn't $5.81 but $2.90. If you don't want two Big Macs, you can get free fries or a free drink, or both, or 20% off your whole order instead: but you can only use one discount every fifteen minutes, and you can only use any specific discount once per day.
The implication for the Big Mac Index is that in the face of the complex web of discounts offered by McDonald's it's nearly impossible to calculate the actual price of a Big Mac in the United States for general purposes.
That the 'discount' is offered through February 27 shows that this isn't really a discount but effectively the regular price for people who order through the app. The choice of the 27th for the end date leads me to suspect that they might be lifting the discount for one day a month to keep the FTC happy.
In the past few years, McDonald's (and some,
but not all, other fast food restaurants)
really seems to have gone all-in on the
price-discrimination approach of setting
list prices high and offering all kinds of
discounts if you know where to look.
Not that this is exactly some secret but a while back, it was explained to us (by somebody reasonably high up the org chart at McDonalds) is that the sandwiches themselves were money-losers, but that fries and drinks were essentially pure profit. (Thus, the birth of the infamous "super size it!" promotion)
They reallllly don't want you going in there and just buying sandwiches.
>“The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks up families. Old people, sometimes bedridden, are driven out of their homes by it. An old age pensioner, for instance, if a widower, would normally live with one or other of his children; his weekly ten shillings goes towards the household expenses, and probably he is not badly cared for. Under the Means Test, however, he counts as a ‘lodger’ and if he stays at home his children’s dole will be docked. So, perhaps at seventy or seventy-five years of age, he has to turn out into lodgings, handing his pension over to the lodging-house keeper and existing on the verge of starvation. I have seen several cases of this myself. It is happening all over England at this moment, thanks to the Means Test.”
Alternately, it can be explained by the fact that a lot of happy Apple customers — 'fans', I suppose — are fine with farming out some of their technological decision-making to Apple. Seriously: if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature into a phone, or computer, or whatever, I figure that there's probably some good reason for that. I'm not sufficiently interested to need to understand the minute details of every choice they make.
LTE is a perfect example. I don't give a damn whether my next phone has LTE. I have better things to do with my time than figure out whether the coverage — independent of carriers' marketing claims — is decent, make guesses — independent of etc. etc. — as to the extent of the coverage rollout over the next year, read up on the battery-life implications of LTE, and ponder whether the bottleneck on my phone has anything to do with the network speed in the first place.
(Actually, I already have a very strong suspicion about where the bottleneck is on my phone, and that's why I really don't care about LTE right now.)
Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology. So far I've been very happy with that approach. So, yes, if Apple isn't putting some seeming obvious feature in a phone, I figure that there's probably a good reason for it, a reason that I'd understand and possibly even agree with if I invested a lot of time in the question.
The risk is that, should Apple go rogue, they could rip me off for an iteration or two before I wised up. In which case I would just go buy another phone from someone else and be done with it.
It's not like I'm blindly trusting Apple to not, say, saw off my leg and feed it to alligators; I'm trusting them to make decisions about a whole bunch of tradeoffs, decisions that will at best be valid only for a few months anyway, decisions on which hinge the expenditure of a few hundred dollars.
I'm not saying that becoming a micro-expert on your purchases is wrong, just that there's something to be said for not bothering. This is very much not the Nerd Way, but I have to say that I'm much happier since I stopped having to personally establish the perfect correctness of all my techno-purchasing decisions.
This is a truly insightful comment, and really clarifies the distinction, I think, between Apple people and non-Apple people. Though, really, I suppose it's more of a point on a spectrum of how much of your tech decisions you're willing to farm out.
As for me, I fall on the other side of that point. Whenever I use an Apple product, I find that I'm often annoyed at the decisions that have been made for me, but more than that, I'm not allowed to change that decision.
It's interesting, though, that people on either side of line regard the other side's feature as a bug.
It's not that I see the greater flexibility of, well, nearly all non-Apple product as being a bug, exactly. There are certainly tremendous advantages to being flexible, adaptable, and extensible. It's just that there are also some advantages to being less flexible; these advantages are subtle and often missed.
The big win in an inflexible system like the iPhone — aside from it being inherently more discoverable and predictable — is that it's much easier and more reliable to get an intelligent, thinking, learning human to adapt to an inflexible system than it is to build a system that can deftly adapt to various imagined human desires.
It's this inflexibility, oddly enough, that gives Apple its reputation for ease of use: it's possible to make much more concrete statements about the operation of a Mac or an iPhone or iPad than it is about most competing systems and devices. The system perceived as 'friendly' is, oddly enough, the one that imposes its will upon the user.
>"Alternately, it can be explained by the fact that a lot of happy Apple customers — 'fans', I suppose — are fine with farming out some of their technological decision-making to Apple."
LTE has nothing to do with my message, you're responding to jrockway now.
I was talking about how Apple fans slightly alter history to make Apple look better. Lesser known inventors/persons/products are brushed aside and Apple gets all the credit. Tesla vs. Edison.
