Spot any errors? let me know, but Unleash your pedant politely please.

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Why "The dumbest 'Macs are better than PCs' post, ever" wasn't dumb at all.

Ian Betteridge, former Mac User (UK) editor and recent switcher from Macintosh (for perfectly good and valid reasons), usually gets it right, but gets it wrong in his The dumbest “Macs are better than PCs” post, ever post.

The post to which he refers says this :

“Apple never, ever expresses battery life based on the number of cells that make it up. The ThinkPad I have at work is available with a 4, 6, and 9-cell option. And I have no idea what any of it means or why I should care. Apple just tells me how long I can work without a power source, which is what I actually care about.

The PC-makers just don’t get it.”

Ian thinks this is absurd, and given an example where it is demonstrably false. That's all well and good, but it doesn't really refute the original post. Indeed, it is demonstrably true for another model by the same company.

4-cell 2.0AHr Battery
6-cell 2.2AHr Battery
9-cell 2.2AHr Battery

Seriously, WTF does that mean to any normal person ?

So far from being a dumb post, it highlights perfectly the kind of thing that most PC makers don't get most of the time. If they did, they would quote a time for each battery. No doubt the batteries are common to many models, but it wouldn't take too much effort to calculate the typical battery life (by dragging amp hours for the battery from a database table and power draw of the laptop from another table). This kind of attention to detail is exactly what Apple get most of the time.

Thursday 2 April 2009

Type-Safe Python

Introspection, baby !

if frameType.__class__.__name__ == 'FrameType':
    ...
else:
    raise 'frameType must be an instance of FrameType'