Apple’s 2016 in review, on the new Macbook Pro lineup:
Apple has built some laptops that nicely handle the needs of the vast majority of its users. It’s easy to look at the volume numbers on what sells and convince yourself that these edge cases aren’t worth building a device for. That seems to be what Apple’s done with these new laptops.
But here’s the problem: sitting in this niche of excluded users are some of Apple’s strongest supporters, the influencers that create word of mouth, and to me, most importantly it includes a significant number of the developers Apple depends on to create it’s Mac and IOS apps.
Couldn’t agree more.
On the surface, Cloudant’s document API appears to be a reasonably simple way to upload JSON data to a key value store and update the JSON data for a particular key. However, the reality is more complicated – isn’t it always? – and understanding what’s happening is important in using Cloudant effectively and becoming an advanced user of the database.
The takeaway point is this: a document in Cloudant is a tree and Cloudant’s document HTTP API is essentially a tree manipulation API.
Google’s Maglev paper describes a high-performance software-based load balancing system. Like many of the systems that Google has described in the literature, Maglev applies commodity hardware and horizontal scaling to a problem in a novel way. These are some notes on the parts most interesting to me.
The Bank of England, I found out recently, produces a quarterly bulletin. The Bank published a couple of fascinating – to me at least – articles on how money is created and destroyed in the modern economy in their quarterly bulletin for Q1 2014:
While other articles in the bulletin look to be fairly specialised, I found these opening two quite accessible. Mostly anyway, some paragraphs required a little more thinking than I was willing to put in for now.
At the crux of the articles is the theory, which the Bank says is the currently correct one, of how money is created. Surprisingly, money is created by commercial banks when they lend to you, me, companies and so on. Out of thin air, a higher number appears in our deposit accounts. On the bank’s side, a corresponding lending account appears. As we pay back into that lending account, we are actively destroying money. So money is created from nothing and, mostly, returns to nothing.
When I start an app like Word by typing its name into Alfred, I almost never want to do anything other than open a new, blank document. Instead, by default, tons of apps show a “New Document” dialog, offering to help me by creating a generic looking flyer, brochure or todo list.