How many Apple fans know about LG Prada and how many of them think that Apple invented the touch-screen phone? Apple is very good at POLISHING existing concepts. This is a very important skill in itself, but why not call it for what it is instead of lavishing such praise on them?
Here's another one: most Mac users still have the impression that Macs are inherently more secure than Windows machines when the opposite is in fact true. This has been mentioned by several security people here on HN to the surprise of others.
And here's you doing it: "Overall, I trust Apple to sell me the best all-round phone given the constraints of current technology." A good phone first of all has to be able to make and take calls, but iPhone 4 has a critical hardware flaw that makes it drop calls. There are no technology constraints that prevent Apple from making a phone that doesn't drop calls when touched.
An yet, in spite all of this, do you think that iPhone 4 is a mediocre phone? No, you still think it's the best "all-around" phone.
I'm also skeptical of the idea of an iPad with a 7" screen, mainly because typing on such a screen would be far worse than on the current one.
However, such a thing would probably be a lot more pocketable than you'd think. My Kindle 2 (9" diagonal and 3/8" thick overall) fits very nicely into all of my inside coat pockets.
The Kindle 2 also weighs less than half of what the iPad does, which is important; I thought about having a giant pocket sewn in to some of my jackets, but then I realized that I'd need a counterweight on the other side, and I actually got as far as starting the weight-and-balance calculations before concluding that this was getting silly. The counterweight idea would require keeping the jacket buttoned all the time, anyway.
A high-density-screen iPad the size of the Kindle 2 would be worse for movies, photos, and (especially) typing, but I could have it with me nearly everywhere, not just places where I am willing to carry my nerd bag.
> Would you apply the same logic to oxygen instead of water?
Markets are a means of managing scarcity. Oxygen is not scarce, at least not if you're at sea level and you don't mind it mixed about 5:1 with nitrogen and a bunch of other gases.
For use in places where oxygen is scarce — like on top of a tall mountain or in an unpressurized aircraft at high altitude — you'll find that the stuff is very commonly bought and sold.
I think a lot of people don't realize how cheap food can be. I average $400 - $500 a month on food, and I buy for myself and my girlfriend. We eat steak, fish, chicken, meatballs, something good every single night. I never even look at prices in the grocery store, I just buy whatever it is I want to buy and it comes out to that amount. If I could spend $800 on food at the grocery store in a month I wouldn't mind, I just don't know what I'm missing out on. The only thing we don't do is go out to eat, or drink much.
We went out for our anniversary the other night and blew $100 on a dinner for two, for a meal I probably could have made myself if I had put my mind to it. That was the first time we ate at a restaurent in probably 3 months, and it was 20-25% of our monthly food budget for 1 dinner. I enjoyed my food but I couldn't help but think, I could eat filet mignon every single night this week and it would be just as good for this same amount of money.
Not to mention the $10.50 martini that cost them $1 to make, or the beer I had that cost more than a six pack of nice local beer.
So don't eat out, learn how to cook, and suddenly $5-15 a day is plenty to eat like a king.
I thought I was future-proofing myself a bit by buying a Griffin AirCurve. The AirCurve is an ear-trumpet kind of thing that acoustically amplifies the output from the iPhone's speaker. You wouldn't call it hi-fi, but it works surprisingly well.
I figured that the iPhone 4 would just require a different dock insert to hold the new shape firmly, but no dice: Apple have also swapped the positions of the speaker and microphone vs. their positions on previous iPhones.
I wonder how much of the speed differences are due to the time spent turning pages? The iPad generally turns pages faster than the Kindle (no matter what app you're using on the iPad), and most books present more text at once, so you have fewer page-turns to begin with.
I think the Kindle DX would also be a more fair comparison to the iPad (especially the new, twice the contrast ratio DX).
I have both, and actually use both. I would probably go with DX and Netbook if I were cost-constrained. The only time I read books on the iPad vs. the DX is when I'm in bed and don't want to turn on a room light, and even then, it's with the Kindle app. I use the iPad for plenty of non-book applications.
iPad turns pages much faster than the Kindle — I've found that flipping through pages is snappier than even the printed book (i.e., via either repeated taps or swipes). Also, Kindle is plagued (though it better than the B&N Nook I played with) with refresh delays whereas on iPad text is nearly always instantly rendered).
And advancing/rewinding to random points in a text — no comparison as Kindle not suited for that task; but on an iPad, it as easy (or superior) to a printed book.
But regular books have page turns, and they take longer than the Kindle's page turns. And the article still says the iPad and Kindle are both slower than regular books.
I didn't get any response until late February 2023, when he sent me a link that produced a 404 error. I complained about that, and about a week later, I got an email from him that asked me whether I'd been able to download that archive he'd sent me the link for "in late January".
I told him, again, that the link he'd sent in February hadn't worked, and that I'd told him that, and in a couple of hours everything was wrapped up satisfactorily.
Had he been able to do that when I'd asked for it five months earlier, I would undoubtedly have a much higher opinion of the man.