cdh's comments

I can see that some people have had serious problems with them. For what it's worth, though, I used their service for the first time last week. It worked fine, and only took a few moments for them to complete the transaction after I deposited the cash.

USPS is expected to remain profitable as a commercial business, but to some extent is still treated as though they were part of the federal government. Their ability to make tough business decisions when they need to is crippled by a slow, ineffectual congress which refuses to allow that. I think the lesson here is that you can't have it both ways.

If USPS were allowed to make their own decisions, they wouldn't necessarily be in this mess.

Thankfully, we don't have to guess about this particular metric, or use silly results based on web-surfing of certain websites. Almost 9% of Steam users are already on Windows 8:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey#cat0

8.76% is much higher than 2.26%.

I don't think that changes the situation, though.

(Incidentally, I'm apparently not the only one who got that detail wrong, since the original post on Reddit was titled "My mistake sir...")

She didn't just "point out" an idiot. She posted the receipt with his name on Reddit, and ended up inciting an internet mob against him: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/17i382/my_mistake_s...

I agree the guy was a jerk, but it should be common sense for any employee that they can't expect to keep their job after revealing private customer information, publicly humiliating that customer, and in this case very likely damaging that customer's career. Duh?

Not to mention, it's free PR. I'd forgotten I needed to order some stuff, but this reminded me, and so I placed the order once they were back up. I'm not sure how common that reaction is, but it might offset the downtime to some extent.

I've been using it for a while. There was a beta version available for free, and I believe most enterprise customers have had access to the final RTM version for months. I know that some MSDN subscriptions include a production license, and I was able to purchase a consumer copy from Microsoft's Home Use program last week, as well.

That's not an entirely fair description. Windows RT is a real Windows 8 installation, but running on ARM, and restricted to running only executables signed by Microsoft.

Unless Google retaliates somehow. I’d be surprised if they didn’t immediately ban or somehow freeze all of his Google accounts and services in response to a chargeback.

Also, details from Facebook itself: http://newsroom.fb.com/News/558/Update-to-Messaging-and-a-Te...

I'm not sure criticisms around cost are as relevant as they used to be. Windows 8 Pro currently sells for $40 on Microsoft's website, and yes, that key can be used to perform a clean install. If you paid $40 to Microsoft every three years when they released a new Windows version, that would work out to $13.33/year.

That isn’t exactly expensive... $13.33/year is basically a rounding error compared to the costs of console gaming.

Has it actually been established that merely linking to copyrighted content is illegal in the United States? I'm not trying to troll, just genuinely curious.

My technical understanding of this could be incorrect, but it seems to me that there is a meaningful difference between a BitTorrent tracker actively coordinating copyright infringing downloads vs. a website like NZBMatrix hosting nothing but static links to another location on the Internet.

If you're talking about MagicISO, I agree, I couldn't live without it. Windows 8's built in functionality is good, but not quite as good.

Here's the trick to get MagicISO to install correctly on Windows 8: http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2012/08/how-to-insta...

Just do that first and it should work fine.

Imagine if someone researched and sold exploits to anyone (“terrorists”, foreign governments, etc.) internationally which allowed illegal access to say, real-world bank vaults, nuclear military technology, or high security prisons. Theoretically, your same logic would be valid, but I'm fairly sure selling that kind of information on any one of those would be illegal. If not, than it should be!

It's an exaggerated example, but it seems to me that sometimes what is in the best interest of everyone as a whole outweighs the desire of some individuals to exploit the weaknesses of others for personal gain.

> MS is not a startup, that can go by with a promising product. It needs massive amounts of sales and with the current strategy Surface is not going to get them.

Out of curiosity, why do you assume the Surface needs to sell in huge volumes? If every single Surface is sold at a profit, and the Surface division is even slightly profitable for Microsoft, I don't see why it matters if they sell 10,000 or 10,000,000 of them.

To me it seems like the genius part of what Microsoft is doing is that Windows RT and/or the Surface don't actually need to succeed in terms of market share. They just need be taken seriously for long enough to drive down prices of Intel's x86 chips, so that Windows tablets have a shot against ARM tablets long-term. As far as I can tell, that seems to be working already. (Intel Atom Z2760)

They also have a massive Enterprise business, most of which will probably upgrade to Windows 8 eventually, buying them quite a bit of time to watch this unfold. Not to mention Xbox, etc. And of course, on top of all that, there is still the chance that Windows RT will somehow be a hit.... which would be even better for Microsoft, because it would end their Intel pricing problems for good.

To me, this seems like a decent plan for a software company that until now has only been losing relevance and market share. It’s a better plan than bleeding out cash selling super cheap hardware to gain market share (Amazon’s Kindle Fire), waiting too long to give up the dying cash cow as the market changes (RIM), focusing only on extremely high quality products while your company dies around you (Nokia), or killing off the consumer version of Office for no apparent reason (which is presumably profitable as-is).

Without going near your comments on Capitalism, I don't think Spotify's situation is as clear-cut as you do. Why would I pay $20, $15, or even $11, when I can get the exact same service from at least a dozen other companies for $10/month or less? (Rhapsody, Zune, Slacker, Rdio, etc.)

If they raise prices at all, they're likely to lose a significant number of subscribers. If they raise prices and somehow keep those subscribers, the record companies may very well just milk them for the difference in increased licensing costs.

They definitely wouldn't turn a blind eye to an OEM distributing them illegally, though. OEMs shipping Android phones pay Google licensing for the Play Store, Gmail app, etc. From what I understand, most Android OEMs also pay Microsoft royalties per handset.

In other words, these are definitely not free to the end user, the cost is just incorporated into the overall price of the phone.

I don't have a Galaxy S3 to test this, but my experience with the Galaxy S and Galaxy S2 is that for normal phone numbers, you need to specifically confirm that you want to dial the number. For the code to factory reset the phone, though, simply typing in the code is sufficient, you don't need to press dial. It might be the same here, so that only that specific USSD code can be triggered without a confirmation from the user.

Who is to say those weren't gargantuan undertakings as well?

The relationship between Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 is closer than that, though. My understanding is that both will make calls to the same WinRT APIs, meaning a significant amount of code (and the XAML defining the UI) can be shared between both platforms. That's a very different relationship than Mac OS has with iOS (where the UI differences are significant) or Android has with Linux (where there is almost nothing in common between X and Android's UI).

I've been using Postbox, and I couldn't be happier with it.