Did Nintendo try to kill GoldenEye 007 before it was completed?
Why did Shigeru Miyamoto keep telling the development team to tone
down the violence? And why did the famous multiplayer aspect of
the game almost not happen? It’s slappers-only on Rad History,
because we’re diving into the history of THE game of the late
1990s, GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64.
Had a blast talking about one of my very favorite video games ever. My main link here is to the YouTube version of the episode, but it’s also available as an audio episode for all podcast players, including Overcast and Apple Podcasts.
The New York Yankees are back in the World Series for the first time since 2009, and for the 41st time in franchise history. Their opponent: the Los Angeles Dodgers, who will appear for the 22nd time. This will be the 12th time the two teams have met in the World Series, but the first since 1981. (The Yankees won 8 of the previous 11.) A star-studded matchup with incredible history, to say the least. May the best team win.
My thanks to Weather Up for sponsoring this week at DF. If you’re even a semi-regular reader, you know I’m an aficionado of weather apps. There are a bunch of really good ones — including Apple’s own — but there’s an incredible degree of variety and originality in their info...
Here’s an interesting bit of follow-up. Last month, when linking to the European Commission’s announcement of “two specification proceedings to assist Apple in complying with its interoperability obligations under the Digital Markets Act”, I wrote a sidenote on the EC’s seem...
Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:
The FIDO Alliance is developing new specifications to enable
secure transfer of passkeys between different password managers
and platforms. Announced on Monday, the initiative is the result
of collaboration among members of the FIDO...
Speaking of passwords, Ricky Mondello — who has long been a leading member of Apple’s “Authentication Experience” team — has an interesting blog post describing the algorithm Apple uses when it suggests new strong passwords:
To make these passwords easier to type on subo...
David Heinemeier Hansson:
Yes, passwords have problems. If you’re using them without a
password manager, you’re likely to reuse them across multiple
services, and if you do, all it takes is one service with awful
password practices (like storing them in plain text rather...
Samantha Cole, reporting for 404 Media:
In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic
employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from
Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an
anonymous workplace discussion platform, which ...
Maureen Farrell, writing for The New York Times:
In May 2022, the chief financial officer of Boar’s Head, the
processed meat company, was asked a simple question under oath.
“Who is the C.E.O. of Boar’s Head?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“Who do you believe to be the ...
With hundreds of weather apps on the App Store, including a solid one from Apple, why pay for another? Glad you asked…
Information Design: If all you care about is the current temperature, any app will do. But for a clutter-free, information dense view of the weather over ...
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged
by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence, the easy-to-use
personal intelligence system that understands personal context to
deliver intelligence that is helpful and relevant while protecting
user pr...
After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succe...
My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.
The less you know about this talk, the more you’ll enjoy watching it unfold. Just remarkably good. Trust me, watch it now, before anything about it is spoiled for you.
Jamie Zawinski:
For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was
the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox)
available to the general public. This beta release was an
unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we
w...
Jonathan Gitlin, automotive editor at Ars Technica, on Tesla’s vaporware event last night:
Over time, Musk claimed the operating costs of his Cybercab would
be 20 cents per mile, “and yes you’ll be able to buy one,” he told
the crowd to excited shrieks. “We expect the co...
Donald F. Trump, yesterday in Detroit:
“Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle?
Know what that is? Right? When you see a car driving along? Some
people do, I don’t know. A little concerning to me, but the
autonomous vehicles we’re going to stop f...
Abhirup Roy and Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters:
CEO Elon Musk showcased on Thursday a long-awaited robotaxi with
two gull-wing doors and no steering wheel or pedals and surprised
with robovan, betting on a shift in focus from low-priced
mass-market cars to robotic v...
Kevin Roose wrote a column for The New York Times last week under the headline “Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?”, about which Jason Snell quipped, “It’s rare that a story is worse than its provocative headline, but this one manages it.” The gist of it is Roose positing that...
Given that Calvin and Hobbes is almost certainly the best (and almost more certainly, the most beloved) comic strip ever, it’s devilishly hard to pick a favorite. But this might be mine. I thought about it often as I raised my own son.
Update: I sent this one to my son, and he sent me this one back. My boy gets me.
Lawrence Abrams, reporting for Bleeping Computer:
Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data
breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a
user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.
News of the breach began circ...
insane battery life (17 hours with profiled usage)
calendar recall
speak in over 50 languages — in your own voice
vision gesture for quick multi-modal questions
playlist support
timers, alarms, world clock
touchcode gesture unlock
pinpoint — locate your pin!
Sometimes all you can do is put your nose to the grindstone and keep plugging. But man, I don’t even hear jokes about the AI Pin any more. (Full change log.)
Kind of crazy to create an alarm clock in this era of bedside phones, but like just about everything from Nintendo, it does seem fun. (Would seem a bit more appealing if it could serve as a Bluetooth audio speaker.)
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc.’s Dan Riccio, who oversaw the company’s push into
mixed-reality headsets and previously served as its hardware
engineering chief, is retiring.
The veteran executive, a vice president who reports to Chief
Executive Officer...
A new website/newsletter from Om Malik and Fred Vogelstein:
Both of us together have followed Silicon Valley’s innovation
engine for more than 50 years. We’ve seen a lot. But one
observation stands out: The best ideas — the ones that launch
meaningful companies — need to...
Many Tricks:
Moom 4 is only available directly from Many Tricks; it is not
available on the Mac App Store. If it were our choice, it would
also be in the Mac App Store, but it’s not our choice.
Why isn’t it in the Mac App Store? Because the Mac App Store does
not allow ...
The Surface Duo 2 has just received its likely final security
update, marking an end to Microsoft’s brief return to the
smartphone market. The company originally launched Surface Duo 2
in October 2021, and promised to support the product with software
updates for three years. Microsoft was only able to deliver one
major Android version update in that time, a pitiful number for a
$1,500 device.
It wasn’t that Microsoft was only able to deliver one major Android version update in 3 years. They’re Microsoft, for chrissakes. It’s that they could only be bothered to deliver one major upgrade. Commitment is vastly underestimated in the hardware game.
Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:
According to multiple 9to5Mac readers and reports across social
media, Home Depot has also recently started rolling out Apple Pay
support. Home Depot has been a major Apple Pay holdout, resisting
pressure from its customers to add supp...
Todd Heberlein:
Cozy mysteries are a genre of crime fiction where the stories take
place in small, socially intimate communities, and any violence is
limited or happens offscreen. Yesterday, I experienced a “Cozy
WWDC,” and it was wonderful!
The event took place in an i...
