pflats

I also teach from an iPad, as do the majority of the teachers at my school. I don't think the issue is as simple as the article presents.

> Essentially, you had to swipe up as though going to the home screen, then tap on the app you wanted in the dock, and that app would take over the external display if it had a presentation mode. This was weird and hard to understand, but Apple’s solution is to just make it so that whatever is the most recently tapped app takes over, which is much, much worse.

Some apps, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, only enter "presenter mode" and take over the external AirPlay screen on explicit user action.

Other apps, like Notability, will automatically enter "presenter mode" and take over the external display if they detect a secondary display without explicit user action, even when it is not the only app on screen. You can then turn off this mode if you would like by going into the menus.

AirPlay calls itself "screen mirroring" in the Apple menus, and I can say with confidence from talking to the average teacher in the building that they expect it to mirror their screen. Well-behaved apps like PowerPoint that only take over the AirPlay session when prompted by the user will match the naïve user's expectations.

Apps like Notability that take over the entire AirPlay session without explicit interaction and without being the only app on screen break the naïve user's expectations of display mirroring. Multiple teachers have asked me why their calculator app (for example) does not show up on the Airplay display when they're using Notability.

> As for what the behavior should be, I’m not a developer, but here’s a proposal: if you’re using an app that is in presenter mode (e.g., PowerPoint playing a presentation, or a GoodNotes document open), it should always get precedence on the external display, until that presentation gets stopped, the document is closed, or the app is quit. Period.

I understand and even share the author's concerns, but I think the new compromise—only the active app can take over external displays—makes sense as a default because it matches the average user's expectations of AirPlay. The old method had major benefits and some annoyances, and in my opinion it should still be an option for a background app to control the external display if the user explicitly wants it or has enabled some toggle.

Apple did not handle the 26-27 transition well at all, and this really threw me the first time it came up. (I did not have the option to not update my employer's iPad, so I've been on 27 since release.) There should be a way to have a second app (secretly) open and focused while you present only from app #1, but I think the new default is better.

I was curious, so I grabbed three undergraduate-level physics texts I had nearby.

One explicitly recites the Ultraviolet Catastrophe prompted Planck story, complete with Rayleigh's incomplete formula.

One essentially matches the story in section 2, using the lesser version of Rayleigh's formula, but (just like the story) does not explicitly tie Planck's work to it. (That textbook notes "an act of desperation" is a quote from one of Planck's letters.)

The third one is interesting! It says that "late nineteenth century physicists tried to understand the shape of the blackbody spectrum [...] using their knowledge of thermodynamics and electromagnetic waves. Their efforts ended in failure." This third text never mentions Rayleigh by name and doesn't specifically show "Rayleigh's Lesser Formula", but it does graph that formula vs. the observed blackbody radiation (interestingly, as a function of frequency instead of wavelength).

The text then eventually says that in 1900, Planck used a photon argument "to make a theoretical prediction that is in excellent agreement with the experimental spectrum". It does not explicitly state cause and effect, but it's kinda implied from the structure of the writing.

Reading into the third text a smidge, it feels like the result of wanting to use the Rayleigh/Catastrophe story and yet knowing it wasn't quite true.

Suppose an author uploads their book to ExamplePrint Inc, a one stop shop that prints made-to-order books for customers.

The reader goes to ExamplePrint and buys the book.

ExamplePrint prints a softcover copy of the book on the spot and ships it out to the reader.

The user pays ExamplePrint, who pays the author some fraction of the user's money.

The reader is a customer of ExamplePrint and reading the author's book.

This is the analogy Apple would like to use for their app store. Apple's print time is almost instantaneous and the marginal costs are closer to zero.

A bit of an oversimplification and slightly wrong, but the problem is essentially that it is a Bad Spaniels brand dog toy, parodying the sound-a-like Jack Daniels brand whiskey.

There exists the Rogers Test in trademark law that says that, for an /artistic work/, all a defendant has to do is show that a) the trademark is relevant to the artistic work, and b) the title is not explicitly misleading (to make the audience think the work is created/supported by the trademark holder).

The Rogers Test, reserved for artistic work, is gentler than normal trademark defense. Bad Spaniels chew toy passed this test easily.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that, because the chew toy is released by the Bad Spaniels /brand/, the Rogers /artistic work/ analysis is not appropriate.

Instead, it should be litigated as a brand vs. brand trademark dispute.

In a brand vs. brand dispute, Jack Daniels will have to instead prove that the Bad Spaniels brand is likely to cause confusion with regards to Jack Daniels brand's involvement in the product.

This is a higher bar to clear than Rogers test, because the trademark doesn't have to be explicitly confusing; it just needs to be likely.

I'm not a lawyer or a judge, but I don't think Jack Daniels will prevail even with the stricter standard.

(IMO,) this ruling is barely going to matter in the long run: if the Bad Spaniels chew bottle was sold by Bob's Novelties and did not included the word "brand" after "Bad Spaniels", then the Rogers test would still apply.

More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s.

A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X).

Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.

Zuckerberg almost always refers to one specific person; Cuban is a last name of an investor and also describes things related to the nation of Cuba.

The study also does not claim to show a causal relationship.

> Isn't there a serious risk of bias, there, though? For example, if a journalist is specialized in CS and have to write about the ecological impact of technology, you can expect them to be biased in favor of technology, even in good faith.

All journalists are biased. Pretending they can be unbiased is silly.

Beyond that, a journalist specialized in CS writing about the ecological impact of technology is no longer "sticking to what they've studied and know" any more than a sportswriter would be writing about the ecological impact of a new stadium.

> Also, curse the Greeks for not using more idiomatic variables. ∑ would never pass code review, what an entirely unreadable identifier

One thing I tell my high-school students: mathematics always looks harder than it actually is. One of the essential skills in succeeding in math is looking at a page of arcane "stuff" and having your reaction be, "Whoa! Can't wait to learn what this means," rather than, "Whoa! This looks so complicated!"

Mathematical is its own language that has developed across continents and millennia. It has its quirks and foibles, but overall, community consensus has guided its notation. Mathematicians want things to be simple and "make sense", especially the notation they use. It's never as terrible as it looks.

Sigma specifically is a Greek letter, but the notation is not Greek. Like a large amount of modern mathematical notation, the convention came from Leonhard Euler in the 18th century. It was a disambiguation choice because the letter S was overloaded.

Single-symbol identifiers are enormously popular in mathematics because mathematics is not computing. Because math is (even now) essentially a handwritten subject, its design plays to the strengths of handwriting. Line size, height, and character layout are essentially freeform. Character accents and modifiers are easy. discrete_sum would never fly in a handwritten world, just like ∑ wouldn't pass code review.

> I'm sort of conflicted about the fine hitting now, as a result. If they were still being intransigent about the issue, sure, but they've already fixed it...

It seems right to me. It's a relatively small fine; Apple makes a few hundred Euros in profit per phone. I'm not sure how many iPhones are in France, but I'd venture to guess this is less than 2 Euros per device.