S. Fero, Cracked
I love me some Cracked humour.
Penned Thoughts
Miscellaneous Ruminations of Aayush Arya
About the author
Aayush Arya is India Editor and Apps Co-Editor at The Next Web. You can find him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter or Google+, or drop him an email if you need to contact him.
It’s notable that throughout all her years of eating stainless steel, Daalman made sure to never eat a knife. Because, come on, that would be crazy.
Apple’s Three Laws of Developers
- A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
- A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
— I. Developer
Painfully true. And it has always been this way with Apple.
(via aulia-m)
The Pale Blue Dot
From this distant vantage point, the earth might not seem of any particular interest, but for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
—Carl Sagan
Video game developers have been making realistic cars and buildings for years, but LA Noire is set to take facial realism to the next level.
This will blow your mind. Seriously, you have to watch this!
(via Prasad Naik)
Dell’s SEVENTH monitor replacement is a dusty, scratched and broken piece of garbage!
After I made a video about it and wrote about my wretched and ongoing experience with Dell the last time on reddit, the post garnered immediate and significant attention and shot to the top of the front page within a couple of hours and stayed there for several hours after that. Thank you to all of you who voted for that story and left me your comments and advice. It strengthened my resolve not to take this sort of mistreatment lying down and here’s a followup to that story.
Past Updates
Employees from Dell called me four times on the following Monday. I was relieved that all this finally struck a cho…oh wait, they didn’t call to tell me that they were extremely sorry and that they would fix the problem once and for all. No, that would make too much sense and be far too customer-friendly for this company to do.
Instead, their calls were to ask me to return the notebook that they’d delivered to me by mistake. I hadn’t so much as cracked open the packaging by then but I flat out refused to return that notebook until they righted the situation. Why did they need to call four times? To harass me. They would not take no for an answer and I wouldn’t say yes, so I did the only thing I could: I hung up.
I then got a call from a member of Dell’s Executive Customer Support Team on Tuesday and it was the same old hemming and hawing about not being able to give me a refund because I was not the original owner and defending the company’s actions so far. Not a single word expressing regret or shame, just the businesslike manner of a person conducting a negotiation. He ended the call with something along the lines of “we’ll see if we can get you a refund but, if we do (and this in no way constitutes a guarantee), you will have to return the defective monitors first”.
Yeah, fat chance! It’s the same old crap that I’ve been dealing with for the past year. No change in attitude or action. For the purposes of full disclosure, I will make it clear that I spoke shortly with him and whenever asked to make even the tiniest concession, I rudely cut him off and refused. I think I have earned the right to.
The Seventh Monitor
The same guy called me again that day and assured me that I would be getting another monitor within a few days and that this one had been personally checked by them and was brand new and fully functional. I told him I did not want it and, at this point, the only thing I would accept was a refund. He refused. I said, “Guess I will see you in court then.” To which he replied, “Yes, we’ll meet in court.”
This leads us to today. I received the seventh replacement monitor today, the one that this guy was so cocky about, the one that Dell considers the best way to solve this problem, and it was broken. But let’s get to the quality of the display itself in a moment.
The guy who delivered the display wanted me to return the notebook that had been accidentally delivered to me back to him. I asked him for a written confirmation from Dell or DHL that I was indeed returning the notebook and he said he didn’t have anything to give me. He put me on the phone with someone from Dell logistics who told me that I wouldn’t need any such confirmation and that I should stop harassing him and the company. And he knew what I had been through, having sent all those monitors to me himself.
I asked him if he would accept it if I refused to sign on the proof of delivery document for the monitor and he said no and yet it seemed illogical to him that I should want the same thing for my own records when it came to returning the notebook. He did finally send me the document but after having rudely shouted at me and wasted a half hour of my time.
Back to the monitor now. It was physically broken at one of the corners and had huge, ugly scratches all over the actual display and was caked with dust. It’s dingy and, for all intents and purposes, looks like something pulled out of the trash can. I would not have accepted this piece of junk if it had been the first replacement they sent me, let alone the seventh one!
Take a look at these pictures:
What I Am Going to Do
Once again, this is the seventh replacement monitor sent to me over the course of a year and that too upon realising that I’d published a story about it on reddit that had been read by tens of thousands of people! Every single employee in this company—from the engineers to the designers, the assemblers, QA specialists, the customer care department, right down to the logistics team—is mind-bendingly incompetent.
Don’t forget, these are all huge 30-inch monitors that weigh upwards of 15kg (34lbs) each and I have had to unpack, install and then uninstall seven of them; twice for each one, to replace them with the original unit. I’ve wasted days doing all that and talking to customer service executives and logistics guys and the shipping people. It’s a never-ending nightmare.
I’ve had it with this jackasses! I am not waiting for any more resolutions and am suing Dell for damages. I do not want any more replacements or refunds, I want compensation for what this company has put me through and I will get it. Thank you to everyone who is reading this for your support.
tl;dr
Dell’s seventh replacement is worse than most of the others they have sent me so far. Their employees have now taken to harassing me and being rude to me over the phone. The executive customer support representative wants to “meet me in court”, so that is what he will get.
-Aayush
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest ‘burning platform’ memo
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop admits what anti-Apple trolls never would. Bravo, sir! Admission is the first step to recovery.
An amusing discussion on my reddit thread
- A (possibly racist) reddit user: How can you afford such an expensive monitor? That’s like tens of thousands in Indian currency, right?
- Another reddit user: Pro tip: There are rich Indians too.
Dell sent me six replacements for my defective monitor and then a notebook.
My continuing Dell saga is now posted on the venerable reddit.
“Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable.” —John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Marco.org: Ode to the App Review team
I wasn’t always a fan of Apple’s requirement that all App Store submissions be reviewed by a fairly opaque process before release, which often led to confusing or unfair rejections.
But over the last year, I’ve grown to appreciate app review and the immense staff it must take to operate at its…
I’ve been meaning to write something of this nature myself but I could never have done as good a job with it as Marco has done. Highly recommended.
(Source: marco)
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
(via Daring Fireball)
(Source: nastik.in)
Whatever happens, for the next two or three years, Apple is in terrific shape. It has incredible momentum. And you know — no one’s made money betting against Steve Jobs in a very long time.
Alan Deutschman
“How Steve Jobs ‘Out-Japanned’ Japan” by Jeff Yang for SF Gate
(via Daring Fireball)
Why do people laugh at creationists. This is a series of videos (about thirty in all) that take video footage of religious nutjobs making ridiculous pseudo-scientific claims about the creation of the earth and systematically and scientifically tear them apart. Watch a few of these if you have the time. Chuckles will ensue.
Here’s a choice quote from a creationist called Kent Hovind, who taught science for fifteen years and claims to have a PhD:
You say, “Come on, is it possible to cover the earth with water? Well, theoretically, one drop of world will cover the water…one drop of water will cover the world, if you spread it real thin.”
He’s off by a factor of about a trillion! That’s like saying that the distance of the moon from the earth is less than one millimeter.
Introducing Notificant!
Anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Notificant is a nifty little app that makes sure you always remember what you want to.
With scheduled notifications that sync via the cloud and can be fired on any Mac of your choosing, Notificant is the notification assistant you never knew you wanted.
I have launched my software company Caramel Cloud and our first web service and Mac application Notificant. Go ahead and buy it from the Mac App Store, you know you want to. And do follow us on Twitter @caramelcloudsw. Thank you.
Steve Jobs’s greatest gift to the company, I suspect, is that his enthusiasm is always on the Next Big Thing, no matter how big the Last Big Thing was.
John Gruber (Daring Fireball)
