mrgan:
In English, “tantalizing” means “arousing interest and desire”. It’s a good thing, a sort of Christmas-Eve teasing rich with the promise of eventual joy. A plot point in ABC’s ‘Lost’ may be tantalizing, a new restaurant going up in your neighborhood may post a tantalizing menu.
The word comes from Greek mythology, where Tantalus is a mortal who repulses the gods by serving them the boiled body of his own son - surely the world’s most inept attempt at ritual sacrifice. Even Zeus doesn’t stand for this, so Tantalus gets punished in one of those metaphor-ready ways: he is made to stand in water with fruit hanging over his head. He spends eternity starving and thirsting, as the fruit moves out of his reach when he grasps at it, and the water recedes when he bends down to drink it. It’s pretty creative, and you can try approximating it next time you’re really hungry by buying a meatball sub and starring at it without eating. Chills!
This is why in Croatian, “muke Tantalove” (Tantalus’ suffering) is an expression meaning “unbearable, messing-with-your-head torture”. And this is why I imagine readers of Mac rumors literally starving to painful death when some “tantalizing” prospect is mentioned (e.g. cameras built into screens).
This is why I love philology.
marco:
Either I’m missing something, the initial iPad apps are going to suck, or we haven’t yet been told that iPad-native apps won’t be available for some period of time after the iPad’s launch.
…
The problem, of course, is that before day one, we won’t have iPads ourselves for development and testing. … [I]f we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).
This isn’t the only hurdle: Apple isn’t actually accepting iPad apps for review just yet. They’ll announce that at some (unknown) point in the future. This also makes it difficult for companies which want to submit something early to see if the reviewers will pull the ‘duplicates existing functionality’ card.
A detailed post from Michael Tamblyn of Kobo about the pricing metrics of eBook publishing, particularly focussing on the agency model being proposed by Macmillan, to which Amazon ‘capitulated’ after cutting them off over the weekend.
Michael includes some interesting information for those following Amazon’s line on the Agency pricing model, particularly this snippet countering the ‘money-grab’ accusations:
It isn’t really a revenue grab for publishers. In most cases, the publisher makes less. That $35.00 Under the Dome that the publisher made $17.00 on? With agency, they might make $10.50. But they won’t run the risk of some retailer forcing them to price it at $15 and making $7.50.
"One of the complaints in Wilcox’s piece is how do you print from iWork? Who needs to print? … 1997 called and it wants its ink cartridges back."
The Macalope Weekly: Welcome, all-knowing iPad! | Laptop | MacUser | Macworld
People forget that the reason Xerox never did anything with all their user interface research because they didn’t want a ‘paperless office’ to impact their sales of paper-based devices and technology. But nevertheless, that’s the idea the GUI was created to fulfil: a paperless office. Wouldn’t it be great to actually have that, finally?
It’s gotta be better than the bank loan department we’ve been dealing with: they don’t know what to do with PDF files or scans, they insist we print stuff out & fax it. Which actually goes into a computer which generates a raster image to email to them. Which they then print out manually.
*sigh*
Many congratulations to my former Morfunk business partner David Kaneda for winning the 14 Days of jQuery Grand Prize for his work on jQTouch. Dave is a fantastically talented guy and I couldn’t wish this accolade on a more deserving person.
"The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party."
"I’m a techie, but I don’t need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don’t hate my dishwasher because I can’t get to the command line. I don’t hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system."
ME WANT.
*cough*review copy plz kthxbye*cough*
"In recent times, Senators merely notify the Majority Leader of an intent to filibuster, and the Majority Leader delays further action unless he has sixty votes."
Aaron Zelinsky: Save the Senate: Bring Back the Filibuster
WTF?
No, really: What. The. Fuck?
So the Republicans can be all political-minded and derail anything and everything the Democrats want to do, purely because it’s the Democrats doing it, by asking? They don’t actually have to do anything?
Is it any wonder the US government is the source of much eye-rolling from the rest of the world? Especially at the same time that they still treat their country like the world’s most succulent fruit, which they must protect from freeloaders from the outside.
My father used to be a local council member, but eventually left because he was sickened by the way that each party would always vote against anything proposed by their opponents regardless of its merits. This seems to me to be exactly what the Republicans have been doing lately. Don’t get me wrong— I’m sure the Democrats do the same thing, but the Republicans seem to be more uniformly frothy-mouthed and rhetorical about it, with accusations of communism or socialism should the word ‘free’ (as in beer) come up in debate.
Sure, you’re telling your taxpayers that you don’t care about them if they’re unhealthy or don’t have lots and lots of money, but the alternative would mean the impossible: approving of your opposition’s policies! Well, we can’t have that now, can we‽
Some lovely experimentation with snowscape photography from my mate George.
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