I just finished worked through the newest version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and feel like I have a much better handle on Rails 3.2. I do recommend it to get people up-and-running on some of the latest things in Rails.
However, I think that my favorite part of Rails 3 is one of the most hated: Bundler. It really just made things so much easier for me.
But I’m crazy, so don’t worry.
Marco Arment wrote Predicting MacBooks with the Ivy Bridge schedule and if you are interested in a look at when Apple could possibly be launching new hardware just read that.
I’m still torn on if there is a 15″ MacBook Air-ish device coming out this year and overall what the lineup is going to look like if one is released.
Basically, everyone things the 13″ MacBook Pro is dead, and while that might be the case, I see two ways the lines could go:
FIrst, a Maximum Possible Choice (MPC) lineup:
A lot of overlap, a lot of models, a lot of chassis and possibly a lot of confusion. However, is satiates the needs of many of the prosumers because I firmly believe that any 15″ MacBook Air is going to be more Air than Pro in the end … so no discrete graphics, no extra ports, etc.
Here is the Least Possible Choice (LPC) lineup:
At that point, you’ve really narrowed down the choices … down to even fewer than Apple has available today. You’ll alienate some prosumers maybe into getting a heavier 17″ MacBook Pro or looking elsewhere, but you eliminate many components that won’t sell that many.
In this scenario I also could see them dropping the “Air” moniker and going even simpler:
Now you have setup the 17″ MacBook Pro as, essentially, the Mac Pro of portables. In this case, I’d also like to see the iMac name changed to just Mac, but now I’m sounding more crazy than normal.
There are tons of middle roads there as well, but it will be interesting to see how the Apple portable lineup changes in the coming year.
Take it for what you want, but Tim Culpan of Bloomberg wrote Now Can We Start Talking About the Real Foxconn? and I think he nails my main point about the whole Daisey affair with this paragraph (but please go read the whole thing, he’s been covering Foxconn for a decade or more):
The problem with Mike Daisey’s lies is that they’ve painted a picture of the Evil Empire, a place devoid of any happiness or humanity. A dark, Dickensian scene of horror and tears. They also make anyone who tries to tell a fuller, more balanced account look like an Apple or Foxconn apologist because your mind is already full of the “knowledge” of how bad it is there.
Any person who defends Mike Daisey usually comes back to some sort of “he was trying to raise awareness about a real issue”. The hard part about that is that his lies now make the job of trying to bring substantive change and have meaningful conversations that much harder.
That’s a net loss, a HUGE net loss.
I really don’t think they “get” it. They really don’t. Most of the “tech press” is a constant parody of themselves.
Joshua Topolsky of The Verge penned an article for The Washington Post titled Why Mike Daisey had to lie to tell the truth about Apple.
Absurd? Yes.
I would recommend reading some responses from Ben Brooks and Dave Caolo because they are far more eloquent than I am about the subject.
Needless to say, I agree with both of them. The saddest part about the entire situation with Mike Daisey is that he’s now hurt more than helped things. He’s undermined his credibility (the little he might have had) and now called into question all of the problems people bring up.
With that in mind, I can only imagine that the primary goal of Mike Daisey was to make money for Mike Daisey by exploiting the workers in China. Then you have Topolsky and The Verge (along with many other publications) using Daisey’s exploitation to push up the page views to their own sites.
And then when he is defrauded, you have some (like Topolsky) trying to justify not doing due diligence and then using the whole “ends justify the means” phrase to just hand-wave it all away.
Sadly, in this case, the ends and the means both stink. That’s great.