apple – Dirty Feed

Silent but Deadly

Published 16th March 2017

Daring Fireball, 15th March 2017:

Jon Rubinstein Named Co-CEO of World’s Biggest Hedge Fund, Fired 10 Months Later

Mary Childs, reporting for The Financial Times 10 months ago:

Bridgewater has chosen former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein as the new co-chief executive of the world’s biggest hedge fund, replacing Greg Jensen as part of a 10-year handover from founder Ray Dalio.

Mr Rubinstein, who also sits on the boards of Amazon.com and Qualcomm, is expected to join Bridgewater in May and to share the co-CEO role with Eileen Murray.

Now:

Bridgewater Associates co-CEO Jon Rubinstein is stepping down and transitioning to an external advisory role in April after 10 months on the job, the firm told clients in a note Wednesday.

“While over the last ten months Jon has helped build a plan to re-design our core technology platform and has brought in a group of extremely talented executives to build out our technology leadership, we mutually agree that he is not a cultural fit for Bridgewater,” Bridgewater founder, chairman, and co-CIO Ray Dalio wrote in the note.

Except that this isn’t how this piece was written when it was first published. It originally went as follows:

Jon Rubinstein Named Co-CEO of World’s Biggest Hedge Fund

Mary Childs, reporting for The Financial Times:

Bridgewater has chosen former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein as the new co-chief executive of the world’s biggest hedge fund, replacing Greg Jensen as part of a 10-year handover from founder Ray Dalio.

Mr Rubinstein, who also sits on the boards of Amazon.com and Qualcomm, is expected to join Bridgewater in May and to share the co-CEO role with Eileen Murray.

Not where I expected Rubinstein to wind up.

Screengrab here, taken from Google’s cache.¹

What’s happened is pretty clear. John Gruber originally saw the FT article about Jon Rubinstein, didn’t clock that it was from ten months ago, and published in haste. Once he saw that the news was out of date, and Rubinstein was actually stepping down, he edited the article to correct the error… but didn’t mention his correction anywhere.

Not exactly fake news of the century, of course. Still, I thought it was worth pointing out, if only because Gruber is one of the good guys. And as the good guys, we should all be as transparent as possible about what we write. If we fuck up, even on a small piece such as this, we need to admit it. Otherwise, who knows what other mysterious edits happen with Daring Fireball after the fact? The issue is one of trust, and it only takes a small breach of that trust to make you doubt an entire site.

I could happily go back through Dirty Feed’s archives and do some nifty editing to ensure I’ve always been right about everything first time. But it’d be a pretty dishonest way to write.

No idea why the spacing is incorrect on the navigation bar there, but I thought editing to make it correct wouldn’t be in the spirit of this article. ↩

The Sad State of ‘The Talk Show’ Archives

Published 30th August 2016

Internet

John Gruber’s The Talk Show podcast – self-described as “the director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball” – has had no less than four separate homes over the years:

First incarnation: As an independent podcast at talkshow.net, with Dan Benjamin (27 episodes¹, June 2007 – October 2009)
Second incarnation: On Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network (90 episodes, July 2010 – May 2012)
Third incarnation: On Mule Radio, solo (80 episodes, May 2012 – May 2014)
Fourth incarnation: On Daring Fireball (85 episodes so far, May 2014 – ongoing)

As this piece is published, that’s a total of 282 episodes. Of those 282, a total of 80 are missing – all of the first 27 originally hosted at thetalkshow.net, and 53 from the Mule Radio years. (Depending on what you define as “missing”, of course – but more on that later.) That’s a full 28% of episodes which have disappeared.

[Read more →]

Episodes #9, #23 and #27 were skipped in the numbering. ↩

Resolution independence, or: an article in which I demand to affect the roadmap of OS X 10.7

Published 18th August 2010

Computing

Whatever your opinion on the iPhone 4, it’s hard to disagree that the Retina display is really rather excellent. Phrases like “It looks like print” are cliched, and entirely true. It’s the single biggest reason I’m not buying an iPad this year; no point buying one now, when I suspect one with a Retina-like display will be released next year.

The thing I find most fascinating about it is that it reminds me of when colour depth ceased to be a big deal to most people in terms of specifications. (At its extremes in the early days of home computing, to get the highest resolution on a BBC Micro, 640 x 256, you could only display two colours at once.) As soon as technology advanced enough so that 24-bit, 16.7 million colours in high resolution became standard, the general consumer stopped caring, as that’s the most granularity the eye can make out. Exactly the same is now happening with pixel density on mobile devices; we are approaching – or at, depending on your point of view – the point where it’s impossible for the eye to make out individual pixels, and there’s little point going much further. And whilst Apple may have got there first, this kind of display will surely become standard across all high-end phones over the next couple of years.

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